This is a very good move! Decentralised components are easier maintainable and scale better. Oh what it would be nice, performance-wise, to have EVE-Online Server being build on clusterwide microservices.
Since you are using XMPP Integration, how do you manage Local? Will a player auto-join the current local channel on the server? Since this is an external service, it means the datastream is separated from the EVE-Online stream. Hope this does not mean I can spoof my presence in a system and avoid being seen in another one.
The simulation cluster, Tranquility, sets the access control lists on the chat channels on the chat server, since it is authoritative on where you are located, in what corporation you are, etc. When you move from one solarsystem A to another B, it will delete your access to local A (and the chat server will then kick you out of that channel) and grant you access to local B and your client will then join local B.
To ensure everyone is updated then the simulation cluster further announces your departure from local A and announces your arrival to local B. The other clients in those locations therefore don’t depend on the chat channel membership list for your presence but rather have that information as well directly from the simulation cluster.
As you have to touch that stuff anyway: will there be any changes to access control for channels, e.g. switching to ACLs and assigning the same ACL to several channels?
And as another poster already mentioned: please remove or drastically increase the char limit of the non-delayed mode for the memberlist.
Will chat logs still be written to the game logs folder?
Thinking about past exploits (that involved EULA breaking changes to the client) I guess your statement about announcing join/leave independently from chat in local takes that issue into consideration…?
Ahh very interesting, thanks for the precise answer!
Nevertheless I don’t think that local will every be made available through a generic API or then only in delayed mode. If not, I could already imagine the chat scraper that will check channel participants to identify hostiles entering local.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this, specifically in regards to wormhole local chat. If these same rules are followed there, I wonder if these announcements might be exploitable to the point of knowing when players enter and leave a WH system.
Well, depends on how they do it but “exploitable” is everything so to say, it´s just a matter of effort and knowledge.
But then I don´t think people put the effort into such things because it´s not just breaking the EULA in such cases and so totally not worth it.
I recall an old exploit where someone would do a thing that basically hid their presence from local. Monkey Sphere I think. Moving the chat servers to not only a separate server, but an outside agency seems like it will be hell to control or change so as to avoid repeats of past exploits. Is CCP confident that they will have enough control over the server architecture so that things like Monkey Sphere either cannot be repeated or at least fixed if they do occur?