Question: Are feeder towns killing the game?
how would it be different if they were not feeder towns? how would you enforce "no feeder towns" since many family members play on different devices You actually should be clamoring for feeder...
Forum Discussion
redec69 wrote:NarraMine88 wrote:EvaMohlin wrote:AJtheboss1 wrote:EvaMohlin wrote:
So it doesn't matter if I have 10 towns, or 10 people have one each, when it comes to the server part. As I see it.
The server doesn't know who owns what town. 10 towns is 10 towns on a server. If it's asked to bring it up, it will.
Yeah, exactly. I just don't get OP's concern about feeder towns killing the game? How could it?
Because my reasoning was, more towns = more server space? I readily admit I know nothing about how this sorcery works.
I thought if everyone has ten towns each instead of just one like they should, surely this could cause some sort of strain? I asked to get clarification from more technically minded people about how this works, that's all.
Professionally I have designed, implemented and operated both datacenter and cloud-based enterprise systems, fairly similar to what tsto likely has for its backend. I am more than qualified to offer some technical insight on server capacity. For a system like tsto their biggest challenge will be more in the area of request throughput - they will be getting thousands of requests per second, and they all need reasonably responsive response times (otherwise active players get kicked out of the game or what-have-you). There's no doubt additional feeder towns will take up storage space, however storage space is the easiest component to horizontally scale on a large-scale system such as this one, and would not hinder server responsiveness in any appreciable way (not to mention it's cheap too).
As for their apparent lack of capacity I'd have to attribute that to poor planning or management, as they do have far more downtime than would be acceptable in my world. It seems possible that they may also have some underlying architectural design issues as sometimes it seems like only small subsets of users are affected by an event that lasts about the amount of time it takes a server to reboot, making me think that each town has affinity to a single server (in a properly architected solution multiple servers should be able to serve requests for a given town, just in case one crashes mid-session or something). This type of server affinity would wreak havoc on request routing and therefor load balancing, which does seem to fit the symptoms/behaviour this system exhibits...
+2 excellent post, extremely informative.
@anne: I know what you mean, it's eerie how little Californians play this game. Maybe they all have better stuff to do than play video games or post on message boards *shrug*
