We have some new engineers coming on board in January hopefully optimizations will be robust enough for you guys to enjoy larger servers again.
In the meantime, have you tried disabling the new dynamic meshes? I imagine 50 castles being erected at the same time and viewable from miles away could cause a hit in performance.
Can you guys describe how you play the game with 50 players? Is it pvp... or coop? Is it a large building community? What is the typical use case for servers this large? How many total players and how many are online when you start seeing FPS drops?
I SINCERELY appreciate you mentioning this and asking.
My personal experience is with PVP servers, less so much PVE, but I have a good Idea of what they try to accomplish too.
I'll put this all in two sections, one on what players look for in larger servers, and another for the issues they are facing.
For
PVE i believe people use these to work with greater populations for horde and non-horde base building, possibly even city building. Essentially taking the base game's ideas and bumping up the scale much more, and feeling as a part of a community rather than a smaller group of friends. Meet new people, show your creativity to whoever passes by, etc. These servers tend to be modded to add more difficulty or custom zombies and such. I do not know what the performance looks like on your average PVE server, but I often see them with nearly 50-60 players sometimes in the server browser which is surprising.
For
PVP, it is an entirely different animal. Probably the strongest, most unique and fun aspect of 7 Days to Die is base building. The amount of freedom this game allows in that regard is almost infinite, but on PVE servers and games this is usually used towards either aesthetic or horde defense purposes. As the store page of the game mentions; "
Work together cooperatively to build settlements or work against each other raiding other player’s bases". Raiding/Defending a base against players is sublime and no other game gives the same experience. AI, as great and as far as it has come, can still be outsmarted pretty easily by players if they know enough about what they're doing. Players on the other hand can be a massive, unpredictable spectrum that always keeps you thinking and on your feet. But why is such a large server needed for these experiences?
Small scale, let's say, 8 player PVP is more consensual than anything. It roots out a lot if not all of the danger, mystery, and the will to rise to the top of the food chain. On larger servers, you have a mix of solo, duo and larger team players who often have no acquaintance with each-other... and therefore compete with each other to get ahead naturally. You have no idea how your rivals could operate, you have no idea where they could be, you have no idea what kind of gear they have. These kinds of scenarios bump up the survival aspect one-hundred fold, and make you feel like your in a dangerous wasteland more than any other way the game is played.
The game's strongest aspect, base building, challenges every bit of your creativity as you continuously evolve your designs to fend off any players who may be trying to either get your loot or wipe you off the map. Bases become purely utilitarian, and it becomes a skill of making a functional base instead of a formal one like in PVE. It's not just the strongest who survive, but the most clever, as opposed to other games where brute force solves everything.
Finally, the gunplay. While it can seem shoddy at times, and the base game's values are extremely imbalanced as they are tuned for fighting zombies, these are easy things to fix with mods and nearly every large pvp server has been doing it for years. Now more than ever, you have a pretty wide array of weapons to choose from to fit your play-style, and you're constantly adjusting mods and adapting with time to get more skillful in fights. When balanced, the game becomes a great mix of offense and defense, where players can take roles of fighters, builders or both... there is always a niche to fill.
Honestly PVP can really just be summed up as the more competitive side of the game by far, and bigger populations are needed to keep it truly competitive.
Now, for the problems these servers face.
I'd say first and foremost is the
Net Code. It doesn't take many players on a server before strange things start to happen, one of the biggest being other players appearing as if they were "teleporting" when they are moving normally. They would be running in place for a moment, then teleport 30m ahead in the direction they faced. If they jumped, they would often look like they were flying despite not. This also leads to showing players in places they aren't actually in. An example would be a player spotting another outside of a building, while on the other screen, they're already inside the building. While i can see it being manageable in PVE, its horrendous for PVP. Many players accuse others of hacking simply cause of this alone.
The reason why the netcode behaves this way is likely due to how much information is fed to every client, but giKoN said it best: "Block Changes are sent out to every player on the server such that the world is up to date for all clients playing. So if player A places a block at +4000 +4000, player B at -4000 -4000 will know. One of the parts where I wanted some change, as the netcode is also so poorly done because there's a lot of redundant and a lot of unneeded information exchanged between all players". When you have upwards of 30 or so people all playing, the entire gamespace and the information in it is being shared and updated to all 30 clients whether they are in render distance of things happening or not. This was not always the case, as we were able to get a somewhat steady 50 players on a server up till early A19.
There is a couple modders that have made a way to bypass the base game's netcode, and uses a server kit that allows even up to 80 players on a server without major performance drops... but its sketchy, if not illegal, as it reroutes client data through an insecure network.
The next issue might be the
client and server relationship. I'm not hugely experienced with networking, but my best explanation would be that the game is extremely client-side biased and gives very little if any power to servers. This causes a lot of security holes where hackers do not need much to be able to run creative or debug mode on a public server. There are many mods that help fight this as a last line of defense, but you can still execute many console commands in the main menu, then join a server that has them disabled, and they will still work. A lighter example would be completely disabling fog through the console to give yourself a massive advantage in PVP. However, debug mode and creative mode threaten all servers no matter the mode intended.
Finally, while I don't consider this as pressing of an issue, is
"Xray". It's the practice of being able to clip your camera into the terrain such that you can see and shoot through it. It's something that's been in the game since the start, and there's countless ways on how to do it. Ride a bike into a 1x2 hole and move your camera around. Stand on a hatch in a 1x2 tunnel and open it, and it forces your head into the ground above. Many modders have been able to combat this using things like blackscreen (turns your screen black when your head is detected inside terrain blocks), but it continues to be a broken leg we can only use a bandaid on. Xray allows players to find hidden bases, shoot at other players and zombies through the terrain, and even fire rockets. Something simple as obscuring vision when underground might go a long way, like perhaps dense fog that appears when surrounded by terrain blocks.
I'm sure I can elaborate forever, but I believe these are the biggest thorns in the side of big servers currently. All the smaller things can be handled by modders.
Once again, thank you so much for taking time out of the day to read this.
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