Guild Wars 2

While attempting to organize for Triple Trouble, it was discovered that there were 3 different map instances with exactly the same IP: 64.25.38.181. It was possible to taxi between the instances, but is confusing as heck.

Could you include the time and day of the attempt? That will make it a little easier for ANet to troubleshoot. (Hopefully, at least 1-2 people also used the in-game /bug reporting tool, which would also have provided that info, as well as other bits of data useful to their QA team.)

Sorry you had the extra confusion to deal with.

cough I don’t think that is a bug, it’s literally just that one physical computer could host multiple “server” processes, each of which was handling the same map.

It may be common, but it is also pure luck, that you get distinct IP addresses for maps. As physical hardware refreshes run through the NCSoft data center — every three years, minimum — expect to see more stacking of map IP addresses, as more cores means more “map servers” on a single system, but not much more capacity from a single “map server”.

(and just count yourself lucky that they don’t use a load balancer to route you to the target process, so all the maps have the same ip address.

@Slippy: by “not a bug” do you mean that (a) it’s intended behavior by ANet or (b) that it’s expected behavior because /ip was never meant to offer players a “unique label” for different instances?

Neither seems very likely to me, unless it never occurred to them that (1) we’ use /ip to keep track of who was on which instance and (2) that they wouldn’t have been aware that eventually physical hardware refreshes would end up causing a ‘stacking’ problem.

Put another way, it’s a functionality glitch for the consumer, with a root cause that is — at best — caused by someone not paying attention to the obvious consumer-side use cases. In other words, a “bug” for players, even if everything was coded as planned.

In fact, there is nothing wrong here. There can be multiple map instances sharing the same IP, the /ip command even shows a number at the end (like XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:Y, where X is the IP number, Y is the instance number).

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

@Slippy: by “not a bug” do you mean that (a) it’s intended behavior by ANet or (b) that it’s expected behavior because /ip was never meant to offer players a “unique label” for different instances?

Neither seems very likely to me, unless it never occurred to them that (1) we’ use /ip to keep track of who was on which instance and (2) that they wouldn’t have been aware that eventually physical hardware refreshes would end up causing a ‘stacking’ problem.

Put another way, it’s a functionality glitch for the consumer, with a root cause that is — at best — caused by someone not paying attention to the obvious consumer-side use cases. In other words, a “bug” for players, even if everything was coded as planned.

I mean both: it’s working as intended, in that ANet are likely entirely comfortable with multiple map server instances on the same physical machine, and also, that it was never intended to work as a unique map identifier.

and as a developer, I can tell you that I’ve encountered this sort of “assumed to be unique” behaviour before, and we really don’t think about it being used like that, until someone points it out. I can’t speak for ANet, but I think it is entirely possible that they never realised it might be used that way.

I accept your point about players wanting some unique map instance identifier, though, and that might be a good thing for ANet to provide to eventually replace `/ip` with…

There was a dev post months ago in the API Development section, mentioning /ip isn’t (supposed to be) unique. It’s intended behavior and thus not a bug. The function merely returns the IP your game is connected to and that’s what it should do.

@slippy: fair enough. I confess I’ve seen the same behavior by even the best coders: it’s easy to forget that not everyone thinks the same way about how to use software.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

@slippy: fair enough. I confess I’ve seen the same behavior by even the best coders: it’s easy to forget that not everyone thinks the same way about how to use software.

No question: it’s one of the hardest things as a developer, because it is super easy to not even realize that you should think about how people might interpret something!