Server costs.

[thunderclap]

What does the PWO server currently cost? What kind of hardware is it? We were told a figure years ago of ~$330 per month on these forums, in the interests of transparency. I've looked and asked, but can't find any up-to-date figures.

That price, if still accurate, suggests that we're using one very high-end or multiple dedicated servers. Which would be total complete overkill for PWO.

Is there any reason PWO can't be hosted on a cheap VPS from someone like OVH or Leaseweb for example? Looking at their prices, I think the total costs to host PWO could be about $15-30 per month, quite reasonably. Certainly a tiny fraction of $330. The specs look quite good also. Should be easy to find an even better deal -- I didn't do any shopping around -- I just know these 2 companies are reputable.

The way a VPS works is we'd be sharing a server with other people, but each section has its own OS installed and behaves like a dedicated server, for all intents and purposes. Each segment is fully isolated from the other users for 100% security. If old server hardware was able to host PWO in its heyday years ago, I think new hardware should manage fine with our few dozen users even if we're sharing it.

I'm somewhat skeptical that we're currently using modern hardware, though, judging by the performance. Not saying this to insult or discourage but each Playerdex page takes quite a while to load, especially Global Link, and there's a lag whenever using bicycle in-game, or entering doors/stairs, etc. I'm sure that's partly due to big sprawling databases and inefficient coding, but does that explain it completely? It's not a huge deal, but we don't seem to be getting $330 worth of performance.

I suspect PWO owns an old legacy server (crusty yellowed Pentium 4 tower?) and pays to host it in someone's datacentre. I could see that being costly, and its continued use justified until now by the complexity/complacency in moving/upgrading servers. But in 2021, that's not at all worth it given the cheap alternatives. VPSes these days have blazing fast NVMe SSDs and a certain number of dedicated CPU cores per user.

Performance isn't my main concern -- if we can keep the same performance but cut the price to 1/20, I'd call that a huge game-changing win. But depending how old our current hardware is we might see a performance gain AND huge cost savings.

We all know that no staff member profits from donations and that any excess donations go to charity, but I hate to see donations being ill-spent on unnecessary costs, if that is happening.

The need to maintain so much donation income is hurting this game. Most importantly the decision not to have any source of free memberships other than random rare giveaways. If another source of memberships existed we might not see these long dry spells between events with only 10 players online. If server costs were $15 a month we wouldn't need the token store at all. PWO is developing an ugly stink of being Pay To Win and it is unfortunate. I'd personally like to remove the shiny chance from the token store altogether.

I think it's in the game's long-term interest to address this issue. @Bluerise

Thanks for reading and for your continued development/support of this game .

 

[thunderclap]

2 year bump @Bluerise.

 

[Isguros]

2 year bump @Bluerise.

It's actually been 1 year, 11 months, and 21 days. Try again in a couple of days.

 

[Jobey]

It's actually been 1 year, 11 months, and 21 days. Try again in a couple of days.

But hasn't technically the bump been reset now? If so, wouldn't he need to wait two more years to make his response accurate? I mean, his next bump would be a 10 day bump wouldn't it?

 

[sYYn]

You're asking why not to host a game on a shared-services VPS? For a game of this size(never really been more than 500 online at once), honestly, a dev or trusted party could probably host this on a backup laptop in their house.
I doubt their hosting prices are still the same, either. Domain and shared services like web, sure. But the game itself? Home host over redirect server. ($11/year)

I'd like to see more developer contribution for fxn on this game tbh. Cpp is a very common language

 

[Jinji]

You're asking why not to host a game on a shared-services VPS? For a game of this size(never really been more than 500 online at once), honestly, a dev or trusted party could probably host this on a backup laptop in their house.
I doubt their hosting prices are still the same, either. Domain and shared services like web, sure. But the game itself? Home host over redirect server. ($11/year)

I'd like to see more developer contribution for fxn on this game tbh. Cpp is a very common language

You underestimate just how heavy the PWO Server actually is. It's not just the number of players that needs to be considered; it's all the backend processes as well. Especially when you have three different pieces of software accessing the same database at once...

As for your other comment, it's not as easy as you think to hire new developers, especially when you have nothing to offer in return. Let's not forget, PWO is a non-profit - a legal requirement, since we utilize Nintendo trademarks. The types of people who would generally want to work on a large-scale fan project like this for free are few and far between, and not all of them have the best intentions at heart - we've seen for ourselves the types of people who join projects seemingly for goodwill but who end up being thieves or vandals - stealing ideas or code, or in the worst cases actively sabotaging or attempting to destroy the project (does anyone remember Zidonuke?). Even if there were a developer who was genuine and honest in their intentions and wanted to join us, many people who claim to be developers actually exaggerate their true skills. But if there IS one out there, I'd be perfectly happy to hear from them. To take any application seriously, however, I'd be wanting to see examples of projects they've worked on in the past AND provided source code for them, so we can judge their actual abilities for ourselves.

 

[thunderclap]

You underestimate just how heavy the PWO Server actually is. It's not just the number of players that needs to be considered; it's all the backend processes as well. Especially when you have three different pieces of software accessing the same database at once...

As for your other comment, it's not as easy as you think to hire new developers, especially when you have nothing to offer in return. Let's not forget, PWO is a non-profit - a legal requirement, since we utilize Nintendo trademarks. The types of people who would generally want to work on a large-scale fan project like this for free are few and far between, and not all of them have the best intentions at heart - we've seen for ourselves the types of people who join projects seemingly for goodwill but who end up being thieves or vandals - stealing ideas or code, or in the worst cases actively sabotaging or attempting to destroy the project (does anyone remember Zidonuke?). Even if there were a developer who was genuine and honest in their intentions and wanted to join us, many people who claim to be developers actually exaggerate their true skills. But if there IS one out there, I'd be perfectly happy to hear from them. To take any application seriously, however, I'd be wanting to see examples of projects they've worked on in the past AND provided source code for them, so we can judge their actual abilities for ourselves.

Hey @Jinji, thanks for the reply. Do you (or anyone) have any insight/comments on the following:

• Server cost. Is it still high, similar to the $330 figure given before? (in other words, is this discussion still relevant?)
• Old hardware was enough for 300-500 people back in 2008. If costs are still high, and if not a home server, could a modern cheap VPS be adequate, with our reduced playerbase? Cloud-hosting is preferable in my opinion so we're not fully dependant on any single staff member having physical access.

Reducing costs would reduce PWO's reliance on donations, enabling PWO to have ways to earn free memberships and/or tokens simply by playing. People would be more likely to play when events/swarms are not happening. More players will lead to even more players with a snowball effect. Some would still donate, if they didn't want to spend time earning things.

The event staff have been amazing and super clutch, keeping the swarms/events rolling regularly. Reducing costs would help build on their momentum and help PWO survive even if they are unable to maintain such impressive cadence.


One last thing, are there any ways PWO can leverage its excess donations without running afoul of legal requirements? It's a difficult topic so it will take some thought and refinement... Let's all brainstorm.. no ideas are bad

• A paid subscription to GPT-4 (AI chatbot) might help in finishing up the NPC Lua scripts for Sevii and future projects. If not yet usable for the scripting part, it should at least be good for creating dialogue.
• Are paid advertisements completely out of the picture? Not talking about front-page New York Times, just something very very small to give us a tiny boost.
• In theory if there were tasks not requiring sensitive code/access or extensive training, would it threaten our legal safe-ground to pay unaffiliated Fiverr coders (or similar) for quick one-time jobs? The way I see it, as long as they aren't "part of the team" they wouldn't be "on the payroll" and any help provided would just be a normal expense similar to server costs.

 

[Jinji]

The majority of these questions are not things I have any information about and are probably best fielded to @Bluerise, @Luminance or a member of our DEV team.