Will Uber offer paid PA servers?

Just curious but it would be nice. I would consider paying some money for say 40 slots worth. I will never rent a server because I hate setting it up and I think Uber makes direct profit from this.

Edit: Please do not get off topic or I will request a moderator to delete your post.

I dont imagine they will, as they have plenty of servers to run themselves, but im sure other people will offer server hosting services.

I would assume that Uber would offer their servers for games for free, though some people might want to use their own servers because they're faster.

Maybe the community could create an EC2 AMI which would allow a novice to simply sign up to AWS, fire up a server instance and instantly have a server they could connect to. It's even feasible somebody could create a GUI app for configuring the server via SSH using the private key AWS spits out when you create the instance.

If Uber had a hand in this then great, but really I think they've got enough on their plate and since we're getting dedicated servers, Uber would be lucky to generate much from the programme.

As they've pushed the client-server thingy quite heavily, I expect them to offer servers for mods.
If they are so big on modding, that's mandatory : I highly doubt every modder will rent servers to run their mod online.

I don't know I imagine it would be pretty profitable for them if the community helped pay for their servers to stay up.

The problem with this is that you get into the grey area where the community ends up feeling like the developers are renting out servers that really should be available to the whole community for free.

And if lag issues occur, people get pissed off feeling that they have to pay extra money to get the better servers.

The idea is not that the 'rented' servers are better, just that you have more control over them so you can run server side mods and such off them.

Of course we know next to nothing in regards to Uber's plans for the servers they'll be hosting so we don't even know if such a system would even be needed.

Mike

The servers already have bandwidth problems although there's only a "few" alpha players. Yes I know they said they will fix it, but not that it will be fixed at the start of beta. And we know that ten thousands of beta players will suddenly appear.

Currently server bandwith is artificially limited on purpose.

Thus: Assumptions made about future server performance are invalid.

Seems like you understand PA backend wrong. There is no "large" servers like in MMO, but only lightweight game servers which probably only host one game at time. This perfectly explain why Uber use range of ports instead of one port.

Uber run those game servers on cloud instances, with multiple game servers per one instance. E.g suppose (cuz we don't know it) each instance host 4 game servers and only have 100mbps link. It's mean each game server only have 25mbps uplink, so if it's host 5v5 game each player only got 2.2mbps of bandwidth which might be reason of bandwidth throttling .

But if required Uber can easily setup 50, 100 or 500 of these instances in minutes, no extra work required. So there is completely no problems with Beta, 5000 players or 50000 players. Only bottleneck is master authentication/ladder server (uberent.com) which is used by everyone at same time.

How can you easily setup 100 servers which each run a game? Even if they had like 5 games per server, then there would still lots and lots of servers be needed to allow everyone to even start a game.
I think we have to create our own servers because image what happens at release. There will be even more players than before, and they just can't afford to have one server per 5 games at all. And lets just not think about galactic war, because that will need more than one server per galaxy. If you are really running it with 40 players that is.

Uber currently run multiple game servers per one virtual instance.

First server power are pretty cheap these days especially if you're major customer.

Second Uber don't need to pay for servers while they're idling. E.g they might have something like 6-8 virtual instances which online all the time, but others will be used only used on demand. If there tons of players who want to play those instances will be activated automatically.

Probably you (or me) understand galactic war wrong. As I see it's will be meta-game which connect multiple battles, so it's not mean to run multiple battles on one server.

If we'll really have lot of 40-players game it's will mean PA is pretty popular and it's will pay for servers easily.

Actually I'm think Uber will host games with some limitations (like we have no with single planet), so if you want super heavy game which require 16GB RAM you'll need to run your own server.

I'm suggesting allowing Uber to rent servers out for several reasons.

One they can have all the preinstalled software so you wont need to install anything unless you intend to run a mod.

Two it gets more money in their pockets and they aren't losing anything.

Three you have much less chance of being swindled than if you went to someone else. With Uber you know you can rely on them because you bought PA.

Four why not?

That means even more servers to set up (I think we had a misunderstanding there, a server is the thing which stands in your room, and the virtual instance is what runs on at least one of them).

First that's true for the not so good servers (< 8GB RAM, small bandwidth), however being a major customer doesn't make them cheaper.
Second they have to pay for setting up one or for having one. And if it is idle it just uses less power. In the case of having to set them up, which is more likely, they would still have to pay all of them.

Again, this results in even more servers (and virtual instances) to be needed, for every battle one. And as there are 40 players this will probably result in about 5-10 instances needed all the time.

You have to use that money for developing and for new games, they once said how expensive that is.

As long as we know Uber don't use dedicated servers at all, even for this forum. So my terminilogy is this:

• Virtual instance == VPS, virtual server on Amazon EC2 or SoftLayer.
• Game server == One PA game server which only run one battle per time (that might be wrong).

Being major customer always make rent of any servers cheaper, sometimes price is lower in two times.

First they don't need to pay for setup 0f cloud instance, they only pay hourly of for CPU/MEM usage.

Then they don't need to pay for idle because when there is no games servers required instance are off and only enabled on demand.

All these 5-10 instances won't cost more than $2000-4000 per month.

Let's stay on topic, here we talk about the cost of supporting server backend for multiplayer. If we'll really have lot of 40-players games in PA it's will mean that game is very popular. If game will be very popular it's will easy pay for server side and Uber don't really need to move on new titles.

A virtual instance can be ran on any computer.
You said they will have multiple games per server before.

If you rent a server you're paying for time rent, not time used, not CPU, RAM or power usage. Because it would be ridiculous to throw those servers around to whoever needs one. You can't just say you want another one.

You mean for one galactic war, but chances are they still need to run multiple.

But we know where Uber run game servers: on Amazon and SoftLayers clouds.

It's only matter how many games they run on one virtual instance per time.

Please learn about Amazon EC2:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
SoftLayer CloudLayer:
http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/build-your-own-cloud/
DigitalOcean:
https://www.digitalocean.com/

And yes, you can put $20 on your account and run 100 server instances for hour on this money, no setup cost required.

I seem to have missed that part. Do you have a source for that?

The cloud provides n instances and x > n games are ran on all those instances combined.
Also please don't say server when you mean game, that's very confusing to me.

It's said multiple times by both garat and neutrino. If I'm remember they also said about cloud hosting in one of streams and also Jon said about that somewhere on this video:


Also you can easily find game server IPs in game logs and check them in whois.

Sorry about that. I just trying to not use "servers" for cloud VPS because then everyone usually think about some dedicated server with physical hardware.

So: one virtual server (cloud instance) run multiple PA games on it.