Dear Commanders,
As of late we've seen an unprecedented number of players take up Conflict of Nations, and other games belonging to our sister company, Bytro.
While this is indeed a very welcome addition, we very quickly needed to shift our day to day operations to cater to the sheer volume of demand. From early on in March we have had the Developers monitor the situation day and night, and will continue to do so even after we have the developments outlined below. Particularly, what is affecting the game so much is the concurrent requests and demands taking place at peak hours of activity. We have been scaling the backend services as much as possible, but there are roadblocks which we could not have planned for. All this being said we are taking this in strides and using it as an opportunity to do right by the players and community. We are overhauling much of the underlying functionality which will provide better service all-round.
As it stands, we have a number of high priority changes which will make their way into the game in the coming weeks:
- Game creation: This system is responsible for spawning games and handling the funneling process of new players into their tutorial games. We are seeing this system cause a heavy strain with the scale of players. This task is marked as critical in terms of priority and planned for a complete overhaul.
- Game updates: Ingame commands and game status need to be polled and updated on a regular basis. We are seeing high processing costs here which can be cut without player interference. This is a high priority task which is planned for a rework for better efficiency.
- Multithreading: In layman terms - currently our server infrastructure and game are not optimized to utilize concurrent player requests/commands in a particularly efficient manner. We are revisiting the approach taken and marked this as a high priority task for rework to better cater to parallel user requests.
- Call prioritizations: In cases where concurrent player requests come through as noted above, we are working further to make sure that these player requests are prioritized in order of importance. This is a high priority task.
- Push Notifications, Research: With the amount of strain on our servers and web calls, a traffic jam occurs. A single action such as Push Notifications to your phone will create an incredible traffic jam on the services. For the time being we have disabled or tweaked some of the functionality like Push Notifications, but other game functionalities such as the Research tree criteria and other linked items cannot be disabled. We have a number of tweaks and changes planned for this High priority task to cater for ever growing game and activity.
Dorado are working closely with Bytro to get these updates out to you as soon as possible. Right now we have an estimated date of 3 - 4 weeks until all the above can be injected into the game, but we will be adding the above changes to the game as soon as they are individually available - so improvements will take place gradually over these weeks, starting from tomorrow.
In any case we will keep the community informed on any intel as soon as we receive it. We wholeheartedly apologize for the subpar performance of the game in the recent days. Believe us when we take no joy in seeing players encounter roadblocks to playing the game they've come to know and love. Our promise is to improve it as soon as possible and is our absolute, utmost priority right now above all.