The "Patch"

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Braveheart, May 19, 2020.

  1. Drencrom Beimeith's Supervisor

    Whoever wrote that just has no idea how server farms work. All server farms have climate controlled areas. The bigger ones (before google existed) take up entire floors of a skyscraper. They set the temp to about 60 degrees and also take the oxygen levels down to 21%- too low for fires to start.

    All totally standard stuff. EQ's devs were not the first people to ever encounter hot computer components.
  2. Magneress Augur

    That stuff costs money for startups. We are talking 1999-2001 lol.

    Back in my day we used to climb up 10 flights of stairs and go to the closet in the closet for the break room to reboot the mail server.

    Don't rage hard kid. You got it Ez.

    Oh yeah, I have been where ur talking about lol. Not as fancy as airlocks with low oxygen. But like pretty snazzy :p

    Guess you could say that I have worked for some cheap... Companies. Heh...

    Tbh don't need crazy high tech scif with glass wall to run a few video game servers.
    Jyve likes this.
  3. MyShadower All-natural Intelligence

    Magneress likes this.
  4. Magneress Augur

  5. MyShadower All-natural Intelligence


    I imagine all the hardware stuff is outsourced these days. It would be interesting to hear about the numbers from EQ's high and low. Learning about what impact the TLP program had on finances and such. If EQ is not at its low financially, that would not be too surprising I suppose.
    Magneress likes this.
  6. Acerbis New Member

  7. Magneress Augur

    https://store.flagshiptech.com/hp-4...DkZrMLtaFoheZfzUzCr-ilgoo0QKiSnhoCY-sQAvD_BwE

    Probably a generous guesstimate for the guts of bristle world server. This stuff used to be so heavy lol. I'm sure they had more than 2gb memory ,but could have been between 2-4 in 99-01 that would have been a pricey machine.

    11lb sounds right. By eq2s launch servers we're a ton cheaper, smaller, and drew less power. By 08 stuff was like woa.. My desktop has 16 cores running @ 3ghz if I pushed em. They could maybe handle a steady 2.4ghz...
  8. Magneress Augur

    The article was a word salad of specs that marketed the xeon iii or w/e and made EQ sound cool to empire builder's. But it had some cool stuff in there.

    I don't play EQ to collect platinum or power broker anymore though lol.
  9. Tanacious Lorekeeper




    I am still laughing about the Vah Shir comment.... need to go find my Puss in Boots meme... hahaha.

    I agree with Drencom, partially, as in he has no idea how server farms work. You probably should realize there are at least one if not half a dozen veteran techs on here, some with their own companies, or multi-million dollar corporations that have more experience in building the things you are talking about than you have years on this planet.

    The bigger ones that took up entire floors of a skyscraper were usually just for that company in the building in most instances, and that was in the early to mid 2000's after the Y2K scare. No company that believed in the Y2K, which was most of them, wanted to bring in something that they were made to believe could malfunction and melt down after the expenditure of capital to get them up to the XXth floor(s).

    Think BUILDING size, single floor building, typically warehouse type open floorplans with either flat mount or daisy chained units mounted to hanging "racks", and not like the ones you have today, big clunky things, but it's where the rackmount sizes came from. (They believed if there was more area for the heat to dissipate upward they could run the servers a bit "hotter". Seriously, it was a thing, and it fried many a CPU and HDD)

    That comment card was written for the "sheeple" that will believe that there are chocolate fountains on Mars if you make a compelling enough video about it and throw in a few doctored (Re-doctored?) NASA photos.

    (Probably why people are still sitting at home scared to death of the Covid)

    The server farms of old, and I know because I got to see a University's server....wait for it... BUILDING....a farm of the highest order back in the EARLY 90's...funded by the federal government... were not super-cooled anything. Maybe air forced dedicated 40K BTU A/C's on the building, maybe.

    The CPU's in the individual racks or flat mounts could not run all that hot by design, they would shut down to prevent damage at about mid 60's to 70ish C. The fanciest cooling system I ever saw was in that facility, and they had actually put an exhaust system that fed the hot air to the outside, with each rack having it's own forced air ventilation pipe that ran out the back into like a funnel looking thing, up to the ceiling and blown through a bigger pipe that led to an external wall exhaust fan. I think there were fans along the way at every section, so it was probably as close to a vacuum type system as you got back then. (Without being NASA)

    (Think of what a modern day cooling system on a laptop looks like. Like a cheap one from HP envy or something like that) They had like 10 or 12 of these, one for each section.

    Anyway. That was about 5 or 6 years prior to EQ being released, and that was the pinnacle of engineering. So to believe they had super cooled rooms that required parkas and all that other jazz just 5 years later is laughable and probably a super inside joke. It was put on display for the "sheeple" as an entertainment spectacle.

    If they sat in a Parka, they were probably some anemic programmer that didn't get enough to eat because SoE didn't pay bupkis, or they were very very cold all the time. Perhaps maybe in winter because the heat would not have been turned on, but still, those servers would have been warm enough, and super chilling a room would have been a costly expenditure, not to mention the fact, it's SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.... you find me a Parka there for sale in the late 90s, and I will show you my DeLorean flux capacitor.

    Secondly, that computer company explains SOOOOOO much behind why EQ's servers are slag. Someone said that they look like they are stuck in the 90's... ya I concur.

    I would be willing to bet that they made an exclusive contract with SoE back in the day and it has been funding them ever since.... based on the following....

    "In mid 1999, Corporate Computer Centers built a new 13,000 square foot building in the Miramar area. Our new facility was designed from the ground up to our exact specifications and allows us to meet the needs of our customers in a clean, professional and controlled environment. Our facility also features a 40,000 watt solar power generating station installed on the roof. This system provides enough power to run the entire building, reducing electricity consumption and the production of waste from conventional power plants. Corporate Computer Centers is a member of the EPA's Green Power Partnership Leadership Club."

    Wow. Guess what paid for that building...? The first two guesses don't count. 40Kw worth of Solar panels...?!? in 1999!?!?! Jeebus.

    So ya I would be willing to bet that they sold SoE some "Lifetime" care package, and whichever company that now owns it has to still continue paying them an arm and a leg for the same crappy servers amd parts because of some contract.

    Plus their website hasn't been touched since 2001. So you KNOW they have to be collecting on this game still, and probably supplying the crappy hardware or VM-ware for these servers. They would have definitely updated their site at least once or twice to keep up with times and continue to bring in new business, but since they have a golden goose, they obviously don't feel compelled to.

    So we can all thank this company for bankrupting our favorite game, and reducing it to ashes of it's former glory(?). Glad they got a new building out of it though.

    Hahah. This has been a fun post. Have a good night all... see you at some point in game maybe... although I have expect them to make another announcement of ... "well, we kind of deleted all player data, so you all have to start over...sorry guys..."

    Least the servers might be fast again...LOL.
  10. Jam_sandwich New Member

    To parrot that bird loving (TM Twitter) cockatoo you have as a president....
    PATCHGATE !
  11. Dancinggnome3 New Member

    Things have been terrible since Holly bailed.
    Servers unstable, cheaters running freely, lag, overseer nerfs and now this overly long downtime
  12. Galliana Elder

    Povar's guild lobby is absolutely flooded with corpses. Anyone else?
  13. kookoo Augur

    Overseer ---------->> i was offered a * recruit rare agent * ( this morning after the patch ).
    ( i got 152 agents 20 of these are rare agents )

    i started with 29 % success rate to start , i was lucky enough to find one with one bonus, so it went up to 33 % :confused: and i got the 3rd agent with 2 bonus .

    for a whooping ------------------------->>>> 50 % success rate....... ( all 3 agents were rare agents btw.)
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    on another toon ( with 132 agents ) i had recruit common recruitment ( workers ) 12 hours to finish , with 2 agents as reward.
    i was used to get a success rate over 90% usually on a common recruitment .

    that one i started with an agent with 3 bonuses
    second agent with one bonus
    3rd agent with 2 bonuses , all these agents were the highest % success rate i could get .

    for a total of 84 % success rate { not bad ,but with all the bonuses it was usually higher than that }, specially for a common recruitment .
  14. Magneress Augur

    I have a single wall mount unit in my bedroom and if I don't eat for 3 days and turn it on max, I definitely have to stay under 4 comforters.

    I know lots of businesses that run their own single racks out of a spare bedroom, living room, or closet space. Even in this day.

    I would not be at all surprised if pantheons servers were in someone's bedroom with the windows duck taped and the AC turned max and a towel on the doors threshold. At launch. I bet it was the exact same for EQ at launch.

    Computers get hot, even the adiquitly ventilated ones. Especially when they are left on in an enclosed space like an open floor office and run at their max cpu threshold for extended periods.

    Even modern desktops cannot sustain their marketed speed 100% of the time without some extra cooling tech.

    It's rediculoisly expensive to liquid cool a single box.

    Finely we are in an era though where people have spent decades figuring out how to run hardware in batches at efficient power levels and in cheap mass production.

    People sell cpu cycles now to most companies. Not farms themselves.

    Anyway I am pretty sure that is the real bristle bane that existed in production in 1999. Having lugged a few of the things around.

    They're heavy, noisy, loud, suck down tons of power. And need to live in 60f ambient tempatures if they're even just on. Imagine that thing running at 90% cpu load for a week after launch.
  15. MiataDriver Augur


    They still had paper tape when I graduated HS. Punch cards at the community college.
    Nennius likes this.
  16. Nennius Curmudgeon

    Quite so. In the late 1970's my Dad and I were called to install the AC for a computer company in Sorrento Valley in San Diego. Most of the building was offices and wasn't anything out of the normal. But the room with the mainframes had six (if memory serves) 5 ton units feeding just that room. Before they turned the computers on it was COLD in that room. And even with that cooling the company was still concerned about overheating. It was an eye opener for both of us. I still remember when a unit went out and the panic on the phone wondering when we would could get there.

    A couple of years later they built another building and that building had even more AC in it. Their electrical bills were huge for that time. Now they would be immense. I should add that this was a bit more than a mile from the coast. The heat loads on a building in the Las Vegas area (where I believe the servers for Daybreak are) would be quite a bit higher and even more cooling would be needed.
    Magneress likes this.
  17. Metanis Bad Company

    Electrons don't come cheap!
    Nennius and Magneress like this.
  18. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    Things haven't really changed since Holly left. :)
    Metanis and svann like this.
  19. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    What?

    By volume, dry air contains 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Air also contains a variable amount of water vapor, on average around 1% at sea level, and 0.4% over the entire atmosphere.

    Did you actually mean 15%?

    https://www.firesuppression.co.uk/fire-suppression-systems-server-rooms.aspx

    Best check your facts before you correct others.
    Nennius and Tatanka like this.