Shut it down, Fix it, Restart Age

[DHaran]

At this point, I am tired of the 2 hour check ups. Most of the hardcore kd strats have already been jacked up in some form or another, and the casual kd players are dropping like flies. The ghetto players will lose interest without something more concrete than "Time of next update xx:xx".

Shut it all down. Sit your asses in a chair, find the problem, fix it. Secure the game, stabilize it, and test it. Restart the damn age, let everyone get a fair and fun start. This age has already been ruined with this terrible start, unfair advantages to people managing to get in OOP, while others sat around hitting refresh on 10 tabbed browsers.

This age needs to be positive, and I don't see that happening without a full restart at this point. Let everyone have a few days to regather the troops and get them ready for the new age restart, while you work on fixing this disaster. A continuation of the failure that has been this age is not good for anyone. Not good for your first age on the new code, not good for our morale as players, and not good for player retention.

Think about it. This no longer has much to do with protection strats being ruined, but moreso about the entire community losing interest and being angry. Just think about it.

[johnnywonder]

i suggest that they find another programmer with actual game experience, i am pretty sure you (OMAC) can find tons here just trying to play this game.

look around, ask for help, plenty will assist.

[testsubj]

i hear mehul is available for part time work
he needs some chump change for kindling. it is winter after all.

[VT2]

I'm gonna watch the nerd instead.

[onlymad]

Agree 100% ,Turn Gen or one of the old servers back in to appease some people even with bugs just to pass the time.
Fix it so people can log into the game even if it is frozen so alot can atleast keep others posted in the ingame forums if they need to before casual players just stop caring.

Locking everyone out with the updated messages every time a date is missed for restart isnt helping much now

[Nobody]

I'm with Dharan here... shut down this code, and start another age on the old code (which is proven to work and handle the load and ticks.. and basically do everything that the new code *should* be able to do)
After that, you'll have roughly 3 months of time to find, fix, and re-test the problems in the new code.

I'm still at a loss as to why they decided to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place.....

[Realest]

yep do this

[DHaran]

Starting an age on the old code is likely not going to happen. But no game at all is better than having 2,000 players rushing the site every 2 hours checking for the latest delay.

Knowing the game is entirely down, and being fixed, is far better than waiting around for it to start ticking again. Meanwhile, we get angrier, and more frustrated, even though I'm sure you guys are working very hard on the problem.

The way things are now, it's just draining the early age excitement, kingdoms are getting bored idling around waiting for something to change. Tell them to come back in 3 or 4 days so you have time to fix it, and RESTART everything. Get a clean slate for yourselves and for us.

[DHaran]

Hi everyone,

First off, sorry it's taken longer than we hoped to get the site back up. Since we took it down we've taken a number of steps to improve matters. Here's a summary:

1. Ticking has changed significantly. At the top of each hour, the main game will be inaccessible while the whole game world is brought up to date with the new tick. During this period, you will be brought back to the lobby page, which gives accurate feedback on progress. This takes 2-5 minutes to complete currently.
By doing ticking in this way, instead of on-demand as kingdoms are accessed, we improve overall site performance considerably. Prior to this, the process of ticking all the kingdoms was competing for server time with thousands of frustrated players hitting F5 in their browsers, which in turn made the problem worse. Now, instead of suffering bad site performance for 10-20 minutes now there is just a few minutes of pure ticking, followed by good site performance.

2. A few provinces' data had become corrupted because there was an issue with training. To fix this in the short term, there is now a cap on how many individual batches of troops you can have in training at any one time. There's a similar new limit on the other schedules, e.g., learning and exploring.

We hope that with these changes the server will stay up during the night. Tomorrow we'll post another update with an assessment of how it went.

Thanks to you all for bearing with us while we work through these difficult teething issues.

Brian & Sean

This is just getting pathetic. Explain to me why the old archaic and unrepairable code could update the entire server on a tick without any trouble at all, and your updated new and improved coding cannot without the whole site crashing? Now we have to sit around and wait 5 minutes every tick? Is this an improvement?

And a short term fix for the training issue? I get the feeling it will probably just lead to more issues. Short term fixes are not helping anything, it's a bandaid on a battle wound.

SHUT IT DOWN. FIX THE PROBLEMS. RESTART THE AGE.

[Realest]

SHUT IT DOWN. FIX THE PROBLEMS. RESTART THE AGE.

this

[Jobolob]

Im pretty sure I have heard along the grape vine somewhere that the old code did not update the whole server on the tick. That it only updated the provinces that were logged in. Therefore reducing server load by a fair chunk.

I am starting to agree with restarting, but I dont want to go through this age. If this is to be a restart. It needs to be working. 100% Im not going through another week of broken protection.

[DHaran]

Jobolob it updated charts for land and NW once every several hours. This version it's just basically doing the same thing every tick.

504 Gateway Timeout. lol SHUT IT DOWN.

[charmed]

hi omac

your new code is one big bug that youre unable to fix.

tick stuff hasnt changed; i was still in the game the first 6 or so minutes after the hour changed.

Oh, there's also no change in server speed/load - it still sucks ass.

Take it down please, thx.

[Jobolob]

Jobolob it updated charts for land and NW once every several hours. This version it's just basically doing the same thing every tick.

504 Gateway Timeout. lol SHUT IT DOWN.

Charts are different from updating provinces DH.

Once again, Im pretty sure I heard that the old code only updated provinces that were logged in.

Hence why there was the MS bug.

[Yadda9To5]

I think utopia's dead :(

Their code just cannot handle the load. At best, we'll get a new new code in half a year or so :/