Politician Archive
Thread: Theory on why so long update times (error message)
We just had a 2 day long update time ("error" Message in City Terminal as to next update while no Mail or XP) ... after these 2 days mails and XP came like regular.
I'm still unsure as to how this whole update thing works. I originaly though you have 7 days after your city update, and as different cities have different set-up times it should mean you get your update at seperate times ... but .. apparently you get it at the same time the other cities get it.
In example ... our city was the first on the server *Yipiee* 
... so in theory we should have gotten our update ahead of everybody else ... but standing at the politician trainer the first few updates (until I had the skill to place my own politician trainer ... "with blackjack and hookers" O-Ton Bender if you don't realise it 
) I noticed that every mayor there seamed to get their XP at the exact same time. Which makes me wonder if all the Cities are connected in this update process and the update routine has to wait until every single city on the server had it's update time pass to finaly calculate XP and Maintenaince etc.
Of course now that multiple cities are new and have been created at totaly different times this update time (when you get the error message) might take a lot longer than when no new towns have been set. Maybe this is also what caused the "Multiple Update" Bug which has apparantly appeared serverspecific (first Gorath, now Ahazi as I recall)
Does anybody else have a clue about this?
What you said makes sense. From a programming aspect, they could do a few things..
1) make the update occur when the city hall is loaded (ie. someone enters landblock
2) make the update occur when the city hall terminal is loaded (ie. someone enters city hall)
3) make the update occur as part of the next maintenance cycle.
4) make the update occur during a daily scheduled 'City Update' (may happen multiple times a day)
5) make the update occur for all cities during a weekly update.
Personally, I think its supposed to be option #4. If its taking longer, it may be a bug in how it calculates game-up time, not actual time. The terminal time is displayed in real time, the update occurs at a different time however. Ie. we lose an hour or two with server loads, and must re-wait for those after every update. I'm basing this on the fact that our hall was placed thursday afternoon. last update occurred Friday night ... and now this week it was scheduled for saturday morning.. If that's correct then approx 2 hours * 7 days = approx 14 hours extra time to wait. So if that theory is correct then our update should occur at 9:30 + 14:00 hours = 23:30pm. We shall see.
