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 devicesYou actually should be clamoring for feeder towns as the multiple accounts on one device can only be played one at a time thereby reducing contention

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.

Question: Are feeder towns killing the game?

AJtheboss1
10 years ago
EvaMohlin wrote:
Thanks AJtheboss!

No problem at all! :mrgreen:

Glad I could help!
neuroheart
10 years ago
NarraMine88 wrote:
neuroheart wrote:
NarraMine88 wrote:
Using 10 feeder towns to bump up event currency is cheating in my book.

No, it isn't. A feeder town gives the exact same benefit as having a really good neighbor. (Which is why I haven't bothered, tbh, I have plenty of really good neighbors.)

It's just not cricket, though. I know it's not against any official rules but EA hardly encourages this, do they? Imagine..

Christmas 2014
1. Put Elves in jars by tapping in your town and fire them from the cannon to earn bells!
2. Earn bells by visiting friends!
3. Make yourself 15 feeder towns for "easier" bells! Hell, why not make 20?

If someone wants twenty of their available neighbor slots taken up with towns they have to put time into, I really don't see a problem with that. (I've been getting puh-lenty of bells from visiting towns run by other people, so I don't think it would be necessary, but I also don't see a problem. It's their time.)
AJtheboss1
10 years ago
neuroheart wrote:
NarraMine88 wrote:
neuroheart wrote:
NarraMine88 wrote:
Using 10 feeder towns to bump up event currency is cheating in my book.

No, it isn't. A feeder town gives the exact same benefit as having a really good neighbor. (Which is why I haven't bothered, tbh, I have plenty of really good neighbors.)

It's just not cricket, though. I know it's not against any official rules but EA hardly encourages this, do they? Imagine..

Christmas 2014
1. Put Elves in jars by tapping in your town and fire them from the cannon to earn bells!
2. Earn bells by visiting friends!
3. Make yourself 15 feeder towns for "easier" bells! Hell, why not make 20?

If someone wants twenty of their available neighbor slots taken up with towns they have to put time into, I really don't see a problem with that. (I've been getting puh-lenty of bells from visiting towns run by other people, so I don't think it would be necessary, but I also don't see a problem. It's their time.)

Or their lack of having a life. I get having one town if it's absolutely necessary like during WD event, but for this event, it's just a waste of time.
annettemarc
10 years ago
NarraMine88 wrote:
neuroheart wrote:
NarraMine88 wrote:
Using 10 feeder towns to bump up event currency is cheating in my book.

No, it isn't. A feeder town gives the exact same benefit as having a really good neighbor. (Which is why I haven't bothered, tbh, I have plenty of really good neighbors.)

It's just not cricket, though. I know it's not against any official rules but EA hardly encourages this, do they? Imagine..

Christmas 2014
1. Put Elves in jars by tapping in your town and fire them from the cannon to earn bells!
2. Earn bells by visiting friends!
3. Make yourself 15 feeder towns for "easier" bells! Hell, why not make 20?

How is it "easier" to visit a feeder town than a friend town? Heck, a friend will clear the handshake in their town FOR me, with zero effort on my part. For a handshake in a feeder to be cleared, I need to log out of my town, log into the feeder, clear the handshake, log out of the feeder, and log back into my town. It is much, much, much harder. I don't have a friend doing the work for me.
EvaMohlin
10 years ago
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.

Edit: me and my husband help each other in events, like putting the gremaliens, feds and so on in each others town. That works a bit like having a feeder.
AJtheboss1
10 years ago
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.
EvaMohlin
10 years ago
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?
NarraMine88
10 years ago
annettemarc wrote:
NarraMine88 wrote:
neuroheart wrote:
NarraMine88 wrote:
Using 10 feeder towns to bump up event currency is cheating in my book.

No, it isn't. A feeder town gives the exact same benefit as having a really good neighbor. (Which is why I haven't bothered, tbh, I have plenty of really good neighbors.)

It's just not cricket, though. I know it's not against any official rules but EA hardly encourages this, do they? Imagine..

Christmas 2014
1. Put Elves in jars by tapping in your town and fire them from the cannon to earn bells!
2. Earn bells by visiting friends!
3. Make yourself 15 feeder towns for "easier" bells! Hell, why not make 20?

How is it "easier" to visit a feeder town than a friend town? Heck, a friend will clear the handshake in their town FOR me, with zero effort on my part. For a handshake in a feeder to be cleared, I need to log out of my town, log into the feeder, clear the handshake, log out of the feeder, and log back into my town. It is much, much, much harder. I don't have a friend doing the work for me.

I suppose it's because you don't have to wait for your friends to log in... Here's what I mean..

For example Christmas 2014... If you want to double your bells from friends you must only tap cannons or elf tunnels. However, this is a pain as many people only visit once or twice a day leaving only buildings to tap. Replace those friends with feeders and....
I don't see how it's easier either. The amount of time it must take to log in and out of these feeder towns makes me feel bored just thinking about it. Yet people still do it. Here's my other example... The big one..

Whacking Day. Has a lot to answer for where feeder towns are concerned. Trading eggs took ages (don't get me wrong, I loved it) and often required correspondence with friends over Origin to organise the trading of eggs. Feeder towns made that MUCH easier. Every event is differeent and in some events, feeder towns really aren't that much help at all.
HisWrath
10 years ago
annettemarc wrote:
NarraMine88 wrote:
neuroheart wrote:
NarraMine88 wrote:
Using 10 feeder towns to bump up event currency is cheating in my book.

No, it isn't. A feeder town gives the exact same benefit as having a really good neighbor. (Which is why I haven't bothered, tbh, I have plenty of really good neighbors.)

It's just not cricket, though. I know it's not against any official rules but EA hardly encourages this, do they? Imagine..

Christmas 2014
1. Put Elves in jars by tapping in your town and fire them from the cannon to earn bells!
2. Earn bells by visiting friends!
3. Make yourself 15 feeder towns for "easier" bells! Hell, why not make 20?

How is it "easier" to visit a feeder town than a friend town? Heck, a friend will clear the handshake in their town FOR me, with zero effort on my part. For a handshake in a feeder to be cleared, I need to log out of my town, log into the feeder, clear the handshake, log out of the feeder, and log back into my town. It is much, much, much harder. I don't have a friend doing the work for me.

Yes, exactly this. I have one feeder but only because I have a second device and can keep my two accounts logged in. It would be a pain to have to log out and in over and over. As you say, much, much, much harder than having friends. I like having the feeder account for testing stuff and the like. It is also nice when I miss a dialog because I clicked too fast. It also gave me a chance to enjoy some of the earlier quests again.
NarraMine88
10 years ago
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.