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Yet another thread about the same problem: changing map instances. This topic is bothering me for months now. I have been doing a lot of testing and research within the game and I think I found a solution that might work. It is a technical stuff about servers and the game itself, so it is ANet's job to find a solution. That is a fair point indeed, but we have not seen a real official approach for years. So I think we have to make the first step.

When I started with this, I've set myself three goals:

  • easy to execute
  • easy to read
  • no additional software or website

The key to this problem comes with the /IP command. If you type this into your chat-window and press enter, you receive a message like this:cquXJPY.jpg

I skip the boring explanation of my research and head straight to the conclusion. If you are curious, just open the spoiler.

 

I started my research with writing down IP addresses of every map I visited, together with date and time. The goal was to separate the long number into useless and useful parts. And to spot any sort of system behind it. Picking a number of values from the middle was never an option, only from the beginning or the end.

The beginning of the IP addresses is not always the same, but it appears to me like the first two sets of numbers represent the physical server from where the map-instance is hosted.18.195. ...18.195. ...18.195. ...18.195. ...or18.197. ...18.197. ...18.197. ...18.197. ...or in some cases52.57. ...52.57. ...or35.158. ...35.158. ...

So looking at my first two goals, picking the start of the IP address was a true dead end. The interesting and "unique" parts of the line begin with the 3rd group of numbers.... 28.21:0... 94.185:0... 106.7:0... 101.215:0... 160.196.0... 78.113.0Big problem, those chains are way too long to be useful. And if you are in a hurry, you maybe start with the wrong group. So I focused on the last digits and tried to figure out how less I can use. As you can see already, using the last only cannot work as it is in most cases 0. I found a few rare situations where it was not 0.

Assuming that the last digit is "always" 0, picking the last two equals only 1 digit. That can be enough if you have < 10 instances of a map and believe that the 3rd digit does not matter. Not the case. As you can see from the last shown listing, that there are already 2x the chains "50".

So I did another testing-phase with the last three digits of the IP addresses. And I noticed three interesting things:1.) The last three digits are enough.2.) It is possible that two map-instances of different map-origins share the same IP. Example: One instance in the Domain of Vabbi and one Instance in the Domain of Istan both have the IP 35.158.51.24:0 at the same time.3.) The IP addresses repeat themselves quite often. For example if I wrote down the IP of Hoelbrak in the morning and traveled to the Crystal Oasis in the evening, I found the same IP.

After more testing I came to the conclusion that there are no instances of a single map with the same IP address. And that the IP addresses are static from a list. Then I remembered the issue with Winter Wonderland. When all available instances are full. So the there might be a limit of map-instances.

Out of curiosity, and to prove my theory, I did a few more tests with instanced zones like Home Instances and dungeons. And as I expected, I have met a few old friends again. IP addresses of formerly other maps such as The Desolation.

 

What we need are the three last digits of the IP-adress and we ignore all the punctuations.R6VAiE0.jpg

Now when we create a squad, all we do is putting that three digits at the beginning of the message. It will look like that:TJHYSC2.jpg

So if you want to switch to a certain map, you can easily see which squads are in the same map-instance.HC6xwkO.jpg

-Asking for the first three letters/digits of every LFG message in the game? I am a stupid person for even thinking about it. Space in the LFG system is more valuable than a monthly supply of gem-cards. Let alone the first three letters. Absolutely horrible idea, I know. But the alternatives would involve either 3rd party programs or a separate website, as we had it when there was no LFG tool in the game. I am not a huge fan of those ideas.

In the end, I am not making the decision. The community does. If you like the idea, we can try it. If you do not like it, let us discuss it in here. Maybe one of you comes up with a better idea or ANet does. It is an important topic and we should keep the discussion up until the situation improves.

Thanks for reading

[Edit] This development was unexpected, but I welcome it. I can finally stop thinking about it and focus on more important things. It is not like I did not read the wiki about IPs, I just did not understand it properly. Thanks for clearing things up. With a little luck this thread will vanish in the endless depths of the forum, without being bumped up again.

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I'll just state that looking at the last three digits does not garantee that you are on the same map.An IP-adres does not look like e.g. 52.58.21.181 That is just a visual explaination to make it easier for us to read. What they do look like is:00110100.00111010.00010101.10110101The second part of the adress would be the subnet mask. This might look like:11111111.11111111.00000000.00000000

Thi determines the seperation of the network ID and subnet ID of the adress. It is a mask so in this example it means that 00110100.00111010 is the network ID and the client ID.

So you are saying that 10110101 (181) is unique. This is not true, just like 22 is not unique if you just look at the end of a number. 21.181 is unique, but there can be a 22.181 as well. Further, it is unique within the specific subnet. but not outside of it.

The service Arenanet uses for the servers is a cloud service. This means that it can run from any datacenter in the world. Arenanet is not in control over these actual IP-adresses. They have a service level agreement with the provider of the cloud service for performance and quality and uptime, but as long as they hold themself to the agreement, they have full freedom to do as they fit and they have many customers. So it might happen that in time the servers are split into several subnets or even a different network ID. So all in all this is a bad idea.

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@"HnRkLnXqZ.1870" said:It is a technical stuff about servers and the game itself, so it is ANet's job to find a solution.

While it may be technical in implementation, Anet doesnt need to find a solution. As Kheldorn above say, there are other games with instanced maps that fixed this long ago. You click a button by the map which slides up a scroll list, select "Instance 12 (86 players)" and off you go. You have now changed instance. LFG would simply list what instance they are on.

The problem here is that exposing the instances to the player would mean Anet have to tell how many instances there are. That goes against the secrecy of how many players actually play... The megaserver tech was designed to hide empty zones, remember?

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