Recent Server Work

[Philipp Strecker]

Hello Hunters,

After having focused on the Scent Hound in the recent weeks we are happy to have released the new companion yesterday. Thanks to everyone who gave it a go so far and to those who have been providing feedback. The team is grateful for all the positive comments and they go a long way towards helping recharge our batteries. Also, a big thank to everyone who helped with testing the Scent Hounds during our closed beta. You've done excellent work!

On the other hand, yesterday's released was plagued by issues, disconnects and downtime yet again. In tackling this, we wanted to give you an overview what we've been doing about this in the past and what is to come.

First off, we want to sincerely apologize for the amount of trouble recently. We are working every day on these issues and the overall stability of the game, however it proves difficult, especially translating the work from a very small internal testing area to the rest of the world. This is what presents the biggest challenge for us at the moment.

After moving our servers and services to Google, fixing the statistics and improving download rates, we worked on a couple of backend improvements (the server and database side of things).

• Increased security by enforcing secure connections
• Moving game data (kills, etc.) to a faster database
• Improved performance for checking user missions
• Better cache logic for getting more recent data when performing actions
• Faster server-side fetching of player inventory
• Caching results for frequent web API calls
• Reworked multiplayer game list to be ordered and filtered by the launcher

Most of these changes are barely noticeable for single users but significant for our systems. Saving a couple of milliseconds in response times might not be important for a single instance of the game, but saving them in every running game increases the stability of our systems. We understand that these points are formulated rather vaguely but we can't go into greater detail for various reasons. Not everything works from the get-go as we test internally (team of ca. 20 developers) and it's difficult (if not impossible) to simulate live environments.

Now on to the things that are lined up for future improvements for stability:

• Ordering events in the client code
• Reworking MySQL get connection as it is rather slow
• Better query system for competitions
• Load testing for a current solution that failed yesterday

While working on the Scent Hound we had improvements lined up that were released alongside the dog yesterday. These improvements did not work as intended and it slipped past us due to the testing environment. We rolled back the changes which is why there were disconnections and short outages throughout the European evening. This was investigated further this morning.

Another current suspect is the "Personal Bests" in your statistics. We disabled this function for the moment in order to allow us time to investigate, improve and enable it again once it's fixed.

Still, we are confident in the solutions that we are working on and we are fighting for stability, step by step. We understand how frustrating it is having to end a great hunt without being able to harvest the animals you successfully hunted, or to be timed out during the harvesting process.

We will fix it.

[nachthexe]

That is good to read, on the other hand I had another 2 almost disconnects in a SP game today.

[ru_Wanderer]

thanks for explanations!, tell me please new dogs is on final stages ? or still there will be additions on functionality ?

[Cajunscout]

Thanks Philipp, for the info concerning all that happened yesterday. As I am in the US and work during the bulk of the problems, I see where many are not very happy (putting it mildly) about the events and the down time. Just know that there are some of us out here that do greatly appreciate the work you and the rest of the EW team do, it does not go unnoticed. Please do not get discouraged by all the negative comments that are posted in the heat of angry frustration. Keep up the good work and again thanks for the update.
Happy Hunting
Cajunscout

[Daugr]

Sounds great, good luck with it, devs!

[HooCairs]

Thanks Philipp for standing up and taking a stance on the current issues.

Please consider changing the client so it does not close a game "just" because the server got disconnected. This of course would only be a workaround and only alleviate SP games, but still.

When you say " Better query system for competitions", is this also just a server-side performance improvement, or are you actually providing more functionality for the end users, such as listing competitions by reserve, fixing the Previous Competitions list, etc.?

Thanks for working hard on these issues, tell the team the forum says hello and supports them.

[outrider]

thanks for the update....i am patiently waiting for the return of my "Personal Best"...i can't brag without pic's........................

[METALEAGLE]

Thanks for the info Philipp.Trying to get everything to operate properly in a game server is time consuming and frustrating at times.Having done this in a few myself (adding commands and effects in a personal game server). Most don't understand the time it actually takes.There are some of us out here who do and are very appreciative for all you and the DEVS do. Its not easy when all you get is negative comments about what you are doing.Those of us who understand you can't just push a button and it's all good.On behalf of myself and those who know appreciate your hard work.THANK YOU FOR YOUR HARD WORK AND DEDICATION! Keep it up good job and good luck.

[FR_Bugs]

Thanks for these explanations Philipp.

[Cogsy666]

Thanks for the info. Hopefully we can eventually get back to the stable game we had before WRR at some point