anonrerising

BINGO

Since this post will be current until January, thought I'd be salty/have fun with it. Let's see if we get Bingo, shall we?

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To be honest, I don't think they even care about how many people hit the cap, nor how many have the treasure reserves to max, nor how many on average max. It doesn't honestly matter. I have the feeling, that if they do think about it, they look at how the server is handling things NOW, and then go 'hmm, if we add more slots, how badly will it adversely affect the servers'.

Because they can't just go 'oh, only about 40% of players will ever max out slots, so we can raise the cap.' There will always be people who don't max, but that doesn't mean that it will always be only 40% of the players, so they have to plan for 'worse case scenarios' of the majority of players maxing out, and act accordingly. Or at least they should.

Also, as time goes by, that 40% of players, while staying static as a percentage maybe, still means even more and more active accounts who have maxed out their lairs. 40% of 10 accounts is 4 accounts. 40% of 100 accounts is 40 accounts.

So, no it isn't 'serious analytics' but just general 'okay our servers are doing good, we can have a new lair cap!'

And another thing is that if a player maxes their lair space, fills it with dragons, and then goes inactive, those dragons will sit on the server forever. Even if they never raise the cap, the total volume of dragons will be continually increase as new players arrive and old lairs full of dragons go inactive.

Also... I'm pretty sure the site doesn't delete a lot of the data on dragons. You can get full hover details like age and stuff on dragons exalted over 5 years ago.

Then again, depending on how they do the data, it may not take much room there.

Yeah, and I think I have heard that it isn't exalted/dragons on inactive accounts that are really an issue, but the health ticks on active dragons.

So, more space for active dragons = more load on the site, not just more space in general.

op

On that front, what I think I've heard most often is that it's about more about hunger tickdowns than sheer dragon data volume. (As the other poster mentioned, nearly all data is kept on exalted dragons too, only the bios get scrubbed, and more space doesn't directly translate to more dragons being created on a regular basis (that would be extra nests).)

So I don't know if already-starving dragons specifically and/or inactive accounts (which can be assumed to always have starving dragons unless there's recently been a sitewide feed) put any additional load on the server at those times.

But yes, that's another point; it's much more common and lower stakes for a new person to arrive and fill up as many spaces as they cheaply can with pretty dragons, whether they subsequently stick around or get bored never log in again, than for a user who's already sunk tens of millions in treasure for full expansion to get an additional five spaces. And since there's no mechanism to control the former, it seems a bit odd to get hung up on the latter.

op again

I wonder if it would ever be feasible to replace thrice-daily tickdowns with simply losing three points every rollover. Because yeah, if starving dragons 'count' even if they can't tick down any further, the possibility of new account creation means active dragon volume can only ever grow, whether the cap is raised or not. So shifting tickdowns to when the site is inactive anyway might help if there ever starts to be lag at the other two times.

I think the main difference is that someone who comes in and fills up their dragon with cheap dragons, as you said, might not stick around, which means those dragons will quickly 'starve' and thus stop having hunger ticks.

However, that person who has been here 5 years, completely maxed their lair, and will buy more lair slots as soon as they are available, are going to stick around, which means that their lair of 210+ dragons are all, usually, having hunger ticks, being fed, then having hunger ticks again.

Which is why I think they do focus on people with maxed lairs, because they are likely to stick around and be 'part of the problem' (not a real problem) with server load. Because it isn't just five extra spaces, it is the OTHER dragons they already have and all the other spaces they can already fill up with dragons, and adding an extra five spaces just adds to that issue.

As for the hunger ticks at rollover, I am not sure how well that would work, but I do know that they did once (at least I have heard this) all dragons ticking down at the same time, but it got too much for the servers, so it could be that even doing a solid 'three ticks down' at rollover might be too much for the server to handle.

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BINGO

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