Mehul vs OMAC v2

Moderator's; this isn't intended as flame against Jolt/OMAC, this is purely a debate between the above names. If anyone goes for personal flaming, remove the indivudual posts, but don't delete the entire thread. Please accept any criticism you may get from the 'community', thats the responsibility that comes along with running a game with other people.

(Copied most of it from my old post)

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Patience my friend learn it and all will be ok.

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Patience? This has little to do with patience. Their lack of knowledge about coding this game is just bad. If you don't know how to (change the) code of a game like this, keep your hands off...

The code was apparantly outdated... but hey, it worked! Now we are sitting with an apparantly uptodate code but a server that isn't worked as it should. Good game.

Fact is, Mehul ran this game with over 100.000 players at some point yet it ran smoothly. The only times it didn't run smooth was when the protection ended - which was somewhat logical if you consider a large amount of those 100.000+ players is trying to make their OOP-hits. It was terribly slow and you had to refresh a page sometimes more than 10 times to make it load... but hey - it worked!

During protection the game was even paused for a few days. Once back up, it was still slow... 12 hours before protection ends the game is down yet again. Protection ends, I hear from some people the server was up for a short time but then it died again.
When refreshing the login page, you get a message "ETA on Fix xx minutes".

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Originally Posted by Clampy

To be fair it took Mehul many years to get the game running pretty smoothly, Brian and Sean haven't had anywhere near as long, and given what Utopia was like when it first started (the beta's), it was a bad joke worse than this.

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Not really. There was a few beta's going on before Age 1 started, but that was no where near "many years", and that was while doing it from scratch. Other than a few loopholes the game ran smooth. Can't really predict all loopholes.

They took over the game, meaning they have the source on how the game works. If you can't figure out how to deal with those sources then please just keep your hands off the game.

The EOA problems last age with updating is something that did not happen before. Last age was the first time chart updates where being done 45 minutes after the age had already past. Mehul froze the charts once the hour ticked; any attacks made on the 1st did not count any longer and had no influence.


I hope you guys manage to fix this permanently really quick, but I don't see it fixed in the next few days

It can be really hard to try and breakdown the two, mehul built the game and for the vast majority of the time (as I remember it) there were few problems. We had some epic issues at times, where there was some down time but I can never remember it being a case of, game doing down, game up for 10 minutes, game down again for 2 days etc.

Towards the end there Mehul had lost interest, changes werent really happening and the game was pretty much just left to run.

Then OMAC stepped into the picture. At the time I remember thinking this could be good. They then made UK. Which got completely flamed by the entire community, I cant remember reading one positive post about it. As far as I am aware, the game was a complete and utter waste of time, effort and any other sort of other commitment it took in order for that "game" to get off the ground. OMAC, you really should have listened to what was said by all of us. When you introduced UK it pissed a lot of people because you were taking what we all consider to be a great game, diluting your efforts and morphing the game of a great game into something it never wanted to be or needs to be.

We heard a lot of issues with the code. This was widely accepted as we all knew and appreciated that mehul wasnt a "professional" programmer. It would be very hard to step into that and take over that database and then try and get your heard around it. So a new code was developed, Utopia classic as our game was retagged, was given a "dedicated" team of S&B.

They made all the right initial moves, basic assurances were given, the blog posts at the beginning were useful, needed and should have continued as that way we can "see" what is going on.

Anger and frustration is boiling over, that much is obvious, all we want to do is play. Now there is little communication. We just want to know whats going on, where we are in terms of everything being stable. I dont really know what more needs said. I think this has been a fair post.

Mehul's a genius, plain and simple. I'm pretty sure any of us would rather have him back over OMAC/B&S tbh.

Mehul's smartest move though - was grabbing the money and running.

Omac doesn't have that option, since the game now is pretty unsalable.

I wonder if he comes back and reads through these forums. If it was me I'd be pretty curious to see if people missed me or not lol.

ofc

He is probably laughing his head off. He got his, as it were.

The main problem is this up/down/up/down/up/down that's stuck in a loophole repeating itself. Instead of bashing your head against it while trying to keep it running, take it offline untill further notice.
Fix it first then try and get it running. You're trying to do both at the same time, thats obviously not working. I think we've seen that in the past week.

I'd rather have the game offline knowing you're looking for a solution than this... this is worse.

If they take it offline for an extended period prot, they'll likely lose 25%+ of the current remaining playerbase as people find other uses for their time

actually i have to agree with you prot.

id rather they just said, "guys, we are sorry, but we are going to take the game offline for a week and get it as stable as we can because we appreciate how annoying the up down is".

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Originally Posted by prot

The main problem is this up/down/up/down/up/down that's stuck in a loophole repeating itself. Instead of bashing your head against it while trying to keep it running, take it offline untill further notice.
Fix it first then try and get it running. You're trying to do both at the same time, thats obviously not working. I think we've seen that in the past week.

I'd rather have the game offline knowing you're looking for a solution than this... this is worse.

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Yeah and the "up/down/up/down" gives uber active players an awesome edge. Pretty unfair imo.

You are right Kuhan, those that are able to constantly check server status all day are going to have an advantage.

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Originally Posted by prot

The main problem is this up/down/up/down/up/down that's stuck in a loophole repeating itself. Instead of bashing your head against it while trying to keep it running, take it offline untill further notice.
Fix it first then try and get it running. You're trying to do both at the same time, thats obviously not working. I think we've seen that in the past week.

I'd rather have the game offline knowing you're looking for a solution than this... this is worse.

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But the problem seems to be one of server load, so there's a very limited amount they can test. In fact, about the only thing they could test offline is ticking the game while no-on can log in, but I don't know how useful that woul be.

The game ran in beta, no problem, and now with 11k users this happens. I just don't think there's an effective test they can do with the game offline. Troubleshoot yeah, but surely they'd have to open it up to test their fixes (and fixes can be a bit trial and error which would only result in more up/down :( )

Crap situation, but I've resigned this to being a beta age as we were told it would be. To me, beta means unreliable and buggy. I think if people were expecting stability like the old code, it was a case of mis managed expectations by Jolt. And Jolt are also responsible for wimping out on the old code to save money and force B&S to release a beta game to the whole community as WoL. Disaster.

lol

Give the guys a ****ing break. They need to rewrite a codebase not their own, and probably badly documented. Seeing that the old code was running into problems with hackers (who have new methods then when Mehul ran the game) it isn't unthinkable that the game would've gone down even if Mehul was still running things.

At least OMAC has people seriously working on it, they could also decide to scrap the entire game because the only activity in it is people spilling negative stuff in the forums...

Let's hope we have a stable game by the end of this week (because when it was up it was fast here), and then the advertisement ingame get's changed to uto advertisment, instead of trying to convert us to other online games :P

I do agree that I miss blog updates, last one is from 13th october and so much happend since then. Just hire somebody for 2 hours a week to write a blog post for us guys :P

But I do appreciate that time is spent into trying to get utopia back for all of us.

P.s. Maybe a OMAC irc channel on utonet?

maybe this age of light will show us the coding war that ends all coding wars

They could make it open source(minus game formulas) and have others give advice or even help out

yea, and hopefully that will be JUST as helpful as that damn wiki guide that the users have masterfully created

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Originally Posted by KuhaN

I wonder if he comes back and reads through these forums. If it was me I'd be pretty curious to see if people missed me or not lol.

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Its probably Mehul that is attacking the server... HOPING that someone will say "I miss the Mehul days"...

Conspirator!

Mods! Bring the stakes and knives!

good times. :(

Making the code open source just ruins their investment.

Fryslandia makes good points. Who said mehuls code won't get the crap ddos'd out of it? I'm pretty sure it would :)

http://forums.joltonline.com/showthread.php?t=602467

Hmm... maybe I'm wrong, but right now it wouldn't surprise me if Utopia suffers the same thing in a few days/weeks.

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Originally Posted by Fryslandia

Give the guys a ****ing break. They need to rewrite a codebase not their own, and probably badly documented. Seeing that the old code was running into problems with hackers (who have new methods then when Mehul ran the game) it isn't unthinkable that the game would've gone down even if Mehul was still running things.

At least OMAC has people seriously working on it, they could also decide to scrap the entire game because the only activity in it is people spilling negative stuff in the forums...

Let's hope we have a stable game by the end of this week (because when it was up it was fast here), and then the advertisement ingame get's changed to uto advertisment, instead of trying to convert us to other online games :P

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hilarious, people seriously working on it? if there were this wouldn't be happening you know;) and badly documented, umm..they have the raw code of the old game, a programmer don't need anything else;) the game have barely had a week with no problems after omac took over, since september there have been more downtime than the game actually being playable.

this is a joke and a finger in the face to all the players that is still around by omac.

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Originally Posted by Fryslandia

Give the guys a ****ing break. They need to rewrite a codebase not their own, and probably badly documented. Seeing that the old code was running into problems with hackers (who have new methods then when Mehul ran the game) it isn't unthinkable that the game would've gone down even if Mehul was still running things.

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to be honest, i am adamant in my belief that the game got hacked BECAUSE of OMAC - they've been frustrating for the entire utopia community ever since they set foot here and im sure the reason they got hacked is some angry person wanted to "teach them a lesson". of course i have no evidence of this, it's just common sense.
funny how this game never got K.O'd by hackers while Mefu... sorry, MeHUL, was around. sure, there may have been hack attempts that temporarily crashed the server (not that i know of but there might have been :P) but at least the server recovered from it.

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Originally Posted by Fryslandia

Give the guys a ****ing break. They need to rewrite a codebase not their own, and probably badly documented. Seeing that the old code was running into problems with hackers (who have new methods then when Mehul ran the game) it isn't unthinkable that the game would've gone down even if Mehul was still running things.

At least OMAC has people seriously working on it, they could also decide to scrap the entire game because the only activity in it is people spilling negative stuff in the forums...

Let's hope we have a stable game by the end of this week (because when it was up it was fast here), and then the advertisement ingame get's changed to uto advertisment, instead of trying to convert us to other online games :P

I do agree that I miss blog updates, last one is from 13th october and so much happend since then. Just hire somebody for 2 hours a week to write a blog post for us guys :P

But I do appreciate that time is spent into trying to get utopia back for all of us.

P.s. Maybe a OMAC irc channel on utonet?

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No I wont give them a break. They took down the old code because of the DOS attacks right? Now what happened once they got the new code up? DOS attacks. They didn't fix **** and instead forced the new code out and screwed the game entirely. New code didn't fix squat.

Stop crying like little babies. They've made perfectly clear we are playing a beta version of the game. This means it's still in a test phase. Now shut up and be good testers.

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Originally Posted by bcolargol

Stop crying like little babies. They've made perfectly clear we are playing a beta version of the game. This means it's still in a test phase. Now shut up and be good testers.

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Are you Beta Testing? If you are then your the only one. Can't be a good Beta Tester without a game to Beta Test.

And if this is a Beta Test I sure would hate to see a Alpha Test. lmao. Beta is a game that actually works. This one doesn't.

boohoohoo. baby

Played this game since sometime around age 8. Nothing game killing till OMAC took over. Think I have a right to complain dumb ass.

I remember around age 14 or so, people were making a lot of really good contributions in the B&S forums to no avail, and after months and months of "where's mehul" posts a few eoa's and and fresh starts he finnally came online to let everyone know that he doesn't pay any attention to the game, just comes online to restart the game at the end of every age.

It completely boggles my mind that Mehul's complete lack of attention was so signifigantly better than Sean & Brians constant time and effort.

seriously guys, perhaps you are out of your league.