Takeover Feedback, please!

[Tom]

There are a few TOs now running with the new code.

I would like to see numbers. If you don't mind sharing them. I'd like to know how many soldiers you needed to start it, and once a day what the % values have changed like.

TOs are incredibly hard to simulate on the dev server, so I need some feedback for final tuning. If you are willing to reveal more, like how many people worked on TO actions, etc. - everything helps. The more data I get, the better I can tune it.

[Chenier]

There are a few TOs now running with the new code.

I would like to see numbers. If you don't mind sharing them. I'd like to know how many soldiers you needed to start it, and once a day what the % values have changed like.

TOs are incredibly hard to simulate on the dev server, so I need some feedback for final tuning. If you are willing to reveal more, like how many people worked on TO actions, etc. - everything helps. The more data I get, the better I can tune it.

Report from Naoie Ukita   (39 minutes ago)
Message sent to everyone in your realm (15 recipients)
Justice is dealt swiftly to those who do not respect the new laws.

Your realm is welcome a bit more warmly now, but not much.

debug: Fear: -1 / Love: 3
This is deal out justice.
The other day i did civil work and it only reduced fear and not increased love. Not worth doing it.

Naoie Ukita (Noble)

Last I checked, he was the only noble currently in the region, though a few more were there I think when he started it, and more should be joining pretty soon to help out.

[pcw27]

To be perfectly blunt, I think BM should adopt the old adage, "If it isn't broken don't try to fix it".

The old estate system seemed fine to me. After the change we had tons of bugs going on which had a very negative impact on the game.

I didn't see anything wrong with the old takeover system and I never heard a single person complain about it in the four years I've been playing. Who knows what's going to go wrong now.

Instead of focusing on revamping old systems that work fine why not develop new ones to expand on aspects of the game that have limited possibilities.

[egamma]

To be perfectly blunt, I think BM should adopt the old adage, "If it isn't broken don't try to fix it".

The old estate system seemed fine to me. After the change we had tons of bugs going on which had a very negative impact on the game.

I didn't see anything wrong with the old takeover system and I never heard a single person complain about it in the four years I've been playing. Who knows what's going to go wrong now.

Instead of focusing on revamping old systems that work fine why not develop new ones to expand on aspects of the game that have limited possibilities.

Things 'broke' in the old TO system, 'fixed' in the new:
1. No more need for a single massive TO unit. Duke cant use 'TO unit' as the excuse for hoarding all the gold.
2. TO used to take just as long for a region with 5000 peasants, as for a region with 20. With the new system D'Hara did a TO in one day of Sallowwild.
3. A Friendly TO used to fail because of a single act of looting. Under the new system, the progress meter just slides towards fear.
4. Nobles used to just sit and wait, especially for a hostile TO; heroes and cavaliers couldn't do CW for friendly TO's, or looting for brutal TO's. Under the new TO everyone can participate.

As for estates, I think the fact that thanks to the new estate system, D'Hara has added 4 or 5 regions pretty much speaks for itself, doesn't it? Lots more lords and dukes running around now, and lots more space for additional nobles too. Under the old estate system we were stuck with certain requirements as far as nobles per region.

[pcw27]

I'm not saying it isn't potentially better, I'm saying there's a fine line between a slight inconvenience and a broken feature. A lot of those problems could have been fixed without changing the whole system, and I'd argue that not all of them needed to be fixed.

The fact that it took months upon months for a region to grow population was a broken feature, especially on Dwilight where most rogue regions had only a handful of people.

I never thought of the old estate system as "broken". I'll admit the new one has certain advantages, but it came at quite a price given how many bugs it spawned.

I really prefer when they ad completely new features, especially ones that let newer players have something more to do then sit at the capital and wait for orders. Adding Stewards was a great idea, that's the kind of  updates I'd like to see.

[Tom]

Well, "they" is not some anonymous games company, it's people like... Well, the ones you are talking to. :-)


While some of the recent changes introduced new bugs, they were not all for gameplay. We are also replacing lots of code. Yes, the new code has new bugs. But it will have a lot fewer in the long run, because it is cleaner and easier to maintain and troubleshoot.

[pcw27]

I understand, and I'm not trying to be mean, it's just the thread asked for feedback that's how I feel at the moment.

[GoldPanda]

New features and refactoring are fine, Tom, but please keep in mind that breaking the game is worse for player retention than any shenanigans us players can do. Quite a few islands were broken for a period of days.

What we really need is a robust testing system, where features can be tested without risking breaking every other island. Maybe the devs can get their own private island to play around in?

Because just "turning on a feature and hoping it works" does not seem to be working. :)

Edit: TOs on depopulated regions worked fine, and were indeed very speedy once the bugs were resolved. We should still see how long it takes to TO a big regions. Taking a large rural region should not take more than 6 days, imho. Maybe 8 to 10 days for major cities. (And of course this is just going to encourage players to completely raze regions, which is fine by me.)

[De-Legro]

New features and refactoring are fine, Tom, but please keep in mind that breaking the game is worse for player retention than any shenanigans us players can do. Quite a few islands were broken for a period of days.

What we really need is a robust testing system, where features can be tested without risking breaking every other island. Maybe the devs can get their own private island to play around in?

Because just "turning on a feature and hoping it works" does not seem to be working. :)

Edit: TOs on depopulated regions worked fine, and were indeed very speedy once the bugs were resolved. We should still see how long it takes to TO a big regions. Taking a large rural region should not take more than 6 days, imho. Maybe 8 to 10 days for major cities. (And of course this is just going to encourage players to completely raze regions, which is fine by me.)

The Dev's have a testing server. The nature of the game makes exhaustive testing impossible, without quiet serious code changes, which of course would in part invalidate the testing since the testing would not reflect the current code base completely. Most code changes are tested, a lot of these bug sprang from unexpected things, for instance the repair bug on Dwilight was because the realm didn't have a entry in the diplomacy table for its relationship with itself.

[Tom]

New features and refactoring are fine, Tom, but please keep in mind that breaking the game is worse for player retention than any shenanigans us players can do. Quite a few islands were broken for a period of days.

What we really need is a robust testing system, where features can be tested without risking breaking every other island. Maybe the devs can get their own private island to play around in?

Because just "turning on a feature and hoping it works" does not seem to be working. :)

That's not how we work, and we do have a testing server.



The issue we are having now is that we are using an entirely new database layer, Doctrine ORM. It has many "features" that come unexpected to us, such as failing the entire turn on minor errors where the old code only failed that particular update and else continued just fine. Both has its pro and cons. The advantage of the new system is that once we have adapted our code structure to it, turn runs will be monolithic, meaning that it either succeeds completely, or fails completely. Which means in the case of failure we can fix the error and re-run it, something we can't do when the turn was a partial success.


But as De-Legro already wrote, while we try to test changes on the dev server, there simply is no way to test the actions of several hundred players. We push things live when we believe they will work, but sometimes we get nasty surprises.


And yes, I realize that breaking the game sucks.

[LilWolf]

That's not how we work, and we do have a testing server.

And a testing branch of islands and a stable branch of islands.

Maybe the game needs to highlight that a bit more when you're creating a character. Clearly tell people who are going to a testing island that they'll see new features first, but that they can also expect a larger number of issues due to that. From my experience there are quite a few people who aren't all that clear on that.

[Tom]

And a testing branch of islands and a stable branch of islands.

Maybe the game needs to highlight that a bit more when you're creating a character. Clearly tell people who are going to a testing island that they'll see new features first, but that they can also expect a larger number of issues due to that. From my experience there are quite a few people who aren't all that clear on that.

Yes and no.

testing and stable used to be very close together a long time ago. They have seperated more and more, but we plan to bring them closer together again. So yes, new features will be on testing first, but the plan is to have it ahead of stable a few days or so (or weeks for large changes), not months like now.

[egamma]

The Doctrine conversion is affecting both stable and testing, I think that's annoying the players more than the things that only affect the test servers.

[Tom]

The Doctrine conversion is affecting both stable and testing, I think that's annoying the players more than the things that only affect the test servers.

Yes, I know. We are trying to isolate it to testing as good as we can, but there is quite a bit of shared code. Really, moving forward and finishing it is the best thing we can do. But it is a LOT of code.

[fodder]

Takeover Initiated   (just in)
message to all nobles of Riombara
Yosef Ishimu has initiated a takeover in Villriil. The region currently belongs to Netherworld.
Everyone in the realm can aid the takeover by going to Villriil and using the takeover support options available there.

Takeover in Villriil   (just in)
message to everyone in Villriil
Yosef Ishimu of Riombara has initiated a takeover in Villriil. The region currently belongs to Netherworld.

----
an instance of redundant message. the people who received the 1st one already shouldn't have to receive the 2nd one too. (noble in question is in the TO region)