Developer Update 4/9/2020

Announcements made here about the game and the company.

Developer Update 4/9/2020

Postby Achilles » Thu Apr 09, 2020 12:34 pm

Hey everyone,

I wanted to give a general update on what we've been working on and what the plans for the future are. I know there haven't been a lot of user facing updates lately besides the cosmetics patch but a lot has been going on that you just don't see.

Full Rackspace Server Updates
Our Rackspace servers were running Ubuntu14 which is approaching EoL support so we had to start upgrading all of our servers to Ubuntu18 at the start of the year. Our Webserver, Gameserver, PTRGameserver, GameDBserver, PhpbbDBserver and Mailserver all had to be reinstalled from SVN (Rackspace doesn't support patch upgrades, you have to fully reinstall from scratch). This also involved upgrading to php7 and MySQL5.7. Any programmer can tell you that when you upgrade your OS and 3rd party libraries things will break and it took a decent amount of time testing and fixing all of the upgrade issues. Some of you may recall the forums being down for a day last month. Ends up PhpBB really didn't like MySQL5.7 and we had to change a lot of queries and settings to get it working.

General Server Code Improvements
There are a lot of server improvements that aren't part of the patch notes because they just aren't interesting to users. For example, we reworked the system that creates forum accounts for users who create their account through Unity. The old system would sometimes fail to create a forum account for users and we reworked it to guarantee 100% success rate of forum account creations. Another rework was to our server performance monitoring tool. This tool tracks timestamps of the major systems on the server and monitors them for spikes in system usage. It was greatly improved and will automatically email us anytime server usage gets too high, including details of what game systems were using up the majority of the resources. Improving this tool helped us track down a login bug that was getting the server stuck in a large loop (this was the cause of some of the server lockups that were happening last month). Additionally there has been a lot of general server tech debt cleanup including the removal of old features/systems that are no longer used. We've had multiple programmers touching the code base over the course of 8 years and it needed some refactoring love.

Anti-Botting Measures & General Game Monitoring
We have implemented some secret features to thwart the botters who consistently attempt to spam the game lobbies. You may not see them around too much other than them jumping into a lobby before getting quickly banned, but that is because we have been working hard to keep them shut down. Some of the secret features are also being used to help monitor the game in general. Perhaps you have seen users get instantly suspended/banned in some of your games. Additionally we added an account name filter for creating accounts that blocks profanity. We also verify a users Refer-A-Friend exists upon account creation now.

IP Restrictions - As both an anti-botting measure and ban-evading measure we have implemented an IP Restriction system. An IP Restriction temporarily stops an account from participating in free-play via Classic Tickets or referrals. It does not effect premium or grandfathered users in any way. We tracked the IPs of many of the bot accounts of the past and discovered that a lot of the abuse came from a few different VPN services. We have Restricted the entire IP subnets of many of these VPNs that were used to ban evade. The restriction lasts for the next 5 years and we will continue to add new restrictions for any VPN services that are used abusively. Additionally the IP Restriction system will automatically restrict the IP of users who are suspended or banned via trial or by a moderator. A suspension restricts the IP for 1 day and a ban for 7 days. This is to combat ban evading. It is possible that some users will be effected by an IP Restriction if they are on a commonly shared IP, but they always have the option to upgrade to a premium account or wait out the restriction. We feel this is necessary to prevent a few bad apples on the free-play Classic Ticket system from ruining the experience of the entire player base.

Steam users who are suspended/banned have their SteamID put into a permanent table that prevents new account creation/linking when the previous account is deleted. This was to prevent ban evasions by Steam users who could delete their banned account via the request deletion email.

Reset password, verify email and account deletion verification codes now timeout after 24 hours.

General Bug Fixes
There have been many bug fixes recently. A few examples:
* When having Classic and Coven tickets at the same time it would consume the incorrect ticket
* CL/Witch targeting transporter would incorrectly show transporter target to Lookout, tracker, Medusa, WW.
* Tracker now sees both of Transporters targets
* Bug that incorrectly showed immunity when Witch controlled Vampires on non-biting nights.
* Pirate can still win when all are dead if completed his objectives
* Tracker would incorrectly see someone visiting when roleblocked/dueled & controlled
* General notification popup with info when clients get into invalid states
* Tracker would get incorrect info when target was dueled/roleblocked

Unity & HTML5
We have made great progress on the Unity port for Web/html5. We have Websockets and WebGL working. The game is actually playable at this point but we have more testing and bug fixing to do as well as implement Facebook API, paymentwall and a few other things that are specific to Web. The port is about 80-85% done and we expect to be announcing the official launch day in the next week or two.

Future
Once the Web port is done we will be getting to work implementing the things we have had to hold off on.

Our current list:
* Ending the current ranked season
* Ranked balance changes and launching a new season
* General role balance changes
* New game mode for Classic & Coven - "Town Traitor". In this game mode a random member of the town will be sided with the Mafia/Coven and wins with them. It is up to the Town to determine who the traitor among them is.
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Re: Developer Update 4/9/2020

Postby NateNate60 » Thu Apr 09, 2020 3:42 pm

Finally, some good news.

Also, why didn't you guys upgrade the OS sooner? 14.04 LTS already reached End of Life last year lol
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Re: Developer Update 4/9/2020

Postby Joacgroso » Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:35 pm

I'm glad you're sharing results, although I don't understand most of them. However, I really think you should implement private lobbies at some point, so people with closed circles of friends can be attracted to the game. Personally I would try to get my friends into the game if we could actually play together. Good luck, anyway.
Joacgroso wrote:I feel like I went from Light Yagami to Keiichi Maebara.

I still hope one day the game will have private lobbies. They would really help.
Also, please nerf vampire hunters.
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Re: Developer Update 4/9/2020

Postby techyleo » Sun Apr 26, 2020 9:37 am

When you announce the launch date, how long do you think the period between the announcement and the launch will be?
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Re: Developer Update 4/9/2020

Postby woahah » Sun Apr 26, 2020 12:30 pm

you guys know that alot of people use vpns when playing and alot of people play with classic tickets only, I get you want to stop botters from ban evading, but at the same time you can just unplug your router and put it back in again and you'll get a new ip anyways, so I doubt itll do much
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Re: Developer Update 4/9/2020

Postby ShylokVakarian » Mon May 04, 2020 9:34 pm

Achilles wrote:Hey everyone,

I wanted to give a general update on what we've been working on and what the plans for the future are. I know there haven't been a lot of user facing updates lately besides the cosmetics patch but a lot has been going on that you just don't see.

Full Rackspace Server Updates
Our Rackspace servers were running Ubuntu14 which is approaching EoL support so we had to start upgrading all of our servers to Ubuntu18 at the start of the year. Our Webserver, Gameserver, PTRGameserver, GameDBserver, PhpbbDBserver and Mailserver all had to be reinstalled from SVN (Rackspace doesn't support patch upgrades, you have to fully reinstall from scratch). This also involved upgrading to php7 and MySQL5.7. Any programmer can tell you that when you upgrade your OS and 3rd party libraries things will break and it took a decent amount of time testing and fixing all of the upgrade issues. Some of you may recall the forums being down for a day last month. Ends up PhpBB really didn't like MySQL5.7 and we had to change a lot of queries and settings to get it working.

General Server Code Improvements
There are a lot of server improvements that aren't part of the patch notes because they just aren't interesting to users. For example, we reworked the system that creates forum accounts for users who create their account through Unity. The old system would sometimes fail to create a forum account for users and we reworked it to guarantee 100% success rate of forum account creations. Another rework was to our server performance monitoring tool. This tool tracks timestamps of the major systems on the server and monitors them for spikes in system usage. It was greatly improved and will automatically email us anytime server usage gets too high, including details of what game systems were using up the majority of the resources. Improving this tool helped us track down a login bug that was getting the server stuck in a large loop (this was the cause of some of the server lockups that were happening last month). Additionally there has been a lot of general server tech debt cleanup including the removal of old features/systems that are no longer used. We've had multiple programmers touching the code base over the course of 8 years and it needed some refactoring love.

Anti-Botting Measures & General Game Monitoring
We have implemented some secret features to thwart the botters who consistently attempt to spam the game lobbies. You may not see them around too much other than them jumping into a lobby before getting quickly banned, but that is because we have been working hard to keep them shut down. Some of the secret features are also being used to help monitor the game in general. Perhaps you have seen users get instantly suspended/banned in some of your games. Additionally we added an account name filter for creating accounts that blocks profanity. We also verify a users Refer-A-Friend exists upon account creation now.

IP Restrictions - As both an anti-botting measure and ban-evading measure we have implemented an IP Restriction system. An IP Restriction temporarily stops an account from participating in free-play via Classic Tickets or referrals. It does not effect premium or grandfathered users in any way. We tracked the IPs of many of the bot accounts of the past and discovered that a lot of the abuse came from a few different VPN services. We have Restricted the entire IP subnets of many of these VPNs that were used to ban evade. The restriction lasts for the next 5 years and we will continue to add new restrictions for any VPN services that are used abusively. Additionally the IP Restriction system will automatically restrict the IP of users who are suspended or banned via trial or by a moderator. A suspension restricts the IP for 1 day and a ban for 7 days. This is to combat ban evading. It is possible that some users will be effected by an IP Restriction if they are on a commonly shared IP, but they always have the option to upgrade to a premium account or wait out the restriction. We feel this is necessary to prevent a few bad apples on the free-play Classic Ticket system from ruining the experience of the entire player base.

Steam users who are suspended/banned have their SteamID put into a permanent table that prevents new account creation/linking when the previous account is deleted. This was to prevent ban evasions by Steam users who could delete their banned account via the request deletion email.

Reset password, verify email and account deletion verification codes now timeout after 24 hours.

General Bug Fixes
There have been many bug fixes recently. A few examples:
* When having Classic and Coven tickets at the same time it would consume the incorrect ticket
* CL/Witch targeting transporter would incorrectly show transporter target to Lookout, tracker, Medusa, WW.
* Tracker now sees both of Transporters targets
* Bug that incorrectly showed immunity when Witch controlled Vampires on non-biting nights.
* Pirate can still win when all are dead if completed his objectives
* Tracker would incorrectly see someone visiting when roleblocked/dueled & controlled
* General notification popup with info when clients get into invalid states
* Tracker would get incorrect info when target was dueled/roleblocked

Unity & HTML5
We have made great progress on the Unity port for Web/html5. We have Websockets and WebGL working. The game is actually playable at this point but we have more testing and bug fixing to do as well as implement Facebook API, paymentwall and a few other things that are specific to Web. The port is about 80-85% done and we expect to be announcing the official launch day in the next week or two.

Future
Once the Web port is done we will be getting to work implementing the things we have had to hold off on.

Our current list:
* Ending the current ranked season
* Ranked balance changes and launching a new season
* General role balance changes
* New game mode for Classic & Coven - "Town Traitor". In this game mode a random member of the town will be sided with the Mafia/Coven and wins with them. It is up to the Town to determine who the traitor among them is.


Good to know that the Unity Port is coming along nicely, and I enjoy this talk of refactoring, and wish to hear more about it. Anything else interesting in the refactoring and code cleanup department?
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