Question: Are feeder towns killing the game?

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...

I worked in network management for a bit as well, and I pretty much said the same exact thing in earlier posts.

In a game like this bandwidth at their end is key for this game to run smoothly, since it's DRM based.

Also servers don't just get rebooted after a DDoS attack, which you probably know. There is a lot of troubleshooting and whatnot that goes into it, and damage assessment. With any system that has regional servers working it only takes one or two of them to go down to take out the entire network. This is especially true in high traffic networks. I wouldn't exaclty call this games DRM style connection high traffic, but it's pretty obvious they didn't have the throughput to handle the amount of requests thrown at them.

They probably have the proper backup systems, because loosing all cached data would be a nightmare for them. Just the payment data would cost them millions.