Question: Are feeder towns killing the game?

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.

It's a fair question. Don't worry about it.

I hope your question was answered though.

AJtheboss1 wrote:

I'm sure there's some cutoff point, but I highly doubt they'll make it "new device" exclusive since that'll cost them a ton of costumers. Some people are still stuck in contracts and only upgrade every 2 years. I mean it's really a balancing act in EAs side. Right now I think they're pushing it with the land but hopefully that'll change soon.

Sorry, but I guess I'm one of those people AJ is talking about. For my phone (for talking,texting) I use an old 3G LG non smart phone (I don't trust the NSA :wink: ) so I use my mom's old HTC Inspire to play TSTO. It only has a single processor snapdragon chip. The game actually runs very well considering the phone's almost four years old now. Even after the updates that added land I don't experience much if any lag at all. Now Tapped Out is the only app on that device (aside from a white noise app) which helps, but I'm sure if the game were as large as some people wish it were, I might start having a real hard time playing the game.

NarraMine88 wrote:

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.

Lol. Yeah, good thing I wasn't around for whacking day. For one thing, I'm in California and its surprising how few TSTO people I find are from here. The great majority of my neighbors are from far away (points helpfully toward Europe). By the time I'm online at 7AM it's 3pm over there, and by the time I do my afternoon or evening rounds, Europe is fast asleep. I have a dozen towns, none connected to my main town, all linked to my son's town. He has no time to be a reliable friend to anyone. So his 12 moms are his neighbors. He's 34, and here I am still "feeding" him. ;)

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...

redec69 wrote:


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...

(Just teasing. I actually understood that. Well explained. :thumbup:

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*

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.

pollardfreek wrote:

AJtheboss1 wrote:

I'm sure there's some cutoff point, but I highly doubt they'll make it "new device" exclusive since that'll cost them a ton of costumers. Some people are still stuck in contracts and only upgrade every 2 years. I mean it's really a balancing act in EAs side. Right now I think they're pushing it with the land but hopefully that'll change soon.

Sorry, but I guess I'm one of those people AJ is talking about. For my phone (for talking,texting) I use an old 3G LG non smart phone (I don't trust the NSA :wink: ) so I use my mom's old HTC Inspire to play TSTO. It only has a single processor snapdragon chip. The game actually runs very well considering the phone's almost four years old now. Even after the updates that added land I don't experience much if any lag at all. Now Tapped Out is the only app on that device (aside from a white noise app) which helps, but I'm sure if the game were as large as some people wish it were, I might start having a real hard time playing the game.

Lmao! Can't go wrong with a little security, but truth be told, the NSA can learn more about a person just through metadata then I feel comfortable with. There's a misconception that the NSA literally goes through every bit of data people generate. It's simply not viable. The things they really care are places you go, people you're associated with, just your general routines. They only dig through hard data when they find suspicious activities, or get special requests from the CIA or FBI.

They did build this huge data center in Utah, where they plan on recording every piece of data they can, so phone calls and texts is a walk in the park for them. They don't even need to decrypt any of that. You want real security? Use 512bit encrypted P2P communication through multiple highly secure VPN's. That'll make them break a sweat. :lol:

AJtheboss1 wrote:
Use 512bit encrypted P2P communication through multiple highly secure VPN's. That'll make them break a sweat. :lol:

I don't think I want to make the NSA break a sweat about my communications :shock:

neuroheart wrote:

AJtheboss1 wrote:
Use 512bit encrypted P2P communication through multiple highly secure VPN's. That'll make them break a sweat. :lol:

I don't think I want to make the NSA break a sweat about my communications :shock:

You're smart about that! :lol:

I heard everyone who was trying to use TOR ended up on a watch list. Not that it even matters since the NSA already has their hands in a bunch of exit nodes so their network is already compromised. That just goes to show that if you want privacy now a days, that makes you a "threat". It's starting to feel a lot like 1984 sadly.

PS: that's the same network Snowden used for his communications.