Hi All;

First let me apologize for attacking code that went live, it was not supposed to go in for FFA at all; we were still discussing FFA's particular case.



The reason the throttling change was proposed was as a result of some discussions of lag during kill runs; people (probably more in alliance than FFA) have complained that there's a high amount of lag when they're being killed and they're trying to stonewall.


The obvious solution seemed to be throttling attacks - when considering alliance; we didn't really consider FFA, that at 1s/attack or 3s/attack should, assuming ~60 attacks per country, equate to approximately 16 or 48 minutes of attacking respectively, which is pretty crazy-high.


So, with the kill run lag problem in mind, another alternate solution (this time with FFA in mind) comes to mind: combine queries/requests in a similar fashion to cashing/exploring

Would sending attacks in a bulk fashion be something that FFA players would be interested in seeing?




P.S. Also Slagpit & I just traced down a source of "lag" which may negate this entire exercise, but I want to get your comments regardless.

Keep anything that lags attacks off FFA,add missiles to market,and me be very happy :)

Thnx for clearing things up :)

too late

mega farming happened already, ruining 2 months of game play.

I dont think I would like bulk attacking although if it helps solve a lag problem then I would much rather have that than the throttling. If we were able to attack in bulk then I could set up my 16 countries to all do bulk attacks and kill someone solo in like 3 seconds which may be a little extreme. It wouldn't be effecient for breaking obviously but for low breaks (early wars) it might make walling basically impossible.

might as well just take the warroom completely away :-p


maybe its a good idea in single country servers.
ffa though .... def not

If it isn't broke don't fix it. FFA was just fine the way it was. Still think you should be able to FA oil, but I say roll it back to the way it was...my two cents.

i never get lag

and too late is right, the fag squad took fluff into their own hands

there was never any intention of changing FFA (as qz said). It was done by accident.
What qz is proposing is something different that would actually make attacking faster on this server (not slower) and *that's* what we would like feedback on. IE you could attack a bunch of times in a row with the click of a button rather than having to click attack again over and over. (only for FFA< not alliance :P)

Wouldnt that just add more power to an already to powerful FS advantage?

so change it back before more people go retarded and suicide others

and agree with Crip

dont need it any faster

it isn't (or shouldn't be) live; the only reason it was is because a setting was cached for a while apparently.

Qzjul, what llaar is doing now to ruin this game/server is your responsibility.

Wondering if you will do anything about this....

no its not

llaar's always been a cheating douche

now he's shown the douche par even more

Please explain how it's my responsibility?

I like it how it was. I like the idea of adding oil to the private market in FFA and allowing missiles going on the market.

It's llaars responsibly. I think he just used this as a excuse.

Qzjul, when you see a guy ruining the game for everyone else... umm maybe you should do something bout it.

just saying

So can I ban all of LaF in alliance for FSing Evo too? ;) Where exactly do you want us to draw the line?


If a suicider happens should we roll back the server?

If I get LG'd, should we roll back the server?


Nothing "bugged" happened; there was no exponential population growth bug, for example....

unless llaar actually breaks a game rule, he won't get deleted. Politics and unpopular actions are left to the player base to deal with in game as they see fit as long as it is within the game rules.

yes your right Martian/Qzjul.. it is up to the player base to deal with issues like this.

Thats where the frustration comes in, not many people have even made an attempt to do anything..

Buyout SDI and chem kill the countries. He won't be able to drop the land he has.

On the other hand ...
Deploying a new build to live server during run hours, that's kind dangerous, don't You think ? :P

Just leave things the way they are. If you feel the need to take out the rapid attack button, fine. But it ain't broke, stop trying to fix it

I don't know why the cache didn't reset... it reset properly on the alpha servers. also, no one reported this to me until the cache had already reset.

but anyone who "farmed the netters" to "protest" the change -> i'm severely disappointed in you. the point of my initial post on the subject was to see if there is a need to add it to FFA. we didn't announce the change as being complete, we were still discussing it across 2 servers, continuing to ask for feedback... so why do this?

the only people you actually hurt is yourselves because it reflects poorly on you. "What you wanted" was already planned to be what we were moving forward with anyway. this just makes me think that we need to stop considering what FFA players want at all if this is the reaction when we do.

disappointing to say the least.

They can fix, unfix, try to fix, or ignore whatever they please.

We as players are entitled to nothing. Just because we are used to things being one way doesn't mean they have to stay that way unless we as players agree otherwise.

Who likes server lag, bulk attacks for FFA , yes please!!

how does llaar acting like a douchebag have any reflection at all on FFA players?

you didn't lose out because of his actions. FFA players in TKO, Panlv, Ely, Focus, Ares, and wherever else lost out because of him.

I don't see how you can make the connection. llaar did what he did so that he could make a mark prior to his already made decision to quit.

it was one player, not ffa who did it. The rest of people were just upset that you implemented a change that was #1 aweful and #2 without notification. It really sucks doing a kr and in the middle of it the gameplay mechanics are changed and you end up getting screwed in the process. You made a post on AT saying that you were implementing it for the rest of the set so it didn't look like a bug, it looked like you just did it without telling us.

EDIT: somehow I added my comments into the middle of the quote.

It was a bug in which everyone got messed up from. Surely the mods could rewind it so that all those netters who put in 2 months of work dont have it wrecked.

And from our perspective it looked like you announced a possible change, got negative feedback and then implemented it anyway without any warning. 'we didn't announce the change as being complete'.

Just saying this bug caused a miscommunication in which the server thought u said fluff you FFA we are implementing it anyway. And therefore people reacted poorly.

how is it a bug?

cause something was wrong in the code and it wasnt meant to happen yet but it did

Qzjul, the reason behind the lag is it tries to load a couple hundred attacks at once when you log in. It tries to load each one as a seperate instance or something, taking as long as 10 seconds (which is crippling). Perhaps if you limited the amount of attacks that show when you log in, that would fix it (instead of everything, putting a 20 cap on it).

Dont change it from the way it was. attacking was fair. stonewalling was fair. if you want to make changes, geta proper discussion going and listne to the FFA community. It will take weeks/months to get a new system that is fair and works.

I think the current system is okay... but if it causes lag on the system - I guess bulk attacking would be glad. Something like (attack x times) like what spyops currently does.

Ah I forgot about that issue too; slagpit and I have talked about that from time to time; perhaps we'll come up with a better method to show or summarize news

What I want is Llaar being banned.
IP ban him.

llaar will not be banned.
He did not break any rules to the game.

I thought we were trying to protect countries, and give them a chance to wall pretty much every run.... The bulk attack system seems to go in the opposite direction. Either way I'd prefer bulk attacks of the readiness penalty.

I don't really think there needs to be a change, but If I come up with an idea, I will be back

Diz, attack throttling is mainly aimed at lag issues. Large scale warchats have been causing lag on the servers, and we're searching for a way to resolve that.

Attack throttling and bulk-attack systems both accomplish this goal, though they have opposite effects on game-play.

-Fooglmog
Guy with no clue.

one thing people are missing with bulk attacks is it may be a time saver / click saver not an attack speed increase

im hoping that the bulk attacks are tuned to attack at something like 1/second unless you get a DH in which case they stop

rather than instantly do 65 attacks on a mono type thing

anyway i dont mind fast killing in ffa to make it convenient for everyone, just make some sort of penalty for killing too fast, that gives an advantage to a stonewaller but doesnt waste peoples time

I don't know much about servers, but if bulk attacking does reduce the load on the servers, I think you can add a penalty such as -10% attack power, or +20% extra military losses, or extra oil usage to slightly discourage people from using that feature to fasten kills up.

all those penalties are probably going to be inconsequential after breaking

but if the goal is to reduce server load and this does that then disincentives to using it seems counter productive

your assumption is probably that it instantly does 50 hits though

the amount of news you see when you log in does need to be lowered :)

but as for the attacking, i would much rather have a bulk attack option set up like the spy ops currently are, limit it to 10 attacks at a time... it would be nice to have it stop attacks if you bounce one, but maybe thats a good punishment for tryin to do bulk attacking and failing, lol

i applaud the developers, admins, and mods for all of their work and dedication to improving the game, but this attack delay has no place in ffa

also... it seems i am missing options since this went into effect... i no longer have a edit attack button on my confirm attack screen and im also missing the attack again button after you send the attack...

i still have never got lag

Have no attack again button or edit attack

Lag?..Jeez,killing is too fast as it is!

take it down to 8 countries would be better then throttling

Popcom is getting old

I'd rather lag than combining queries / throttling.

Have you made the war room scripts as resource efficient as possible? For example, if you are using MySQL, and you are currently using MyISAM structure, you could change to InnoDB for much better results. Or, even if using InnoDB, you could look into Percona XtraDB, which is an enhanced version of InnoDB.

There are plenty of ways to reduce lag without limiting functionality or sacrificing how the game is played.