
Originally Posted by
Naiven
skorf, many things you say have merit, but part of it I can answer:
A far bigger issue that storage space is bandwidth, of at least it should be. Memory space to store troop info, city info, etc. is not trivial, and more information does slow things down, but that is all stored as database info and is not real a huge deal.
Bandwidth though is costly. 1000 human users are limited as to how much they can do in sending commands, building troops, etc. Even if alts were allowed, those 1000 humans can only send 1 command at a time, for 1 account at a time, and for a limited number of hours per day. Bots, scripts, or whatever you want to call an automated system though can run 7x24 sending several commands per second from multiple accounts. While a human may for instance farm 100 npcs in a day per city, a bot can run 1000 cities and farm 1000 for each of them (made up numbers but they give a realistic idea). That is a massive increase in the amount of data that has to go through a limiting bandwidth bottleneck. Access providers charge geometrically more as your bandwith usage goes up. They do charge you for total data use, not because they care, but because they can charge you. What they take you through the ringer for though is how much data per second you have to move around and that is where bots kill them. Dead city data is not accessed, it just sits there, a minor charge.
Most of your ideas I would call good, but would only provide limited relief on older servers. Not at all saying that is not good steps and good ideas, only that it does not address what I believe is a bigger server issue. You can extend it to just going ahead an limiting bandwidth and if the bots clog it, it gets clogged and the server dies a useless death, and in part, yeah, might as well. I think that is basically what we have been living with for some time and has been killing off the game. I for one could live with that if in return we were given clean and fair servers to replace them.
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