Hi everyone,
Sorry we've been relatively quiet for the week. We've been busy on stuff that is important, but not so visible as a player.
Here's a quick re-cap of the week:
- News only kept for 2 utopian years.
The most disruptive update of the week was the downtime required to expand the storage space on the server to accommodate the growing database size. The fastest growing data consisted of province and kingdom news reports. To help combat this problem, only the last 2 utopian years of news is kept, with old news removed once per day. Unfortunately, this daily cleanup process had some problems, and caused a very slow tick to occur at 5am GMT on Wed, Thur and Friday this week. This should now be fixed.- Professors, instructors and exploration leaders removed.
The underlying bug that led to the introduction of these concepts (the deterministic scheduling of small amounts of science, troops or acres) has now been fixed. There is now no point in trying to train hundreds of troops in batches of 1. In fact, it's better not to. As a result, the artificial limits of professors, instructors and exploration leaders that we introduced have now been removed (they didn't make much sense anyway, we know).- Rankings
It was pointed out that rankings were often reset, taking a few hours to rebuild. This is a result of us doing maintenance on the server, and restarting the program that manages these. We've improved this program now so that this will be less of an issue (although it will still sometimes happen).
It's been mentioned that there might be a problem with self spells, for example the success rate of casting the paradise spell, and the number of days that it becomes active for. We'd be grateful if people could keep an eye on this and report in if you feel there's a definite problem, along with information on your race, personality, guild percentage and whether you have a ruby dragon or not.
We'll have more news next week.
Thanks
Sean and Brian.
