Darkfall: How to Fix the Queue
The long queue times are a product of three main problems. One can be fixed with money, and the other two with a little creativity. Because the queue times suck, people stay in the game and go AFK instead of logging out. Because people stay in the game instead of logging out, the queue times suck. It’s self-fulfilling. Plus, people often go AFK and macro using an external program or simply use in-game mechanics (like auto-running into a wall to train Run) to advance while AFK. But these problems can be fixed!
The first–and most obvious–solution is to throw more hardware at the server and improve the server technology. This is neither cheap nor easy, but is something that will help the game over the long term. If they have the money to do it, they should. If they don’t, they can still take some major strides in the direction of reducing queues and lag for all players.
The worst of the problems is players going AFK in the game and never being disconnected. Darkfall does not disconnect players from the game, even if they are inactive. Like all other MMOs, clients that do not communicate with the server for ~15-30 minutes should be disconnected. But, macros and external programs would avert simply logging a player off due to inactivity, so the solution has to go further. Due to the fact that the game is skill-based and requires repetitive actions to advance, it will always be desirable to AFK macro, so I would propose solving this problem permanently instead of just while queue times are long.
A more proactive solution that would both prevent unattended macroing and reduce queue times and lag is the implementation of a CAPTCHA system. Every 30 to 90 minutes (the interval chosen at random within that time frame), a pop-up box should appear with a CAPTCHA phrase that the player must enter within 5 minutes. This should happen for all players, whether they are suspected of being AFK or not. The 5 minute leeway would be given in case the player is in a heated battle. The CAPTCHA phrase should be 2-3 words, and the player should be able to generate a new phrase within that 5 minutes in case they can’t read the current phrase (but the timer should not reset).
Additionally, there are players pre-launching the game, and the “Play” button is staying highlighted for them when they come back. This appears to be increasing queue times (even if the “Play” button is only active for 10 minutes like some claim), because they are retaining their login slot and preventing others from getting one. Instead of doing it this way, the player’s character should immediately enter the game world when they are at the front of the queue. Since this is so risky in a PvP game, players will be less inclined to pre-launch the game, and more inclined to log off in a safe area (no area is 100% safe, but towns are basically secure). Their character, after logged in, would be subject to the same CAPTCHA program and would be logged off if inactive for too long.
Just implementing the latter two solutions would be relatively cheap and easy compared to improving server performance with better/more hardware and improved server code. Hopefully Aventurine will address the queue problems soon, because I’m already getting frustrated with paying $15 a month to spend more time in the queue than in the game (by a significant margin). The game itself is actually enjoyable in a nostalgic capacity so far, but that won’t matter if I can’t play. If I can’t play, I won’t pay. And I’m not alone.
Um … correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re saying that anyone and everyone should get a pop-up on the middle of their screen every 30-90 minutes, even if they’re actively pressing buttons and playing the game as they should be?
To me that would be very … VERY annoying. It’s on par with invasive advertising that pops up in your face while playing. If you’re idle for X amount of minutes and a CAPTCHA pops up, that’s ok. I’m fine with that. But not while playing. No way, sir.
Not in the middle of the screen, but everyone, yes. It’s too easy to macro to appear as if you are playing actively.
I’ll liken the experience to something I currently have to do where I work. We have these RSA key FOBs that change the displayed number every 5-7 seconds or something like that. The code is used as a password to log into a secure system. I can stay logged in to that system for 4 hours at a time, maxed. If I want to head off being DCed, I have to manually DC and use whatever number is displayed. It’s very annoying and it only happens once every 4 hours
If I’m playing a game and I randomly get requests every 30-90 minutes to put in some code to verify that it’s really me playing the game, that would annoy me just the same if not more. It’s just me personally though, so I’m sure there are people out there who wouldn’t mind, but I think maybe the focal point on this is pointed in the wrong direction.
If you set up your game to be so easily misused by macros as Darkfall is, that to me is a flaw in the design of the game. Don’t penalize people with invasive verification mechanisms because your system fails at preventing botting, cheating, etc.
I like your other ideas about actually having people log out after X amount of time being idle. It’s fundamental nowadays. Hell attacking a mob (test dummy) or running in place doesn’t work for WoW. It’ll still kick you out. Yes there are programs that simulate key strokes, but it doesn’t bother WoW as much because you actually need to be active in WOW to raise skills (unless you’re crafting, but I don’t see crafting so long that you go AFK and log out)!
If they can’t see the problem their system is creating, then they either don’t care or don’t have an answer which demonstrates a lack of foresight. Either way I know it’s a problem, but penalizing everyone by making them enter CAPTCHA codes every so often isn’t the answer I don’t think.
Ergh, CAPTCHA, no thanks. They need to invest in anti-bot software, and more servers. Yes, these both cost money… welcome to the world of MMO’s (if only everyone had a rich baseball superstar benefactor right?).
The other ideas are good.
You’re right that it’s a result of the game’s design. I would never advocate CAPTCHA for anything other than a skill-based game.
There are other ways to prevent macroing. Detection is hard and expensive, but I think it’s still worth pursuing. After implementing a detection system, it still makes sense to use CAPTCHA to check if someone is AFK after they’ve been detected (to avert false positives). Beyond that, they’d have to throttle back on their freedom decree and implement something in their design.
For example, making it impossible to advance your skills in areas that are considered more or less safe (all cities, NPC and player). That alone would get rid of most of the macroing. To macro, you would have to be out in dangerous territory where you might be killed by a mob or, more likely since they have so few mobs, a player.
I would prefer less invasive methods of getting rid of cheaters and AFKers as well, but most of the in-game solutions I can think of (mechanical solutions, not overlays like CAPTCHA) require steering in a different direction than they’ve taken in terms of “anything goes,” or at least switching lanes.
I actually don’t mind the CAPTCHA idea. It, however, does need to be done correctly, as far as PR. If suddenly people notice this box appearing every 30-90 minutes in the corner of their screens demanding that they type the letters from a CAPTCHA image, they aren’t going to be very pleased, they will probably not understand why it’s happening, and many of them will go complain.
If, however, Darkfall were to release a big public announcement that explains their action of adding this, promising lower queue times, I think everyone will be more forgiving.
It’s all about the PR. You have to give people notice and explain to them the reasoning. If they understand that it’s for the greater good, they will be glad to type a few extra letters every hour. Big deal. But if they are completely unaware of its purpose, it becomes an annoyance, and they are inclined to angrily shout “Why are you making me type this crap in the middle of my grinding!?” every hour until they get fed up.
I also agree with entering the world immediately, but I think it should also be done nicely. Maybe like a “The game is done loading, entering in 10…” and definitely make an audible sound. That way people can turn up their speakers and walk away, and have 10 seconds to get back before they’re launched into the world. And of course a skip button to enter immediately, because it doesn’t make sense for those who are right at their desks to wait 10 seconds – this isn’t an enforced wait, it’s a courteous wait.
And yes, the most obvious and effective strategy is definitely to add more hardware.
Oh! One more idea too! If it is at all possible to optimize their server code, then it should be done. Sometimes going back through a completed program, some new algorithm can pop up that will drastically increase running speed. Or, like some older games, write important algorithms in assembly to super-optimize things. But this is all things that are required of their server team, and nobody probably spends time on them anyway.
-Ricket
“I would prefer less invasive methods of getting rid of cheaters and AFKers as well”
So would I, but as far as I’ve seen “less invasive” methods end up biting “honest” players in the ass anyway and having *zero* effect on the behaviour they’re trying to curb. SWG had some good examples of this, but there are dozens of instances all over the place (and no, I don’t think SWG’s effectively capitulating to rampant AFK-marcoing and making it “legal” is a particularly good answer).
That being the case, and though I’m a loather of all things poppy-uppy and attention-grabby, I would accept a captcha method simply because I think it’s the kind of method that actually has a snowball’s chance in hell of doing what it’s supposed to do, which is check whether people are really at the keyboard or not. Provided we can drag it away from the middle of the screen — if that happened to me every 30-90 minutes I would probably start frothing, and not in a good way.
Really? Your solution is to force everyone to verify their humanity every 30 minutes?
Your ‘solution’ assumes that a huge percentage of the population is AFK at any given point in time. Let’s assume it’s as big as 10% and the average queue is 2 hours. By kicking those people out, you’ll get in 10% faster, making the queue wait 1 hour and 48 minutes. Hurray progress!
Except that it doesn’t kick the AFK player the instant he goes AFK. Instead it will take an hour(on average) to find out that there’s no ghost in the machine. So you’re annoying everyone every hour and getting no one through the queue any faster. In fact, you’ll see no decrease in queue time unless over 50% of the players in Darkfall are AFK at any given point.
And if 50% of your players are AFK in your PvP game, well who wants to get in?
I would actually bet that close to 40% of the players online at any given time are AFK. I see more people standing idly in town than in the wild by far. Given, they could be in many places in the vast emptiness of the wild, but I do see about 10x as many people standing still in town as I see at any of the nearby camps.
As far as the whole CAPTCHA thing goes, I still stand by it. It would be messaged before it happened, and if it didn’t work, it would be removed. But I’d still probably try it, especially because it’s really not difficult to implement or to get rid of afterwards. The times would probably be start at every 60 minutes on the dot, and if it didn’t nuke the queue or get rid of most people, I’d add the random range.
I know it would be annoying, but I’d probably also give some happy little benefit to it to make it less of a pain. For example, when you enter it you get a full refresh of your fuels, or you get 0.1 points to add to any skill you want. Something like that. I’d also probably first try asking questions that had one-word answers so the text could be normal instead of all twisty and hard to read. The problem with that is, eventually, the macroers would catalog every question and could recognize it.
First, even if it is 40% there will be no decrease in queue wait. Second, how do you know those people standing around aren’t upgrading skills? Does darkfall animate other players using their skills?
And keep in mind your terribly invasive scheme will only catch macroers who leave the room while the macroing happens. Those doing other things on a separate monitor or watching TV in the same room will still be able to answer the question and continue macroing.
A different solution might be a safe zone timer. You’re only safe in the city for 2 hours, then you have to spend some time in the wilds before you can reset your timer. At least it opens up the opportunity for loss if you leave your character unattended.
I’m shocked that an upstanding company with the pristine reputation of Aventurine is having problems like this. There’s another solution to the queue problem…wait 3 or 4 months. I’ll tell you what…if there is a queue to get in the game in 3 months I’ll make a $25.00 [Canadian, not real money] donation to Nerfbat. If not you have to give me a colored name and a title…Forum Prophet will do nicely
CAPTCHA will be real popular in a PvP game…err…. “I lost my stuff because that damn CAPTCHA popped up while I was trying to avoid a ganking”.
RE: If 40% of the people online are AFK, there will be no decrease in the queue
Why?
RE: Can you tell if others are leveling their skills?
Yep. They animate.
RE: Wait a few months for the queue to go away
If they don’t solve the queue problem within a few weeks, the game will be gone in a few months.
RE: CAPTCHA interrupting combat
It wouldn’t gain focus, and wouldn’t be in an obtrusive location on the screen. They also would have several minutes to enter the phrase.
OK, there’s going to be a little bit of handwaving here on the math. It involves a lot of averages that have no actual knowledge of player behavior, but you don’t have those stats either.
I believe you stated the average queue to get in was 2 hours, that number is going to be the average play time including afk’ers. Assuming that 40% of the poulation is afk lets pick a magic number and say they are logged in that amount of time. Let’s say 4 hours. This allows us to assign weights and calculate the average play time of a non-afk player.
(.4*4) + (.6*X) = 2
The weight of afk players times their average playtime plus the weight of legit players times their average play time equals the overall average play time. So when we know X we know how long legit players play. Then we do some reductions
1 + (.6*X) = 2
(.6*X) = 2 – 1
(.6*X) = 1
X = 1 / .6
X = 1.666
So the average legit player plays for 1.6 hours. Assuming that afkers never played legitimately, that all they did was macro and assuming your system picked them up immediately and booted them then the average wait time to get in would become 1.6 hours instead of 2 hours(caveat: unless the server is less than 40% over capacity in which case there would be no waiting)
So you’ve harassed every legitimate player hourly in order to decrease the queue time by 20 minutes. I’m not surprised at the idea but I am suprised that a game designer is so stubbornly clinging to a technological solution to a social problem that every one else is telling him won’t work.
By the way, the mathematical flaw is that your confusing the queue time with the amount of players. Once a system goes over capacity it will run poorly. But the individual sees the people in front and thinks “Hey, if they weren’t there I’d be done much faster.” Which is true, but the system wouldn’t run much faster.
Think of it like the DMV. Say it takes 5 minutes to service a customer there. If 1 person shows up every minute, there will be a big line quickly. If you show up after 20 minutes and look at the 15 people in front of you you’ll think “Man, if 10 of these people were booted out of line I’d get through much faster.” Which is true, but if you looked at the average line speed at the end of the day it’d be practically the same. The only way to get more people through is to open up a second window, to expand capacity. Nothing else will make a dent in the overall throughput of the system.
I think the net effect would be more drastic than you think. The average queue time over the weekend was 4-6 hours. Most players I saw legitimately playing were on for around that number of hours. The people who went AFK, which were most of us, would stay on for more than 12. I personally was logged in for about 14 hours on Saturday and played about 4.
The big problem is that this has become self-fulfilling, and even the idea that players will be getting kicked out for inactivity (which will solve problem with all the non-macroers) would discourage people from staying logged in, because there would be no benefit. And, if they made it so you couldn’t pre-launch, you wouldn’t have people in the queue who weren’t planning on playing.
Basically, if they nuke inactive players and don’t let you pre-launch, most of their queue problems would be resolved. The CAPTCHA system is something I would do temporarily because it’s a quick system to implement, then I would move that to only come up for people who were detected to be macroing after resolving those two previously mentioned issues.
It’s heavy-handed, but it’s a solution that would reduce queues AND latency (the other biggest issue in the game) enough to help ensure the game limps along toward a future of any sort. If they can implement the pre-launch and AFK issues quickly, then they should bypass CAPTCHA until they have macro detection, because those are better and less annoying ways of solving the problems.
I’ll plug the 6 hour number into your calculation now for the heck of it (including change the 1 to a 1.6 because that’s what 0.4 * 4 is):
(0.4*4) + 0.6x = 6
1.6 + 0.6x = 6
0.6x = 4.4
x = 4.4 / 0.6
x = 7.33
Also, the average AFK player is probably logged on for 8 hours or so. Like I mentioned, you do not lose connection until they restart the server. I’ve stayed on all day several times. I even do it at work and just have my character running at a wall all day.
Quick hacky voodoo math:
If the average AFK player is on for 8 hours, and the average queue is 6 hours, the average legit player is on for 4 hours. That sounds about accurate to me. That would mean about 53% of the wait time is caused by AFKers even if 40% of the logged-in players are AFK, since AFK players are online for significantly more time than online players.
Wouldn’t it be very easy to disable the CAPTCHA phrase while in PvP combat? It shouldn’t be so hard for the game to recognize if you are.
Also if its questions with answers you can make bot programs unable to get all the answers by default if the questions are stuff like real name, address, phone number etc personal details that you (I assume) enter when you buy the game.
Captcha would annoy the hell out of me I wouldn’t want it while trying to play as far as macroing goes
they could just as easily make the skill rank up if you’ve killed something with it or used it to help kill something.
That way its a use system that a macro can’t so easily do …
That would be ideal, morbid. It’s silly that some abilities require you to hit stuff to advance (all melee skills) while others only require you to fire them (all spells and archery).
If you had to hit your target to advance, and they made you advance more against enemy races and NPCs than friendly races/guildmates, it would solve most of the macro problems.
You’d have to go further with some things like friendly heals and such. The target would have to actually be hurt for it to do anything, but you could even get around that. Whatever, it would be a step.
It would not have to look like the sort of CAPTCHA that appears on websites. It could be something more fitting with the nature of the game. All it has to be is a question or puzzle that cannot be answered via automation.
Also, if you were to add a small reward for answering correctly, like a short term buff, people would be looking forward to it, rather than finding it an annoyance