OOPS Hot Fix

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06-04-2018, 17:37
Andurilas

OOPS Hot Fix

Is there a discussion thread on this somewhere? See OP at http://forums.utopia-game.com/showth...81-OOPS-Hotfix

Quote:

We have implemented a new hotfix that we expect will prevent the major issues that have arisen during bursts of extreme activity (OOPS).

How it works: Once a set number of OOPS have occurred during a conflict, this new code will activate for a total of 10 minutes. During this time the Kingdom will be limited to 1 aggressive action every 5 seconds thereafter. Upon expiration of the 10 minutes, if another 30 OOPS occur, the same will go into effect.

What you will see: There will be a message that appears on your loaded Utopia page that tells you that you must wait a few seconds before attempting another aggressive action.

What this will do: By allowing a cooldown between database requests this should ensure that actions being performed will go through without major OOPS'ing and deadlocking everyone out of everything. Based on recent events this has lasted for up to 40 minutes with everyone involved being upset about not being allowed to perform the actions they wanted. This new method should allow for all provinces to use ALL stealth and mana within the 10 minute cooldown period while they are limited to 1 operation per 5 seconds.

This seems like a problematic fix. It says "the Kingdom will be limited to 1 aggressive action every 5 seconds." This means that when a kingdom is trying to dump stealth and mana into a target, *that kingdom* will be limited to 1 op every 5 seconds. Let's say it's just 12 provinces nightstriking from 80% stealth. That's 420 ops, which would take 35 *minutes* to complete if the deadlock protocol remains in place. Add in nightmares, MVs, fireballs, whatever, and the problem compounds.

At absolute minimum, the metering should reply to both kingdoms, at least when war status is active (otherwise I could see abusing this by forcing metering on an innocent bystander kingdom).

Better: meter actions by province and reduce the 5 second cooldown. So, say, once deadlock is triggered, each province in the "offending" kingdom (and the enemy kingdom if at war) can perform hostile actions only once every 3 seconds.
06-04-2018, 18:00
Pillz

Game obviously needs a rewrite to properly be able to handle regular gameplay.
06-04-2018, 19:21
chadbrochill17

what a ridiculous way to fix a problem. Talk about mickymouse bull****. Fix your god damn servers guys, are you running it on a potato?
07-04-2018, 13:30
Fiskinator

Funny how mehuls spaghetti code could handle it
07-04-2018, 14:18
elmoheadbutt

Whenever I log in, the number of users online never reach 500. Are you guys running this game on a calculator or something? Don't tell me the server can't even handle 500 users' worth of simple data.
07-04-2018, 16:31
LuckySports

I think its one op per 5 seconds, per province, so for a province at 80% stealth to dump all of it, it would take 205 seconds, or 3 minutes 25 seconds. Even though it says kingdom, that might specifically refer to attacks. Otherwise, it would definitely take more than 10 minutes for the kingdom to burn all their stealth and mana, especially if you have more than 2 T/Ms that have to burn both.
07-04-2018, 16:40
Chris121

It is per province not per kd. The original announcement was edited (it is still not particularly clear in the edited version but David has confirmed it is per province).
08-04-2018, 05:39
DavidC

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andurilas

Is there a discussion thread on this somewhere? See OP at http://forums.utopia-game.com/showth...81-OOPS-Hotfix

This seems like a problematic fix. It says "the Kingdom will be limited to 1 aggressive action every 5 seconds." This means that when a kingdom is trying to dump stealth and mana into a target, *that kingdom* will be limited to 1 op every 5 seconds. Let's say it's just 12 provinces nightstriking from 80% stealth. That's 420 ops, which would take 35 *minutes* to complete if the deadlock protocol remains in place. Add in nightmares, MVs, fireballs, whatever, and the problem compounds.

At absolute minimum, the metering should reply to both kingdoms, at least when war status is active (otherwise I could see abusing this by forcing metering on an innocent bystander kingdom).

Better: meter actions by province and reduce the 5 second cooldown. So, say, once deadlock is triggered, each province in the "offending" kingdom (and the enemy kingdom if at war) can perform hostile actions only once every 3 seconds.

The post was edited (I mis-typed) to reflect the actual implementation of 'per province' instead of 'kingdom'. Apologies for the delay in edit on that, certainly makes a huge difference!
I'm sorry but I'd like to clarify that I understand your suggestion, it seems like the only suggestions you're making is: 1) reduce from 5 to 3 seconds and; 2) force the kingdom you're at war with into same throttling. Is that correct?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pillz

Game obviously needs a rewrite to properly be able to handle regular gameplay.

Regular gameplay that less than 5% of the server experience? I'm sorry I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chadbrochill17

what a ridiculous way to fix a problem. Talk about mickymouse bull****. Fix your god damn servers guys, are you running it on a potato?

What's ridiculous again? I'm sorry I don't understand...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fiskinator

Funny how mehuls spaghetti code could handle it

typo correction: couldn't**

Quote:

Originally Posted by elmoheadbutt

Whenever I log in, the number of users online never reach 500. Are you guys running this game on a calculator or something? Don't tell me the server can't even handle 500 users' worth of simple data.

The servers are capable of handling quite a lot more players than currently play. The issue is not the server capability it's a general database locking principle. If you prefer to have inaccurate database records we can use Mehul's method, that's always a viable possibility! Although, this hotfix should resolve the issues we're seeing, reduce the OOPS frustrations, allow all kingdoms experiencing frustrations to perform all ops and intended actions in less than 10 minutes (as compared to being locked out for 20-50 minutes and not completing anything desired), and by the way this code will likely only ever go into effect for less than 5% of the server.

Quote:

Originally Posted by LuckySports

I think its one op per 5 seconds, per province, so for a province at 80% stealth to dump all of it, it would take 205 seconds, or 3 minutes 25 seconds. Even though it says kingdom, that might specifically refer to attacks. Otherwise, it would definitely take more than 10 minutes for the kingdom to burn all their stealth and mana, especially if you have more than 2 T/Ms that have to burn both.

Yes you are mostly correct. 80% stealth (36 operations = 180 seconds or 3 minutes)
5 second delay for everyone should ensure that every operation is executed without OOPS, so when you perform an operation it will go through. That means no more frustrating spamming operation requests, not having any load, and the ones that do load go to OOPS pages. Getting locked out of your account for close to 50 minutes as the most recent Kingdoms did seems like a poor alternative to our new solution!
Thank you for clarifying my mistake for everyone :)
08-04-2018, 17:25
fawk

As a long time programmer and developer, this fix sounds horrible.
Databases should have no problem running thousands of inserts per second.

Obviously something is horribly wrong in either design or implementation of the code or database.
The fix of limiting the entire kingdom to one operation per five seconds is awful in both a programming perspective, and the user interface perspective.

I am not sure how the database is desgined, but surely this issue has a much better solution.
And i would not call this a fix at all, it's just replacing the oops message with a lockout message. The effect of the bug remains basically the same.
08-04-2018, 18:38
Chris121

Quote:

Originally Posted by fawk

And i would not call this a fix at all, it's just replacing the oops message with a lockout message. The effect of the bug remains basically the same.

I don't think so. Currently, for the KDs affected by the lockout that we are talking about they get locked out of doing anything for much longer than 10 minutes, and then finally get back in and find they've been chained army in etc. With the new code, assuming it works as stated, they won't be locked out at all and will be able to do an op/attack every 5 seconds. That means they can avoid (or mostly avoid) being chained army in etc.
08-04-2018, 19:05
Pillz

Oops is obviously intentional at this point. Must be DylanC's way of discouraging serious play.
09-04-2018, 12:04
Yadda9To5

I'd think arranging a war and not being able to steal war horses, or any op, before an attacker sends army out, is kind of broken and a huge boost to dryads.

I also think it's not entirely professional for current owners to lash out at the previous owners, be a little less defensive. The community realizes utopia inherited a broken codebase, but that doesn't make band-aid solutions like this anything except band-aid solutions. At this point every utopia player must be getting a little worried about the future of the game. Not much progress has been made in making the game more accessible :( And old problems periodically show their ugly head.

"If you prefer to have inaccurate database records we can use Mehul's method, that's always a viable possibility!" YES PLEASE. This is a game, not a bank. The original Mehul pascal code didn't bother about sync, and it rightly didn't. Trading immediate consistency for performance is the right choice (though i'd think that with current compute power, there is no need to make that choice). What's he worst than can happen, ops/attacks being out of sync, no big deal at all.
09-04-2018, 15:04
Pillz

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yadda9To5

I'd think arranging a war and not being able to steal war horses, or any op, before an attacker sends army out, is kind of broken and a huge boost to dryads.

I also think it's not entirely professional for current owners to lash out at the previous owners, be a little less defensive. The community realizes utopia inherited a broken codebase, but that doesn't make band-aid solutions like this anything except band-aid solutions. At this point every utopia player must be getting a little worried about the future of the game. Not much progress has been made in making the game more accessible :( And old problems periodically show their ugly head.

"If you prefer to have inaccurate database records we can use Mehul's method, that's always a viable possibility!" YES PLEASE. This is a game, not a bank. The original Mehul pascal code didn't bother about sync, and it rightly didn't. Trading immediate consistency for performance is the right choice (though i'd think that with current compute power, there is no need to make that choice). What's he worst than can happen, ops/attacks being out of sync, no big deal at all.

Irony is that I'm not even sure hawk played on the current code base when it came out. His career save for the last two years was entirely or almost entirely under mehul's tenure and code... But he will now probably explain that mehul's code resulted in incorrect meteor showers behavior or something and explain that taking ten minutes to dump ops is a worthwhile trade...

Game takes enough time as is and you stated you wanted to make it less time intensive and open to more casual play. Your hot fix, instead, penalizes serious play by making it take even longer than it should.
09-04-2018, 15:14
Chris121

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yadda9To5

I'd think arranging a war and not being able to steal war horses, or any op, before an attacker sends army out, is kind of broken and a huge boost to dryads.

...

"If you prefer to have inaccurate database records we can use Mehul's method, that's always a viable possibility!" YES PLEASE. This is a game, not a bank. The original Mehul pascal code didn't bother about sync, and it rightly didn't. Trading immediate consistency for performance is the right choice (though i'd think that with current compute power, there is no need to make that choice). What's he worst than can happen, ops/attacks being out of sync, no big deal at all.

Wouldn't your last paragraph mean you risk stealing war horses to find that not only did you not manage to steal them before the attacker sent out, but also that you just wasted a lot of stealth getting 0 horses?
09-04-2018, 16:29
Yadda9To5

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris121

Wouldn't your last paragraph mean you risk stealing war horses to find that not only did you not manage to steal them before the attacker sent out, but also that you just wasted a lot of stealth getting 0 horses?

Yes, but only because for all practical purposes it happened simultaneously. Give or take a few seconds. But that's the risk you take for button spamming.
09-04-2018, 16:32
Pillz

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris121

Wouldn't your last paragraph mean you risk stealing war horses to find that not only did you not manage to steal them before the attacker sent out, but also that you just wasted a lot of stealth getting 0 horses?

No it wouldn't. The issue was primarily that passive spells like MS didn't have accurate effects because the db updated when provinces got interacted with or accessed their throne page or made operations. An attack sends out all horses, the prov would be updated as such, and again by the OP itself.

Ms is the most consistent example Zauper & hawk bring up when discussing the flaws of mehuls code... And it seems painfully minor compared to what we suffer through now.
09-04-2018, 16:33
Andurilas

DavidC: Per province is *much* better and does address most of my concern (it makes the effective rate about 25x faster, so...).

I'll defer to the programmers and database experts on whether 3 seconds is feasible as compared to 5, though I would ask you to keep in mind the possibility of reducing the cooldown after testing this deadlock protocol.

And yes, I do think if two kingdoms are at war the throttling should apply to both sides. If one side is spamming NM and NS and the other side is spamming Aura and whatnot, it doesn't seem fair if only one side's actions happen to trigger the OOPS threshold while the other side is hot to trot.
09-04-2018, 17:36
Andurilas

Also, you should post a link to this discussion thread in the announcement, along with a notice that just badmouthing the server or code will get you banned :p