A large amount of lag we experience every day is due to the traffic near the Rollover. Basically, a huge amount of players rush the server near 7AM EST to get their new forum visits and start playing right away.

I’ve made a lot of enhancements to the codebase to try and improve this performance lately, but it seems that no matter how solid the code gets, it’s hard to handle a huge surge of users all fighting for the server’s resources.

One thing I was thinking of was giving each account a random rollover hour, and distribute it evenly so that there’s an even amount of rollovers at every hour. Then, you would be given a counter that says “Your new visits will be given in 5 hours, or 9PM local time”.

Just so we’re clear: each account would have the same rollover time every day. The randomness is only what hour of the day is bumigned to your account to roll over.

How would you guys react to such a change?

Edit: Related, I gave everyone playing 2 bonus forum visits due to technical issues this morning.

I like. I VERY like. I very very VERY like. The only thing I didn’t like about this game was the 7 AM rollover- because of my sleep cycle, that’s somewhat awkward for gettin’ in my turns. A random one? There’d be an 2/3 chance of having a much much better time! Go for it! Log in to see images!

SirIsaac Posted:

This seems interesting, and certainly like a good idea, but I’m curious on how this would be implemented.

Well each account that signs up would be bumigned a random number between 1-24 that would designate the hour of the day their rollover would take effect.

Then there would be a countdown clock on their character page (or somewhere else) that would say how many hours to go until their new visits come.

Then instead of running the deliveries and stuff overnight, they would happen every hour for the users with that time.

I’d say this is good, as long as you keep the refresh hours to 10PM PST and later. Otherwise, you may get some domination-nuts ****y about a potential advantage some people have getting their visits potentially before the final tally is made.

I love the idea, and with it being predetermined i don’t see a problem. Hate having those huge spikes when i want to play.

Yeah Evil, even if you get your turn after the domination reset, you get a head start on next week so it does even out.

Thanks for the scoops btw! and reinstating my lost cash from this morning.

I wouldn’t mind a change.

Thanks for the bonus visits, btw. Log in to see images!

lol yeah, suddenly I have more visits

Opinion: let us choose the rollover hour, if that can be made customizable.

The hour chosen at a given day would affect only the rollover after the next one (as in: if is right now 10:00 AM and my rollover was set to 9:00 AM, setting it to 7:00 PM would mean my next rollover will be tomorrow (or the day after tomorrow) at 7:00 PM.

If you think that’d be too messy, roll the dice right now dewd ^^

Edit: Crovax, if people will get random rollover hours, I guess the hour their Dom bracket ends will have to be more varied too so no rollovers fall too close to a bracket’s closing. Nothing overkill like 24 different bracket endings — but mebbe four of them (one at 6:00 AM, one at 12:00 AM, one at 6:00 PM, one at 12:00 PM)

Approve.

Cherrypie Posted:

Crovax, if people will get random rollover hours, I guess the hour their Dom bracket ends will have to be more varied too so no rollovers fall too close to a bracket’s closing. Nothing overkill like 24 different bracket endings — but mebbe four of them (one at 6:00 AM, one at 12:00 AM, one at 6:00 PM, one at 12:00 PM)

The only issues I can think about this is that once you divided people up into four groups, is that you’d probably want to make this another choice option. If you don’t make this available for choice, you run the risk of screwing people out of being able to be there at the end of their bracket, since it may occur at 3AM their time.

However, if you make it a choice option, you also run the risk of Klans being able to engineer their way to taking over brackets (should they want to) or, conversely, being able to increase their chances of staying spread out so everyone can take their own bracket.

Also, if this was a choice option, would it too change every week? Or would it be a one-time deal sort of thing?

Sorry about overthinking this… game design/test is kinda my thing, and I tend to overthink the repercussions from every possible decision.

Edit: The only real issue with bumigning brackets to the people based off of their refresh time is, as refresh time doesn’t change, you’d stagnate your pool of players pretty quickly, and would have a harder time getting new blood.

Edit the second: The easiest thing to do would probably just have the random times fall between 10PM EST and the following 9-12 hours or so. That way, you can completely avert all potential Domination foulups.