Changing the servers

I'm planning to change the servers a little.
The first tests looks promising.
On alServ2016 I have already activated the new configuration.

The changes are:

• Less CI
  
• More SI
  

Well quite short to explain but it offers a different game experience.

With having less CI, you should have less lag in crowdy situations.
The lags mostly appear with many players connected from far away countries and with lots of CI in the game.
So when reducing the CI it should be better.

But with less CI it would be too easy for 10 players.
So what to do.
Give the CI more health again?
No, it would break the weapon balance (thanks Tron who opened my eyes^^)
So I tought about adding more SI.
Some SI plugins had problems after the last big game update.
Now I found a fixed one which seems to work mostly.
Only sometimes we have experienced that it stopped spawning SI in a map.
Don't know why at the moment.
Maybe because of Tank in a map or some panic event.
We could not determine it so far.
But on the next map it worked again.
So I'll have to investigate that somehow.

Ok, so what does more SI mean?
The game director is disabled in this configuration and the plugin completely spawns SI by itself.
Since the configuration the static in this plugin, I have made another plugin which changes the configuration dynamically based on players alive.
I think this is fair otherwise you would be faced with e.g. 4 SI even if you are the last man standing^^
Currently it is configured like this:

Players alive	SI on the map
1,2	1
3,4	2
5,6	3 (old 4)
7,8	4 (old 5)
8,10	5 (old 6)

I'm sure that the configuration needs some tuning.
So please give feedback.

Well the values may seem low but the SI are coming all the time.
There is no break.
Yesterday we played the new "Day Break" campaign on alServ2016.
On normal with 2/3 human players and it was balenced quite well.
Could be different with special tanks etc.

And the SI health is on back on default at the moment.
Otherwise it could be hard to compete against many SI.

And like I said the number of CI is reduced too.
But only this values (mob size, backgound zombies, etc) may have to be adjusted too.

My plan is to activate the configuration on alServ2019 to get feedback on different difficulty settings (alServ2018 would go up to expert automatically)

Ok, enough said, I will activate the configuration on alServ2019 now and we are waiting for feedback.

Plugin works properly, the server has now more fun and dynamic everytime, good job with that plugin Albert.

Thanks for your feedback.

We made more tests with a slightly different configuration for the dynamic difficulty servers ("alServ2018 Coop Dyn" and "alServ2021 GunGameMod").
We tested it on GunGameMod.
I have enabled this config now on alServ2018 too.

The config on alServ2018 is now like this:

Players alive	SI on the map
1,2	1
3,4	2
5,6,7	3
8,9,10	4

And the number of CI is lower compared to alServ2019.

This is a first config try to match the dynamic difficulty.
Since it could be too difficult on Expert with too many SI and CI.

So again your feedback is needed how the gameplay on alServ2018 is with many players on expert.

And I have configured "alServ2017 Realism" like "alServ2016 Realism" so that both should be equal now again.

Personally, i like the number of SI now, didnt complain earlier.

However the number of CI could be a bit more.

You know that feeling when you go across map and hear the tank growling, getting ready the molotov to burn him to ashes.
How about making Tanks lets say "Fireproof" for a % of full hp.
That way the tank killing will be more challenging from "burn and run scheme". Of course there are shield tank, but they are quite rare and tank killing sometimes gets boring.

I just loooooooved the idea of 2 tanks on the last wave of finale. Seriously, its just great. Maybe in the future you can implement the two tanks scheme on a random "uncommon" cases where you have to fight 2 tanks somewhere in the subway of "Mercy Hospital" or anywhere else, not only in finale. Maybe increasing on "Rare or Uncommon cases" HP of a Tank to match 100k damage?

Hi!

First of all thanks for your feedback.
I will think about your suggestions.

Could you please give me some more details like:

• Which server you played on
  
• Which difficulty was set
  
• How many players were connected
  

This info would help to tune the config of the correct server.
Not all servers have the same config.
Roughly alServ2018/21 are equal regarding CI and SI.
And alServ2016/17/19 have higher settings because they don't increase the difficulty automatically.

Generally speaking it is not easy to find a good configuration for all players.
Many get scared and leave early right now^^
Maybe I should think about a config based on player rank or steam ID or whatever.

I usually play on alServ2019. From 1 to 9 players on various difficult, usually normal or advanced. However i noticed big lag spikes in past few days, when alot of players are connected.

Thanks for further info.
Yesterday we played a new campaign [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] on alServ2019.
With 4-6 players on expert.
I consider all of them as real experts.
And it was quite hard but so much fun.
We had to restart each map several times.
I was thinking that the difficulty on expert was too high.
But I let it as configured.
The team finally made it after several restarts.
But it was so much fun.
Always on the edge.
No time to rest.

It seems that there may be a noticable gap between <=4 and >=5 alive players.
The table shows that the SI goes up from 2 to 4 between 4 and 5 alive players.
I think there could be some ajustment.
It seems that they beat the final map yesterday with 3 players quite quick compared to the previous maps with more than 4 players.
This could mean that the final map is easier or that the dynamic setting has some gap there, or it means something else^^

So my feeling is that there could be some adjustment in the lower area of alive/connected player.
And maybe in the high are with 7,8,9,10 alive/connected players.
I didn't play on expert with 7,8,9,10 players since the new SI config.
So maybe it will get to difficult on expert with many players.

Yeah and I forgot to mention that 4 alive players could also mean 3 bots and one noob player or 4 professional players.
So it is also not easy to match those configurations.

Actually the dynamic servers alServ2018 and 21 are a little easier with many players (see the tables in previous posts, a little less CI and less SI when more players are alive, but equal SI with few alive players)

Again, thanks for every feedback.
We should have a vivid discussion about difficulty and configuration here, to find the best setting for all situations.

So it is very important to know all about the circumstances.
Even the name of the map may be important to know.
Because yesterday I felt that many many hords were coming in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] campaign and it may be because of the map itself.
So possibly we would have to adjust some settings based on the map too.
I even did that for several maps were it was not possible to finish it with super tanks activated.
But I feel if the players get better they would even manage this sooner or later.

And again.
It was so epic and fun yesterday with a professional team who had to fight real hard in the beginning but got used to it step by step.

About the lags.
Lags are very difficult to solve.
Often players are complaining about lags during we are playing on the same map.
And I don't have lags in this moment.
Sometimes I have lags when a really huge horde is burned all at once.
But generally I'm quite lag free at the moment.
I may be the client internet connection or the client PC that is the reason.
It also could be the server when all 9 game servers are active and maybe several panic events are running in parallel.
I'm tracking the server load constantly and it does not look worse.
This also matches to the fact that I don't see lags often.
And the server is not in my home (If someone thinks that)
It is a rented linux root server which runs several hundred kilometers away from my home.
With lowering the CI horde size the lags should be less because even the client PC has less to do to render the infected.
But one guy reported the opposite which I only can explain with different game situations like map, number of players, countries the players are from, ...
I don't know
Oh and the original game with only 4 players and far less SI/CI/Tanks/etc. performs for sure far better than this config.
If it would really be a problem on the server side, the only solution I could think about is to shutdown some servers and concentrate on a fewer amount.
But like I said the server monitoring does not show a problem at the moment.

Enough said, I think I will adjust things only very carefully so that it does not break the overall configuration we have at the moment.

Yesterday, ~@7pm-8pm gmt+2 on alServ2019 we were playing "crash course" on advanced 6 to 8 people. And we were at the event where you had to shoot your way thru the pile of cars at the bridge. We camped in the building from the angry horde and annoying jockeys when the lag spikes started. They lasted for a minute or two and many have died including me, so i spoke into chat that im lagging horribly and Karina responded as well as some one else. after that - I left to get ready for the night.

Maybe if you have more info, you could determine what was or is the problem?  

Thanks for further info.
The log files didn't show anything unusual.
I have optimized the mysql databases. (done)
Then I will try to renice the game server processes so that they get more CPU priority. (in progress)
And I could try to eliminate as much logging as possible so that there is fewer disk IO. (in progress)
Maybe this helps.
It will take some time to make all the changes.

And I have lowered the SI values a little bit (see the first post in this topic)
It turned out that with many players it was to hard with 6 SI.

Yup, it was hard, but it was epic . Non-stop action to the roof of mercy hospital  

Not really sure where to post this, but oh well.

Military sniper used to be at 260/260 capacity, and now its down to 180. As well as special upgraded ammo which used to be 90 shots, now to be 30.

Is it how it is going to be from now or is it just a misc unwanted change?

I changed all weapon ammo back to the default value.
People always saying that they have so many points.
Now they can spend some points to buy ammo^^

I'll also disable the keep lasers plugin on the buy-system servers.
So that some points have to be spend to buy a new laser when changing the weapon.

That is so evil of you albert!     

alBert2000 wrote:

I changed all weapon ammo back to the default value.
People always saying that they have so many points.
Now they can spend some points to buy ammo^^

I'll also disable the keep lasers plugin on the buy-system servers.
So that some points have to be spend to buy a new laser when changing the weapon.

Though the laser makes sense, what about the number ammo problem with the number of CI around? Will they be reduced? I mean with 10 people on the map and the default amount of ammo, it's really frustrating buying ammo because most of the time players who use throwables will get most of the kills leaving those without it short of ammo.

Nothing else is changed.
Use your points to buy ammo.