game id: 16386

BaronHelix was flagged by the game as being unresponsive however he does not appear to have been lagging.  On his end he saw the game window as having been closed.  To the rest of the players he was still shown in the game list however the game had instructed us he would have to be kicked to continue.  We waited for some time to see if the issue would resolve but it did not.

An alternative but similar idea to hex plots.

How about reducing the EOS bonus but allowing plots diagonally connected to factor in to EOS?

This would reduce the dominance of EOS while still leaving just enough bite that your opponents have to consider breaking things up in the land grab.

Here's my idea on how the NPC Store Buyer might play the auctions if it comes in as a seller.  This could be shown better in a flow chart but I'm not able to make one at the moment, so I'll try and type it out

- Establish a base price for each commodity, 75% of stock is sold at this price.

- If more than 75% of that rounds stock is purchased then the store bumps up to tier 2 pricing.

- If more than 85% of that rounds stock is purchased then the store bumps up to tier 3 pricing.

- If more than 95% of that rounds stock is purchased then the store might holds its remaining stock for the
next round if demand for the product is likely to be greater the next round.

- If no sales are made when 75% of the time has expired the store will cut its price in half and sell 25% of its stock at a discount.  It will then start to step up the price again.

- Base price is adjusted for the next round after production occurs and demand is estimated.

Buying would be a similar process where it is willing to buy a certain amount at a premium price however as its stock fills up it would adjust its buying price downward until it hits a base price at which it will buy any amount.  This limitless buying at a base price is justified because it can be assumed in a galactic market that it can always sell anything if it is able to buy cheap enough.

Currently the store doesn't fully participate in auctions.  It sets a static price and can always be counted on to buy and, if it has product, to sell.

How about adding an NPC to represent the store in auctions?  This would make it hard to starve the store since it could race for goods the same as players.  I could see the NPC being used in two ways.  It could replace the current buy/sell mechanic for the store entirely.  Alternatively the NPC may only come out when the store is out of a given product and thus it is willing to compete with players for limited resources.

Additional Players:

I like the idea of 6 players though I think you would need a larger map to support 8 players.


Game Speed:

I would like to see a method to skip game phases such that if all players choose to skip you don't have to wait for the clock to wind down.

I've seen this behavior in a couple games on 1.2

Cheating with a firewall or similar is certainly a possibility however I have seen it happen in normal game play.  When this happened with me as the host I noticed the game window was frozen however the chat window worked fine.  This let me know I could communicate with all the players fine.  Additionally a PING of the clients returned a reasonable response time as well.  In all cases I have seen the game continue normally after a time however it usually resulted in one or more players timing out before the game resumed.  I don't think the games function for monitoring client lag accounts for instances when the host itself is running slow, hung, etc.

Sounds to me like something was happening on your end of the spectrum, like a very bad lag spike or connection dropout.

The log file indicates acceptable ping times.  I've played with people pinging around 200ms without interupting the game, everyone was well under that.  Also if it had been an issue of client lag the game should have self resolved this through the GameController.checkReadyTimeout function.

  INFO [GameController.beginNextPhase]               --------- COLONY_EVENT_B #10 --------------------------------------------------------
  INFO [Server.logRoundtrip]                         Roundtrips: <P10 P12> 15ms <P11> 109ms <P13> 78ms
  INFO [Client.logRoundtripTime]                     Client: Roundtrip time is 15 ms
  INFO [ColonyEventPhase.begin]                      ColonyEvent: PIRATE_SHIP

Update:

It took it a few minutes, but it came out of the freeze from the ignored update and finished the game off after that.  The only oddity I noticed was that in round 11 production phase a crystite strike happened however the animation for it didn't play.  The game board tile changed and you heard the audio, but you didn't see the meteor flying in.

Also player dkovar and kevlar said they had seen this happen in another game they played.  I don't know which game it was, but a review of recently abandoned games may show game logs with similar behavior.

Update:

It only resumed for a short time.  It made it through the auction phase however the whole application seems to be frozen when auctions were finished and the next round was set to start.

  INFO [MasterClient.logSend]                        MasterClient: Sending Round Results
  INFO [MasterClient.logSend]                        MasterClient: Sending Round Results
  INFO [MasterClient.logSend]                        MasterClient: Sending Round Results
  INFO [MasterClient.logSend]                        MasterClient: Sending Round Results
  INFO [MasterClient.logSend]                        MasterClient: Sending Finish Round
  INFO [MasterClient.logSend]                        MasterClient: Sending Game Chat Log
  INFO [MasterClient.logSend]                        MasterClient: Sending Game Log
  SEVERE [MuleGameContainer.run]                     Ignored update

Update:

Once all clients disconnected (only AI left) the game resumed.  So the game was not crashed however something in client/server communication seems to have been stuck in a loop.

Game: http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=14315
Type: Online tournament
State: Running (as of 4:48PM PST)

Abstract:  Visually the game window froze after "[ColonyEventPhase.begin] ColonyEvent: PIRATE_SHIP" however the server reflects some activity after this event regarding "SEVERE [GameController.checkReadyTimeout]" for a player timeout.  I'm going to leave the game in its running state for as long as I can in case that will help to show why it is hung.

@Intergalactic Mole
My thoughts exactly.  The server has never been over run with traffic any time that I've connected so I don't have a need to set one up now.  However down the road if they pulled the plug it would be nice to be able to slap up a server on a cheap slice server or something.

@Lomgren
Thanks for the follow up on skinning the game.  When I'm able I'll have to plow through the *.jar file and see what I can come up with.

Will the software for the Master Server be released at some point?

The game seems to be setup for custom skins.  Is there any documentation on this?