What is up with shard0? The unfairness of slow ticks.
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The idea of CPU Unlock fairness brings up a good point. Shard0 is an obvious bad choice for players.
How about fairly refilling buckets based on time instead of ticks. E.g. every 4 seconds add a player's CPU level to their bucket. Now the Devs target tickrate means something in game.
This would balance the slow vs fast shards a bit. It would allow shard0 to deliberately remain slow, or possibly slower (does anyone want 8s ticks with ~double available cpu?). This might enable new play styles, without the disadvantage of losing 33% of your CPU Unlock. (E.g. a player on average would pay for
Memoryserialization less often on a slow shard).This would also enable a FAST shard (1 tick/s) without making it cost tremendously more to run for the server. (Per player over head increases, but time executing players' code does not).
Best of all a change like this is nearly imperceptible to the players' bots. Any bot with enough CPU control to notice will also have enough cpu control to cope; it would appear that
Memoryserialization is taking more or less cpu.
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Another aspect I hadn't considered. Resources all spawn based on ticks rather than time.
Sources:
This could never change. The regen time is too tightly integrated and optimized in creep builds.Minerals:
Regen every 55 hours instead of 50K ticks. Player harvesting would be completely unimpacted, especially since they already have to adjust to different regen amounts. The sticky part is theticksToRegenerationproperty, but I don't think a fuzzy value would break anything.Deposits and PowerBanks:
From the player's point of view there is no change. It'd be a bit more work on the backend to convert from ticks to time.It's all a little complicated and the result is not perfectly fair. I'd suggest it isn't worth it unless deliberately differing tick rates was going to be a feature of the shards.
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Basically anything that is shared among shards will be unfair if the ticks are different. More specifically I see 4 things that are affected by the tick speed.
- Inter-shard resources like CPU subscriptions, pixels and access keys.
- Anything that goes through inter-shard portals.
- The leaderboard.
- GCL and GPL.
A fully fair solution would need to fix all 4. If fixed then the like @deft-code said the shard could be much slower and nobody would care much because it is still fair.
I understand devs might have other priorities, but I think at the very lest then there should be a warning below shard0 about it being discouraged to spawn or settle there, if that is really the case.
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NO
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@adeptofnone No what?
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There is nothing wrong with the so-called "unfairness". Shard0 subscriptions should be increased in price by 37%.
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I can tell you one reason, a lot of the players who bought the game through Steam live there and it benefits them for ticks to be as long as possible. With the recent unannounced change to generatePixel() players can go back to using their cpu just to make the game ticks longer. Be careful asking questions about the game on these forums tho, the @artch has a real ego problem and might threaten you just for asking.
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@tdxtor said in What is up with shard0? The unfairness of slow ticks.:
has a real ego problem and might threaten you just for asking
@tdxtor I share your frustrations but that's unhelpful in the extreme. Knock it off. Let's work to build relations instead of insulting each other.
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@tdxtor I highly doubt the pixel change has caused the ticks to increase. More than likely this was brought on by the number of players (sitting at 2k from 1700 a few months ago) and the addition of seasonal games.
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All I asked was a position from the devs. Even if that position was something like: "Shard 0 is not our priority and will never be, we recommend everybody to leave Shard 0 so it can be decommissioned."
That is what I assume their position is anyway.
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Shard0 exists near a gravity well and thus time moves slower there.
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We will never decommission shard0 since it is an essential part of the game world. However, we don't have any plans to allocate more resources to it in comparison to other shards. Currently they all have similar number of workers, and slow ticks on shard0 is a natural result of its historical difference from other shards. We recommend all players who suffer from slow ticks to migrate to other shards - either via respawning or intershard portals. Other players may find slow ticks beneficial on the contrary. All this information is available on the shards select screen so you can choose carefully.
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Cleanse the outer rooms!
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@artch Thanks!
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@systemparadox Is it true that killing players by the outer layer helps?
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They previously shrank shard0 to speed up the tick rate. I seem to recall some players graciously respawned and a few players helped with an attack effort to clear the others.
The current outer rooms are a lot more dense and I don't think it's a high priority at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that they're deliberately avoiding placing respawn zones in the outer areas.
I am sure that the devs would close blocks of outer rooms if they became empty and eventually shrink the shard again. The inactive rooms and all the portals are a horrible mess and it would be really nice to cleanup shard0 and bring it in line with the other shards.
As soon as I get some decent combat code I'm going on a crusade!
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Is it a fair conclusion that competitive play and cleaning out zombies is part of the game design as way to get better tick times?
This is just a question to better understand the game, not a comment in the form of a question.
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@kingkong said in What is up with shard0? The unfairness of slow ticks.:
Is it a fair conclusion that competitive play and cleaning out zombies is part of the game design as way to get better tick times?
This is just a question to better understand the game, not a comment in the form of a question.
I'm not really sure it's part of the game design. It just is what it is.
