We really need to talk about this now.
The structure of the events necessitates that everone log on at exactly the same time to avoid danger of losing overall total games to play, and also to beat other players in tie breaks (I am fighting for 5th place right now so I get the chance for a Deploy the Gatewatch rather than a load of old crap).
To avoid these problems everybody has to start playing immediately at the start of the event, and then again when their final nodes respawn. As a result, server load always, predictably, goes up at these times, and often causes problems, from temporary lag to an outright crash of the game which requires ‘A Maintenance’.
I suspect that even the Americans have been badly affected by todays A Maintenance, as they will have just got out of bed and will need to clear their nodes after a night’s sleep.
The structure of the event can EASILY be changed to avoid this problem. Firstly, do not start with the nodes full. Give everybody 12 hours to start playing their games. I know, I know, it’s important for you to instill Pavlovian reactions in your user base because you want them to keep playing because of the addictiveness of the system (and not because the game is ‘fun’ or any nonsense like that), but believe me, you’ve accomplished that now. We spend all day on Slack talking about nothing but this game. You should join! You might learn something. We talk a lot about MPQ. Have you ever played it?
Secondly, do not rank players above other players who have the same number of points for prize purposes. Again, I know why you’re doing this, the benevolent dev team have been beaten into submission by their evil corporate overlords who won’t allow them to give out any more prizes, and giving everyone prizes for the higest rank they are tied into would cause this. So why not just give everyone who is tied prizes for the lowest rank? You know you’re shafting us, we know you’re shafting us, you might as well be honest about it.
Thirdly… Oh, I don’t know. This isn’t my damn job. You think of something. What percentage of your team gets called off content creation every time your server falls over? Think of your bottom line!
