[CF List] New To Crossfire

[Joris Bontje]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 04:23:50PM -0600, 
     
     misleb at onshore.com
     
      wrote:
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      [cut]
     
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      I noticed that there are many servers running at any given time.  Are
     
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      these servers usually running the same basic "world" (set of maps?) Why
     
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      not just one server? Or just a couple? Seems like it would be more fun
     
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      with lots of people running around in a single (large) world.
     
     It is an opensource game, everybody is free to start his/her own server.
There are 3 'big' servers running:
crossfire.jyu.fi
metalforge.real-time.com
mids.student.utwente.nl

These are the big ones because (I think):
They have fast connections
Are updated regulary
Are online 24/7

With a realtime game it is important to have a small latency... You
can't do that with 1 server. I think it would be best to have a server
at every center of crossfire playing...
The other small servers are probably people trying to become big...

Now the problem is... do we have a limited userbase,
if so, are multiple servers bad for it, spreading of the users
or, is the amount of users limited because there arent enough fast
servers...

The current maps are only playable with a small amount of players. 10-15
is a maximum, otherwise some areas get too crowded. Ofcourse this
depends on the players, if they team up, or explore new places a server
can have more. For performance the amount is limited too... but I have
never experimented with that, but I should.

>
     
      I noticed that there are usually never more than 5 or so people on
     
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      any given server at any given time. Is Crossfire meant to be a social
     
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      thing or just a few people who happen to running around in the same
     
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      world together? I understand that you COULD create parties and fight
     
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      monsters together, but does it happen? 
     
     There are enough multiplayer features and people are known to play
crossfire multiplayer (understatement). Actually there is quite some
helping and teamplaying which is fun.

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      How long do the servers generally run? Are we talking weekly turnover
     
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      or monthly? Also, I am not quite clear on how or if the servers refresh
     
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      the monsters/quests. If a server has been played by enough people, does
     
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      it get depleted of monsters/quests/artifacts?
     
     Server run till they crash :) Most maps are resetted individually every
2 hours, but that depends. On my server I delete players who save with
0-1000 exp after some time, just to clean up a little, but I don't have
a strong policy on that.
Some maps, for instance pupland' raffle1 is very popular because of the
specific enemies you find there.. There are often requests to the
dungeon master to manually reset it. With more people you will have more
of these problems. I think shortening the reset time isnt good for
everything, having more maps is better.

Thanks for starting this discussion, I think it is very usefull and we
can learn a lot by observing the current usage and state of the game.

Joris Bontje / mids
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