Is there any way to increase the amount of people able to be in a channel above 400? It seems strange that the auction channel sometimes becomes too full to join on Agnarr, would really be nice I think.
This times infinity! Sadly the cap is for all channels. You would think after all these years that would be one of the QoL changes.
I'm curious as to if this is related to a technical limitation or a design time limitation. I would guess that it is not a technical limitation since you can in fact create new chat rooms and join them even when the initial chat room has met the 400 person capacity limit. If it is a limitation based on design, then you would think it would have been changed by now. Just makes you wonder what the factors are behind the 400 person limit.
The problem is the chat server is connected to all servers and across multiple games. It's one big chat server. So there is quite a few people connected to it especially during prime time US hours.
How much real infrastructure does one need have in order to manage a text chat box with 100,000 people in it? I'd think pretty much next to nothing these days vs. 1999. Unless the hurdle is code and lots of junk code from 99 then I understand they just don't want to spend the labor time.
Here's a suggestion for the devs - If you can't (or don't have the resources to) increase the limit of any chat channel, or even just general, how about it automatically making the next one up - so if you have autojoin set for general, but it's full, it'll automatically put you in general1, general2, etc. Also, if it has 400 people in and you can't get in, it'd be nice to have a message saying it's full, not this: Channels: 1=General(400) You are not on any channels Channel general not found
I remember an overflow method not to long ago, but it just disappeared one day. Not sure why they quit allowing the system to do so, but im sure it was something with the coding.
I ran a IRC chat network for years back in the late 90's so I know some of the issues that can happen when you don't have a stable build to handle thousands of clients connected at once on one server. It's obvious their chat server can't handle it and probably has had no development on it in years. We in Everquest experienced this chat server instability back when they opened the chat server up to all the games. The chat server was down more than it was up. They tried for months to get it to work right and they finally gave up and capped the general channels. They need to localize the chat servers for each server so they can easily handle each servers traffic. If people wanted to chat globally across servers and games, they can connect to another chat server.
In this aspect EQ really shows its age. I believe at one point they did try and had nothing but problems.
