Originally Posted by
Thantium
Ok here is a sum up from the last few posts...
1. We are not heavily censoring, except when forum rules are broken, and if you notice Evony staff is not moderating them, forum mods are as well as players are removing their own posts, at least that is what I am seeing from the logs of who removed the posts, I am not sure if a normal forum account can see that data. If we where heavily censoring posts, we would have removed almost all of the posts that are critical of us, as well as the posts that are flat wrong, and there are alot of posts that are flat wrong.
2. A Macro recorder would not trigger a captcha failure... well OK it might read on. In general I would say no it will not, as once the captcha window comes on you can click anywhere on the screen and nothing will happen. A macro program is just automatically moving the mouse and clicking. A bot or unofficial client can send direct data to the server without needing a mouse click. So what happens is the server knows the captcha is up on the client, but it is still getting commands to send troops, farm, etc. At this point the client is force logged out. The one exception would be if the macro program while it was trying to continue to click, kept clicking on the macro send box which would be interpreted as a failure in entering the captcha. After 20 fails it would force a log off.
3. Botting and it latency. I'm sure people will call BS on this but here it is. I am estimating these numbers I do not claim they are 100% correct just indicative. Lets say a normal player makes on average 10 clicks/commands a minute on average, some minutes more, other minutes less as you chat with people. That would send 10 commands to the server to be processed. A bot on the other hand sends consistently 40 commands a minute updating its information and sending out orders. So on average a bot has a server overhead of 4 normal players on average. See the issue?
What happens is the servers hit a tipping point where the number of commands exceeds the amount they are able to process in a cycle. If this happens a few times every minute there is no issue, as there will be an unnoticeable 1 second delay. But if you continuously exceed the ability of the server to respond, commands back up and you get latency.
Now both ss57 and ss60 are on our highest spec servers, they are faster, have more mem, and faster data arrays but they are not the highest population servers we have. These other servers do not have latency. What was found was that the average number of commands sent per user over a time period was higher then the other servers which caused the latency. After looking at some of these we found higher then average botting on these servers. (Why these servers have more then other is another conversation, but I have some pretty good ideas) Now with the captcha we see the commands per minute average inline with other servers that have much lower botting issues. So with less commands being sent the servers are able to stay under the tippingpoint and there is no latency, or stay under more with less latency issues. Or in simple terms the people sending/requesting the 4x the amount of data are amazingly not on the servers anymore... (no 1 captcha every 2 hours will not magically change this average command per hour number)
I can already hear the complaints OMG WITH THE CAPTCHA I CANNOT ENTER IN AS MANY THINGS. We have taken this into account, and lets be honest even a worst case scenario of a 45 seconds to answer the captcha would not impact your average commands sent to the server over a 2 hour period. Yes there is also less players on the server which helps with latency.
So I hope this addresses the last few pages of questions. I am trying to be more open with you guys, so please respect that. A lot of you have said you want better communication and more information. If the things I say get twisted by partial reading of the post, it really does not make me want to come post on the forums and I will stay over on feedback.evony.com. So I am showing you respect by trying to be detailed, I hope I get it back in return.
Oh and as a bonus for reading this far. Reloading the captcha does not count against you. I just had this confirmed.