Name reservation is great and all...

Why aren't you opening up the server 24hrs early, and turning all of the zones offline?
(Thus allowing ONLY character creation, not login access)

Every new server, the sheer demand on character creation chokes the server preventing people from logging in through the authentication. Now you have a system in place to let people reserve their names, but why aren't you opening up ACTUAL character creation so that the day of, characters are made and people are able to login, instead of everyone congesting the creation/authentication servers and causing more strain on your system at launch time?

I would guess that adding the new servers requires server downtime and impacts all servers. While that idea is interesting it would likely just push the launch of the server back a day to be the day after patch day.

That would be a weird assumption as server downtime / patching was last week. No scheduled downtime for tomorrow ...

They've said repeatedly that 4,000 newbie zone pick spinups happening simultaneously is the bottleneck, not character creation.

You're just bored and want some busiwork to do while you wait. Appeasing that is not a good use of resources in a company where the devs have to moonlight as janitors.

I have never seen this claim, and frankly don't think it has much weight since there is only like 6 Gfay, which is probably the most populated zone on launch. (will probably be kunark this time around due to iksar available on launch, and being great races for a few classes). Anyone who has played on launch day knows most of the issues getting into the servers day 1 are trying to get to character select, once you are in game you are fine. This eludes to a authentication server issue, not a load balancing from pick's issue. I could see ingame LAG being from spinup/spindown of instances, but the actual day 1 issue's are character creation writing to the database (You have to lock the database for a split second to write to it).

God forbid I try to help the company not DDOS themselves, but yeah, go ahead and cry for them, champion for them. Making excuses to not solve an issue sure does help a lot.

Ah, you are right, I was thinking this was patch week.

They've actually said that was ONE of many - the primary of which is the new DB writes for characters - of which name selection would be a portion.

Also with the "multiple sets of newbie gear" issue that has happened with initial login a couple times now where the initial login ended up duping multiple times is a solid point of evidence towards the "pain point" being to be character creation to some degree.

Assuming this is true, what concerns me most is how personas are going to effect this launch. On day 1, players will not only be creating their main characters, but they will also be creating personas for quicker transport around the world. The number of toons being generated the first few days/weeks is going to be a massive number. If the first week of Teek is even the slightest bit stable I will be impressed, because as of right now it's looking like it's going to be an absolute disaster. I'd love to be wrong though.

Personas don't really generate anything new other than a few inventory items... more akin to looting something from a mob or doing a /claim.

Where have the devs posted information regarding the database architecture? I'm curious and would like to check it out.

There was a comment quite a long time ago - well before Personas, but I'm not going on a scavenger hunt for it - but just talking from the player experience the character is only changing a few values - none of which with conflicts with other accounts (AKA names)

Unfortunately on these forums most developer responses get buried and lost over time. It is a shame since some of them are VERY VERY Transparent and helpful in understanding why's on things. Here is a prime example, when live server lag was a big issue, you have Accendo who posted this great detailed explanation, but because they no longer work with the company, their name is no longer listed as developer/community manager, and in this case, has gone inactive, so even if you KNEW Accendo posted something at some point in time, you can't search for their username and look up their post history to find it. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/addressing-latency.282286/

I can't remember exactly when I saw the post about databases being locked on character creation, my gut is telling me it was sometime between Phinny and Aradune. I know Aradune had tons of issues on launch, due to the sheer demand, but I searched through the forums at that point in time, including looking at posts from previous developers like Prathum, and current Dev's like Niente, Mepps, Klando, or Ngreth's posts as well (Ngreth was more active on the forums at that point in time, and was transparent on many things regarding Tskills and loot buckets etc, so I though maybe he posted it.) I also looked under jChan thinking it may have been a top level communication but I could only find the server hardware issue they faced a few years back.

Sorry if I couldn't be more help in understanding the core issue of taxing the database on character creation. (which at this point, I am gaslighting myself asking if the post was even there since after a hour+ searching I can't find it, lol)

Who are you and what have you done with Waring? The real Waring would hijack the thread and cyclically spew non-sense every five minutes about how he’s still right.

Who are you and what have you done with Waring? The real Waring would hijack the thread and cyclically spew non-sense every five minutes about how he’s still right.

Who are you and what have you done with Waring? The real Waring would hijack the thread and cyclically spew non-sense every five minutes about how he’s still right.

Yeah, like the did before with the very first TLPs in 2005 and for some reason not since.

Wait, TLP's really go back as far as 2005?

Combine and Sleeper were the first one in June 2006 or so. It was not called TLP though, just progression servers. They had a nice timeline also, and expansions unlocked once key targets got killed. The timeline showed which guild killed what target etc. For Velious unlock, all class epics needed to be completed also and the timeline showed the first char for each class who completed epic.

Edit. Here is the link https://www.everquest.com/news/imported-eq-enus-50178

Too bad the timeline image sample isn't there...it was pretty neat. It died when eqplayers.com got abandoned for the usual reasons stuff got abandoned by EQ Dev Teams

combine/sleeper 2006

its extortion pure and simple. it could have been done for free to all access members as a benefit for being one. instead they want $5 for it.