Kill Distension

[midoent]

midoent, how do you explain the lack of people in ?go base when distension isnt being hosted

Read: 80% of the time throughout a week

Ask any baser dako, distension killed base. I don't have any exact figures to argue with you, I don't know exactly what times its run. If I did i'd show you why completely. But i'll give you a few personal and common sense arguements:

I usually log on to play from 5-11 pm ET (which a lot of people do i believe) And at best I manage to play 1 8v8 game, on average getting to play 1 or 2 5v5, 6v6 games. Where as before, whenever you dont have a bd you just ?go base and there is always a game running. I also do know that before distension base would always have downtime for 10 hrs or sometimes more hours because americans - school work sleep, euros - school work and that's already more than 40% of the day. You trying to give me the 80% figure is a bit strange to me right at this point, but there are other factors... Other times when squads accept bds base would die out for about an hour. So distension gets the more active 20% chunk of whats left. Since distension is played at a nice active time where the best base games would usually be played (where you know who you are actually picking)

The bottom line of all this rambling is: players arent inspired to play longer thus keeping base (and other arenas and events) fun and alive like before.

[Rhino_haha]

midoent, how do you explain the lack of people in ?go base when distension isnt being hosted

Read: 80% of the time throughout a week

It takes patience and a committed few people to actually jump start a ?go base game. When distension is going on there's no way in hell to get a game going, 80% of the time i log on is just to see if a ?go base is going, and 90% of the time i log on distension is going on. If base is down ill just pub for a while, but that gets boring pretty fast, nobody TWD's, even ?go javs is usually dead. TW is pretty damn boring if you're not a distension fan.

And STFU SAL you know you fucking love go base when im around.

This is directed more to qan that anyone else really, but how would you feel giving this a shot as an ASSS concept? I kinda sorta have my own ASSS zone that I play around with just for fun, testing the capabilities. I'm not saying I want to, or that I'm willing to code distension for ASSS, that seems like an absolute shit-ton of work, but for the sake of argument, lets say I (or someone else more accepted by the community) volunteered to get this done....Would it be acceptable by the TW community to have distension seperate (like it was in beta, getting sent to dev)? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

[dako]

midoent, how do you explain the lack of people in ?go base when distension isnt being hosted

Read: 80% of the time throughout a week

[Salubrious]

Notice how ?go base rarely runs anymore? That is because there is never enough people since everyone is in distension. So when a base game dies because theres only 10 people alive in it, guess what, those people are discouraged in logging in later after wasting time on a horrible base game. Now apply the same concept to all other arenas and you get zone dying out... And the way its going right now, new people trying out the game wont get to distension and even if they do and learn tw by playing distension, i doubt theyd be able to play anything else besides it. Personally I think distension is more fitting to be another zone, but at this point doing this would be catastrophical...

It's great that theres such a game that has so much interest. But you dont want to lose population that doesnt like it and thats whats happening right now. I think distension should have even stricter limit of people in so people go play other arenas and if they like the arena enough, theyll just wait.

base games were horrible even before distension

at least they have been for the latter half of 2000 anyways

[midoent]

Notice how ?go base rarely runs anymore? That is because there is never enough people since everyone is in distension. So when a base game dies because theres only 10 people alive in it, guess what, those people are discouraged in logging in later after wasting time on a horrible base game. Now apply the same concept to all other arenas and you get zone dying out... And the way its going right now, new people trying out the game wont get to distension and even if they do and learn tw by playing distension, i doubt theyd be able to play anything else besides it. Personally I think distension is more fitting to be another zone, but at this point doing this would be catastrophical...

It's great that theres such a game that has so much interest. But you dont want to lose population that doesnt like it and thats whats happening right now. I think distension should have even stricter limit of people in so people go play other arenas and if they like the arena enough, theyll just wait.

[gdugwyler]

Distension has been causing the recycles lately (it has to do with sending/receiving too many packets at one time), and to remedy that I've reduced the max number of players that can be in the game at one time, as well as a couple of net settings. Sorry for the problems it's caused.


As for the lag, there's a possibility Distension could have something to do with it, but at this point it's largely speculation. Yes, it's rather network intensive, and running 40 people in Dist is certainly not equal to 40 in Warzone (has nothing to do with the arena itself). I had to rewrite parts of the TWCore netcode just to be able to keep Distension from constantly recycling the server; for those that remember, there was about a month that Dist beta ran on the Dev server. Now the problem's returned and I'm taking it down an additional notch, and will continue to do so until we're never recycling the zone.

[Liquid Blue]

what?

I'm not going to "hide" essays or any other counter-arguments when I believe the guy is wrong.

he's wrong, I said so, why do I need a block of text to go with it?

[DankNuggets]

actually everyone's doesn't

i'm assuming since you didn't include your counter argument, either it's not ready to be published, or it doesn't hold it's water.

because that's exactly the issue that's showing up on the forums, and in gossip throughout the game

[Liquid Blue]

I like how everyones anti-distension argument comes down to

"People used to like <insert my event/arena/league here>, but im a hardcore <insert my event/arena/league here> player, and i dont want something more fun than <insert my event/arena/league here> to surface and take away from <insert my event/arena/league here>."

actually everyone's doesn't

[Lag.Com]

Rock on, Distension, apparently you're killing TW.

Or maybe you're just another scapegoat. What's more likely? Ho hum.

[DankNuggets]

alright... if i understood this right:

a large amount of commands causes the distension bot to crash... this in turn can cause the server to lag...

this sounds like a yes to distension being the cause of lag.

all i wanted to know was that in any way shape or form, can distension running cause lag for the zone different from what wed see from lets say a 40 person warzone arena?

I wouldn't be so quick to say yes, distension is the cause of lag.

A) I don't think there are more than a handful of people who are qualified, or in-the-know enough to give an educated answer. Everyone else is just guessing, or putting pieces together to come up with an answer, that may or may not be right. So unless qan or maverick come out and say it, don't believe it yet.

B) To keep up with the guessing, Distension crashes when there's a bug in the code AFAIK. Severe lag hasn't made it crash to my knowledge. Distension is extremely laggy when there's ~40 ppl in one flagroom. From what qan said in beta, this scenario is always going to cause lag. Also, it spouts an unmatched number of PM's, which take up bandwith i'm sure, but probably not enough to make the entire server lag. But what do i know.


So to answer your question: It could cause more lag than a 40 person warzone because everyone's in almost the same position on the map, and there are hundreds of PMs being sent out each minute.

[Zeebu]

1) as far as I know, no. Distension wasn't hosted for 48 hours straight over the weekend and the biller lag was still insane, and now its fixed, distension has been hosted 3 times since it has been fixed, and is running fine now.

2) first off, its only 40 people, speccers would be analogous to that of 110 people speccing in ?go twld. As for the 40 people playing, of course its going to put stress on the bot, but I believe this only becomes an actual problem for the server when the bot crashes because of this

alright... if i understood this right:

a large amount of commands causes the distension bot to crash... this in turn can cause the server to lag...

this sounds like a yes to distension being the cause of lag.

all i wanted to know was that in any way shape or form, can distension running cause lag for the zone different from what wed see from lets say a 40 person warzone arena?

[HateTheFake]

6 years. Almost 7 methinks.

Either way, how many people total get to play twl? The number is more than likely close to 100. I've been there and back. At least everyone gets an opportunity to play distension, it isn't some elitist microsociety where all your "leet" friends join one freq and demolish the level 1 newbies.

I've played plenty of DDs/JDs/a few BDs since distension as been going on, at the very max of its scheduling its still on for 25% of the day.

TWD is available 24/7, distension is available 6 hours a day for 5 days a week, and you want to kill it?

distension is killing the zone, quite literally, Weve had about 1 recycle per day the last few days distension has ran. And so your aliased on teks just another name to add to ignore.txt

Distension killing all other things in tw, no squads have enough to twd, no events being ran with more then 20 (unless warks hosting)

[dako]

i said nothing about killing.

i have a few concerns though.

one of them. when distension is hosted, is it putting a larger burden on the biller or anything? it seems that things are far more laggy as of late on that side of things. please no avoidance comment or anything like that. so, just wondering:
1) does the act of distension being hosted lead to the biller lagging beyond normal times
2) is there a general increase of biller lag or general lag when distension is hosted versus any other time when youd normally gather 60 or 70 people in an arena?

1) as far as I know, no. Distension wasn't hosted for 48 hours straight over the weekend and the biller lag was still insane, and now its fixed, distension has been hosted 3 times since it has been fixed, and is running fine now.

2) first off, its only 40 people, speccers would be analogous to that of 110 people speccing in ?go twld. As for the 40 people playing, of course its going to put stress on the bot, but I believe this only becomes an actual problem for the server when the bot crashes because of this