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.