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Thread: How about this for a fix?

  1. #111

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    Quote Originally Posted by GirlSeeksGirl View Post
    make bot usage mandatory and no one will be at a disadvantage.
    now that is damned funny. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.

  2. #112

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    Quote Originally Posted by Nicephorus View Post
    Bots ruin the game in the following ways

    1. They impact server performance: I am tired of server lag because some punk is running 200 bots against the server.
    2. They lead to exponential cheating: there is a guy on na50 with 200 alt accounts in a single state (cities every 10 miles). When you get hit with 1 million catapults 1 month into the server opening, it is pretty aggravating. When 0,0 falls 21 days in because 4 guys are running hundreds of alt accounts (all botted), it is pretty lame. In response, other players start trying to do the same (thus the "exponential" aspect to this).
    3. They lead to elevated star sets: 10 guys with 15 sets 2 months into server opening--that was never intended by evony.
    4. They cause other players to quit and never come back. When a server goes from 500 players to 50 players in two months because 0,0 has fallen and everyone is getting wiped by a handful of hardcore botters and coiners, it ruins it for everyone. Servers become ghost towns. Fewer people spend money, and evony starts losing revenue. The game gets boring.
    5. They provide defense of cities while offline, which is hardcore cheating, and leads to other problems.

    I am a paying customer since na4. Unless the bots finally go away, or are somehow curtailed, I go away.

    Hear, hear!!

  3. #113

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    OK, without being too technical, I will try one more time to explain how bots cripple the servers with lag. Sorry if this does not make sense, but trying once more:

    Amount of data stored, as long as you do not reach the size limits of the database system in use and as long as the databases were not horribly designed slows the system down, but not horribly. In a typical database, look-up times increase by a factor a maximum 5-10% each time you double the amount of data being searched through until you reach complexity limits. Evony should not be close to complexity limits so cutting half of all data out of the game would be a trivial gain on the server side. As to costs, total data saved on a server is cheap as mass storage is cheap and simply not a issue.

    Bandwidth however is the great limiting factor in all computing. This is how much data you can have moving across through a limiting choke points, the routes, switches, and other parts of the network. When data throughput reaches anything over 10% of the limit of any one of the choke points data flow begins to slow down, data errors begin which requires the network to retransmit packets of data which further lags the system and creates a deteriorating situation which spirals to a lock. These bottlenecks are like hoses, you pay for the size of the hose. It can be a straw size, the level of server which could handle old 300 BAUD dial up modems, or it can be a fire hose that can handle terrabytes per second. The provider charges geometrically higher for the size of hose you need, that is if you double your bandwidth, your charges my go up by a factor of 10.

    Most humans may play the game 2-3 hours a day, max. During that time, they are limited how many commands they can execute and how close together they can do those commands, but each one sends data to Evony, and gets data back. Each time another player does something to them, again, they received data. That is multiplied by the 100's of players online at any given time. Anyone offline affects the total amount of data stored, but has zero effect on bandwidth. A human cannot be actively sending commands from more than 1 city at the same time, nor from more than 1 account and it takes them real time to switch between. With a bot however, that player can have 100's of accounts active at once, and thousands of cities. They will be active 23 hours per day. So the amount of data that one "player" is sending through that pipe every day has not be doubled, it has gone up by factors of 1000's. And there are players out there running several hundred alts, that is single players using more server bandwidth than an entire server of human players would use.

    Anytime there is a hick-up of the network you can see the affect of this. If you refresh an account in the middle of the day you can quickly get logged back in, even though that is a lot of data that transfers when logging in to update the status of your game. But when there is a server bounce, even after the server comes back up, it may take you an hour to get logged by in. This is not because anything is still wrong with the server, it is because a few thousand bots are out there trying to all log back in at once and bringing the login bottleneck to its knees choking it with requests and data.

    A common battle tactic is when you are attacking someone you know is defending with a bot to send a huge number of attacks at them, both the account you are attacking and other accounts you know they are running on the same computer. This overwhelms their bot, chokes it, and it dies. It does this by choking that computers memory and communication bandwidth, not their storage memory, the bot dies, their city gets destroyed. That is what is happening continuously with the server.

    Yes, the severs have always had lag. When the game first began, the data required to be transfer to the players was beyond what the servers could handle. Servers and network bandwidth have improved vastly since then. The data required per command and to run the game in general have only increased marginally. The number of people actually playing has probably gone down. But the number of accounts and cities per server has gone up vastly and lag is beyond choking and it is because of bots, not the number of players.

  4. #114

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    PS. as to where my experience comes from, my first server was server 4. Not SS4, server 4.

  5. #115

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    Quote Originally Posted by queste View Post
    The disadvantage isn't so much created by bots, it's created by massive multi-accounting.
    people can only run so many accounts, because they can run them on their bots. So do not pretend, they are not connected to each other.

  6. #116

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    You won't see me denying the bot is an enabler of the multi-accounting. I won't even deny the bot is a problem for several reasons. But the multi-accounting is the main issue at hand imo.

  7. #117

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    lol not that i care but everyone keeps blaming multi accounting for the lag issue's. if some people have been paying attention to other threads and even from years ago before the bots. the lag has always been there much worse then now. Lol everytime evony opens a new server evony is almost unplayable. Now lets take away the fact that there was no multi accounting going on ok. and people got fed up with logging in only couple hours a day just to farm and make some troops and thats it. after that someone was gonna make a bot to help people play and keep interest in evony. And lets say EVERYONE started to bot witch 98% of the people that play do. and evony allowed it lets just say. would that be multi accounting also? would that cause lag ? no it would not. So idk what the issue is. This is the same thing that happen with a game called Ever quest were all the cry babies complained and complained and what happen they ruined the game. to the point were they have to let people play for free when they were makeing 15 a month per player. So all this complaining is just gonna make things worse it's bad enough that evony don't care for our opions. if evony would have listened to us before the bots we would not be here on this thread talking about this.

  8. #118

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    Quote Originally Posted by Naiven View Post
    OK, without being too technical, I will try one more time to explain how bots cripple the servers with lag. Sorry if this does not make sense
    You're right, it doesn't make sense, because you've clearly never spent any time watching the Evony packet stream with an AMF packet decoder, Wireshark, or other network sniffer. If you had, you would see that Evony's data exchange is rather minimal, other than initially on login when the server has to send you what is essentially an entire "copy" of your account configuration (all castles, heroes, etc). After that, the amount of data exchanged is rather minimal, with the server sending incremental updates to the player (such as resource updates, hero status updates, etc.) and commands sent to the server by the user I would say 99% of the time are under 32 bytes in total.

    With very few exceptions, I believe most people use a babysitter to farm for them and watch their account while offline... activity which does not lend itself to huge amounts of data transfer to and from the server. A periodic farming wave sent out, a periodic troop queue sent, and the rest of the time sitting there twiddling its thumbs waiting on resource update packets sent from the server automatically every six minutes on the server tick.

    [snip some bloviating]


    Most humans may play the game 2-3 hours a day, max. During that time, they are limited how many commands they can execute and how close together they can do those commands, but each one sends data to Evony, and gets data back. Each time another player does something to them, again, they received data. That is multiplied by the 100's of players online at any given time. Anyone offline affects the total amount of data stored, but has zero effect on bandwidth. A human cannot be actively sending commands from more than 1 city at the same time, nor from more than 1 account and it takes them real time to switch between. With a bot however, that player can have 100's of accounts active at once, and thousands of cities. They will be active 23 hours per day. So the amount of data that one "player" is sending through that pipe every day has not be doubled, it has gone up by factors of 1000's.
    The problem with this logic it assumes Evony is some form of 'real time' game exchange, but that's simply not the case. Again, if you had spent even 5 minutes watching the packet stream with Wireshark you'd know the fallacy of your posting. And, furthermore, you want to claim that bots are the source of all this lag, yet somehow all these super-botters running hundreds of accounts don't experience "lag" at their end, because they clearly must have those multi-billion-dollar terabit-per-second links you mentioned in your post while Evony does not.


    This is not because anything is still wrong with the server, it is because a few thousand bots are out there trying to all log back in at once and bringing the login bottleneck to its knees choking it with requests and data.
    Or, more likely, its because the single-server used to host dozens of worlds choked, and has nothing to do with bots, as you attempt to log in to the Evony forums and find yourself equally unable to access them with some type of http error.


    A common battle tactic is when you are attacking someone you know is defending with a bot to send a huge number of attacks at them, both the account you are attacking and other accounts you know they are running on the same computer. This overwhelms their bot, chokes it, and it dies. It does this by choking that computers memory and communication bandwidth, not their storage memory, the bot dies, their city gets destroyed. That is what is happening continuously with the server.
    I can't speak for how bot programmers build their program, but even a couple dozen incremental updates simultaneously to someone's computer is hardly going to cause them network congestion. And, if it does, I doubt they're are running dozens of these bots which, according to your logic, are flooding the Evony servers with data continuously.


    Yes, the severs have always had lag. When the game first began, the data required to be transfer to the players was beyond what the servers could handle. Servers and network bandwidth have improved vastly since then. The data required per command and to run the game in general have only increased marginally. The number of people actually playing has probably gone down. But the number of accounts and cities per server has gone up vastly and lag is beyond choking and it is because of bots, not the number of players.
    The real problem with bots is they prevent Evony from merging even more servers together by killing off the dead accounts. Those dead accounts are still "active" in the form of alts long after the players have moved on. Alliance hosts maintain extensive lists of hundreds of alts they allocate to players in their alliances to run. By eliminating the alts, you essentially eliminate those "players", and you can merge even more unprofitable servers together.

    Do bots contribute to lag? Of course they do. They keep accounts which are otherwise dead and would be zeroed out alive. Those accounts keep running, keep farming, and there's a certain amount of overhead -- storage, cpu, network, etc. -- needed to maintain those accounts.

    A server merge is really nothing more than one or more servers closing by attrition. Where 5 servers existed in the past (and theoretically 5x the amount of hardware, although these days Evony from what I'm told relies heavily on virtualization and not physical machines per-se) Evony can kill off 4 of them and throw everyone onto 1. If not for bots keeping those other accounts "alive", Evony may have been able to merge 10 servers into 1, and reduce their costs by a factor of 90% rather than 50%.

    Bots cost Evony money. That's the "real" problem.

    Even Dawnseeker admitted in previous postings that Evony was willing to tolerate a low level of botting by implementing an IP address restriction, until one of the bot makers built a bypass into their software. Why would they be willing to tolerate a low-level of botting if bots themselves were the problem? Do you think IP address restrictions exist to limit bandwidth, or to limit alts?

    They exist to limit alts, of course.

    A basic tenet of any investigation is to "follow the money". Rest assured, Evony is a business, and they do exactly what is in their financial best interest.... if a majority of my customers want PHP rather than ASP web sites, guess what? I'm offering PHP. I seriously doubt they will ever seriously ban all botters, because 1) I believe many botters coin on a regular basis, otherwise Evony would have banned every botter a long. long time ago (and rest assured they know EXACTLY who bots and who doesn't), and 2) the "free forever" whiners complaining constantly about bots and game mechanics contribute nothing to the company's bottom line other than lip service, because even if bots weren't around, they STILL wouldn't coin (if they were such huge coiners, Evony would have banned all botters to appease that vocal group a long time ago).


    For a long time on Age 2, at the start of a new server coiners have come in, gobbled up historic heros, cities, built up accounts, etc... and then offered them for sale to the highest bidder... technically, against the TOS, but Evony has done little to stop this... Why? Because those players coin huge amounts of money to build up those accounts, so what does Evony care, they got their $$$ after all, and probably got more $$$ from those coiners than they would have if Joe BotWhiner had played on the server.


    They will suck the Evony game for every dime they can until its a dry husk with no life left, then they'll bury it. If it were my business, that's what I'd do. Profit is the name of the game.

  9. #119
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    The bot makers are still able to remove the proxy features of the bot, they have not made it to a public release yet. The 3 connections per ip was too restrictive as a first measure with absolutely no way for multiple people on one ip (husband/wife, college dorm, office, etc.) to share. If evony would like to make a limit like 10 or 25 or something, I'm sure the bot makers would be happy to oblige and remove their bypass. It was added only because the 3 limit was buggy and overly restrictive. I mean.. you couldn't even open war reports lol. What evony should have done is started out in steps... reduce the limit to 100, wait a couple days, reduce it to 50, wait a week, reduce it to 25, wait a week, reduce it to 10-15 and keep it there. None of those would have caused the uproar and boycott that 3 caused right off the bat.

    A limit of 10-15 would not rile up the community and would not have made people step in and teach or add 3rd party measures to dodge it. Most people actually run less than that. It would only hit the largest offenders and even amongst the cheaters no one wants to support the largest offenders.

    If your server load is still too high after 10-15, then there's other ways we can figure out how to cut corners. Ways that will not alienate your users. Ways that do not look like Evony is declaring war on it's customers.

  10. #120

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    Quote Originally Posted by pier117 View Post
    Here's a limit you can't beat....

    Troops eat food while on holiday.

    Set a cap based on city size. Like say 3-4 days worth of food. While on holiday your cities will eat food till they reach the 3-4 day limit. This will encourage players to either stay engaged (out of holiday), or use smaller armies.

    There really isn't much of a way around it.. you kinda need that food on your account or it will get farmed while you are on holiday, so most likely you'll downsize your armies so you can sustain the troops.

    I know some people think this is nuts, but really holiday mode has become less about not being available to play and more about stocking up food for massive armies. Evony probably won't go this route because it would be an issue with revenue, but how badly do you want to fix the problem?

    -pier
    (facepalm) I hope someone has placed a cork at the end of your fork to protect your eyes when you eat. Holiday is called holiday for a reason. Why would someone pay to do the same thing in holiday as you would do outside of holiday ??? You are a prime example as to why western civilization is doomed. There is already a penalty in place to holiday... its calked money, its called not building troops, its called letting some a hole nearby build lvl 5 npc like a noob for his lame alt. Isn't all that penalty enough.


    I go back to my original suggestion for evony. Just shut down all the servers and end this nightmare. Maybe this guy and others like him will then have the chance to develop some critical thinking skills.

    I apologize in advance for my lack of civility. Obviously being exposed to ignorance can bring out the worse in even the best of us.

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