Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Dannan]

Dear Bobik,

I'm not sure the best way to contact you directly. If this letter is in the wrong place please remove it.

Firstly and most importantly, I am a massive fan of LiF. Pretty soon I will pass 2,000 hours in game. I have been running a server ([AU/NZ] Realm of Fury) for over three months now, and though its been busy, its been very enjoyable. I speak regularly with fellow players about how good this game already is, and how much potential it still has. It is unique, it is the game many of us have been waiting for.

In Australia/New Zealand the game has done well, at one point there was probably about 50 servers downunder, and quite a few of them regularly had double figure populations. As LiF:YO has consolidated over the last six or seven months and total servers and players number have declined, AU/NZ is down to about 15 servers, and only two typically get to double figures, one of them being Realm of Fury. RoF has reached 38 population, and over the last month regularly goes past 30 people on the server during peak periods. Some of the players who are regularly on RoF have reported from time to time it being in the top five world wide for server population.

Server members have reported several reasons for RoF's popularity amongst players downunder:
1. Relatively low skill cap, at 1400 its lower than most servers, and players who are looking forward to the MMO appreciate that
2. A really great core group of players, helpful, experienced, and always up for a fight
3. Active GM
4. Good server events (animal hunts, arena events, etc) with big prizes
5. Server Admin is making a big effort to limit the potential for lag

The last point is probably the biggest draw card, for the simple reason that many players have experienced the frustration of seeing a server they have been building on for many hours become unplayable because of lag. What efforts have been made on RoF to limit the potential for lag? Mining and tunneling have been banned, and have only occurred to a very limited degree. Infinity piles are not only encouraged, I have personally gone out and set up at least 25 of them, with 10 materials in each including iron, copper and silver ores. The server has been cleaned once of all trees of Q3 and under, which removed about 35% of the rows in the forest Table, including all stumps. The server encourages limiting the number of tree logs lying around, and I have spent hours helping this situation. Decay is on.

Despite these efforts, a few weeks ago during peak period Friday night, we began to experience regular lag spikes sufficient enough to make play very difficult. I checked for mining activity (it was not morning lag) but there was no evidence of any. I then asked everyone who was terraforming to stop for ten minutes. The lag stopped. Since then the incidence of terraforming resulting in server wide lag appears to be getting worse. It has been happening with less players on the server, at times when overall Internet use in AU/NZ can be expected to be lower. We are just at the point where we are looking forward to holding large scale battles and sieges, we are looking forward to some major combined arms combat. But the spectre of lag-induced unplayability is hanging over us.

So when I saw the latest vlog in which you asked admins to be be brave and allow tunneling, I winced. We are at the point where I sometimes have to ask players to stop terraforming for a while, just so the game remains playable for those on the server. Players are at times now giving up and logging off, even though they are very keen to build and do tasks. I invite you to come to our server and check it out for yourself. Our geo_patch table is > 800k rows, skill_raise_logs nearly 500k, forest_patch approaching 300k, and objects_patch > 100k.

Please, we want so badly for this game to do well, we want so badly to have our cities and villages functional and our players to be participating in wars and sieges. You have done excellent work so far in this game, and have built up a lot of trust that ultimately problems will be worked out. We need reassurance that the problems contributing to lag issues will be sorted out, and your desire for admins to allow tunneling comes across as being ignorant of the issues we are facing. I tried doing some tunneling in the early days of the server, when geo_patch was < 50k rows. The three other people on the server at the time begged me to stop because of the lag spikes it produced.

Thank you for your time,

Dannan (aka Scarsbane).

[DaVinchi]

As a member of this server. Id like to back up Scars words. I am nearing 1000 hours but my last 10 hours have been riddled with rage quits over lagging issues which have made the game unplayable. you may assume it was peak time, lots of players and etc, etc, but last time was at 6 players online at 10:45am on a Monday morning.

Other times the server runs fine, but then we all know when the server is calculating crop growth, tree growth, barn spawns, etc due to the horrible laggy response that occurs at this time for about 3-5 minutes.

I am really hoping the devs can fix this as im sure we are not the only server that is complaining about this game breaking issue. Whats the point riding a horse if it doesn't move when you finally do get on it!

DaVinchi

[Alakar]

You are already experiencing major lag at only 800,000 lines? May I ask what kind of server you run on? I have never really noticed or had noticeable lag from terraforming except on large cascades even around the 2,000,000 line mark. I too would like to allow tunneling and in preparation for our wipe after character customization patch. Though without a real way to remove them, unfortunately, I will have to probably leave the ban in place too.

-Alakar
http://arkhaya.com/

PS - What we really need now is a way to condense the geo_patch and how to figure out the right CRC values for it once you cut out something and re-sequence it.

[Dannan]

You are already experiencing major lag at only 800,000 lines? May I ask what kind of server you run on? I have never really noticed or had noticeable lag from terraforming except on large cascades even around the 2,000,000 line mark. I too would like to allow tunneling and in preparation for our wipe after character customization patch. Though without a real way to remove them, unfortunately, I will have to probably leave the ban in place too.

Hi Alakar, thanks for your response. The only LiF approved server to have an Australian based operation is Blackbox. I have played about 800 hours of LiF on Blackbox-based servers and have been unimpressed, mining/tunneling problems were severe. I've been in touch with Australian based people who have paid for servers on Blackbox and the reviews aren't good. Comments on this forum add to concerns.

With that in mind I did my own research. I ended up going with clanhosting, a smaller local operation. Their customer service has been outstanding, and the server has run very well, all things considered. Compared to Aussie-based Blackbox servers that I have played on it has withstood more building and terraforming than I have seen before and still runs well much of the time. That is of course provided that no one mines or tunnels and everyone is patient for 2-3 minutes during morning lag.

The ironic thing is a lot of the players on the server are looking forward to the challenge of no more Infinity Piles, but at the moment this is impossible.

[Azzerhoden]

This was just discussed on the Oakheart server. Lag spikes based on terraforming are still prevalent. Impacts game play.

[Alakar]

Ah I see, that is a common theme among all the hosting providers out there it seems like. That is why I went with a full dedicated server for us. Recently switched to OVH for ours. If you are able to get away from the "hosting providers" do so!

-Alakar

[Azzerhoden]

Ah I see, that is a common theme among all the hosting providers out there it seems like. That is why I went with a full dedicated server for us. Recently switched to OVH for ours. If you are able to get away from the "hosting providers" do so!

-Alakar

Hmm, interesting. I am slowing working on setting up a dedicated public server. Wonder if I should speed up the process to test further.

[DaVinchi]

I'm not sure what you guys are paying if your AUS hosted or US hosted. but Looking around at dedicated server hosted services they are charging $150-$250 per month for entry level servers. ie small processors with 8 gig ram. Which not being involved in hosting myself id assume is big enough.. The next level up 16gig of ram is $250-$350 per month. Not sure how you would expect people to run these kind of servers. considering the current hosting providers like clanhosting or blackbox is around the $30-$50 per month.

[Alakar]

$109 a month for

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1620v2 4c/8t 3,7 GHz+/3,9 GHz+
RAM: 64 GB DDR3 ECC 1600MHz

+ $25 a month for Windows Server 2012 License

So $134 a month. Also running an Ark Survival Server and one of our friend's Minecraft servers on it + webserver + mailserver + MySQL on it. Only using about 20% of RAM and peaking around 30-45% on CPU at times.

-Alakar

[DaVinchi]

Who with? Alakar?