Question: Are feeder towns killing the game?

The New Years Day outage had the distinct odor of a DoS attack. Nothing to do with feeder towns.

no it's not the feeder towns.

i hope this alleviates your concern.

keep calm and tap on!

It's fine if it's different family members with accounts who are actively using them and contributing to the game, spending donuts etc. It's these other towns owned by one user, used usually to gain more currency during events. I think one feeder town is acceptable, but when a single player has 5 or 10 feeder towns... It makes me wonder how many of these "dead" towns are taking up space on EAs servers etc?

I don't think the number of players is the issue. They certainly are bringing in enough money that if it were server loads they would buy more server power to be able to handle the load of players. After all that would be in their best interest to continue making money if the game was/is growing beyond their current server capacity. I believe the connectivity issues we are having is a broader thing. One such thing being DDoS attacks. For whatever reasons this year and possibly the past few years there are groups of people out there that for whatever reasons attack big gaming companies. Blizzard, arenanet, ncsoft, to name just a few of the companies repeatedly hit by such groups. I have no idea if all the outtage we have had are as a result of these or not but they certainly smell like it to me.

And with the size and complexity of the internet now adays as well who knows if anything of that factors into connection problems. I know all sorts of companies who like to blame everyone else for connection issues. I know netflix and my old ISP both like to place blame on the other for service problems with streaming. Loss of connection to the stream for example or sudden reduction in stream rate. I've also had other online game companies and ISPs place blame on the other for connection issues as well. The bottom line as a customer is, unless we are extremely knowledgeable on the technology involved, we don't know who to believe we just expect that all parties involved do everything they can to make something we pay for work. That way we get to enjoy it when we want to enjoy it.

Dead towns take up disk space, the cheapest part of computing infrastructure. It would be my guess that a town's layout only takes up 1 Mb at absolute max, probably much less than that, depending on how they store them. It's just a big database, and that's what I do for a living.

I'm pretty sure you are confusing increase of use of storage space on a computer and the impact on the servers from towns being opened.

Think of it in terms of your own computer. You can save a gazillion files on it, but it doesn't lag and crash until you open too many files at the same time. Its the memory drain that would matter. As data surgeon said, since we can only open one feeder at a time, its no extra strain. Plus, feeders are notorious for being undecorated, and very small. Without large land masses and decorations, they open quickly and use a fraction of the memory that a main town gets. :)

I'm aware of the attacks, I was thinking more of the last 6 months... Well let's face it, the game has always been plagued by connection problems and I suppose I'm just thinking it could be a contributing factor.. I don't think feeder towns are actually gonna kill the game by themselves but it could be an issue.

imdreaming691 wrote:
Dead towns take up disk space, the cheapest part of computing infrastructure. It would be my guess that a town's layout only takes up 1 Mb at absolute max.

But when you multiply that by.. 70 million?

i wonder how many inactive towns there are? A lot of people only play for a short while and then abandon their towns forever.

If only we could have all that wasted land shared out between us active players! :-o

thatdonald845 wrote:
i wonder how many inactive towns there are? A lot of people only play for a short while and then abandon their towns forever.

If only we could have all that wasted land shared out between us active players! :-o

Good point. I had to delete about 5 users who hadn't played in months.. Shame as some of them were really good neighbours (kungpao if you're reading this!)