Politician Archive
Thread: Give me more room!
I realy can not see ANY reason why a town should not have a larger area as its designated zone if it has enough citizens, that does not impinge on database size because it does not mean more buildings, just that they can be more spread out - thats even going to improve client performance!
If the database is realy hosed and cannot deal with all the extra gardens, fountains etc. then fine but as it stands my village simply does not have room for the gardens etc. to which it is entitled. We had to insist that factories were moved out of city limits to make room for more citizens, a PA hall and an aquarium, but thats it, we are full - small houses only for new citizens and no more than 6 or 7 without reorganisation to cram everyone together which we don't want.
Also I cannot see any reason why a village cannot be a good place for crafters to work, or why it can't have an improved job market etc. No specialisations work till size 3 and there can be no good reason for this.
aachil wrote:
My village was created in the second wave but has never grown beyond 2. We now have enough citizens for a size 4 city, I've not even been spending exp because there is no benefit to the skill tree unless you have a size 3 or bigger town.
I realy can not see ANY reason why a town should not have a larger area as its designated zone if it has enough citizens, that does not impinge on database size because it does not mean more buildings, just that they can be more spread out - thats even going to improve client performance!
If the database is realy hosed and cannot deal with all the extra gardens, fountains etc. then fine but as it stands my village simply does not have room for the gardens etc. to which it is entitled. We had to insist that factories were moved out of city limits to make room for more citizens, a PA hall and an aquarium, but thats it, we are full - small houses only for new citizens and no more than 6 or 7 without reorganisation to cram everyone together which we don't want.
Also I cannot see any reason why a village cannot be a good place for crafters to work, or why it can't have an improved job market etc. No specialisations work till size 3 and there can be no good reason for this.
I've posted this before in other threads asking this same question. It is not just an issue of DB bloat with more and more objects being on the servers. If it was as simple as that, they would remove all the crap CDEF loot from the game.
The issue with city sizes is system process speed and time. We have all seen already how various things occuring on the server cause lag... vendors taking forever to load up an inventory view, warping when you get off your speederbikebecause the server didn't realise you had gotten off until it calculated your new location, mob spawns not loading until you run past them... a million things.
The lag causing issue of cities is the nice little message you see each time you enter or leave the city limits. "You are now entering Vicimus", "You are now leaving Vicimus". These messages are handled by code that needs to figure out where absolutely every object is on the server so it can calculate things like citizen counts, city taxes, /citywarn (the code is still there, the command is just disabled)and /cityban issues, GCW issues, Imperial crackdown issues, mob spawn issues, etc etc etc. All these things related to player cities need to be calculated continually. The larger the city, the more objects to calculate and sift through. The more objects to sift through, the slower the server runs and more lags spikes that occur. The more lag spikes that occur, the more lag that occurs like my second paragraph above, and also as tested by the DEVs, the more server crashes that occur.
It may not seem like a big deal to you to have your city be 400m radius instead of 200, but for the server, that is horrendous. Now, add in all the other cities that want to be larger and instead of just lag, we'll have continual downtimes.
I'm not defending the way the player city code was made or how efficient it runs or how well the database handles wasted useless items loading in cities. I am pointing out that this has been tested already and the current city size caps are there because they are the limit of what the servers can handle. Any more and the servers risk recurring restarts.
It is better for SOE to limit the number of player cities at various sizes than to have to deal with 100,000 ranting customers because the server is always down because it crashed. You would be one of those customers.
Message Edited by Korrack on 04-06-2004 09:04 AM
The server does not keep track of every item at all times. It considers only items that are called by a client (hence buildings take a while to load if your the first into an area and vendors dont appear on the map until they are visited etc.). E.g citizen count is caried out once per week - the server only pays attention to who lives in the town at that time, city taxes are paid when the building is refreshed (e.g. if your city is empty for 6 hours then the first person to tour the town will trigger 6 hours of building maintainance and tax payment).
Korrack wrote:...These messages are handled by code that needs to figure out where absolutely every object is on the server so it can calculate things like citizen counts, city taxes,
Simply put: your wrong.
When the Dev's introuduced this planetary cap they said, specificaly, that it was because of the number of buildings that cities could support. To avoid hosing the database with thousands of civic structures, they introduced two measures at the same time to address this: a cap of civic structures for each town size and a cap on town size per planet. Perhapse this was a lie and the truth is that due to bad coding cities are treated in some odd way that leans toward your explanation (i.e. unlike most other stuff in game player cities behave diferently).
If you were to argue that more space alocated would encourage more civic buildings then I could see the argument, but is a minor consideration, at least from the perspective of most of the 45 people who reside in our town. There are not many towns in such a situation and most of them will already have the max number of civic structures.
The wag who sugested we were dumb to start anywhere but Rori:
We had 18 people when we set up the town, we have attacted people who are *new to the game*, at least ten people have started playing (at least partly) because of our town. Its dumb to penalise our sucess but to reward the jerks who set up cross server agreements to keep their Rori city going (Rori is packed solid with ghost towns).
Furthermore...
Given the unreasonable cap on city size it is out of order to gimp Mayors of small cities, my city has a big population but I cant use city specialisations, the crafters go to the next town to make stuff, but of course they cant get a house in that town because its full (not that they would want to).
I cannot see ANY reason why specialisations cannot be applied to vilages or even outposts.
1) one star my posts
2) flame me
3) inacurate, unsubstantiated (indeed absurd) statements about how the server code is writen
4) no attempt to engage in the arguments
I assume that this is another elitist forum and the residents here simply dont care about thoes who are not 'l33t' enough to have loged on at whatever hour of the morning was required to build a decent sized city.
The size cap impacts most on the area you have but the *reason* for it is the extra gardens and other 'server objects' that would need to load each day.
Answer this:
Why cant I have city specialisations?
45 citizens, master politician (if I spend the exp and SP, which there is zero reson to do).
Please entertain me with some 'reason' that this would break the servers and cause endless down time.
I realy, realy don't want to propose anything that would harm the enjoyment of other people, I'm not selfishly demanding a raise in the city cap or more city furniture because I know that thoes things *would* require more server load time and would have client performance issues in some situations, what I want is something that would have no effect on the servers but would benefit the residents of many player cities (villages).