Fix Lag please.
Problem statement:
Every player suffers from lag at some point. Fleets are lost, with players left frustrated and annoyed, at you. Many players will simply log off and stop playing at that point, after all, why risk another fleet. There is no incentive to coin that repair if you are farming - and those that do will be left with a bitter taste. I literally just had this happen and lost and entire rag hellfire fleet. For nothing. End result for you - no coin from me for next 7 hours. That's 7 hours of play time where I may have made a mistake flying and coined it because I was responsible for incurring the repair time.
You may have it in your core business that you 'want to monetize emotions, good and bad', but I don't think this would fall under that category, even if it does appear that you are indifferent to addressing the issue. I believe this is mainly an issue of priorities.
Solution:
In a nutshell, improve your net code. There are lots of ideas listed in old posts, but to try and remember some ideas:
1. In disconnects on PVE, put battle 'on hold' for max 5 mins. That should be enough time for player to reconnect.
2. In disconnects on PVP, apply the same, but any other fleets / comms are frozen till reconnect to stop someone exploiting and using the time to take a counter over. There are still loopholes there where alliances fit in the picture. Perhaps even only apply to PVE in short term.
3. Offload PVE to player devices to some extent. That would reduce load on servers in peak time. Who cares if someone cheats on a 27? It's not like it's a real problem with so many insta fleets out there. At the same time, prioritize PVP on the combat servers. You worry about security of end devices sending in fake battle reports, but 27 and below should be low risk - and you can always have some basic checks like number of concurrent fights reported, res cost repairing etc.
4. Review and see if you can improve / reduce amount traffic.
5. Add better latency support. Up to 3 min within battle. Maybe fail over to device side if disconnected and upload battle track log to server for later analysis.
Comments and concerns:
Yes, this is probably well down the priority list because it does not generate revenue. On the other hand, you are losing some spend, and the fact that most players have such apathy to the problem really shows how the community thinks you work. I know there are at least a few who think this is deliberate on your part in order to get coin spend. Your reputation is as a money grabbing company, and it is reinforced with this problem not being addressed for so long. If you do address it, you will have much happier user base, potentially better spending and improve trust with the community.
Lag would be easy to fix by getting more servers but servers cost money so we get bare minimum.
Many of these suggestions simply aren't applicable. For instance, "add[ing] more servers" isn't a useful suggestion because we don't operate our servers in-house. Our servers scale dynamically, like almost every major enterprise server application. The sad fact is that the majority of lag is attributable to issues before a player's signal reaches the servers.
I do like the PvE battle hold idea, and I'll be sure to pass that on to the team.
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