Devchama here, alright, since the issue has pretty much blown up in these past few days I'm going to summarize what is going on and keep you guys in the loop. Long story short, haaton sheet is doing a lot of damage currently and something WILL have to change in order for us to move forwards. I'll be mirroring this post on the floor using my Nasfaq Dev Account.
>inb4 it's the touristsWhile we have seen an uptick in tourists lately they have not been the primary contributors to the problems we're facing, at least as far as we can tell.
So, what's the big issue with the haatonsheet and other Google Sheets based solutions:
1. The biggest and main issue with these are that they spam requests to the server.
>inb4 but that's been fixed on the haatonsheet.Yes and no. Apparently it's been updated so it doesn't spam buy/sell requests anymore, but it still remains true that we still see an inordinate amount of history requests and leaderboard requests in addition to wallet and market info requests. During the time that the server was on fire we saw hundreds of requests from Google IPs.
>inb4 proof?https://files.catbox.moe/jwmqth.pnghttps://files.catbox.moe/k0opgh.pnghttps://files.catbox.moe/vmdj3h.pngI've censored IPs of unrelated people and also removed user sessions and ids for the sake of their privacy but here are some snippets of our server debug messages. Every single one of those 107 and 35 IPs is a fucking Google IP. Look them up yourself if you don't believe me. Note these are mere snippets, this shit went on for fucking miles. This isn't on the level we can accept anymore. Sure, it's convenient for you maybe but for everyone else you're just a fucking nuisance and guess what, you spam is making it worse for yourself as well since you're missing cycles. Great job anon. Outdone yourself there. I know the creators of sheets write these with the best of intentions, hell I'm thankful that haatonsheetwriter is actually taking the time to update his sheet so that it's less spammy but because you guys cannot use the websocket your sheets are sending far too many requests and the server is dying trying to keep up. We're working on rewrites to make practically everything more efficient but the arms race is always in the favor of the bogging the server as the volume of data you're requesting is frankly impossible to keep up with.
2. Old versions of the haatonsheet and other such sheets are still out there and still spamming our servers with failed requests. I'm talking in the hundreds of thousands per user range. While that has decreased and we haven't had to wave the banhammer around as often as before it's still unacceptable.
>buh buh the old zhonkbot did the sameYeah but the zhonkbot autoupdates when it is refreshed unlike the haatontrader and not only that, only runs when the computer is on thus meaning that most users will likely get their hands on the updated version. The haatonsheet can run INDEFINITELY without player input and potentially never be updated. That's unacceptable. When we set down guidelines for bots we made it clear that it was because they were impossible to distinguish (at that point) from human traders we wouldn't be able to rule to harshly on them. Well, clearly that hasn't been the case as of late.
3. It is an unfair advantage over players who are trying not to bog the server. We have many players here who are quite kindly trying their hardest not to bog the server using the latest official zhonkbot, playing manually at times and having fun shitposting on the thread. It's unfair for me to tell them that yeah, they just have to put up with constant server bogs that SHOULD be completely avoidable. I don't want this game to become tedious for them just because certain others are using unofficial and unsanctioned code.
Now, what are we doing about it?
- As I said we're rewriting several pieces of key infrastructure in order to make them more efficient
- We're going to be implementing anon's idea of creating an API that allows multiple different coins to be transacted in 1 request, reducing server load somewhat.
- We're going to be taking a stance regarding external autotraders. More info on that Soon™.
>inb4 but but the haatonsheet has been out since foreverYeah, and server capacity was able to take care of it because 1. not as many people were using it, 2. because the amount of data that is getting transferred was lower and 3. there were less players overall. We've basically hit critical mass at this point. Because of the sheer amount of transactions we're processing now, >Market Closed is becoming a real chore for the server, and, with the additional load of these sheets requesting data and whatnot on top, it's grinding to a halt. We can rewrite many parts of the code to help this but like I said, no matter how much we try, data volume is data volume and eventually it's gonna grind the server to a halt.
I'll answer any questions for a bit.
