Tribalwars: Complicated Server issues

A lot of people have questions about why the server(s) go(es) down on tribalwars.net. The answers are not straightforward without a basic knowledge of how the Internet works. I will give a basic overview of potential causes for problems in this blog. If it gets a bit technical I do apologise.

Tribalwars.net is an Internet based game. This means that you, as a player, log onto a website to play the game. This is important to know for two reasons: One; the game does not run on your own computer, a lot of problems that affect all players therefore have nothing to do with your computer. Two; you are relying on the internet to provide a stable environment for you to play the game on.

The fact that the game runs on the internet does not mean it does not need a computer to play. The computer (simplified) that this game runs on is called a server, you log onto this server with your home-computer. This server provides all the ingredients needed for you to log into an active and non-stop gaming world. This is also the reason why sometimes the game has collective problems. If the server can not process something, because of a bug, because too many requests from too many players occur, or because it is having difficulty with the connection with the internet then all players logging into that server will encounter a problem. It is important to realise that the game does not actually run on ONE server, but relies on several servers to be presented in the way it is.

One of the servers that can cause great grieve is the DNS server. You might have heard of DNS and I will not dive into what it is supposed to do other than that it provides a way of connecting a specific server (computer!) to your computer by resolving the name of the game and connecting it to the right combination of numbers (IP plus port) . This DNS server is not actually maintained by the makers of Tribalwars but by the provider of the game. The provider tends to use one DNS server for many other servers which is a reason for the provider to look after it extremely well. However: Things can go wrong, and when they do, it causes problems for all the servers relying on that DNS server to provide the right instructions.

The recent problems we have had were mostly to do with the DNS server. I can assure you that as a team we apologise for the inconvenience caused! I will continue blogs on this subject, I don’t want to bore you to death. If you have suggestions for this topic then please let me know!

Tribalwars: Grey village disputes?

Well, it is to be hoped I will get subjects like this handed on a regular basis. This has really got me riling. Apparently in World 2 there is now a discussion about who should take which grey village! I am a World 2 vet, it is the world that I got innoculated on and I have learned most from playing this world. I had a fantastic tribe (ESL) with some fantastic leaders in Lokinder and vpar2. I grew more and more frustrated with the enormous clusters of allied villages though so I decided to give up by launching attacks on RUM independently, thanks to the Saints and ESL backing my villages RUM didn’t manage to delete me though, so in the end I gifted my villages to these tribes.

What frustrated me then has probably grown into a new cultural habit on World 2 as apparently it is now even necessary to eliminate the last viable targets by discussing who gets to take which grey (abandoned) village. I have one word for you lot:

SICK

Tribalwars is a wargame, I don’t understand how you do NOT get completely pigsick of playing a wargame without actually having a war. An organised attack/defense scheme as you seem to develop on this world is beyond all tolerable playability levels in my opinion. Basically the strongest characters/tribes dominate the world and decide it is all cast in a pattern that no one can jump out off. It is a good job the world got locked for new players as they would immediatly leave the game again due to boredom!

 

For those that argue there are wars going on after the CEG debacle, true! Good for you! but the war is only interesting for those that are on the frontline. Players like Pepperbro and Cpt_Jack have a great time slugging it out against each other, but I know for a fact that the majority of players are so hemmed into the brutal strapjacket of their tribes faulty and ridiculous alliances that logging in once every three days to avoid being gobbled up by your own tribe is enough to play.

 

 

 

I say we lock World 2, set all inactive and semi-inactive accounts (including those being sat for weeks on end) to Barbarian and generate some fighting spirit again! Oh and whilst we’re at it anyway, let’s disband all tribes. Bureaucracy should not be tolerated in the one place where war actually creates fun and excitement!

Tribalwars: Gifting bans

There are not many rules that I have difficulty with to enforce. But the gifting rule is one that causes a lot of controversy. I will try to explain what is going on with this rule that actually causes the problem in this blog, I am looking forward to comments on the subject.

Someone called Player X is fighting for months to gain 50 villages. He does so with help from his tribe, but he is always free to join another one as ultimately he is an individual entity in the game and gets judged as such. Player X however has a girlfriend that is pregnant and decides to leave the game. He clears his villages by sending the troops as support to needy tribemates and organises his tribemates to noble his villages.

This is fair, it is allowed and will not cause any reason for me to shout at you.

Someone called Player Y however is also the proud owner of 50 villages. He got them with some help from his tribe. He however gets bored with Tribalwars (Yeah right, like that is realistic!) and sets a sitter and leaves. The sitter is likely to be a tribemate and after a few weeks decides he is fed up with sitting the account. He sets up his tribe to noble the villages and clears them out beforehand.

This is not fair, the problem occurs because the sitter is not the original owner of the account and the sitter will benefit from the distribution of the villages between his tribemates. This will result in me getting annoyed with the sitter and the tribe, resulting in a punishment (of various nature, depending on a lot of factors)

A lot of people get upset about this. But the answer is actually really straightforward: If you are a sitter of an account you don’t want to sit anymore, choose to end account sitting. Wait for a good while (24 horus at least, but I advise to wait for a week) and then take the account over WITHOUT having moved all the defense out of the villages. If we see proof that the villages were legitly conquered (ie. troops were killed in the process, no troops were moved out before by a sitter) we will not oppose the taking over of the villages as it then falls under the normal ennoblement rules. And ennobling is a standard exercise of the game, regardless of whether it is in-tribe ennobling or not.

The controversy this rule creates is open for discussion but at the moment we lack any other ways of dealing with the concept of gifting. We do need a rule however because of the last example:

Player Z has set a sitter because he is going on holiday for a week. He is the proud owner of 50 villages. He comes home from a great time in Greece and logs into his account to find he is left with one 250 point village. He checks twstats.com and sees to his astonishment that all his villages have been taken by his tribe! His sitter betrayed him and emptied all his villages for easy ennoblement. Trust me, this happens. Would you like it to happen to you? Be smart, gift with sense!

First day

The University of Sheffield, I never realised before, is actually based in China. Over half of my fellow Information Management Master students are Chinese or certainly South-East Asian. I am not complaining though, today at the introductory meeting it seemed like there were a lot of nice people around and I  am sure I will get on with a number of them.

I learned that the SAP introduction (Software for automating information processes and mailings)  causes a lot of problems for students actually getting through the admissions process. I am hoping they can resolve that in time so I will have my University card before the end of the year!

Tribalwars

When I was about eight my dad got his first proper computer. It was an Acorn and it ran a simple Operating System (I think it was called BBC) and allowed users to program in Basic. It used Basic as a basis for it’s applications as well. We had some games on there (Digger, although called differently, was the most popular) and the opportunity to type out letters which would get printed on a massive and noisy Matrix printer.

It never bothered me that the games did not have the best graphics, I simply did not know any better. some years later we got a Nintendo Entertainment System which had cool games like Mario Bros and Top Gun. We loved that and were pleased we had colour in our games now. Dad had got his first PC as well and this was clearly much further advanced then the Acorn. It ran DOS which was really a lot smoother. I started playing games like Simcity and later Doom. Commander Keen was another favourite, although not of mine.

Graphics were going up a bit, resolutions became higher and the colourcount shot up. These days I play a game over an internetbrowser called Tribalwars. It is not pretty, it is not sexy, but it is highly addictive, more so then those oldies. I have played loads and loads of games before the internet came into full effect. But I really got the bug when I discovered online gaming. It started with Delta Force and went on to Vietcong which was a great time for me as it coincided with my study. (Which meant I could play whenever I wanted, provided I did some studying at some undefined point, usually a week before the tests started.)

But as life became more intense and the interest in Vietcong dropped after the horrendous release of Vietcong2, I decided I needed to play something that was less demanding. Via www.popomundo.com I got to www.tribalwars.net which was very different of nature, but a lot more interactive. I have played it for a year and a half now and it still has not got boring. The reason is simple. Where in other games people are your opponent, in tribalwars you are really bonded together to try and defeat the opponent. Communication is highly important at all levels and because of this you are always playing with people’s minds. And this is what creates a vivid, sparkling and dynamic environment in which a lot of people loose themselves every night.

I was very fortunate to get taken in by a wonderful tribe (ESL) and I learned a lot from their approach. Now we are considered old-school, probably with dated techniques and old-fashioned values like honour and pride. But we came back to one of the new worlds (w10) and are still goign strong as we were in the early days.

These days playing is not my only involvement with the game, I am one of the team of admins and moderators. As a so called superhunter I get to hunt cheaters on all worlds except the one I play. Without disclosing too much here I will give the occasional piece of insight into the way things work, so if you are from the tw.net community, keep coming back! If you drop me a line here with a specific request for a topic you would like to see some more about, I will try and address it. But please do realise that I am bound to a certain code and will not discuss things here that I would not discuss on the domain of www.tribalwars.net either. This is just a more comfortable place to manage requests.

Hi there odd person!

Don’t be insulted, be odd. It is a way of life apparently!

I hope you enjoy reading the occasional blog here. I keep a blog/social network site up in Dutch and divide attention between the two. I just find that with all the internet-contacts I have, it pays to have an English blog.

Therefore you will find topics here that concern my Netlife. If you are not interested in that, well… tough!