My Suggestion List: Improving network flow, increasing monetization (fairly), and more

Introduction
Hi, I'm Xehalin. I used to do entry level programming with java and vb in high school as well as was learning C# as a hobby. When I was learning c#, I used to also work on a small emulation project for another mmo. I was never a big wig programmer or official member of the team, but I did do community contributions and helped other people get involved. I started with it late 2015. I was learning how the project worked and was developing character skills for the server up until their first major rewrite of the code, and again until the project's closure in early 2017 due to a DMCA from Nexon. It was a software project called Aura, one that aimed to recreate the game Mabinogi. It was made with the idea that someone could honest their own personal version of the game, with their own changes if they saw fit. I've also been actively involved with Black Desert since early 2015 or so. My first live experience with the game was on the Japanese client, where I played up until level 30 as a Musa and couldn't continue because of the poor connection quality I had via free vpn software. Later that year in the fall, I got into the Alpha test of the NA/EU client and continued to participate in every beta test. After that, I bought a conqueror's pack, and then played on my account from day 1 of head start until February 24th of this year, when I quit for Gamez. My overall time with the game is stretching towards 3 years now. I've mained Warrior, Musa, and have mained Ninja since it came out on retail. I've seen every connection issue, I've participated in every form of pvp except arsha and the 5v5 arena; I've seen siege, t3s, t2s, and t1s. I've done gvgs, ba, duels, ow, and town arena. Now that I've talked about my experience and where I'm coming from, I have some suggestions to help.

Suggestions
Gamez seems to be struggling with stability at this current time, resulting in the patch that we received today where monster spawns were slowed to match retail, and then buffed to be slightly faster. In an environment where you have a concurrent rate of about 500-600 players in a single server, most of which will be actively grinding, this can't work. There simply aren't enough mobs to support the playerbase. I understand that this change was made to accommodate network bandwidth being squeezed tight by the servers, as well as it squeezing the performance of the server hardware. I will admit right now before I make my actual suggestion that I don't know if what I say will be feasible with our current server setup. I don't know how the backend is coded and I've heard several rumors that the retail servers are a mess of crap code, causing tons of issues if even the slightest thing is changed in the wrong way. Nonetheless, I have my own ideas of how things could be handled and might be possible to be done. I also have other, unrelated suggestions to put on the table.

Network Improvement
1. Dividing up handlers to different hardware/software
With the current influx of players and the bogged down network, I feel that it may help to improve server flow by dividing up the server from one big server into several small server sets. This can be software-wise or even hardware, where multiple server configurations connect together in a network to reduce individual overflow.

This is a diagram example of how aura was eventually planned to work. Communications and Monster servers were incomplete at the time of closing, with only login and world really complete. The diagram includes brief explanations of how this would work. If this is possible, I would imagine this is a hefty rework of the current code. But if you wish to remain as you are and stay successful, this might be one of your only options.

2. Obtaining a second network line.
Some isps offer second or third or more lines to homes or apartments. This would be something to look into, and might be less expensive than renting out more server hardware. I would say this is actually required, along with splitting the monster handler off to a different machine.

3. Optimization of data use
There might be an offset of unneeded packets being sent when monsters are spawned, killed, etc. Trimming the fat and removing any unnecessary data may improve network flow.

4. The much more obvious one - Additional servers/channels.
This is probably the easiest change of them all, but the most costly. Introduction of additional hardware (beyond the one previously suggested) could run costs even higher than what I've heard in the rumors, but it's still an option on the table. 4 channels still can't support a population of 3k. 7 channels still won't be enough with the current monster spawn rate.

5. Up the rates into the sky.
Drop rate, enhance rate, exp, skill, etc. Everything must go up! If we can't solve the monster spawn issue because of the costs, then simply make it so ineffective farming tops any sort of effective farming. Even if you can only kill a handful of mobs every 3 mins, you still get drops and levels! This is even easier than the last, but I don't think anybody would want this.

Monetization Improvement and Reduction of Server Costs
I have my own ideas about how they could increase monetization to better afford some of these suggestions presented. I have no idea as to how profitable the current set up is. Perhaps the devs want to avoid making it too profitable for the fear of DMCAs or lawsuits, though I have heard that they've already won at least one lawsuit that attempted to shut the server down.

1. Restrict premium packages to 30/90/X allotment and introduce higher premium tiers with better rewards.
The current premium package is very amazing. Some would even call it p2w for all the advantages it gives. I'm not one of those people who cares how p2w something is, as long as it's affordable for everyone involved or everyone can get their hands on it reasonably. That said, I believe premium packages that are under 30 days should be removed, unless you wish to offer a trial package to let people try it out.

Packages could look like this:

GamezBD Premium Bronze Package
$15 for 30 days, $25 for 90 days.
+ What we have now.
+ Implementation of the exclusive shop and access to credit. (See below)**

GamezBD Silver
$20 for 30 days, $35 for 90 days.
+ All of Bronze benefits
+ Enhancement bonus rate on boss-difficulty gear raised to 50%.
+ Enhancement chance reduction on green grade or lower by 50%.
+ Appreciation pearls raised to 300 per hour, or 150 per 30m.
+ All exp bonus rates raised to 50% instead of 30.
+ Now able to add individual item ids to drop filter.
+ Slot expansions raised to +16.
+ Weight limit bonus raised to 1000lt.
+ Combined with value pack, marketplace collection is now 100% of the item's sale value.
+ Horse flute active on all characters while package is valid.
+ Free daily loot scroll.

GamezBD Gold
$30 for 30 days, $50 dollars for 90 days.
+ All of previous benefits.
+ Enhancement bonus rate on boss gear raised to 100%.
+ Enhancement chance reduction on green grade or lower by 100%.
+ Appreciation pearls are now gained while being offline (elaborated further below in a different point)*.
+ Exp bonus rates raised to 100%.
+ Slot expansion raised to +32.
+ Weight limit bonus raised to 1500 lt.
+ Combined with value pack, marketplace collection is now 120% of the item's sale value.
+ Offline energy regain is now raised to match online energy regain.
+ Monthly gift of one item of your choosing, at dev's discretion. Could be costumes, sets of loot scrolls, value packs, exclusive pets, accessory box, etc.

2. Introduction of offline pearl appreciation gain and maybe how to accomplish this*
I've already heard that the devs want to introduce a means of gaining free pearls while offline to reduce 24/7 player population. I'd like to stress that this is a good idea, and also throw in my own two cents on how they can accomplish this within the current server means. Okay, so, we already have an item delivery system that comes from webshop or even the current appreciation system. We add two things to the account: 1- Time since last played, in hours. This is easy enough to keep track of, through the character/account database. 2 - An item claim button for pearls.
The back end of this claim goes as is - the system compares the last time you played, server side, with the current time of the server and spits out in number of hours not played. From there, it totals up the number of hours and converts that to pearls. The system then sends you a mail ingame as it would a webshop purchase, containing the number of pearls you earned. So you would have to manually claim them, but it would present an easy solution to this.

3. A new web currency, credit, and a new webshop alongside the current one**
As we are now, the only interactions between donations and pearls are to trade cash in for pearls, but you also want cash to buy webshop items. You could introduce an intermediary currency, that I would call credits. You can trade either pearls or cash for credit, cash being worth much more credit than pearls. You add a new webshop to work with the old one, one which only takes credit as payment. Rates could be 1 cash = 3 credit, 1 pearl = 1 credit. You can add things like seasonal pets/outfits to this shop, valks advice with varying stacks, loot scrolls, hedgehogs or penguins, energy pots, etc. Things like the black pegasus would remain donation exclusive, though. While making it so that you can buy ingame items with real money might seem p2w to some, but you also have the option of earning these items for free, which balances the system out. It allows people to pay to get things faster, or receive them for free with a little more time invested. It adds back in items we might not be able to get normally because we run the NA client like loot scrolls outside of value packs as well, so I think it is something to consider. You can also add items like magic tool boxes, regional meals, and other low stock items from ingame to the shop for purchase with credit.

 

great info! @Kolka @Carl @Noyah

may help the server bandwidth bottleneck and allow for an even larger community.. so we can keep growing the population

 

Nice post. I agree with a lot of the comments except everything about figure 1) where you talk about sub rates for 30/90/x days. I think a lot of the players here like that they have an affordable choice to support the game even for a nominal donate of 5 bucks and still get exactly the same return as someone who is spending enough money for a 90 day premium. The idea here is not to introduce classism into a playerbase that has largely suffered from P2W money-grab tactics from the likes of Kakao over the last 2 years. Here, when we donate we know its going towards a company / server we appreciate. On retail, we felt like we were forced into handing over money just to compete at an even-scale with the rest. I don't want that feeling again.

Anyway, props for giving them some ideas.

 

+1

Please implement something to give us pearls even if offline, there is no point on keeping everyone on 24/7 and this is for sure affecting the server performance, I think its the easiest and fastest thing that can be done to go in the right direction and then from there you guys can start tuning respawn times again. Also a little bit of transparency would be appreciated, im sure the community wouldnt have reacted so badly today if you guys would have said that this is some temporary change to help server performance if thats the case, not change this out of nowhere with no explanation.

 

The idea of compartmentalization is likely already handled by the provider Liquid Web. They say "dedicated servers" it just means allocation of resources and a dedicated OS, you pick the CPU load, storage and memory, the abstraction layers handle the rest. Most hosts don't physically allocate hosts to clients, it's a serious point of failure issue. As such the diagram you have is incorrect. It's more about how the software handles certain tasks well vs not well. The original developer wrote code that uses so many calculations to generate data, upping the amount of times it does it without going back and improving or decreasing the interactions of that aspect of the code means it's not optimal. In other words, increasing spawn times breaks things because they weren't designed that way.

Obtaining a second network line is just.. wrong. Sorry it's hosted at a facility, they have multiple huge connections. They allocate bandwidth as needed and paid for.

 

It was described to me that one of their issues currently is they are hitting their data cap; their line caps at 1Gbps. So it sounded like an inhouse server instead of an offsite server. Also, who are you? I find it really odd that you know who the host is, but this is your first post.

 

I don't agree with the bronze/gold/silver; I like the current premium package. Something that sounded great was having pearls delivered when your offline, for premium users only. Other than that, nice suggestions.

 

Surely Liqud Web offers larger bandwidth packages, they aren't capped at 1 Gbps, they just allocate that much to the host.

I chatted with their sales chat

I know who the host is because I looked up who owned the IP the game connects to. Pretty normal discovery method.

 

I don't know anything about 80% of the stuff you said but I agree that for a Playerbase of 2,5k-3k Player there must be more Channels or as you said more drop from the amount of mobs we have now

(AND EU SERVER SOMETIME PLEASE )

Literally everywhere you go there are multiple people

Doesn't matter if the droprates are 10x if you don't get nearly as much Mobs as on Retail, even at places that are usually less known.


Offline Pearls would be great, I suppose I'm not the only one who literally has the PC on 24/7 because of this..idk why make it like this when you could get it offline, maybe make it so online active players get it and not people who dont play for 2 months just do come back and have 2394834 pearls

 

Your suggestions are honestly, really great. I like the last one.