Last night after rollover I decided to polish off a leftover mission, and just after I received the “You have 3 more forum visits today” message, my computer crashed. In another thread, somebody mentions having their mouse stick and spawn three simultaneous forum windows, essentially halving their daily limit. This got me thinking: What would the most sensible way of tracking forum visits be?

I figure there are two stances to take here: One is the tough-love policy—when you visit a forum, your daily counter decreases, and if you **** up, too bad; the other, gentler option is to track user movement such that the daily limit doesn’t decrease until you first enter a thread in a forum. There’s nothing wrong with the first option, per se, but it might be nice to go with the second, both to ward against accidental daily-rate burnthrough, and also allow players to preview forums before they go in and start fighting. (E.g.: “Ooh, new areas! Let me see what I unlocked before I commit to adventuring there!” )

Anyway JUST A THOUGHT I HAD Log in to see images!

Evil Trout Posted:

I’m going to Sticky this because it’s a good point.

Too many people are entering forums by mistake or thinking they could re-order their toolbar, etc. It’s a problem because I don’t like the idea of us cheaply taking your turns. I’m going to add some kind of mechanism that allows you to back out in the case of a mistake. This is my #1 priority today and I’ll do my best to get it out.

I think it might be more useful to have a mechanism that only reduced your forum visit count in the event of clicking on a thread than having a bumon that lets you redact your forum click—the former also catches people who accidentally close a window or have Firefox crash or something.

In terms of future features, it might also be nice to have the site save your state when you leave (through cookies or in the database or somesuch) so that if the browser dies you don’t lose out on your turn, but rather reappear where you last left. Having the choice of when to enter and when to leave a forum stay squarely in the realm of user choices, rather than environmental happenstances, seems like the best way to do things—especially in a game where you are limited to four “turns” per day (each of which has a notionally infinite number of sub-turns), rather than 40 turns.

how about only taking a forum visit upon pwning or death/quitting the attack BUT you can’t do anything else while you’re doing it? sure you can log out, close the browser, clear the cache whatever but when you log back in the server will know what you were doing.

24 hours you get kicked out for an idle connection (and this counts as a loss for the “beat forum first try” explot you were talking about) but by then it’s reset so you won’t have lost a forum visit anyway

i can’t see any holes in that, what you think?

WEED GUN Posted:

Dan0rz Posted:

i can’t see any holes in that, what you think?

This sounds essentially like the “state-saving” notion I posited a few posts up, except that I’d like to see it implemented site-wide. (E.g.: You leave on the bookmarks screen, you come back on it.) This way, when you start pwning a thread in a forum, and only when you do so, does your daily forum-visit counter decrease, and only when you personally click out of the forum will you end up leaving it. I’m bumuming this could be implemented (relatively painlessly) in the code used to maintain a user’s session.

Firstly, I’ve updated the code on the dev server to only record a “visit” once you perform your first attack. You can enter a forum, re-arrange your toolbar, even go into a thread. But the second you start to interact with it, the site logs the visit. Seems to be working well, will push it live when I get a chance.

Technical Stuff

Even though it’s pretty simple to play, the battle system for Forumwarz is quite complicated. There are lots of different abilities that work in different ways, mixing in with properties that may or may not be there. Early on in development I noticed that a simple operation like eating a Happidex was resulting in like 30 database queries to get and update all the relational data, which wasn’t going to scale easily, especially since Ruby has some (justified) notoriety as a slow language.

What I ended up doing was loading all the data you’d possibly need when you enter a battle, then creating a state machine in Ruby with everything a battle could need. This state machine is serialized into a string and shoved into a memory store (Memcached.)

Every time you attack, it retrieves the state machine from memory, does the operation, sends it back with virtually no database access. The great news of this approach is it’s very fast. The bad news is it doesn’t work for long lasting operations. In fact, if you don’t finish your battle within 60 mins the memory will expire.

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is the session data is not around long enough to remember it if you leave for more than an hour or so. I could try and implement a system where the serialized session is stored to disk somewhere, then restored, based on how people do things, but it certainly wouldn’t be trivial Log in to see images!

tl;dr version: the programming involved to persist an in-battle state is hard.

Anyway I’m not saying never, just not right now Log in to see images!

Yep this is good news. Well done.

AwesomeLog in to see images!

shoot, if I had known this I would have left and came back to the forum I’ve been leveling at when it only had 5 threads.

pokeyseks81 Posted:

Prosthetic_mind Posted:

shoot, if I had known this I would have left and came back to the forum I’ve been leveling at when it only had 5 threads.

Is that a viable strategy? Coming and going from a forum to beef up or lower it depending on your needs?

I think the best fix would be that once you enter a forum, it locks in the number of threads there, so if you do leave and come back you’ll still see the same number of threads.

Evil Trout Posted:

I’m going to Sticky this because it’s a good point.

Too many people are entering forums by mistake or thinking they could re-order their toolbar, etc. It’s a problem because I don’t like the idea of us cheaply taking your turns. I’m going to add some kind of mechanism that allows you to back out in the case of a mistake. This is my #1 priority today and I’ll do my best to get it out.

Boy am I glad you implemented that.