Lobby Merging

[Henry]

Cool.

 

[HalfSquirrel]

Just showing my support for this idea - maybe some money & energy could also be saved by powering down servers during off-peak hours and waking them up on demand.
A quick match option would also be a nice add on, but that's a completely different story.

Powering down servers during off-peak hours would be silly, because there are still people playing. And you never know how many people there will be. Also, I don't think anything would really change from closing a few servers and it may just cause confusion among some people. In addition, I believe you would also have to do it manually (to make sure you're closing the right servers and at the right time), and it wouldn't be worth the effort.

 

[KeloCube]

Yeah, I guess you're right about it being too much of a hassle for not so much benefit. To clarify though, I didn't mean shutting all the servers down during the night or having a fixed number of servers open at a given time of day. There could be a background process or service that would wake up the server from sleep mode when the number of players online increased, and vice versa.
As far as I'm aware the Minecraft server doesn't actually do any processing when empty however, so I have to agree - it might not be such a save after all.

 

[Claps]

Update: Is being added apparently.

 

[EditingXBL]

Something like Call of Duty's lobby merging, I think.

 

[Redjosepie]

You. Are. A. Genius

 

[Col_StaR]

If 2 or more people are in a lobby and the timer runs out, instead of restarting it should search for games with more people and merge the 2 games. A bit useless but could be helpful sometimes.

We're already working on it. The whole system is a lot more complex than people realize, so it's giving us some trouble. But we're very hopeful for its completion.

Just showing my support for this idea - maybe some money & energy could also be saved by powering down servers during off-peak hours and waking them up on demand.

This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Servers don't act like regular PC computers than you can turn on and shut off at will quickly and conveniently. Simply put, it's just overall better (and safer) for us to keep some servers always running with 0 players than it is to deal with the hassles and potential deficit of servers (if we're super popular for some reason, we'd want more servers, not less).

 

[Claps]

We're already working on it. The whole system is a lot more complex than people realize, so it's giving us some trouble. But we're very hopeful for its completion.

I understand it's complex, I'm just glad it's being added!
Also, I know you're already working on it... I didn't know that 3 weeks ago when I posted this though.

 

[KeloCube]

This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Servers don't act like regular PC computers than you can turn on and shut off at will quickly and conveniently. Simply put, it's just overall better (and safer) for us to keep some servers always running with 0 players than it is to deal with the hassles and potential deficit of servers (if we're super popular for some reason, we'd want more servers, not less).

I get that automated shutdown / startup of servers would be very difficult to implement, but putting them to sleep mode should not, providing that the hardware supports this. There are 150 servers in the EU region, of which almost a hundred may be unused on a weekday morning, for example. Not saying you should disable all inactive servers though - it's good to have some marginal for the number of players to grow rapidly, but maybe put even a half of unused servers to sleep. After all, 100 inactive servers is quite a lot.
To continue my previous post, I think this could be done by having a background process control the actual Minecraft server. This process would be connected to a "master" (hub, website, database, etc.) server that would control each client server via said process. Perhaps you could also automate plugin and map updates this way.

Again, these are just ideas...heck, I don't even know if you have something like this already.

 

[AMooseMan3]

I rather like this idea, but I think there will be a lot of people that won't like for the sole fact that they might get merged with a server that has horrible maps.

 

[HalfSquirrel]

They are already working on making the lobby merging feature.

 

[Brandon6895]

Sounds like a good idea, but I think the developers have more important things to fix/add.

Thats what they all say -.-