@tedivm Oh yeah, I'm not disagreeing with the ban at all, tdxtor was just trolling. But I do feel like genuine questions and concerns are sometimes met with quite a bit of hostility and I wish that was not the case. Most people that bother to post here are doing so because of how much they like the game, it shouldn't be taken like an attack.

@artch Not sure I understand your response. Are you saying that you should be held to the same standard as the other people in the forum? Not trolling, honest question.

@tdxtor I think you should be grateful that the development team engages with us at all. If you want an unmoderated discussion you can always go to the Reddit Screeps community. This is the official Screeps forum, it has their name on it, they are liable for anything that happens here. Any game developer will take moderation very seriously in their official forum.

I have to admit I have felt intimidated by this forum's moderation and felt like moderators sometimes take comments about the game a bit too much like personal attacks instead of healthy discussion about what is best for the game.

That being said, the main reason why I have not said anything is because I love this game so much and I'm VERY grateful for the game development team and @artch for having created it. I can appreciate the ungodly amount of work that must have been put on it and can see why someone would get annoyed when confronted. So as much as I can see things in the game and on the moderation that could be improved but I really don't want the development team to get burned out with petty details.

So yeah, my take on it is thanks Screeps Development team.

@systemparadox Is it true that killing players by the outer layer helps?

@artch Thanks!

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.

@adeptofnone No what?

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.

1. Inter-shard resources like CPU subscriptions, pixels and access keys.
2. Anything that goes through inter-shard portals.
3. The leaderboard.
4. 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.

When I started playing, not really knowing the game mechanics, I though shard0 was just slow. That is not necessarily a bad thing, I even though it might have been intentional to provide a more slow paced experience and give more time to react IRL.

But as I started learning more about the game, with the tick approaching 6s in Shard0 and with some of the recently added features, I realized just how unfair it is for players in slower shards.

To start with. Technically the CPU subscriptions are 33% less worth for Shard0 since even if you were to just let it pile up in the bucket and convert to pixels, you would end up with 33% less pixels. Conversely, it takes 33% more "resource harvesting power" to be able to afford a subscription in shard0. It also means your GCL and GPL are 33% less valuable.

If a player from another shard decides to cross the portal to attack shard0, it will not only be able to produce 33% more creeps, but also they will be produced 33% faster and will arrive to the portal 33% faster creating a completely one sided fight.

So I guess my question is, what is up with shard0?

• Are there any plans for improving its tick time?
• Are players encouraged to just leave it?
• Are there plans to address the unfairness of it? Lets say if subscriptions gave you a certain number of ticks instead of real life time. Make the leaderboard corrected by the number of ticks?
• Is shard0 on the way to being completely shutdown? I see entire sectors being removed without really an explanation.
• If shard0 is deprecated, can we expect some sort of migration plan?
• Finally, I'm just curious if you guys don't mind sharing, what is the underlying technical reason for it being so slow?

*Assuming the current average of 6s tick duration of shard0 compared to shard1 and shard2 with 4s tick duration.