Question: Are feeder towns killing the game?

NarraMine88

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 towns as the multiple accounts on one device can only be played one at a time thereby reducing contention

imdreaming691

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

4junk3000

no it's not the feeder towns.

i hope this alleviates your concern.

keep calm and tap on!

NarraMine88

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?

Raven_Darkstorm

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.

imdreaming691

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.

annettemarc

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.

NarraMine88

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.

NarraMine88

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?

thatdonald845

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

NarraMine88

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!)

Zozobras

NarraMine88
"I personally don't bother with feeder towns as it just doesn't seem worth the effort. It's also basically cheating."

Everybody has a different way of playing the game and I can't see how "feeder towns" would be cheating. Just because you have a different style?

NarraMine88

Zozobras wrote:

NarraMine88
"I personally don't bother with feeder towns as it just doesn't seem worth the effort. It's also basically cheating."

Everybody has a different way of playing the game and I can't see how "feeder towns" would be cheating. Just because you have a different style?

Mild cheating, but cheating nonetheless. Using 10 feeder towns to bump up event currency is cheating in my book.

AJtheboss1

The game has been running perfectly fine before this. There were occasional bugs that caused outages, but it had nothing to do with their server congestion. This particular issue arose because EA was recently hacked by a DDoS attack.

For those of you that don't know what that is:

A DDoS attack is when one server is bombarded by a huge load of requests all at one moment. This overwhelms the server being attacked, and it goes into safe mode and shuts down to avoid any further damage. This can be avoided if servers are set up for tremendous amounts of bandwidth, but if hackers have a big enough Botnet, they can fully saturate the bandwidth and bring down the network.

In theory if all existing accounts decided to log on at the same exact moment, I'm almost certain that the same thing would happen. It would be unintentional of course, but the chances of that happening is almost 0% since probably over 40% of the accounts are dead, and the other half isn't hardcore players. There's only probably 15% or so of players who actually play this game everyday multiple times a day. That would be very unlikely to bring down their network.

annettemarc

NarraMine88 wrote:

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?

That's seventy terabytes. My home computer's got two.

EA currently boasts thatTSTO has been downloaded 10 million times. Lots of those are the same person installing it on multiple devices. Wonder how many of those were reinstallz after uninstalls to try to fix it when it crashes for good. Wouldnt it be a hoot if they also reported how many uninstalls there were.

It IS frustrating that we can never actually delete a town. I'd think EA would be happy to take them off their servers. Those are just dead weight.

HisWrath

AJtheboss1 wrote:

In theory if all existing accounts decided to log on at the same exact moment, I'm almost certain that the same thing would happen. It would be unintentional of course, but the chances of that happening is almost 0% since probably over 40% of the accounts are dead, and the other half isn't hardcore players. There's only probably 15% or so of players who actually play this game everyday multiple times a day. That would be very unlikely to bring down their network.

Exactly. As well, even when multiple feeder accounts are being used at the same time, they aren't continuously connecting to the server. The game make only periodic connections to the server, maybe every 10-20 seconds. That's why you can lose a just-purchased premium item by closing the game immediately after purchasing (I learned this the hard way).

NarraMine88

AJtheboss1 wrote:

The game has been running perfectly fine before this.

As Mrs. Krabappel would say...

Ha!

AJtheboss1

annettemarc wrote:

NarraMine88 wrote:

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?

That's seventy terabytes. My home computer's got two.

EA currently boasts thatTSTO has been downloaded 10 million times. Lots of those are the same person installing it on multiple devices. Wonder how many of those were reinstallz after uninstalls to try to fix it when it crashes for good. Wouldnt it be a hoot if they also reported how many uninstalls there were.

It IS frustrating that we can never actually delete a town. I'd think EA would be happy to take them off their servers. Those are just dead weight.

I really don't think that towns take up that much space once everything is coded. Think about it. The game is only about a 1gb. If one server has 100TB, all it needs is one copy of everything which is 1gb. and everything else is just placement information just telling where each thing goes in a grid. That shouldn't take more then a few megabytes at most.

madfish86

We're all logging into TSTO via Origin and so are a bunch of other EA games so it isn't just us. This could just be a case where a lot of people are off for the holidays and are logging in more frequently. I know I am but that will change after this weekend when many of us have to go back to work or school.

AJtheboss1

HisWrath wrote:

AJtheboss1 wrote:

In theory if all existing accounts decided to log on at the same exact moment, I'm almost certain that the same thing would happen. It would be unintentional of course, but the chances of that happening is almost 0% since probably over 40% of the accounts are dead, and the other half isn't hardcore players. There's only probably 15% or so of players who actually play this game everyday multiple times a day. That would be very unlikely to bring down their network.

Exactly. As well, even when multiple feeder accounts are being used at the same time, they aren't continuously connecting to the server. The game make only periodic connections to the server, maybe every 10-20 seconds. That's why you can lose a just-purchased premium item by closing the game immediately after purchasing (I learned this the hard way).

Exactly! I shoulda went into that too! The whole connecting to the servers before playing is just a DRM system. They just want to make sure no ones stealing donuts through hacks and whatnot, and not messing with the game.

AJtheboss1

madfish86 wrote:

We're all logging into TSTO via Origin and so are a bunch of other EA games so it isn't just us. This could just be a case where a lot of people are off for the holidays and are logging in more frequently. I know I am but that will change after this weekend when many of us have to go back to work or school.

Eventhough you're right, they most likely have more then enough bandwidth to accommodate this. Companies would never intentionally leave themselves vulnerable to not having enough bandwidth to cover their playing base especially during the holiday season. This can cost them millions and actually already has just this past New Years.