A standard, predetermined procedure for what happens when PA goes down

[Banned]

Because come on, it's going to happen again and it'd be nice to have a predictable result.

[MrLobster]

Blurp! Planetarion has gone down faster, than a presedential secretary.....

[Appocomaster]

That'd be a good idea, I guess. It just moves all the arguing about what happens to now not when the ticks go down

Originally Posted by Kal

The recent handling of downtime has been very poor in my opinion.

The set policy should be:
ticks restart 24 hours after the last good backup
fleets are not recalled
no resource bonsues are given

(note this should only apply to serious downtime with more than 1 tick lost)

http://pirate.planetarion.com/showth...89#post3005989

Apparently this was the standard way for dealing with downtimes. My problem is that you either barely stop ticks or you have a 24 hour tick st op depending on where you draw the line to serious or not serious. As wakey has argued (and I believe a lot of other defence officers agree) it really does mess up defence, as even if they stop defence calls when ticks go down, there's up to 2 ticks rollback. If there's a lot of incoming (say if it's at a peak time) you have to rollback quite a few defences manually, and that's really not easy.
Another issue is that if you're on between the last safe backup and when the ticks go down, you can "see the future", and when people are landing (especially fake attacks) and you get rolled back, it becomes a mission of working out if they were online or not to see as much as anything else - lokken came to me with a concern similar to this during the first downtime.


and MrLobster: I don't know, sometimes those girls can hit mach 2.

[Heartless]

Back when Spinner was in charge we did have auto-fleet recalls exactly because of what Wakey says. It is annoying to lose out on a good attack due to rollback, but it is surely a lot more annoying to lose your whole fleet or something because of a rollback.

[frostbeule]

I'd say that even if the ticks are down you get the resources for that not-ticking-time.
ie if the game goes down at 00:50 and then a rollback to 23:50 takes place and the next tick happens at 12:00, you get the resources for the tick at 00:00 , 01:00, ... 12:00
simply so that you dont have any looses on them.
this is ways better than a fix amount, plus if someone loged in in at 13:00 he wouldnt even see that there was a rollback if he doesnt look at the mail or ticker.

[Nadar]

Originally Posted by frostbeule

I'd say that even if the ticks are down you get the resources for that not-ticking-time.
ie if the game goes down at 00:50 and then a rollback to 23:50 takes place and the next tick happens at 12:00, you get the resources for the tick at 00:00 , 01:00, ... 12:00

That means every XP wh0re wont get to land that day, which matter a LOT to them. This solution is only nice for fat valueplayers.

[Cut Tooth]

Originally Posted by Banned

Because come on, it's going to happen again and it'd be nice to have a predictable result.

This is good because people would know where they stand. A policy whereby every outgoing fleets gets put back to base after 2 hours of down time might work.

[Lοki]

Anything, as long as you don't donate us resources again.

Everyone suddenly had 6m resources to defend theirselves last time... I say just 24 hour stop and make the round last longer, and pull fleets would be better I think.

If you don't pull fleets then there's loooaaads of time to do ingal def ... pretty much a waste of travel time for the attacker. Pulling everything is more fair for everyone in total.

[Kal]

fleets recalling at the end of day probabaly isn't that big a deal - however if you do recall all fleets then it means a 24 hour gap until ticks restarting is pointless. If fleets are to be recalled then ticks should restart at the time when most players are online (this should be pretty easy to determine from game logs), which I would guess would be in the evening UK time.

Not leaving 24 hours will however screw some plans up for some people e.g. they had ships in production ready to launch at a particular time.

I agree with Appocomaster that its often hard to tell how serious a downtime will be - I;d suggest though a simple rule:

If a tick is missed roll back to last backup if it isn't more than 1 hour ago and continue.
If more than 1 tick missed stop ticks and follow delayed restart procedure.

[paolo]

I like the idea of a fixed set of decisions that are made when this happends.

I'd say don't recall those fleets that are eta4 or below (it depends if the ticker was running without the players being able to log in), those battles are already 'over' and can be jgp'd during the time until ticks start.

Don't give out res, because it will only enhance stagnation. The overall value in the universe increases while the roidcount stays the same. So it'll be harder to capture the same amount of roids.

I'd say restart the ticker at the time the ticker went down the next day, unless you can fix it within the hour. One hour behind isn't that bad and it won't affect the game that much. Everytime the ticker is effectively down for a day, the round should last another day.

[wakey]

Due to the backups happening at xx:30 I firmly believe that any rollback that happens should be accompanied by a fleet recall, atleast for any fleet thats hasnt reached eta4 at the point we roll back to

[Kal]

I'm against the whole let the people below eta 4 thing carry on as it benefits a select group of people who launched at a particular time.

Wakey is your fleet recall argument about helping defenders or attackers? As I see it the game is going to be up for a minimum of 12 ticks in the rolled back state most likely which surely gives both attackers and defenders amble time to investigate what their fleets are doing etc.

[paolo]

That is actually the point. People who already are flying at least 3-5 hours and are 'through' shouldn't be penalized because the game dies. They picked a time to launch just like everybody could. Why should those people be forced to throw that away?

[wakey]

Mainly from a defence pov. Its just a major headache when a rolback happens and your trying to DC calls and it can cause some major confusion. It wouldnt be as bad if backups were done at the hour so you knew that anything new wasnt covered at all but the xx:30 backup throws in added confusion.

Now yes you have 12 hours which in theory should be plenty of time but in reality it can be pretty tough and pretty much relies on you have a good external systems to simpify things which not every alliance has. If the game doesnt offer a way to manage such things then its a little harsh to put peoples ships and planets at danger based on the idea that everyone has a good set of tools to manage the situation

As for the ETA 4 thing, imho no-ones really benifits here that wouldnt have anyway as its too late to get extra defence and defence that was sent would have been sent anyway rather than being missed as it was launched after the backup

[Appocomaster]

This is the rough result of a similar thread on the admin forums from a couple of weeks ago (shamelessly copy/pasted ):

Scheduled downtimes:
We leave the game as is, no fleetrecall, no donations, no rollbacks or anything. Game restarts at the same time it was taken down and round is extended with the amount of days it was down.
They would be preannounced by at least 12 (24?) hours - thinking of how little time Jolt left when telling us the server had to go down for emergency maintance, and when we had to take the server down when we found a problem with it.


Unscheduled downtimes:

< 1 tick
should be ok

>1 tick < 80min:
We don't do anything really. Rollback to last stable, and leave the ticks running. No recall.
Yes i'm aware some will claim this will give insight into attacks etc, regarding faking and such, but that'll work both ways.*

>1 tick > 80min:
Rollback, and full recall of fleets.*
Possible donation of resources*
12 ticks to restart the game from when it is accessable.

*I know people will want to comment on these points .

[Kal]

Originally Posted by Appocomaster

This is the rough result of a similar thread on the admin forums from a couple of weeks ago (shamelessly copy/pasted ):

Scheduled downtimes:
We leave the game as is, no fleetrecall, no donations, no rollbacks or anything. Game restarts at the same time it was taken down and round is extended with the amount of days it was down.
They would be preannounced by at least 12 (24?) hours - thinking of how little time Jolt left when telling us the server had to go down for emergency maintance, and when we had to take the server down when we found a problem with it.


Unscheduled downtimes:

< 1 tick
should be ok

>1 tick < 80min:
We don't do anything really. Rollback to last stable, and leave the ticks running. No recall.
Yes i'm aware some will claim this will give insight into attacks etc, regarding faking and such, but that'll work both ways.*

>1 tick > 80min:
Rollback, and full recall of fleets.*
Possible donation of resources*
12 ticks to restart the game from when it is accessable.

*I know people will want to comment on these points .

I'll give in and agree with all of the above with the following modifications for the >80 min situation:

rollback to last good backup
recall all fleets
restart ticks 24 hours after the backup that is used
no resource donations as they affect different playing styles differently and can hence affect the outcome of the game.

[Banned]

Originally Posted by Appocomaster

>1 tick > 80min:
Rollback, and full recall of fleets.*
Possible donation of resources*
12 ticks to restart the game from when it is accessable.

*I know people will want to comment on these points .

If you're going to donate anything, donate roids. Roids = more action, resources = more stagnation.

[Kal]

Personallyi think a sensible compensation for downtime would be an extension to the round of 1.5*the down time period.

[Banned]

Originally Posted by Kal

Personallyi think a sensible compensation for downtime would be an extension to the round of 1.5*the down time period.

Why the extra factor?

[Shyne]

Originally Posted by frostbeule

I'd say that even if the ticks are down you get the resources for that not-ticking-time.
ie if the game goes down at 00:50 and then a rollback to 23:50 takes place and the next tick happens at 12:00, you get the resources for the tick at 00:00 , 01:00, ... 12:00
simply so that you dont have any looses on them.
this is ways better than a fix amount, plus if someone loged in in at 13:00 he wouldnt even see that there was a rollback if he doesnt look at the mail or ticker.

Ive never understood the need for resources to be given out over downtime.

Everyone else has proportionatly the same resources/ships as before, so its not necessary.

Originally Posted by Banned

Why the extra factor?

Why the extra at all...

Once everyone has maxed out research and stuff, its just night after night attack/def for a month, and missing a day doesnt really matter.

[Kal]

Originally Posted by Banned

Why the extra factor?

so its actually compensation, not just getting what u paid for

[Banned]

Originally Posted by Kal

so its actually compensation, not just getting what u paid for

I don't actually pay for 1.4k ticks, 8 weeks or whatever of PA, I pay for a round. A round is a unit of PA that begins on one date and ends on another. I realize that not everyone agrees with me, but by the last day I mostly just want it to be over. Even if the extra day will gain me some ranks. If the downtime is extended (the total round downtime exceeds 3-4 days), I agree that some extra time should probably be added, but not a whole week.

[Shyne]

Originally Posted by Banned

I don't actually pay for 1.4k ticks, 8 weeks or whatever of PA, I pay for a round. A round is a unit of PA that begins on one date and ends on another. I realize that not everyone agrees with me, but by the last day I mostly just want it to be over. Even if the extra day will gain me some ranks. If the downtime is extended (the total round downtime exceeds 3-4 days), I agree that some extra time should probably be added, but not a whole week.

I'll reiterate my post, can you honestly say you even want the recompense of the missed time ?

[Anonymous Hero]

Could we also have a list of circumstances in which the game gets stopped/delayed?

Will problems with events outside of the game (such as the recent NetGamers mass gline) always result in delayed ticks? Some people will be annoyed at delayed ticks, others will be annoyed the game wasn't stopped.