Sunday 23 July 2006

Pic of the day: Plantzon Fyre, my fire/fire tanker.

Double XP weekend

Some readers may have noticed that my journal entries became even more delayed than usual this weekend. I will now reveal the reason: It was double XP weekend in my favorite online game, City of Heroes.

It sounds like a small thing, and indeed it is, compared to other online events. I doubt any online game has ever had an event that needed so little programming! The only difference from usual was that everything that gave experience points, gave twice as many of them. But it certainly pulled in a lot of players. Actually, this was the main attraction for me. I do not play the game to get my characters to the highest possible level as fast as possible. I play it because I enjoy it. In fact, even though I have played this game since it was in closed beta, I still don't have any characters at level 50, the highest possible. Instead I tend to divide my attention between many different characters which I play depending on my mood and the activity in my supergroup.

With the double XP, many players would come and play at times of the day or night when they were usually not online. Some who were only sporadically active would be playing much more during this weekend. So this was the ideal occasion to meet new friends or get new ideas from observing unfamiliar players. And to tell the truth, I was also a bit curious how well the servers would handle the load... there hasn't been that many people on since the first weeks after the game was released, and the game has been expanded with seven "issues" since then, each of them about the same size as an expansion pack that is sold separately for other games. So there is a lot of new content and new details that have never been fully stress tested with a full server.

As for that last point, the servers handled the load fine. The same cannot be said about the clients (which in this case is not the people, but the actual program installed on each computer which displays the game world to the player and communicates with the central servers.) On my machine it worked fabulously. There was barely any delay at all, certainly less than it has been some days in the past. But this was not so for all players. Even inside the game, some complained about "lag", others spent a long time zoning from one part of the city to another, and some simply were disconnected from time to time. Of these, some didn't come back to the team. And forums dedicated to the game, including the LiveJournal community where I am a member, were flooded with horror stories about the game being too slow to play. Since it worked fine for most of us, the problem was obviously not with the servers. Perhaps the computers had not been upgraded while the program gradually grew. Or perhaps their ISP did not have the necessary capacity at the time. After all, when there are twice as many players, there is a lot more information to send from the servers out to our computers.

As for my own goals, I have to admit that I didn't meet anyone particularly interesting. It was kind of fun to see more people around, like in the good old days when the game was new. But that was pretty much it. Oh, and I guess my characters did level up a bit faster than usual. But this wasn't something to stay online all day and night for, and I didn't either. Just the time I would otherwise have used to write my journal...