NationStates Jolt Archive

With NS hosted independently and talk - and indeed, more than talk - of new features on the horizon, there's been an ongoing discussion of revisions, particularly to the invasion/defense game. With that in mind, I want to bring up something rather fundamental to that aspect of NS.

Since the Dawn of History, when the first NSers crawled out of the primordial ooze, the period of time in which the update that governs Delegacy determination has generally been around the same time. Specifically, it's a time that (for Americans) is in the wee hours of the morning and that (for Europeans) is somewhere in the mid-morning around the start of the school/workday. This has had a number of effects on the invasion/defense game. Since most invasions are conducted in the hours before update - and indeed, the development of that side of the game has assured that anything earlier has a high chance of failure - this limits the ability to participate in invasions to people willing to stay up very late, people willing to get up very early, and people who live in Australia (you know who you are). Despite the epic contributions of the latter group, it severely limits the number of people who can play the invasion game.

On the other side of the fence, it also is a limiting factor in the ability of native delegates to defend their lands. Delegates that fear threats of invasion must burn the midnight oil alongside their adversaries to be sure of security, lest they be caught off guard by a lightning raid in the middle of the night and henceforth condemned as negligent.

Would it be feasible to move the primary update to a time that would let more players participate in (or keep watch against) the invasion game?

Sounds like a [violet] question. Ideally, the major update ought to be run when the game is the sleepiest: when fewest nations are logged in. This prevents game lag and lets the old CPUs crank away more efficiently to finish the job. Perhaps this is not an issue, but it's always advantageous to inconvenience the fewest players if something unexpected and really bad goes down.

Almost any major update requires that someone babysit it. No matter how perfect a script you write, unanticipated problems can cause it to grind to a halt and require that it be abandoned until the problem is debugged. An elegant script will simply roll back what has been done if it can and send a server admin an email that the job failed. Bottom line: I suspect the job probably needs to be run when [violet] and crew are awake and can respond in a timely way to keep things moving and the game stable.

Moving it to a different time is a fascinating concept that would improve many conditions - including the playing of nation issues - but I don't track when the game itself is sleepiest or when the codemonkeys and hardware geeks lay their precious heads down.

Sounds like a [violet] question. Ideally, the major update ought to be run when the game is the sleepiest: when fewest nations are logged in. This prevents game lag and lets the old CPUs crank away more efficiently to finish the job. Perhaps this is not an issue, but it's always advantageous to inconvenience the fewest players if something unexpected and really bad goes down.
Well... if we have shiny servers I could hope we could have a bit of lag with fewer problems. Or maybe move delegate spots to midday update and leave world rankings and such on the nightly update. Granted, that would mean most people were at work during update, but at least weekends wouldn't be quite so bad.

I suspect the job probably needs to be run when [violet] and crew are awake and can respond in a timely way to keep things moving and the game stable.
hahaha how long have you played to see the game go down at all hours and take a long time to get poked again to get going? Not to say that wouldn't be an ideal reason, but I somehow imagine that had very little to do with it.

Update is very drive intensive, very CPU intensive. I feel certain that the timing was driven by server activity logs, and it was deliberately placed at the slowest times.

No matter what we do, we're going to be inconvenient for significant numbers of players. In addition to the US, UK and Europe, we have a large presence in Oceania (Australians and Enzeds), a growing presence in the Orient, and scattered activity elsewhere. Even if we limited our concept to US and UK, you're still talking about an 8 hour difference between London and San Francisco. Finding a time that works well for everyone simply isn't going to happen.

I saw some Google Analytics stats once about international activity and participation. It included the number of page visits per session, indicating that (for example) Germans clicked links 60 times each visit, compared to 40 for New Yorkers.

We could probably resurvey and get a more current picture, including times. Have to bring this to [violet]'s attention at some point.