I have to admit that I know very little of how the servers technically work nowadays.
Do you know any examples of popular games that use these amazon servers or cloud servers in general? Are they as stable as the more traditional types?
You make it sound so simple and easy but quick googling didn’t bring me any lists of games using this type of technology. Am I just lacking in my google-fu skills?
I hope my questions are not too off the topic 
I believe it’s just that they don’t have to go anywhere to setup a new server. They just need to pay for it and have the ability to setup it from whatever location they want.
The technology is so common that its no longer listed as something special so googling this wont get you anything specific.
It sound simple and easy because it is exactly like that 
I think you’ve at least partially misunderstood my question. I know that much that you don’t need to physically setup anything anymore. Last game I’ve played that had servers maintained by the publishing company themselves was Luna online, I think? At least they sometimes had really long server maintenances, with the only guy working there trying to save his cat which got tangled up on server lines and sometimes accidentally spilling his cup of coffee on servers while working on them (theories I came up why it sometimes took so long 
).
What I was interested was these cloud servers I’ve read few mentions already.
Other than few smartphone games I couldn’t find any mmos that actually use them and one few years old reddit thread I just skimmed through gives them an image of being more expensive than more traditional servers, with their faster scalability being the only significant asset for them. And this is the case only if you can afford the extra costs short spikes in amount of online users causes.
If they really are more expensive (as I said my only source of info by so far is few years old already 
), then it probably wouldn’t be a wise solution to rush and use them just to get fast servers for the EU customers. I can’t see why the situation would be much different than few years ago. Cloud servers need to have more extra unused resources than traditional servers (if I’ve understood this correctly) so theoretically they can’t be as cheap as more traditional ones unless they can significantly cut costs on other than hardware expenses.
There’s also the problem of finding the cheapest deal from different service providers even if this cloud server type is the solution for getting EU server up easily and fast. This might also cause some delay on how fast you can get the servers up and running.
Anyone feel free to correct on parts I’ve misunderstood and spoon feed me with info on this matter. And why Amazon cloud servers in particular would be the definite solution and our salvation to this problem? Are they somehow without a doubt cheaper than other server providers? Just being an easy solution might not make this problem as a whole any more easier.
Thank you for admitting that NA needs ping advantage
You mean, NA players are not skilled enough to win w/o ping advantage?
What ? You’re overthinking it.
Today servers are rented (usually), housed (you put your own server in a DC and rent the housing, probably when you have specific needs), or self-hosted (when you are Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft… and have your own datacenter or when you want theses servers at your workplace or when you don’t need the services of a provider, like when you host your RPi at home).
What you can rent is either :
The ToS NA server uses the Amazon datacenter. They’ve used them in both closed beta tests.
It’s a simple phonecall since they are already partners with them. Amazon has these datacenters all around the world, there’s actually two in Europe. One is located in Frankfurt Germany and one in the UK, Ireland.
It takes them at most perhaps a day to get the server done. From my experience a server capable of data as big of an MMO is probably going to cost thousands a month.
They most likely have already purchased 3 or 4 servers, but all located in NA. They have learned from the closed beta tests that there is no way one server is enough.
I’d also imagine the login server needs its’ own dedicated server, but since it only handles logins it doesn’t need that juicy of a machine.
How beefy does a server need to be depends entirely on the software used, aka ToS’s server software. I’d imagine quite a pretty beefy one.
This is just from personal experience, but most servers can rank up the costs in the hundreds of dollars to thousands a month.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/?sc_channel=PS&sc_campaign=acquisition_ND&sc_publisher=google&sc_medium=ec2_b&sc_content=sitelink&sc_detail=%2Bamazon%20%2Bserver&sc_category=ec2&sc_segment=pricing&sc_matchtype=b&sc_country=ND&s_kwcid=AL!4422!3!85667384480!b!!g!!%2Bamazon%20%2Bserver&ef_id=VvRq4AAABHWQ2LVI:20160324223206:s
For example I’d imagine CPU heavy server is needed so say a c3.8xlarge server service in Frankfurt is 2.064 $ an hour. 24 hours times 30 days = 1486$ for 30 days. Say if 5,000~10,000 people from EU played on that server only and bought 19$ tokens ever month that’s 100,000$~200,000$ made from token purchases alone.
I have no idea how much the Founders Pack will make, but my estimate is: a lot.
So far this is the first time IMC has put out something on sale. Last iCBT2 was 5 months ago. It surprises me they didn’t anticipate the need for other regional servers.
Surprise! The world is bigger than USA and coastal Europe.
I don’t care that some ppl sometime in history played an old game with 1000 ping. Today, if I pay for a game I expect good service. I expect to not be discriminated based on where I live. If not there are plenty of games out there that have EU servers because they seem to think they should exist.
And just for you information, ppl here are requesting a West Coast NA server already.
Quite frankly, after reading these kind of reactions from NA people I have no desire left in me to share a server with them.
@celexample
It’s funny how all the guys against an EU server don’t have the slightest clue about hosting/using a server. (Meaning that knowledgeable people see what game imc is playing, and that’s not an honest game.)
By the way, I’m very curious about what type of server is required for running a MMO like ToS… And how it scales with the player count…
Do you have any input regarding that ? (Don’t really care if it’s ToS or not)
No. I just pulled up Amazons site. We have google. So I used it. I honestly have no idea if that’s exactly the service they are using but they even list NA East, Virginia, the server location they use for ToS so I’d imagine this is exactly what they use.
I can only speak from personal experience from RO private server hosting days. I’m no expert. I remember a really crappy server then being able to host a 100 players all at once with no issues and that was back in 2004.
Games have changed, computers have become 100x times faster and especially servers have become insanely more powerful. If you look at some of these servers they even feature 20x 2000 GB SSD hard drives. These type of servers are what google use.
Don’t ask me. I’m just a wiki warrior / google user. I can’t imagine a ToS server costing more than a few thousand though. It needs to host the maps, monsters, NPC locations, their dialogs, quest informations and actively update player locations and send it out. Most of the hard labour is done by your computer, like the displaying of effects, graphics etc. Most database servers just contain your characters levels, loot, gear, pets etc. as an ecrypted SQL database. It’s actually not that complicated. Oh and of course it has to host all the monster data too. Think I mentioned that.
IMC could easily modify anything withing the monster database or look stuff up. I’m sure they have software just for that.
But I’m rambling. This was stuff I did over a decade ago and most likely isn’t that relevant to ToS at all.
I know where I could find this info but forum is currently closed °°
My honest guess why there is no EU server planned/prepared yet…
They have got no clue. No clue about ping. No clue about routing. No clue about networking. Or at least the management that holds the license.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
Business called an consultant who had to calculate how to setup working servers for maximum profit and here we go. AWS US East as the amount of customers/profit lost without real regional servers has been proven less then the profit gain doing it like that using some outdated statistics and pie charts.
Well I still wait for the 29th. At the moment I ordered nothing yet and if there won’t be an announcement of a solution I will just pick founder’s 3 on my Russian account for -70%. You don’ care - I don’t care.
I work at IBM but I’m not much involved with our Cloud Products.
However Amazon explains their public cloud services quite nicely in the video on this page:
It really doesn’t seem like an EU server requires many complications and such high costs.
On a home computer with a basic i7, given a sufficient connection, you can easily lag free host for a thousand people.
Take a look at that. It’s a dedicated beast. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was already far enough for an EU ToS sever. But I also lack real knowledge about needs of these dimensions.
YOu dont rent a whole server most times. Just computing space ^^.
Normally you need virutal servers for:
-login
-maps
-client connection
-Serverside work
Where the last 2 are the heavy loaders.
But with the first gone or any of them, the others dont work anymore.
Moneywise it can cost quite alot.
As you pay per bandwith usage etc.
Or you rent it … i dunno how the big firms do it exactly.
The betas i was at, had often own servers.
…one time a snowstorm killed they’re server room.
Another time the cleaning lady… unplugged it.
And it went dark for 7 hours, till they noticed the error.
“I needed a plug in for my stuff~”
But dont expect tos to run cheaply.
Cheap for firms liek imc yes.
But then again, they want to cut back on any and all costs. As good as possible. till they secured an income … and heck that might just kill them xD.
No regional servers for non publisher lands… will hurt.
There are 2 logical reasons why we don’t have an EU announcement yet.
1: They are working out a deal with a publisher. If so, they should have told us long ago though, now it’s too late to do that route.
2: After seeing how the game is doing in Korea they have no faith in their own game and are scared to open more servers.
Sad times.
If they say no later, people will just refund before 29th… (from the comments i read around). So better say no now xD Or at least no for now, or yes, whatever!
Maybe they’re considering some EU publisher offer.
This game is a big hit in marketing, many publishers want a piece of the cake
Because this server is what the game deserves, but not the one it needs right now, so we’ll complain. Because it can take it, because its new. its a nostalgia, a hype, a retro. 
We need curve of your discuss IMC. Really.