HWS mid-season patch announcement | Limits | Part 1

HWS Announcements
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Hi HWS Community,

I try to make it short: the current season attracted over 3000 players, 10000+ structures and even more game hours from you guys.
The consequence: the game just can’t handle that “success”!

Some playfields are overcrowded in such a way, that it not only crashes from time to time but also affect other playfields even, because the server CPU can’t keep up with the overload.

And realistically there are 2,5 solutions:

  1. We reduce the server slot amount from 170-177 down to 50-70 (no real solution nevertheless)
  2. We introduce limits to stop having structures parked all over the place and motivate only to have structures you actively use right now
  3. (0,5) => we add more HWS servers (no real solution because we are overloaded with 2 servers already)

You see where we we are going.

New limits | New gameplay philosophy | Part 1 (of 2)

Important notice first

The plan is to activate the following changes at the 14th November, 5PM!

Because we are very careful with changes (maybe not justified in an Alpha game), we nevertheless do this big change in two steps. The first step only covers the important global limit changes — this is a big change still.
The second step will be 7 days later coming — on the 21th November.

Second change spoiler

The part 2 will address local playfield limits. Example: every orbit won’t have unlimited limits anymore!

What will change dude?

The Global Limits!

Before (at the moment)

image

After (on 14th November)

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Are you serious?

Yes and let me explain:
In almost 3 years we have still a very buggy, glitchy and non-performant game at all available! This won’t change any time soon either.
The HWS Community though is awesome and big. We really want to provide you the best Multiplayer place for Empyrion! For all of you.
However, after long thought, I come to the conclusion that we will change our gameplay philosophy (Feedback appreciated!)

No parking anymore

The idea is that we remove the “park / backup” gameplay many of you have and turn it to a “Shipyard” gameplay (well, at the moment the name "Blueprint Factory is better I guess)
Like “let’s park my 10 SVs in Binomi System, because I can grab one, as soon as I need it”.

Instead the future and for the sake of performance will be:

You can only have as many structures as you actually use (and need).

So instead of parking structures somewhere and abuse the buggy DSL mechanic, you rather have many “ready to spawn” blueprints in your factory and spawn them only if you use them — otherwise the limit system take the “inactive” ones.

This is the intention behind all of that. The number scheme 2-1-2 is taken for easy remembering and consistency.

(Note: Supporter Planets are untouched from this as you know)

Example for new guys:

  • You have a 10 member faction means you can have in the whole universe 2 + 10 = 12 Faction Bases / Ships and 2 private Bases / ships (so in total 20 private bases / ships spread out). I think this is more than enough.

Last but not least, together with the “Fast” blueprint time we have set in the config and the cheap “egs:reducebptime:xx” command, this is a more interesting and dynamic gameplay overall, in my opinion.

That’s basically it for now. You wonder how these little numbers require such a big announcement, but trust me, these numbers will hurt some factions.
And to make it clear: you have NOW the chance for feedback. If the limit will be active we will NOT RESTORE any structure you lost because of it. This 7 day warning is more than polite from us, considering the current critical situation!

Last hint for feedback: be constructive and check the current situation carefully before you post. I have to ignore any generic “you kill creativity”… “you killed my ship showroom collection”… comment.

This is a preparation for Alpha 9 / HWS 9 where a lot of new features are coming. And they will be buggy. And the most important thing for us is performance and stability again now!

Thanks for reading, your understanding and patience in that matter.

Your HWS Team

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Hopefully this will fix a lot of issues, until 9.0 :smiley:

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Great idea, please also keep an eye on donator planets too.

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Please don’t lol. We could make a ship bank, so people could store ships on donare planets, until they need them, for a payment lol.

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Well, I have no objections to this reduction, because I do not collect multiple structures/vehicles anyway. That is true of our faction as a whole. We have done a quick count-up and find that this new measure is not going to affect us at all. We have never collected ships and bases for the sake of it. We only have what we use, so we support this measure completely.

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Please consider having the faction limit scale with player count.
For example, produce a base limit for all as you have done, but allow for additional cores based on faction size. This will alleviate some of the pains involved.

Perhaps configure separate global faction and private limits for PvP and PvE. Reward players for venturing into PvP by allowing “extra” cores over the PvE limit. Once you’ve grown enough to be able to afford some risk then you spill over into PvP to stimulate PvP play.

Also, rather than playfield limits for faction/private, consider solid limits across server, I.E my faction + my private count be configured as a sum server wide versus playfield dependent.

This way I cannot encounter issues in moving ships from playfield to playfield. This way if I am moving a CV with a docked SV to my base playfield, I dont trigger a take-away warning while im offloading supplies or SVs to/from that CV to my base. Imagine if I disconnect or lose power at home while this transfer was underway – each incident like this will create a support ticket and further headache.

Each playfield would still have a max core count - But consider allowing ships to go over this max count when entering the system - just generate a warning for the player that if their ship remains in the full playfield at server restart that it will be deleted. (I.E if core count max for playfield is 200, I can enter as number 201 but if I’m still there at reset then im deleted.)
(this allows for fights, travel, or things-in-progress to not be impeded by the core count max, but protects the server from prolonged stress)

Donor planets/space is specifically kind of designed to allow the donors who get them the luxury of a private playfield with a core count max to themselves to park/freebuild/etc. The count max protects the server from stress, and the playfield performance effects only the people with access. (and from experience, the playfields are tuned well enough for good performance)

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Fine with me. I have 1 sv personally and it’s all I use for now but I do keep stuff ready to go in my bp factory so this works fine for me.

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The “keep it in your factory” meta is wise and has been my go-to means of having ships in the bank ready.

Pushing the whole server to this meta is wise for performance, but in order to make it more user friendly I suggest a Quality of Life improvement for SV/HV spawning. (possibly CVs as well)

Allow spawning of SV/HV without a base. Instead run a check that no un-allied player/structure is within X distance (wide distance) This prevents assaulting a base with excessive hand-spawned waves as intended by requiring you to spawn on a base, but now would allow players to spawn mobility without having to spawn an extra simple core-and-blocks spawn pad. These spawn pads are clutter - I shoot my spawn pads cores out so they will despawn but this still leaves the clutter till restart.

After all, your backpack is only so big and only contains what you planned for, you cant just pull ammo out of your butt (well maybe with ocd 7 once an hour) so spawning without a pad will only get you so far. Mostly just “not stranded”, and you may still need to buy fuel/pentaxid from the market at that.

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Sounds awesome - hopefully this’ll fix the major issues we’re all having. It’s worth a try!

I’m against scaling this to faction size, due to (as already seen) some factions are getting upwards of 30 (active?) players, meaning they could still abuse the ‘spawn masses of cores in one area’ lag (dare I say it) exploit.

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The “additional cores for faction size” would be a buff to the factions maximum cores server wide and could be at a ratio:
1-1 one extra core for faction global limit per player
1-2 one extra core for faction global limit for ever 2 players
1-3 etc.

This would just mean that for every X players your faction has, your faction total sum max cores server wide could be buffed to accomodate the fact that if you are all online at once you might just want to all be doing something together in each your own ships.

Yes I realize you may have your ship set to private, but that will make issues with turret targeting if you’re trying to fight with your faction.

Giving your whole faction server wide +1 core per player on faction roster just seems simple.

If in your example they had a faction of 30 and parked all 30 cores around their faction base, they’d literally have all their eggs in one basket. Like as in you wouldnt find anything owned by them anywhere else in all of PvP space because it was literally all there at one vulnerable place. An incredibly poor choice if any of them own any garage ships.

This makes me wonder if alien cored vessels should be exempt. Like, garage ships or ships you core with an alien core. Adds utility and value and will likely result in alot of alien cores actually getting bought/used/lost. Presently some factions have 20-30 banked and it would be nice to see them valuable enough to be risked/desired

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I get what you’re saying - but the moment that is implemented, it’ll be abused. Just go fly over to EU and approach the Russian bunker on GG; you’ll see exactly what we’re talking about. It needs to be restrictive.

It’s nice having the freedom of cores, but the price is too high on server performance.

Just look at the following - it’s insane.

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Cap the bonus cores then to prevent extreme cases of abuse.

+1 core to faction global max per player in faction up to a max bonus of 15

Or, only give one extra core per 2 or 3 players and have no max.

Either would prevent a 30 core pileup.

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If it’ll work, then I’m all for it - but if you can think of even one way of abusing it then (I will guarantee) it will be abused. Some factions actively fight on the edge of the render range of their stockpile of cores, knowing full well anyone approaching for a fight will be stationary for at least 5 seconds (depending on CPU and connection).

These limits will hit us too - but it’s gotta be done. Currently the server is so broken it’s not even worth attempting PvP.

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Im thinking all supporter planets need to be indestructible to help with lag as for factory build times set to 0 that’s not needed as u can get a 60h build to 1 sec in a few min if u know the trick i think doing this will affect the trade market even more than it is atm with the abundance of deposits witch also would be a lag cause also because u have to dig a lot of them out to get a decent amount make them bigger and less of them maybe.

maybe consider more surface wipes on planets and also server re starts to do this.

as for the server limits i suggest 70 na 90 eu it would be a bit annoying if if u were dc and then u cant get back in due to limits especially if your in a fight or pvp space.

with a new server do Asia pacific :slight_smile:

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We have the OCD to store everything in…and we can recycle our ships but…that wil fill up the ocd fast,maby its an idea to make a option to recycle/store ba&vessels in a diferent kind of ocd like Structure storage?that way people can have structures/vessels stored,what wil make players remove some structures/vessels from the playfields…so when they loose a ship they can easely get one back without them loosing all there ocd storage.

2nd reducing rcs on ships might help making pvp go smoother for example 1 rcs per size so a size 4 cv can have 4 rcs and so on…and a size 4sv 4x10=40rcs this might also reduce the use of huge vessels in pvp simply becouse huge ships wil be real slow in turning so that gives a smaller ship a bit more advantage maby?

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I know what cheese you speak of, our enemies did the same thing last season all season long. As funny as it was to dogpile them when they hit their own lag-wall, we felt strongly that the game would be better without it. The above suggestions would work as intended if the values were set right - I know from experience that 30 cores in one render chunk is cancer, but finding the perfect number…

Well actually, I have a suggestion to directly patch out the issue you speak of without it impacting the other thing:
Set a maximum to the amount of friendly cores you can have within X distance of each other.
This would directly prevent parking too many BA/HV in one place to where it lags out the game when an enemy force attacks.

Or easier to code: Must park non-docked vessels 250m away from each other.
Check: Structure occupied/piloted?
No -> Check if 250m+ away from another friendly structure
No -> pop warning, ship will be moved/taken if not moved within X

Or some such.

So you can dock ships/hvs to get close to base/offload stuff/park guard tanks, but they have to be docked or 250m away from any other faction core

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One of the features seriously under used is egs:stealth, the theory behind the command is to manually remove the item from the playfield “in space only” therefore reducing cpu usage.

I do wonder if this could be coded for planets so any “sv, hv and cv” core that’s not been visited for say 8 hours is automatically stealthed “removed from the play field” and the item is deleted after 14 days if not unstealthed. Stealthed items could still be tracked on HWS connect in the same way they are now.

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This is a big deal, @Israel_T-C is a big fan of it too.
Until now it wasn’t possible due performance issues.
But never underestimate @jascha s magic :wink:

The main issue is though:
what if a ship is stealthed and someone else is parking his ship at that position and you unstealth your ship there?
Technically they bounce like crazy then. But in worst case they are removed then (out of boundaries).
Suggestions?

If we could make “HWS Auto Stealth” real, we would have the best insane server performance ever!

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hm Bases would be the worst. but I think thats not the issue here.
I mean I could check if anything is close by. If so I warp it a bit further away.

For that to work we might need a good view of all stealthed ships. A command to unstealth a planet (for a certain player/faction).
I fear a bit that under high pressure the server will have some problems. But I think I can catch that.

Automatic stealth should also work without problem (as long as the Playfield is not unloading…)
Automatic unstealth via command of all ships in that are: would be also a possibility.

Will be some work… but as far as I can see it should be possible.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions! that can only improve the game

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For added server performance, allow Stealth on Donor planets. This way we can stealth our unused ship.