After some talk in a chat yesterday there were some disagreement of the best way for the tick countdown to work. The way it currently work is that it estimates when the tick will end, and does a countdown towards that. But as most of you know, it’s not entirely accurate. The reason this is done is because doing the operations of the ticks takes time, and there is a que of world, so it doesn’t happen right on the dot.
My suggestion is to have the countdown count downward to when the tick engine starts it’s work ie. 15 20 30 00. Especially for less experienced players this would help as it’s way less punishing that the tick ends 15 seconds after the countdown has ended than 15 seconds before if you try to do an eot attack. But even for experienced players it’s easy to look at the countdown and make a mistake.
What do you guys think? Should it stay the way it is with the game trying to estimate when the tick ends, or a countdown that counts down to when the first server starts processing it’s tick?
Just to clearify. This wouldn’t fix the problem of worlds taking longer to process ticks. It will only change what it counts down to: either an estimated tick end, or when the tick engine starts processing the ticks.
I can understand that it needs to process game actions, but on worlds where barely anything is happening (it’s basically only counting minimal troop movement and resource gain) how can it be ahead or behind the actual game clock that is displayed to the user? Having your tick refresh at 00:45, or so delayed that you’re better off going back to the world list and re-logging is in it’s own way, game breaking.
The tick countdown should be to the time you are last able to input a move. Anyone who knows better looks at a real clock like https://time.is/ET to make eot moves. The clock in game is basically entirely meaningless
What about staggering the ticks slightly?
Deliberately setting them off a few seconds apart and timing to that?
Eg all 3 and 4 tickers occur at 15seconds past the tick time
im not sure if i understand correctly, but this kinda sounds like aids for actually playing. just have the timer reflect the time you are no longer able to input any actions, which is almost exactly when an hour turns on real clocks.
having the clocks show anything other than this makes 0 sense. people want to know when they can last input an action
yes, absolutely. right now the tick will roll at arbitrary times when considering the in game clock, and not let you make a change or move even if there is time left on the clock. What is the point of the clock if i cant use it to make movements? if i look at the in game clock i will get screwed over and die every important eot move i make.
not a single person i know uses the in game clock for eot moves. whenever newer people come along, one of the first things people tell them is never trust the in game clock. so why not fix it so its usable?
Well in that case, you could give some buffer time between ticks( say 10 seconds maybe?) so that all the operations get worked out.
The timer’s say number of ticks per hour but not the duration of the tick so it will still be the same. For a 1 ticker it would still be 1 tick per hour but the tick duration will reduce to 59:50.
I’m not really sure how feasible or useful this will be, but then we can atleast trust the in game timer to be accurate and work based on that.