Spike Hike Addresses Concerns of CPNext and Clarifies How You’ll Meet Up With Friends and Mascots Without Servers (Updated With More Info)

For those of you who read my interview with Spike Hike from last week you’ll remember him revealing Club Penguin will be removing servers in lieu of their new internal technology called CPNext. While many are excited for this to hit Club Penguin, many were worried about how they would meet up with friends if there’s no specific server you can log on to. I asked Spike Hike to clarify this and he cleared everything up! When CPNext is released you will no longer be able to log on to a specific server such as Sleet or Fog. You log on to the game and you connect to an imaginary server where other random penguins are also logged on with you. So how do you meet up with a friend? You can’t say “let’s log on to Sleet to look for fake betas” anymore. Instead something similar to server jumping will be released along with CPNext. It’s called Friend Jumping and it sounds exactly like it does. Instead of jumping to another server like server jumping would have enabled you to do, you just teleport to your friend, wherever they are. If you’re on imaginary server 1 and your friend Bob23 is on imaginary server 5, you’d probably do something such as open your buddy list, click on Bob23, then click the jump button. It will then take you to imaginary server 5. Remember, I say imaginary because technically servers won’t exist anymore. I am not too sure how well this will work for meetups such as Spike Saturday or if I have a meetup since many penguins are not Spike Hike’s friend or my friend due to full lists, however that doesn’t necessarily mean you will be unable to meet up.

Let me make an example. Let’s say Spike Hike is holding Spike Saturday on Club Penguin. Since there’s no servers you can’t meet up on Fog, so what do you do? You need to either be his friend or friends with someone who is. I’ll write it out with imaginary servers in my example again. Hopefully it makes sense!

1. Spike Hike is on imaginary server 7. Anyone who is his buddy can jump to him for Spike Saturday.
2. Bob23 is friends with Spike Hike. He jumps to him. If you’re friends with Bob23 you can jump to where Bob23 is and as a result you will be able to hang out with Spike Hike too, because that’s where Bob23.
3. Bob26 is friends with Bob25 who is friends with Bob24 who is friends with Bob23. If Bob23 is at Spike Saturday, Bob24 can jump to Bob23. If Bob24 jumped to Bob23 to be with Spike Hike, then Bob25 can jump to Bob24 to be with Spike Hike. The same goes with Bob26. If Bob25 jumped to Bob24 because Bob24 had jumped to be with Bob23 to be with Spike Hike, then Bob26 will be able to go too. It’s slightly confusing but as long as you’re friends with Spike Hike yourself or have a friend of a friend (or a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend and so on) you can jump to them to be with Spike Hike as long as they’re all online with Spike. It’s a chain reaction.

Also, if you jump to Jamie54 who is on imaginary server 7 and you’re in the Town but decide to move to the Snow Forts, you will still be grouped together when switching rooms. Just because the server is imaginary and nonexistent does not mean you’ll be split up. CPNext is coded so you stay with your friends. Either way, if you get separated you can still jump to your friend!

Rooms can still get full. If the room is full the CPNext technology will just put you in another version of the room with other penguins. The other version of the room will look the same, it’s just on another one of those imaginary servers and of course won’t be full.

Spike Hike did also mention the team has a backup plan in case this does not work well. I do not know what it is, nor do I know when CPNext will be rolled out. I also inquired about mascots, since without servers the team can’t say on the blog “Log on to the server Abominable to meet Rookie” because the server Abominable won’t exist anymore. Instead mascots will be made public so most likely anyone can jump to them.

A huge thank you to Spike Hike for clearing this up! Hopefully it makes sense. If you have any other questions or concerns let me know and I’ll see what I can find out!

UPDATE: Here is more information from Spike Hike. He said the following in the comments below explaining why CPNext is a good and important change. It sounds awesome. Here’s what he said:

There are a lot of benefits –

1) We can better cluster the community together so the CP world doesn’t feel so empty. There may be places where the audience wants it to feel more empty and we can adjust that, but in general, the CP world will feel more alive more of the time.

2) Its way more efficient on the server side. Not necessarily a benefit you will see but way easier to manage for us which means we can spend more time on content instead of server maintenance.

3) We will be able to group people over time based on things we know about them. We would like to find ways, for example, to group you with your friends automatically without even having to teleport but we could group based on other things too.

4) We can serve you different versions of CP rooms based on the “mode” you are in. Imagine Operation Hot Sauce style missions that happen in the CP world. We can make those permanently available down the road. But the trick to those missions is that they are social. You want to be in the room with other agents. But people who are not in mission mode want to be in the regular version of the room. No problem. We can group you with other agents and give everyone else the regular room. That’s just one example but there is a lot we can do here.

5) We could – theoretically so I am NOT announcing this here, its just an example – let you take over your own version of any room in CP and throw a party in it. You might also be able to decorate that room with your iggy items. Your friends could access that special party version of the room while everyone else gets the normal one.

6) We can make the CP world infinitely large. Imagine that as you play CP, you discover more rooms that you can go to and they unlock on the map. So for noobs the experience is really simple, but for rares the world is really big so you never get bored and there’s always something new to explore. The problem with this in “Classic CP” is that we can’t add more rooms anymore because they are always empty. Spreading out the audience more across empty rooms doesn’t help the community, it hurts it. Now we can have more rooms and more to do but group people in ways that keeps the community together – across space and time in the game.

7) We won’t have to take the world down to launch parties and A LOT fewer overall bugs.

8) In the future we will be able to distribute these server rooms around the world so we can put the servers close to our users in each country and make the overall performance a lot faster. Today everyone is playing out of Las Vegas, so people in the US get a fast connection while kids in other countries get a slower one. We want the whole world to be really fast!

Excited now?

Don’t worry, we will be listening, tweaking, and solving all these concerns. Trust me, this is a far, far better technology to take CP into the future.

Also servers on web will be around for a while – at least a year. So we have a lot of time to get this right and IF we need to we can do something like today’s servers using the CPNext technology for players who want that. So you can keep playing the way you want to on the web and we will evolve. Trust us, we know we need to get this right.