Scout Archive

I think Squid's point is that from day one we have been told, "Missions are for quick play sessions. They should not be your focus." Thunderheart pretty much told us to forget roaming the world and only do missions. That is why it felt like a complete turn around.

The question is did he mean take missions while they look into it, or did he mean it like he said it and the design philosophy has changed? He did post the other day that they think something else might be up, so maybe that is good news. (If nothing else, they are looking into it.)

Not new to me, although I am glad to see a firm number and that it is made public so everyone can be aware of the limitation.

Once they sort through the problems, there might still be a lack of game due to existing spawns. It would be nice if they had some sort of despawning mechanism to remove inactive spawns. Otherwise they can sit there all day, reserving that space. Something like this could make the planets look more populated than they are again.

Inactive spawns - Once spawned, a lair or hidden lair is placed with x number of creatures attached to it. If no one is nearby, it is "despawned" or made inactive, but still holds on to those assigned creatures in case someone comes by. This is why you can leave a spawn then return to it to find the lair and creatures healed, different baby/adult ratios and other oddities. These are the problem (or one of them).

The trick is to allow enough time so that these inactive spawns are truely abandoned, not because someone cloned, lost connection or passed by going to another mission. Any timers need to be long enough to allow for these events but short enough to recycle the lair.

Now if the system is supposed to do this, I would say it is broken and this needs to be looked into.

but take into account that almost everyone has speeders now, so that each person that trips a spawn will make the spawn visible for X amount of minutes. In this case the more traffic the worse the lag because of all the tripped random spawns.

Another thing to look into is the pure number of gamers on at a single time. This system works great in a single player game in which a singler person touches off a spawn and can move away and cause the spawn to disappear, but what about when there are around 500 people all at once tripping off spawns randomly?

The spawn system itself wouldn't change, because that is how it works now. Kill (or despawn) one, a new one pops up somewhere.

It is entirely possible that on highly populated planet that there are more than 1000 spawns because of mission takers. They force the limit to be exceeded and that is where the lag comes in. Under those conditions, new random spawns would not be appearing.

It is the despawning that would be new. That allows for the planets that are not over-populated to have spawns "move" with the players.

There are two problems that I would see with adding this system:

1) It would take additional resources to track the spawns to know to despawn them. For 1000 spawns though, that is a miniscule amount of CPU time and database access if coded properly.

2) Enough players may pass through a given area to keep resetting the active timer on a lair. Ones far out in the boonies would not have this problem, but the "ring of death" might return. That would be the major hurdle to cross.