Concerned About High Tick Times - Requesting Additional Server Resources
-
I have been watching the league map as I am sure others have as well and I have been saddened by the number of players I have seen without remote mining. These are players who for whatever reason have decided to let their subscription run out and to leave the screeps community.
I wonder what it would take to add additional computing power to the screeps servers in order to deal with the high tick times. If not that could high cpu usage operations be moved to other server infrastructure in some way in order to help speed up tick processing? (Market functions etc)
I feel like the game continues to slow down. I have been playing since october of 2016. (Not as long as some of the old guard) And I remember how tick times used to be almost half of what they are now. I would love to see tick times decrease and the pace of the game return to what it used to be. Currently the game is becoming too slow for my liking - I don't want to leave the community and with it the time I have put into developing code. (I used to do a GCL every 10 days or so but with tick times increasing its now taking me much longer than that).
I would ask that the developers add additional server infrastructure to support the growing community.
Atanner
-
I agree. Not only are tick times increasing, but server performance is dropping as well due (I am guessing) to how overloaded the machines are. We've all talked about being on "bad nodes" where performance is awful, and everyone who has statistics graphing capable of showing this has examples.
I don't know if the answer is just a matter or more resources, or if there needs to be architectural changes as well to prevent the "bad node" scenario, but in my opinion this is the most urgent thing that the devs should be resolving.
-
Agreed. I think especially since this is a subscription based service, the performance needs to be both better, and more stable. As it is, while I'm paying the same amount each month that I was when I started, as time goes on, I'm receiving less and less for my money as there are fewer and fewer ticks per month.
Optimally would be keeping ticks to a steady couple seconds reliably. But perhaps if that's not possible, the subscription price should change, either lowering to compensate for the instability of the service, or being a sliding scale based on how many ticks there were that month.
Honestly, I wouldn't be subscribing anymore if it weren't for the player community, slack, etc.
-
Adding more server resources is not enough anymore, we need to do a major refactor. I'll post a blog post soon explaining our plans regarding this.
-
Awesome, looking forward to the post!
-
That's great news, make sure to provide enough information about how we can help.
-
As a new player, im coming in and seeing this $8 price tag and a horrible laggy service. while $8 a month is a great price... when you sit down and think about it... It is about a great of a price as the $8 240 piece tool set at princess auto/harbour freight that is always on sale at the front of the store. I mean you KNOW why it only cost $8... its cause they just want to sell it, but you also know its the biggest piece of chinesium clad garbage around and its likely to break the first time you use it.
Yes that is how I see screeps, it refuses charge people enough to give them a quality service, and hopes to just sell as many $8 subscriptions as they can until it comes apart at the seams. The entire cloud is chinesium plated shit.
Solution, raise the price so you can afford better infrastructure for the people who WANT to play... while driving away the people who dont want to play so their resources can be better put to use.
-
@pfifo Have you even read the latest statement? It's not about infrastructure anymore, right now the code is the bottleneck.
-
@PostCrafter, just so were on the same page, people are infrastructure and you can hire twice as many if you charge $16 a month. The point im trying to make here is that the cheaper your service is, the lower your quality is. And it shows here in this game.
-
@pfifo mate, when I started the quality was great amazing and people were complaining about $8. $16 I don't want to think what would happen.
-
I see no issue with raising the price, although I think raising it to $10 first (a 25% increase) would be a better first step.
