Conquer Club

this lag is so fucking awful. you cant even play 1 minute games? i have a super fast computer. this lag is 7 seconds half of my attacks. i try to auto attack, and i dont know if the lag has seen or knew it, so i hit it again, and bam, i cant move cuz it thinks i wanted to transfer no troops. why in the f*ck is the right click hold your troops and left is move them? that is ridiculous.

freestyle games like others have said are pretty much donezo.

i don't play speed and i've even noticed the lag increasing. apparently new servers are en route. but, i'll believe it when i see it…

i've wondered if the bot games are the cause? i've recently played 8 player bot games and can imagine that it might lead to increased demands on the servers? then again, i'm no technical expert.

This reminds me of an old Yogi Berra quote, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

I remember from my old days working for the "Multi-Player Games Network." Originally, (around 1990) we were connected through the dial in facilities of Compuserve. We used to charge a per minute fee. The more people used the system, the more money we got. Then came the evil world wide web (honestly, you never saw "Re-boot?") and with it the evil notion of a "flat fee" for service. Pay the "flat fee" and you could bang the hell out of our servers all you want, and we received all of the inconvenience and none of the additional benefits to upgrade equipment.

Now I am not saying that this site should go back to the glory online days of per minute charges (or - gasp - the notion of a fee per speed game), but this is a horrid fact of life. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If everyone attempts to saturate the system with a plethora of speed games, the system is going to slow down. Faster systems may be installed in the future, but that could just as well be like adding a few more lanes to the crowded highway, the highway still continues to become just as crowded but now even more people are in the traffic jam.

tzor wrote:This reminds me of an old Yogi Berra quote, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

I remember from my old days working for the "Multi-Player Games Network." Originally, (around 1990) we were connected through the dial in facilities of Compuserve. We used to charge a per minute fee. The more people used the system, the more money we got. Then came the evil world wide web (honestly, you never saw "Re-boot?") and with it the evil notion of a "flat fee" for service. Pay the "flat fee" and you could bang the hell out of our servers all you want, and we received all of the inconvenience and none of the additional benefits to upgrade equipment.

Now I am not saying that this site should go back to the glory online days of per minute charges (or - gasp - the notion of a fee per speed game), but this is a horrid fact of life. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If everyone attempts to saturate the system with a plethora of speed games, the system is going to slow down. Faster systems may be installed in the future, but that could just as well be like adding a few more lanes to the crowded highway, the highway still continues to become just as crowded but now even more people are in the traffic jam.

yeah... this is all great, except you are missing out on some of the important aspects... CC now has 1/2 the membership it had a few years ago when lag was not an issue... increased new doo-hookies are more than likely the cause of the lag... when lack updated, he could not have foreseen what Big Wham was going to do with the site, so the servers are not adequate. B Wham is updating the servers to fit more in tune with what his vision of what this site should be... i'm being patient and waiting for the new servers... and another point you missed... freestyle is dead... we used to have an insane amount of freestyle speed games on this site and that has all but vanished... back then, with 22K members, there was no lag on speed freestyle games. now, with new freestyle rules having ruined freestyle, even with the reduced number of games, there is insane lag... again, i'm being patient and giving BW a chance... he has a vision and is sticking to it...-Jésus noir

tzor wrote:This reminds me of an old Yogi Berra quote, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

I remember from my old days working for the "Multi-Player Games Network." Originally, (around 1990) we were connected through the dial in facilities of Compuserve. We used to charge a per minute fee. The more people used the system, the more money we got. Then came the evil world wide web (honestly, you never saw "Re-boot?") and with it the evil notion of a "flat fee" for service. Pay the "flat fee" and you could bang the hell out of our servers all you want, and we received all of the inconvenience and none of the additional benefits to upgrade equipment.

Now I am not saying that this site should go back to the glory online days of per minute charges (or - gasp - the notion of a fee per speed game), but this is a horrid fact of life. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If everyone attempts to saturate the system with a plethora of speed games, the system is going to slow down. Faster systems may be installed in the future, but that could just as well be like adding a few more lanes to the crowded highway, the highway still continues to become just as crowded but now even more people are in the traffic jam.

But somehow "equipment" has advanced since the 1990s. It seems that your 'fact' doesn't hold in reality.* Regarding the bottlenecks of internet systems, I'd hold the municipally granted and federally enforced monopoly privileges for ISPs and the price controls through regulation largely responsible.

*Although pricing is difficult, the various uses of the service (speed, 24-hour) can be bundled within a flat rate. Within the firm, it depends on how well they discount the future costs of such services into the present value of a flat rate. Many firms take the easier route of separating speed from the 24-hour service. Depending on their success, they'll have the incentive to upgrade equipment. (Note: this is an ongoing process).

External to the firm, there's market demand which is CC's main problem that in my opinion won't be sufficiently addressed by capital improvements (e.g. stuff that makes the site faster).

owenshooter wrote:yeah... this is all great, except you are missing out on some of the important aspects... CC now has 1/2 the membership it had a few years ago when lag was not an issue...

Membership in and of itself is not an issue. You need to look at the majority of the games and you need to see the number of people actively playing the games that determine the stress on the servers. I would suspect that the majority of players played regular games and probably checked on the status of the game once or twice a day and probably only took a turn every other day or so depending on the number of players and their locations around the globe.

Today you have a lot of players probably playing bot games, and the same number of players playing speed games at any one time. This is the stress that hits the servers.

owenshooter wrote:freestyle is dead... we used to have an insane amount of freestyle speed games on this site and that has all but vanished... back then, with 22K members, there was no lag on speed freestyle games.

Please define "insane." Also please define "no lag." Perhaps my mind is playing tricks, but I recall a lot of "lag" threads in the old days.

BigBallinStalin wrote:But somehow "equipment" has advanced since the 1990s. It seems that your 'fact' doesn't hold in reality. Regarding the bottlenecks of internet systems, I'd hold the municipally granted and federally enforced monopoly privileges for ISPs and the price controls through regulation largely responsible.

Of course equipment has advanced, and so has everything else. the quality of the games we offered then, the amount of network traffic required back then, are all minuscule compared to the amount of data that even a simple game session here sends out. But you are missing the point. My argument is that increasing the number of people on the system doesn't automatically give the financial benefits to increase the amount of equipment to handle the additional load. This is especially true when not everyone is even paying the flat rate in the first place.

I'm not sure how you can keep repeating your contradictory stance, so I'll leave it at that.

BigBallinStalin wrote:I'm not sure how you can keep repeating your contradictory stance, so I'll leave it at that.

Stop being so contrary.

BigBallinStalin wrote:I'm not sure how you can keep repeating your contradictory stance, so I'll leave it at that.

I think he's making a straightforward rebound effect argument: make using an internet service cheaper, and people will use the internet service more, which makes it more costly to provide the service, negating at least some of the initial benefit.

If I can leak the confidential information...... We are only DAYS away (provided everything holds firm)

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Metsfanmax wrote:

BigBallinStalin wrote:I'm not sure how you can keep repeating your contradictory stance, so I'll leave it at that.

I think he's making a straightforward rebound effect argument: make using an internet service cheaper, and people will use the internet service more, which makes it more costly to provide the service, negating at least some of the initial benefit.

So, like I said, what's missing from that story are price adjustments.

But he's also claiming how the greater quantity demanded stifles innovation (implicitly because somehow firms aren't adjusting prices to incorporate the different types of services).

BigBallinStalin wrote:

Metsfanmax wrote:

BigBallinStalin wrote:I'm not sure how you can keep repeating your contradictory stance, so I'll leave it at that.

I think he's making a straightforward rebound effect argument: make using an internet service cheaper, and people will use the internet service more, which makes it more costly to provide the service, negating at least some of the initial benefit.

So, like I said, what's missing from that story are price adjustments.

That may be true from a short term net revenue perspective. But if CC wants to retain its customer base, it cannot substantially increase the price of membership (unless the benefits provided for that additional price are disproportionately large, to make up for the trend that CC is fighting against). And that customer base is, I think, the key for long-term revenue.

I think he's missing a different part of the story. CC has half as many active players as it used to have, but somehow only now we need to replace the servers? Unless bw has introduced some stuff that is extremely network intensive, my bet is that it can mostly be explained by aging servers.

BigBallinStalin wrote:I'm not sure how you can keep repeating your contradictory stance, so I'll leave it at that.

It's not contradictory. I have plenty of contradictory stances and this is not one of them. Some of my best stances are contradictory, in fact.

...

I should also point out that without knowing both the demand curve and the lag curve I can only vaguely speculate on demand. Is the particular problem network driven, load driven, or even hard disk driven because after years of use the disk is so fragmented that you have to look everywhere in order to get the information on a given game that you need in order to return all the necessary game information. Working with databases for a living, I know it's really easy for one of them to start to slow down over time as demand increases even slightly. In some cases upgrades can give dramatic improvements.

come on guys cut BBS some slack.

he's still putting the pieces together after hurricane saxi

"insane amount" equals a lot of fucking people playing freestyle speed games all the time. i cant find any freestyle games to play right now. even at 9 o clock est. there were always 8 player esc freestyle classic games. always. now this is like a ghost town. if membership is cut in half since i left. double that number for the amount of speed freestyle games. also, add 50 percent of that number that wont play due to lag. and throw in another 20 percent for the new rules effect.

that should equate to insane...

i just had a full 60 second lag to miss my first turn in a speed game which resulted in a loss...

TeeGee wrote:If I can leak the confidential information...... We are only DAYS away (provided everything holds firm)

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Oh lawdy. I hope so.

Butters1919 wrote:i've wondered if the bot games are the cause?

yup

Well, it's public now.
New servers will be running as of Monday (or late Sunday depending on your time zone)

I'd say the vast majority of people coming here are looking for instant action. They sign up, apply for a guide game, and then leave, or perhaps take one turn. Many people are looking for the Risk games they used to play on Facebook. The market perhaps isn't huge (Zynga shut down Attack, after all), but there are enough people around to keep CC running.

macbone wrote:I'd say the vast majority of people coming here are looking for instant action. They sign up, apply for a guide game, and then leave, or perhaps take one turn. Many people are looking for the Risk games they used to play on Facebook. The market perhaps isn't huge (Zynga shut down Attack, after all), but there are enough people around to keep CC running.

well, thats encouraging. thank you for that.

look out for the CC app on facebook

TeeGee wrote:look out for the CC app on facebook

i just have no comment on this... none whatsoever...-Jésus noir

p.s.- interesting article on Zynga (they actually made some money) http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gami ... /16952815/