30JUL15 - 1WK NOTICE: NPC AI & DIPLO CHANGE

Dungshoveleux wrote: as an aside, how do you know that some of the players aren't somehow AI's?

There are architectural considerations to actions like launching units. Regardless of how efficiently you code the system, it will always require something to track all those individual units moving on the map. I bet there is a single situation that causes the huge spike--Audrey beating. I had 2000 scouts ready in every city, to be sent one at a time. Lots of other people did the same thing.

Comparing that to tournaments is apples and oranges. Sure, the army sizes are bigger, but size is just a single number attached to an object. You can only launch 5 armies from each city, not 2000+. To put that in perspective, I alone launched 3000 cities worth of armies the last time Audrey woke up. You can build the servers to handle spikes like that, but it isn't cost effective for a 1% case that's 1000x bigger than your typical volume. This solution is just better.

When players understood the way to play audrey was to spam her, the devs had to turn off part of the moving units display elements around audrey as the congestion was simply epic! It isn't the sending of the units that caused the problem, it's what happened when they converged on the temples, as the missions had to be converted into attacks on the sending city.  I reckon 50+ people each sending 2,000+ attacks = 100,000 attacks.  An attack takes around 2-3 seconds to send, but this slows dramatically once your active missions creeps above 1,000.  Then when they all reach the other end...

With the mission count changes if you choose to dedicate a town to diplomacy and build a consulate and 22 foreign offices in one city you could still have 460 theft, sabotage, assassination or scouting missions in progress from one town.

GM ThunderCat wrote: With the mission count changes if you choose to dedicate a town to diplomacy and build a consulate and 22 foreign offices in one city you could still have 460 theft, sabotage, assassination or scouting missions in progress from one town.

One notes that would require over 35,000 stone an hour and with that epic number of foreign offices the city could snag a huge 23 tentacles when Audrey is beating--about what is needed for the quest--unless you are a non-orc of course because orc tentacles are much rarer and worth more.

There is also now an interesting trade-off between being able to hire diplomats and being able to use them since both foreign offices and the buildings which allow diplomats to be cheaper both require res per hour. There are many trade-offs in this game and most are interesting, but this seems like a pretty darn stupid one.

In addition, I still go back to my original point that if Audrey (or perhaps other extreme scouting behavior though Audrey seems like a definite outlier) is the problem, there should be a fix better than making it so that the statue quest now takes new players months to finish. I can't imagine that a city with a level 10 consulate sending 26 spies out in various directions really destroys the server all that much...if it does, I agree with Rill that it sounds like there are much deeper problems.



Edited by Alcie - 05 Aug 2015 at 00:10