Poll: If there were a second entirely separate grid on new servers, would you use it?

So, the problems that are plauging Second Life right now are entirely due to the fact that LL is running absolutely everything off of a single huge asset server farm, and that server farm cannot handle the peak loads when everyone is logged in.

There is a very simple solution: a new grid, with new, blank asset servers. Subdivide the world, and the load problems go away.

This in effect is how games like WoW and Everquest are able to handle so many people. The world is divided into realms/shards, each with its own dedicated servers not used by any other realms/shards, and only about 10,000 people ever use any one of them. If a server is getting full, Blizzard actively shuts down new character creation on that server, to steer people to less busy servers.

Note that if this were done, you cannot easily move from one grid to the other. You'd have to completely log off of the second grid, and log back in on the regular grid.


The big downside here is that if LL were to split off a new separate server farm, you might have to start over building everything completely from scratch in the new grid.

It'd be more likely that if this were done, you'd get a one-time chance to copy your inventory to the new server, and after that you can only transfer individual objects or folders of objects back and forth for a transfer/handling fee, rather than the entire inventory.

And leave my friends, land and house behind? Nope... not a single hair on my would even consider that.

Edit: I know you mentioned copying your inventory... my house and land have also some emotional value too.

Morwen.

No thank you.

Hmmm..... if moving was a one-time only option, I'd be very cautious about it. Yes, the prospect of moving to a 'new frontier' is an exciting and refreshing challenge. I can see that content creators would simply create an alt to carry their product lines over a new grid. That's what I'd do. I can see that alot of regular players would end up with an alt on each separate grid further inflating Emperor Phil's resident numbers.

I'm not sure if I'd really be keen on separate grids. That goes against the grain of the 'metaverse' concept though I can imagine that some of the larger land-barons in SL would jump at the chance to have their own grid. Going down that path would eventually lead to separate themed grids: Furry grid, gorean grid, A Certain Player's grid, mafia grid, military grid, D&D grid, goth/vampire grid, cyberpunk grid, star wars grid, chinese grid, etc., etc. Basically a scaled-up version of what's happening at the moment with themed sims.

What I would like to see would be separate 'continents' each on their own server farm with free and unrestricted travel between them. Obviously if you spent most of your time on one continent, most of your inventory would reside on that continent's asset server. As you move from one continent to another, only the data you need would be piped across. So..... the experience you'd get on your 'home turf' would be higher performance (faster data access times) than when you're doing an 'away team' thang on another continent.

Putting a (possibly nominal.... as in yet another economy sink) charge on transferring data from one asset server to another would garner a fair bit of grumbling but not an outright revolt. Content creators would prolly take it in their stride as just another operating expense.

I'd tend to assume that this could work like WoW or EQ. You can have different avatars on each separate grid if you like, but the inventories and cash wallet is independent between grids. So you'd not necessarily leave your friends behind, when moving to a new grid.

But as with WoW and EverQuest right now, separate grids mean that your friends might get scattered across them and you can never all seem to get together in one place to play together at the same time.

In WoW, I personally have given up on trying to start the ten different characters I'd need on ten different servers, for all the different friends I have who aren't on the same server as my main character.

So, I could copy my entire inventory to the new grid and set up a shop on both grids? Every larger SL developer would surely do so. Soon the new asset database would be just as large as the old one. And we'd have to raise our prices, since we now pay twice the land fees, advertising costs and personnel wages.

Besides, SL is not a game. A second grid makes as much sense as a second internet. Either the SL architecture is really as scaleable as LL always told us, or the big dream of the 3D web is dead.

I think it would be good to have several grids, if they act as one so that avatars do not notice when they cross a grid border or when they teleport from one grid's area to another grid's area. Instant messaging would stay as it is, I mean that for example Microsoft Messanger is internet wide, but it works with one "grid".

I bet WoW has many "grids", but each of them are similar. That is why WoW worlds have to be separate. But in SL you would have many different kinds of grids, which do not have to be separate.

Using map and teleporting around between many grids would be just like 3D internet. You browse only so and so large areas of land, but the map part can be downloaded to your client from some other grid. And search function would stay the same too. I mean Google searches the whole internet, too.

This sounds suspiciously like a feature suggestion
*moves to feature suggestions*

For inventory to be universal, the asset servers have to be inter-connected; which totally mucks up your shard idea. Better to just make the asset server more redundant.

I do not understand why inventory has to be redundant.

If you have to load your inventory from somewhere, it does not matter where that inventory is located. Your inventory could be on grid1 or grid2, because approximately half of all the inventories could just be on grid1 or grid2 servers, even if you are not. Then you could just download your inventory from the grid where your inventory is. You don't need to replicate internet either, you just have some address from where you load stuff.

And I do not understand why my inventory has to be loaded from the server, anyway. Why it cannot be located on my computer? The other people that sees my rezzed things have to load stuff from my inventory, but my inventory could still be loaded from address like grid2 even if we are on grid1.

If LL was to launch an additional grid that would co-exist with the existing one (e.g. like having two separate countries) then I would certainly have no problem using it. As far as I am concerned, anything that makes SL work in a more effective way is a plus, and its been going rapidly downhill for the second half of 2006.

My main concern, however, would be land assets on the main grid. If a new grid proved to be the preferred one, then land prices on the old one would probably go through the floor, so that needs to be factored in too.

The asset servers pretty much define the grid.

What about this scenario?

There's a new grid, with new empty asset servers. Since assets are defined by a UUID that should contain a computer identifier: the UUID contains the information necessary to determine what grid it exists on. if it doesn't, a fallback mechanism that had it try the new asset server first would have the same effect. Both grids, either way, potentially have access to the other grid's asset servers.

So you can get to your old inventory from the new grid. But for efficiency's sake, they want to have it running from the new grid as much as possible, so when you use an asset from the old grid it gets queued and copied over to the new. If it was no-copy, it gets deleted from the old in the process. The copy operation could be treated as "importing"... and you could perhaps pay for express shipment. Until it's copied it may be slow to access, but it'll be there.

So your new grid will only need to have the *active* inventory in its asset servers. All the old junk will remain in the old grid.

Well, LL could copy all the stuff into the new servers as a background load. So the old servers would not be needed as a warehouse. I think the problem is not in the amount of stuff, but in the amount of traffic and simulation power. So if there were multiple grids, then there would be multiple asset server farms and thus more simulation power. But if we just interconnected those grids, then everything would be ok.

I do not see, why there has to be just one grid just because of the asset servers. Of course it would require some work to implement the address usage for multiple grids. But it would be worth it in the long run, because that way there would be no more scaling problems.