Dual Login-Servers?

[Secrets]

I don't know how much this has been discussed, but with the event of many loginservers popping up now, we may have to look into something new for connecting to them all. Trevius and I have spoken about this idea ages ago, and we came to this idea, or something similar (I personally think this works great!)

It would work like this:

Server is listed on both loginservers. Depending on which loginserver you log in to (based on IP), it would forward your account to a different accounts table. This would mean we could have the same characters table since they are linked by account name, however, it would also mean we'd have to re-write a lot of code to make this work (mainly SQL code)

This would make it so we could have characters from both loginservers logging in and not conflicting.

Is anyone willing to take up this task? It is possibly the only thing that will be able to keep the community together and not split up into shreds at this point... put them together at the world level instead of the loginserver level. I think at this point this should be priority to not split up a community.

[trevius]

Yeah, a dual LS setup would probably be a great way to ensure that the community never has to be split between various Login Servers.

Having multiple Public Login Servers would probably be hard to make a solution that both accounts can be used from either LS without either having both databases sync'd to each other, or opening up possible security risks or other odd issues. I am sure with a bit of creativity, it would be very possible though.

So far I have a good idea about how to have a pretty secure dual LS setup with 1 Public (Normal Public LS) and 1 Private LS (Hosted on the server you are connecting to) and be able to use the same accounts on the Private that were created on the Public one. But, I don't have a simple solution for 2 Public Login Servers just yet.

[Belfedia]

Originally Posted by trevius

So far I have a good idea about how to have a pretty secure dual LS setup with 1 Public (Normal Public LS) and 1 Private LS (Hosted on the server you are connecting to) and be able to use the same accounts on the Private that were created on the Public one. But, I don't have a simple solution for 2 Public Login Servers just yet.

Have you think about security problem ?
If all local LS can handle account, a hacker can make a local LS for have acces to all login/password ....

I think 2 login servers is enough with spare of account...

[Aergad]

I wish i could understand the Devs paranoia about the project forking, worst case scenario is that there is a larger community which would mean more opensource work being done alla round. Furthermore players as well as server ops have multiple choices, instead of the basic SOE live clone that exists now with the current monopoly.

The SWG Emu server has its own LS That is built right into their server WOW Emu does as do others. and those projects are all doing fine.

As has been demonstrated the way things work now is woefully inadequate. one LS goes down and noone has an option to even play at all. Atleast with some kind of an official LS Release there would be redunancy, there would be options for everyone to still be able to play on their respective servers with or without the main LS being active.

Last night not only was the main public LS down but also the third party LS down at the same time leaving everyone absolutly no option whatsoever.

I submit to you that isnt the paranoia of the project getting forked here and there a bit out of hand in such a circumstance where noone has any option to login at all??

[trevius]

As I have stated many times before, these issues should be a thing of the past soon and no longer a concern, so there isn't really much need to get too worked up about it.

Paranoia (if you want to call it that) works both ways. Just as we may be concerned about giving out Login Servers to anyone who wishes to have them, you are Paranoid about the Login Server being a single point of failure and have little faith that one could be created that would have very minimal downtime.

The fact is that the current official Login Server could not be distributed in any way for multiple reasons, one being that the creator of it specified not too and we are legally bound by that decision. Other Login Server options are starting to pop up and I wouldn't be surprised if we see 1 or 2 more options in the near future. What is done with them is up to their creators. I believe the only one being worked on by an actual EQEmu team member is the one that WildcardX is currently working on. I don't have the details of the plans he has to use that for yet though.

Really, EQEmu can't easily be compared to some of the other emulators, because we have a unique setup that works well for our needs, or at least will once the LS stuff is all back in working order again. To even compare any of the multiple WoW Emulators to this project is just wrong lol. Not only does WoW have a hundred times more players than EQ, but they also have at least 3 separate major emulator projects all doing their own thing. With a huge community like that, sure, they can do things differently and still do OK. Personally, the main reason I won't even consider running a WoW emulator server is due to the community as a whole. They are split between their multiple projects and each server is split due to their private Login Server system as well. So, you have servers advertising everywhere if they want to maintain any sort of decent player-base. You also have no one easy place to go to even get started. If you are a player, it is a bit overwhelming trying to find a decent server to play on and can take quite a while of searching around the net to even get information on various servers. If you are an admin, you have to first pick which emulator version you want to use, and then which database you want to use and so on. I imagine there is probably some setup that is better than most to get you started off, but from all of the searching I did, I found no clear answer as to which one that would be. Not to mention having to find one that has decent tools made for creating content. I didn't personally see any special tools like what we have for EQEmu when I was searching around about the WoW Emulators.

SWG and EQ2Emu are both in development, so it is hard to really compare them to EQEmu as well IMO.

We have a very limited player-base that probably maxes out around 1000 or so total players throughout a 24 hour period, which would probably only be over the weekend. That doesn't leave much play room to be forking. If you cut those numbers in half by forking the project, it would quickly get to a point where people would have a hard time finding a group/raid and get bored and quit. The more that numbers dwindle, it would be likely to start a snowball effect causing the project to basically be abandoned completely. I think that should be avoided at all costs. Call that paranoia, but when dealing with dividing up an already relatively low population project, I think you are just asking for the worst.

Hopefully something can be worked out to give us a backup option anyway. But, forking is not a good solution IMO.

[Aergad]

well thats the thing most people wont fork theres no point to it really. Nor would that be the purpose of releasing a better LS option then minilogin. Yeah a few forks might pop up but on the whole nothing would really change.

About releasing public login according to what ive read the agreement is that the source not be opened, precompiled binaries are not the source.

and whats to say that when the new server is bought for the ls it wont still have the same problems and vulnerabilities as was posted the ls is brought down by exploiters at present new hardware wont solve that problem.

All im saying is we need more and better options, or eventually we will be back in the same boat we are now