Irritating timers

/sign

Eeeeh, not really. Zapping a Lost with a wand causes all the others around him to start blasting away at their former comrade, who has gone mysteriously invulnerable {I suspect Hero 1's blood}, and completely ignoring the player.

Which is a problem why, exactly? "Cured" Lost give no rewards whatsoever and I'm pretty sure they don't count for Defeat badges. The Lost Curing Want arc shows up at level ten. Even at that point, a hero has the option of going to Kings Row and attacking -5 Lost for just as easy an encounter and just as much boredom.

The entire mission where you cure the lost is dumb and badly designed. It's a no-rewards mission, it's awkward, it's never, ever fun and it takes far too long. This would be far superior if it were an instance mission with several bosses that dropped to their knees when defeated and became invulnerable to anything but the Lost Curing Wand, providing a legitimate mission and mixing that in with the curing mechaninc. At least it would ensure fair fights.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Why on earth would you pick a fight with normal level Lost that would give you exp if it wasn't being wasted when you can blast grey-cons with total immunity?
I find that logic...illogical.

And /Signed to the OP

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I save my Lost Wand and use it on the Aberrant Rectors in the Faultline missions, especially when playing squishies without mez protection.

/totally signed and totally agree with Tech I dont care what level i am doing this mission at I go where I can quickly cure 30 lost with absolutely no chance of winding up in hospital. The Wand itself when used against any level Lost gives no XP so why drag things out?

I also agree with the costime change time. No idea why the delay there at all. Switching outfits doesn't add any new powers or change anything that might help a player so why not do away with that delay as well?

Because costume changes can crash entire servers.

Some time ago, the timer got reduced (I think it was a dev testing the change on the internal servers, and it accidentally slipped through to Live). When people discovered it, some people decided to test the claim that costume changes streamed too much data if allowed too frequently. A group of 2 or 3 people went to the globe in Atlas while there were a lot of people there and spammed costume changes. Everyone in Atlas was Mapserved shortly after. They were even able to replicate it in relatively low population areas (like in an instanced mission with only one team there). And if I recall correctly, that reduction only bumped the timer down to 15 or 20 seconds, not the 5 or 10 people keep asking for.

You can take screenshots and compare them in an image editing program side-by-side.

Also, if you want to have a costume with the same face, scales, and colors as another one, you can save the older one and load it into a costume slot.

okay if that's true I can see the need but is that cold hard fact or urban legend? I mean honestly.. 24 players can join a league and enter the BAF trial.. all of them with some sort of Aura blazing. Multiple judgement attacks going off at the same time and huge mobs of MK Vickies and ACUs spawning ever 30 seconds and the server is fine but three or fours guys gather in ATLAS and change costimes really fast and the entire server population mapserves? When they did the Praetotian invasion on servers 48 man leagues were being built to roam around and battle invading groups of IDF with AV leadership and GM support and the servers held but they crash if too many people switch outfits at the same time?

Like I said IF it's true fine forget the change but I really find it hard to believe.

I'd say both are a pain if I just want to (say) make sure I had the same face (just swapping out from using a helmet, for instance.) Saving/loading a costume = redoing everything when loaded.

Much faster to just look - say "Face 7," switch and use it. Except, of course, for that 30 second timer.

(And I'm laughing at the "to keep you from dominating encounters!" for the lost curing wand. "Look at him go, getting 0 XP!" ... really?)

See my Guides and Tutorials

Because there's never been noticeable performance problems during iTrials...

He said just Atlas, not the entire server.

Player costumes are dense chunks of data. We're not talking graphical lag, we're talking bandwidth, and clogging it up by continually transmitting costume swaps.

I will say, I've never heard of the event Roderick is referencing (or at least, never heard mention of it on the boards until now), but we've been explicitly told in the past that the timer is there due to performance concerns.

You realize that even with the 30 second costume change timer you could probably still get a group of determined people together in the same zone and synchronize a costume change at the same time and probably cause the same kind of mapserve problems you're describing. Sure the 30 second timer makes the chances of something like that happening that much less "accidental", but it still wouldn't prevent people from being able to do it on purpose.

Even as someone who has a couple of decades of software engineering experience IRL I remain convinced that a full 30 seconds for such a safeguard timer is excessive hyper-conservative overkill in this situation. Your story aside unless a Dev can directly explain their rationale for why the 30 seconds is still justified in 2011 I will always believe that this timer could be reduced to 15 seconds without undue risk.

That is fact. I know people who did it. However, I'm wondering if I was mistaken, and the change only went as far as Test, not all the way to Live. And the Test server is supposedly lower spec than the Live servers, so it stands to reason that it would be easier to crash.

Yes, because the auras don't stream and data (after the first time you see the person); that's all handled clientside. Likewise, the Vickies all have the same costume, and it's saved on your computer in the pigg files. All the server has to send is a short string with the entity ID number and the location.

No, that is only enough to mapserve the zone. However, the issue I mentioned above did include a concerted effort of a larger number of people who not only mapserved the zone, but crashed it. People who were mapserved couldn't log back in, and people trying to zone into that area crashed and logged out. That's what I meant when I said they could crash entire servers. (Note that "Freedom" or "Victory" are NOT servers, they are Shards, and each Shard is comprised of multiple servers.)

Theoretically possible. I've never tried, and I doubt anyone else has either.

Have you ever approached an area with lots of people, and had your computer freeze for a few seconds? That's the server dumping a pile of costume data on you all at once.

If you'd like to see the data that's being sent, just start a demo record (I believe the command is /demostart ) and run around a populated zone for a while (use /demostop to finish). Then, open the resulting file in a text editor. What you'll see is what is sent to your computer.

When you get close to an enemy, there will be one or two lines to spawn the enemy (a NEW command that assigns the entity's number and the class of the entity and sets its location), then a few lines that describe the emote it's doing or how it's moving. A player will have all the same data, but it will be defined by a data chunk which is basically the same as a saved costume file.

And when you approach that player, the server doesn't just send you their costume data, it sends yours to them. If you change your costume, it sends that costume file to everyone who can see you - including yourself.

Using your example of a 48 man league all changing their costumes at the same time, assuming there was nobody else in the area, that would be 48 costumes sent to each of 48 people, totalling 2,304 costume files being sent at once, in addition to all the normal data being sent. If there were more people, the amount of data sent would increase accordingly (adding 2 observers that didn't change costumes would up it to 2,400 costumes sent). If you remove the throttle, at some point, you end up with people changing costumes before the server finishes streaming out the previous batch. That's also why you get temporarily silenced if you send too many things to chat channels too quickly (in part; it's also to stop people from being annoying). In fact, if you've ever heard of a website being crashed by a DoS or DDoS attack (Denial of Service or Direct Denial of Service), that's one method in which it's accomplished (using page requests, instead of costume changes, of course).

The only way I can think of that the timer could safely be removed is if your costume data sent to nearby players contained all five of your costumes. Then, a costume change would just send a single line, same as an emote. However, up to five times the data would be sent when you first see any player, and as someone who can get mapserved just by approaching the market now, I don't think I would like that change.

You're right. However, with the timer in place, there has to be enough people to do it in one shot. And most trolls and griefers aren't willing to put that much effort into it.

You are probably right, especially in light of the recent server upgrades. However, I have a theory as to why the timer is so long: It's the average amount of time it would take to send X simultaneous costume changes to X players, where X is the zone cap. If I'm correct, that means that, even under the most determined of attacks, a group could not push the server (too far) beyond the point where it's queueing costume changes before it finishes sending the previous ones.

However, I suspect that neither of us are network analysts, nor familiar with CoH's bandwith requirements or availability, therefore, this is all conjecture. And I doubt that a timer implemented for flood control will be removed or reduced without sufficient testing to verify that it's excessive, and I just can't see resources being devoted to something like this that most people would never notice or need.


Concerning the Lost Curing Wand? 3 second recharge. PLEASE.

A player costume constitutes a 7-10 KB data chunk, and a player's custom powers constitute another 10-15 KB data chunk. You can check the size of those files when you save your costumes and custom powers. The net result is that when you swap costumes, the server is sending anything between 17 to 25 KB of data to every player in range. Do it within the presence of 50 people, like on your average Hamidon raid and you're looking at making the server upload over a megabyte of data on top of whatever else it's handling at the moment. Have ten people swap at the same time in a high-density environment and you can force the server to upload 10-15 MB on the spot.

Notice I never mentioned anything about the actual timer. If you get many people to swap costumes within the presence of many others, you'll choke the server's upload, and that is a fact. A 10-hour timer on costume changes won't change that. The 30-second timer is in place to prevent a single player from doing so by binding his costume swaps to a key and spamming that very fast. With 100 ms of ping, which should be about average for US players, a player should be able to swap costumes 10 times per second absent any timer, which is constitutes a significant load. However, drop that person down to a timer as short as one second, and you're limiting him to a bandwidth load of a bout 25KB/s, which isn't all that much to speak of. Yes, you can still get lots of people to spam it, but you can't really change that with a timer anyway.

If a timer HAS to exist, then have it activate only when costume changes are threatening to overload the server's bandwidth. For instance, have swapping a costume from one player suppress other people from swapping costumes for the next 5 seconds and introduce a scaling timer that lengthens the more you swap costumes within a small amount of time. There are solutions for this that aren't as annoying.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Yes obviously the Devs would have to test dropping this costume change timer down to say 15 seconds (or Samuel_Tow's scaled timer idea) in order to be statisfied that it would still be a viable amount of time for the purpose it is serving.

But as far as the age old question of "would it be worth the Devs' time to mess with this" all I can say is that there have been countless people suggesting this timer be reduced for YEARS not only in these forums but from what I've seen of people chatting in game. If ever there was a candidate idea for the Devs to put on their "QoL improvement list" this would be one of them. Remember the Devs have "devoted resources" to change things that seemed far more trivial than this little ever-present annoyance.

This was one of my thoughts as well. the story we've been given is three players went to ATLAS as switched outfits really fast and caused a crash. If a group of jerks wanted to do something like that badly enough what would stop say 20-30 of them from gathering in Atlas and all switching costumes at once?.. You'd think it would have to be just as bad if not worse.

Really though this is a much smaller issue that the Lost Curing Wand. I honestly see no good reason it needs to recharge THAT long between uses. We don't even need one on Villain side so its just another thing to slow down the process invloved in gaining access to the Midnighter Club.