@Xaldafax cheers to your 30+ years in IT development, I too have 30+ years in IT development and currently work for a top 100 company. James didn’t communicate nor develop for 3 years. It’s not that I didn’t like James, I didn’t like his lack of communication. On a personal level, I’m sure he was great.
Do you know why the setting was changed? It was changed because the cost to run Boundless exceeds its profit. The CPU utilization was crazy high; sovereigns actually cost more to run and make zero profit. So, they are looking at ways to bring the server costs down. They were also looking at putting worlds to sleep when there are no players on them for a 24-hour period. I’m not knocking anyone from Wonderstruck, they made a game I love, but it would seem there were some poor choices made, and I’m just guessing here, but if sovereigns actually make no profit, I can see why James sold it.
Who are they going to ask? Wonderstruck and James would be the only ones to ask.
There were issues with getting the test servers up, as well as there is a cost to put the test servers up. If the prod servers are losing money just running with our current population, I imagine that cost would nearly double putting the test servers up since all planets run on their own servers and are running 24/7 at very high CPU utilization.
The “screwed up” exo I was a large part of. All it did was unlock some colors and I’ll gladly take that blame as I created the exo in the world builder, set the world colors, and since the Test server wasn’t’ available it was spawned as a sovereign and set to private so it could be tested. Of course, Monumental didn’t know it would unlock the colors, and it didn’t dawn on me either and I don’t think it would have been caught on Test.
Is it the correct way to handle it? Nah, in my current job we go through Dev, Test, UAT, Prod and through 5 approval processes with multiple teams across the world that know what they are doing and we still make mistakes. it happens.
Lastly, I’m being critical here because, the alternative is to shut the game down. There is a large effort to get Boundless to break even or even a little profitable monetarily. As I said in another post, Wonderstruck had a brilliant system that scaled when we got more players, but they failed to create a system that scaled down when we had the 45ish we have now.
With the current population of the game, the prod server basically is a test server. This wasn’t a gameplay change, it was server tuning. It is also fairly common practice in many companies these days to just pushing changes straight to all environments, including prod, and roll them back if something breaks. I find that practice rather terrifying, but it isn’t unusual. I do hope the pipelines in this case are setup for instant rollback…
i know its now kinda off topic but if sov arent profitable for them, according to maintain server cost, maybe it will be possible to put sov at client side? i know its risky becouse this way rented sov will be available only when owner is online, but it is no problem imo, hunt planets are usually opened only for hunts, opened for farm sovs - there will be no prob to write when owner will be online right?
You should take NO blame and that is your problem here. You are coming in and defended a bad approach to management of the game that deserves criticisms. Is it the end of the earth, NO. Of course not. But, the process and mindset used here MUST CHANGE or it will lead to even worse situations with the game in its current state. They are the OWNERS and they should’t have approached the changes in a way that they did.
The exo stuff shouldn’t have been silent and more work should have been done. That mess up should have immediately stopped additional “development” where nothing is really fully understood. We have very experienced players here and some of us know a lot of details on the game and how it worked. They should be extracting what information they can from those of us that are still around. Any info can help them be better stewards of the game considering the horrible and very hard situation they are in now after so many years. I certainly don’t envy their situation but want responsible development not ad-hoc.
You are over 50? Because growing up with computers doesn’t equate actual “IT experience in a job.”
Please don’t lie. There were multiple posts about their situation on development. They were continuing to do what they had funds to do and told us what level of development existed and did NOT exist. Not to mention that pretty much the whole team shifted to go work for another company to keep the game online. They were very clear what they were doing during that time and any honest person would have accepted that even if they were disappointed and frustrated.
At least have integrity on what actually happened instead of selectively pulling points to demonize the original developers because the game didn’t end like you expected to. Maybe James should have just shut it all down because clearly people still want to lash out with incorrect info. If James was a jerk and there are documents showing that he said to them “go to hell on day one” then fine we should call that out. But, we shouldn’t just make things up. That’s disgusting.
Why would I know because no NORMAL IT RIGOROUS PROCESS WAS FOLLOWED. You sit here coming in acting like you are an experienced IT person and then try to justify and make excuses to let them off the hook for 1) screwing up an exo and releasing colors, 2) making a change without real testing. It isn’t hard to say - we should do better going forward and learn from the mistakes.
INCORRECT AGAIN and selectively picking points. The game was able to use the incoming funds to keep itself online when James was running it, he more than made a few comments about them being fine at that point in time. Yes, there were additional partners that helped based on their CONTRACTS and we all never saw an official publicly released finance sheet. They were also using other game development contracts to keep Boundless development going. That was the state of the game and it isn’t fair at all to manipulate things to demonize that team for where the game is NOW.
The game CHANGED OWNERS and has failed to keep players, lost its other support, and who knows what contracts it still has with other companies. So the math now has changed from years ago under different owners. If they need to adjust things that makes sense and I wouldn’t even blame Monument for that - the math changed. But, it is completely unethical to sit here trying to blame James and the original Devs for the situation Monumental is in. It is beyond shameful and wrong.
James likely sold it because a guy with “deep pockets” came in and said he was going to take over. James was in a longer term contract and a year of that proved he just wasn’t going to be able to get the team or him the TIME needed to move forward. Maybe there were finances as part of it but who knows. We all don’t know.
True completely inexperienced IT developer/manger/leadership experience mindset here. Mature processes have a risk analysis and a change control that should list out possible “failure modes.” If you go through all those actual levels of testing you would NOT have mistakes that just “happen.” If you did, then a mature leader would start firing people and solve the development team issue that exists. IT mindset is one of the most important things in development and management of infrastructure. You want a mature one not a reckless one.
When I bought the game we had less people playing than now most of the time. The game had no issues with that. When we scaled UP the problem and servers became overwhelmed because of a whole host of issues. Like really, are you going to try to find everything you can to justify this situation? The game was built and developed on THIS MANY PEOPLE. It is not a “scale down” issue.
At least if you want to be better in an assessment of the game - they didn’t maybe put stuff in to dynamically handle scaling of server resources to player counts. That would at least be more aligned.
How would ANY of us know this??? A simple FORUM POST could have explained the situation. Asked for suggestions on how we cut costs, etc. An actual “communication with the community” before you just go in flipping switches. It isn’t hard to be mature in approaching a bad situation in a safer way.
I’m all for helping them save costs to keep the game going. But, I don’t want them just doing ad-hoc stuff that ends up crashing the game or corrupting something that ruins it all. There were huge issues Wonderstuck and the original Devs did cause and we don’t need another set of Devs doing stuff too that hurts the game.
You understand a mistake could corrupt the whole world. Are we even sure the backup routing has been validated and tested recently to ensure our builds and progress to date is safe? That is the point I’m trying to.
I’m beyond happy to see an actual person looking at the game. Still no nothing about how actually experienced they are, or what they are trying to do, or been given one chance on feedback on what we think is important to stabalize and secure the game so it can stay up.
Just going to point this out, but this just proves you’re not reading the forums. Because these posts did get made, and most of us know about them and have posted about them on the various social channels…
Incorrect. I read the forums constantly. A small comment about “I’m gonna make a change and asking quickly” is not a DEVELOPMENT UPDATE. There was no announcement, no details on the new Developer.
Everyone can sit here and try to justify the actions. Or you can come to terms this was done ad-hoc and not really the type of development we want. It has been YEARS with no real comments from them. So stop trying to make me the bad guy because I wanted decent developers with actual real communication processes.
Dude stop cherry picking. You said there were no posts about the CPU utilization, no posts about the costs, no posts about putting the worlds to sleep.
And yes, they exist, and were discussed by the community.
We can stop the going back and forth. I don’t want another super long post. So, I’ll just post facts:
The exo colors while a mistake, increased the player base temporarily by 28%.
I’m over 50.
James started the downward trend of losing players by not updating the game or communicating why there was no update. He posted finally when asked on the Larian forums by me.
There is a staging server.
Sovs lose money as do homeworlds due to their 24/7 uptime and their CPU utilization regardless of if by design.
When something loses $10k a month due to how its designed there’s a problem.
James is not a jerk.
Wonderstruck made a great game, but it’s far from perfect.
I agree that reducing context switching can help overall system performance if one CPU is running multiple worlds. As far as if that helps portal processing surely depends on if Boundless’ server side is multi or single threaded?
As far as the in-game ping is concerned, I don’t think it’s simple ICMP packets because when I ping the eu-central ec2 servers themselves I get ~20ms. So without knowing the code, I believe it’s showing network + game latency, which would explain why 85+ now has visibly effects doing certain things on the client.
I think going from 2000 to 20 TPS may have been a bit too aggressive of a change because it seems like it significantly reduced the speed with which the client and the server can communicate, even if network latency would allow for much faster communication.
(PS: The copyright notice when the game loads still says 2023 )
Sorry for the double post, but I just noticed that shop stands seem to load in the item on top significantly slower now as well. Can be easily observed in big shops like “The Vault” over on Arie.
Incidentally on this point: Was standing in the dragon hub yesterday talking with someone and saw the globes on the shop stands near the portals visibly shoot left and right across the screen.
I think playstation is locked to 30 fps, so at least 30 might be better than 20. I’m not having any issues at 20, but before the update my ping always fluctuated wildly almost by the second so just having it steady is a massive improvement.
Pre-update my ping would jump from 60ms to 300+ ms almost on a second by second basis.
Post-update I am at 90ms on USE, 140ms on EU, and 220ms on AUS servers pretty steadily.
I am wondering if internet speed and user-device are playing a factor in what players are seeing. Or maybe some people just always had much better ping than others for some reason? Stuff popping in once every 10 minutes doesn’t bother me because I am used to stuff popping in every other second. I am not sure why some people would have been better before vs others. I play on a very high end PC with a 5GB up/down connection speed, and always had massive problems.
FPS (your client side framerate) are not TPS (the server side tick rate) mind you
What you are experiencing in game is definitely a combination of your latency to the game server you are connected to, the rate with which the server can send you updates and the rate with which your client can process those updates. So it’s definitely a combination of factors.
I suspect the people with massive problems always had a bad connection to the game servers to begin with. There is also the network settings that can help:
In the past I noticed that sometimes my connection seems to be degraded as well. During those times I couldn’t connect to anything outside of the EU because I would get constant “unplayable” notices. These problems would usually fix themselves after a few hours, but I noticed that reducing the chunk download rate would help a bit.
Just a side note. None of us work for Monumental, it is there game and can make changes as they feel necessary. We are lucky to be able to give feedback if those changes work or not. But even if we do agree or not on those changes they ultimately have the last say and choice. If a mistake is made hopefully it can be fixed. Just glad there is some movement in trying to do something that could possibly make things even more enjoyable for us.
I know TPS and FPS are different, but I was thinking if the TPS was at least as fast as the FPS then the popping of blocks might be reduced. I’m guessing that is being caused by the client running at a higher tick rate than the server and the two getting out of sync on which blocks have been updated. If the TPS was at least as fast as the base FPS, then the client and server might argue with each other less obviously and popping would be reduced. Nothing says that the two would be in sync, however, so it might not make any difference.
As for the connection, I have lived in multiple states and had multiple different ISPs. I have been steadily upgrading both my PC and my internet speed trying to reduce the problem, and it never made any difference. Increasing the chunk rate did help to an extent, but I always had ping swings no matter what I did. If I turned on Pause Inputs on Lost Connection, I basically was eternally frozen. I’m just not sure why other people were not seeing that issue.
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I know TPS and FPS are different, but I was thinking if the TPS was at least as fast as the FPS then the popping of blocks might be reduced. I’m guessing that is being caused by the client running at a higher tick rate than the server and the two getting out of sync on which blocks have been updated. If the TPS was at least as fast as the base FPS, then the client and server might argue with each other less obviously and popping would be reduced. Nothing says that the two would be in sync, however, so it might not make any difference.