aya
New Member
Posts: 2
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Post by aya on Dec 12, 2016 6:38:43 GMT
So far I've found this pretty fun even though it's so simple at this early stage, and I like the Inugami & the pixeling style! (I like creepy horror things in general, ha ha) Something I'm curious about is — so far, with only a handful of users on the site, it's been fairly simple to grab items from the drop, but what are you planning for when there are many users? Will the amount of items be scaled to the number of users, or will there be something like instancing where there's a maximum number of players per instance? If this was mentioned elsewhere, sorry that I didn't find it! Something that I'm curious about is whether the caught/missed notifications on the item drop page could mention which items we grabbed/missed, but I don't know if that's feasible or if it would become a problem in terms of server strain later on. When I'm clicking many items rapidly, it becomes very confusing which ones I got and which ones I missed. But this isn't really a problem. Aside from that I haven't encountered any bugs thus far
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Post by Thornes on Dec 12, 2016 7:53:15 GMT
Adding different 'servers' or whatever for the game should be added one day whenever there are quite a lot of users online at all times. I can't imagine having 400 users taking items in the same 'item dropping' room. That would be horrible, probably.
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Post by Manewa on Dec 12, 2016 8:45:58 GMT
Yeah, I think the item dropping rates have to be adjusted to the amount of users somehow, and the page probably needs some other tweaks as well. Just now there were five of us I think, and already there were some problems. One of them was some serious lag with the items. I encountered several instances where I knew I clicked the item properly, but it still traveled down half of the page before disappearing. Also the rarity of some items (like the dog head I believe most of us were hunting for) gets ridiculous when there are more than one or two users. I hunted for about 10 minutes with three or four other users and saw one of those. When we add the lag into that, it becomes a game of who has the best computer, and those with worse ones are left with nothing. Also, I've noticed that whenever another user leaves the item dropping page or comes there, it causes a lag spike when the list of onliners tries to update itself. If it already lags with a handful of users, I really don't want to know what happens if there would be like ten people coming and going simultaneously.
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Post by Lavie on Dec 12, 2016 17:35:29 GMT
I expect we will have some bumps in the road and obstacles to overcome before the site is officially live. I will try to better lay out my "planbook" of sorts for the site so everyone knows what steps I'm doing first. As I mentioned before, I want to get our core features pushed first, then after that make improvements, tweaks, and opitimizations to the gameplay. But I also don't want to frustrate the alpha testers who are helping to make this game better, so I'll see what I can do for the more important things in terms of optimization. (:
Luckily I can make some tweaks now, like making the drop chance of dog heads a little higher, and lowering the item limit so that users will need to take breaks or have a wait period before grabbing more items. I had previously tweaked the item limit per user from 10 to 45 per minute. We have more users joining now, so maybe I will need to unfortunately lower it to 25 or so per user? Along with increasing legendary (dog head) drop rates so you'll see them more.
We just need to figure out a healthy balance of items dropping, how often they're dropping, the amount users can grab per minute, and the rarity drop rates. Easy in writing but not in practice lol. xP
My two main issues is that I don't want users getting frustrated with certain items being so rare they can never get them so they just quit. And the other is that I don't want this game to be one of those easy games where you just get rare items handed to you like candy. I want it to be fun and hey, maybe a little annoying when that other user grabs the item you want so bad. But once you do get that item, it should be a great feeling instead of a "oh, let me add this with my other 56 dog heads".
It has been suggested to have multiple Item Drop pages, and have items drop by their type. We may need this eventually so if plain old optimization doesn't do the trick I can get with my programmer about more item drop pages. Also I'm not sure about this, but maybe even just upgrading to a better server will fix lag problems.
Thanks for the feedback guys! I'll make some tweaks later tonight, so if anyone has suggestions (numbers for everything) before then let me know.
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Post by Lavie on Dec 13, 2016 3:28:49 GMT
I've made some changes to drop rates and such. Let me know if you notice a difference or not!
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aya
New Member
Posts: 2
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Post by aya on Dec 13, 2016 8:28:10 GMT
I definitely understand your concerns about balance in difficulty! I don't consider this a frustration or anything (actually I find the current drop rate fine for the number of players here right now), I just think it's something to consider now rather than having to worry about recodes later. I've seen situations where games unexpectedly got a big influx of players and that put strain on the servers, which meant people couldn't play much while the owners scrambled to fix the problem or even had to temporarily shut features down, and so on. Alpha and beta are a better time to try to mitigate those problems than during live release imo! I think that people competing to get the same item may be less of a problem later on in the game — right now we're all trying to complete the same recipes, but when there are many recipes there may be less competition for specific items. The times that people would all be aiming for the same recipes would be events and new releases. So those times would be when to expect more activity. Some people play just to collect all items, though, not necessarily to compete. I'm not necessarily that type of player, but I've collected a lot of gems even though they don't have any purpose in the game yet, it's just because they're shiny So people are going to find a lot of different aspects of the game amusing. As for the lag problems, I haven't experienced it personally; the most people that have been on the drop page at the same time as me were 3-4, and I haven't noticed lag when players enter/leave. Very rarely it takes two clicks to pick up an item. But that may be affected by browser and the player's computer too, I don't know how much.
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Post by Lavie on Dec 13, 2016 13:10:38 GMT
I do see your point! I've posted a thread yesterday detailing the phases we will go through during alpha, beta, etc. Hopefully the majority of features will be well balanced for the release and we'll have good servers. Of course this is my first time owning a game of this scale so I can't predict if everything will go smoothly or not lol. Depending on the amount of interest we get right before release, maybe I can enable a certain amount of sign ups every week or two to lessen the strain on servers.
I've also noticed in different browsers the item drop behaves differently. In internet explorer the items pop up and disappear after a while but don't fall. I think I will add a little help box above the item drop encouraging users to use latest browser versions and good browsers like Firefox and chrome (not to hate on ie but yea haha). I'm sure some users also have pcs that have lower processing power which can cause some lag. I'm not totally sure if a better server on our part would help with that but it doesn't hurt to try.
Thanks @aya! I'm glad you're enjoying the game thus far. 😊
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