The game's services run on amazon AWS (Cloud).This provides both Red 5 studios and the player a flexible and accessible gamespace to play on. Amazon has its cloud services all across the world and hosts huge datacenters where many companies offer cloud services to internet users such as soundcloud and github for example. R5S can deploy their services as wide and deep (for catching many players) as they like. Think of it like a spider that can weave it's web as large as it needs to. It's a robust way for them to cover what they need and reduce presence if there's not so much users connected online.

Red 5 studios hosts their service clusters in 3 major regions. US West, US East and Western Europe. In the future, the game may be deployed in additional AWS datacenters / regio's.

When players make their account, the game's services will detect where they connect from and will bind the account to the correct geographical cluster.

Players connect to shards, and depending on the amount of players simultaneously connecting, several shards will run at once. In the quiet hours when less players connect,: the system will scale down and there will be less shards to ensure that the world of Firefall still feels filled with people. This is one of the many benefits that the Red 5 server programmers have on the Amazon cloud.

The system will always attempt to connect hundreds of players in one shard so that the world can feel alive even when global connections decrease. This is something unique to Firefall!

Each shard runs a copy of all the playable spaces that Firefall has to offer. At launch of the game, it offers 3 large zone instances and several smaller ones.

Technically, an “instance” is a playable space in Firefall which is hosted on a shard/server. Instances vary from very small to very big. There are several types of instances in Firefall.

• Zones, Zones are the primary playable spaces in Firefall. These zones are the "overworld" if you will. Each zone has a number of towns and belonging sintowers, buildings and cave to house ares missions and other wandering encounters can be found as well. There are 3 major zones in the game at launch in 2014 called Coral Forest and Sertao which make up New Eden, and Devil's tusk, which is an endgame zone with harder enemies and a more unfriendly environment, without the benefits of having dropships and arcporting to quickly go from one town to another like in the safer zones like New Eden. These zones are PvE and give you access to the onther types of "instances" (gameplay spaces) in the world of Firefall.
  
• ARES instances such as Cliff's Edge, (which is like an specific mission in it's own “instance”.-
  
• Campaign (Mission) instances are player spaces that tell the story of firefall and each of them have their unique pacing and gameplay. Missions like Crash down, Risky business and blackwater Anomaly have their own “adventure zone” so to speak and they sometimes include bosses.
  
• New ground story setpieces such as Operation Cinderblock. These instances tell the story of the accord getting a foothold in a newly discovered pocket of melding which will eventually grow into an entire zone.
  
• Warfront instances such as Devil's tusk Takeover. Although this instance is technically as big as a zone, it's like the "campaign version" of that zone where you progress trough the story telling aspect of the game in a small 2 hour raid.
  
• Operations instances such as Operation Maru, that are used as engame content for squads of 5 people. These instances employ a more elaborate "choise based" game mechanic as story telling tool.
  
• Boss Instances:In terms of playable space they are the smallest nstances, but they contain one huge creature to defeat and platoons can earn high end rewards.

Zones are very big playable spaces such as New Eden. This zone contains an area called Coral Forest, where all new players start and where they can progress their battleframe with ARES jobs, dynamic encounters, thumping and ARES missions. So it's called a progression zone.

Sertao is adjacent to Coral Forest (and belongs to the same New Eden zone). Sertao is a mid to high-level progression zone.

Devil's tusk is a chosen warfront zone, there global events will take place to push back the melding and make the chosen retreat and ultimately win our Earth back.

Every major zone has a few places where players can arcport to other huge zones on the planet.

At launch, there will also be one contested zone (openworld player versus player) where players can fight against eachother and try to take control of bases. This is incentive based. If players travel to this zone via arcporting, they become vulnerable to friendly fire (unlike in PvE zones such as New Eden), and player armies or platoons duke it out for total control overthere!

As already said before, technically they aren't really different, They just differ in size and what gametype goes on there. Sertao and Coral forest are called “zones” but technically they are both “instances”. If you cross the border from the 2 you'll switch instances but the environment just connects because geographically they are adjacent sectors and are designed to be a whole playable space. No arcporting is needed between them although you could do so in the Copa Cabana or Trans hub arcport stations.

The AI servers are sepparate services that run allongside the shards. They inject AI behavior into the world of Firefall. This method ensures that processorload is being balanced and the developers can add behavior and turn on or off without having to even restart the services.

Chatservers are also sepparate servers that inject into the service players user to play the game. That means that everyone (Europeans and Americans alike) can chat across zones. There are a few behaviors you have to pay attention to.

If you're in New Eden, you chat in zone chat. This is across shards and regios. But somebody in Sertao won't see you.

If you form a squad and join the /squad channel, even if your squadmembers are across shards, regions or instances you can still chat with eachother. Army chats have the same behaviour.

Remember how every player connects to a shard and how multiple shards (copy of the entire Firefall world) can be ran at once to accomodate many players as desired ?

As players add eachother to their friendslist, they can end up on different shards but can still see eachother typing in zone chat. It can also happen that one European player is talking to a player from North America. Obviously they are connected on different shards because they are located on different continents.

Red 5's policy on connection spread of players is that every player should have a balanced experience and for that, they autoconnect to an shard which has the lowest latency, and has the most suitable amount of people playing. Therefore it's not directly controllable on which shard/area players connect but there is one exception to this rule:

However, when players are invited to a squad, the game will inform them that they can join the squad leader's shard with the command /joinleader (or by accepting the notification).

If players proceed, they will then join the same shard as the suadleader regardless of the continent they live in. Squadmembers will connect to the shard in that (real world) region.

When an European player has been playing on an North America shard and loggs of. After 4 hours he/she will be reset to their account bound home server if it's the Western Europe cluster.

Normally, dynamic encounters and ARES mission will randomly appear on each shard individually. But some events are synchronized across all shards and all regions. A major warfront event or chosen invasion (like in high level zones such as Sertao) will happen at the same time. This is to prevent multiboxing / server hopping into zones. This is unique to orchestrated community driven event by Red 5 Studio's.

When Firefall receives a new patch, all running shards are put in “drain” mode and new versions of the shards/services are started at the same time. The shards in “drain” mode will no longer accept new players. This means that existing people can still play out their session and log out without having to "server hop". Once they take a break and log in, they will be on the newly updated shards.

This ensures a natural “migration” that is unique to Firefall where players will not receive a global system warning message telling them to reconnect.

In very exceptional cases, such zone shut down broadcasts and the requirement for players to server hop might be required when Red 5 studios needs to emergency fix an unexpected exploit or game breaking bug which might have slipped in anew update. But this should only happen rarely.

I hope this explanation about the world and services of Firefall makes a bit more sense.

In the future, there will be more zones, more campaign instances, more boss instances and more warfront instances and pvp instances for you to play on, all running on flexible shards, provided by Red 5 studios and Amazon AWS cloud, Firefall endeavors to give you a streamlined connection experience.

Thanks for reading this steam guide.