what kind of person keeps firing off sneezing powder over and over again despite being told that it is effectively disabling the game for 90ish other human beings?
Ugh! Just ugh! I couldn't even drop all of the drinks I made. I couldn't move. But it was fun when it started. And I didn't realize there was a shoppe there. Love it.
agreed - it was awful. I noticed two attempts which were to complete the quest...
I hate that quest! I have it currently and I'm not entirely sure when to do it. I'm very much not a griefer sort, so it goes against my instincts. But I am very much a completionist, so I've got to do it! Any tips from those who have been there, done that?
I should have gotten there earlier, I had all sorts of stuff for the pot luck. I even made a special trip home to get more goodies, since I live right in Tii Street.... =/
I had to leave the party, as my game crashed 3 times, each time it was because of sneezing powder. Not impressed.
That quest that makes people do that is stupid.
I finally let off one sneezing powder as I hadn't done it before and wanted the achievement for it..but i have to say it was a pretty lame end party...so much so that I wasn't even able to activate a new skill - very disappointing =/
I'm under the impression that the devs enjoy the griefers letting out sne
ezing powder. Otherwise it would say who opened it in the local chat (just like sparkle powder)
FairTrade, one of the Devs said that there's a chance that those powders might get limited during the end-of-test parties. I don't think that they enjoy it any more than we do - I'm sure that they get a ton of lag from it too, and don't enjoy having their Glitches frozen mid-jump (sorry, Glum...).
That was ridiculous. It's one thing to do it once during a party, it's another thing to shotgun the powder like mad. Just rude.
Was it just one person? Because if it was then maybe they could just have a long refractory period like with the focusing orb before you can use another one.
I haven't made sneezing powder yet so I'm just guessing it's not reusable.
I think this is the first time the server could not handle the load of the people. The closing song was speed up it felt like (could have been my connection) at the past two closing partys it was also none stop powders but the server seem to handle it for some reason.
Either way we all want to have fun at closing so enjoy what we have for now cause soon it wont ever happen again =/
Peace everyone and bless you all!
Maybe sneeze powder should only be used once per day. Or the perpetrator should be highlighted in red, or something. The party was great until the sneezing set in.
@Folderol: I never said anything about sneezing powder being banned at the end of the test! All I said is I was annoyed. However, my philosophy in this game is if it can be done, always expect the worst. I would NEVER ask for something to be banned cause it was annoying, unless I think the content is not appropriate for the game then there is no reason to restrict it. You must have me confused with someone else
EDIT: I still think it was rude for someone to do. I just don't think it needs to be restricted.
FairTradeFullStacks, re "I'm under the impression that the devs enjoy the griefers letting out sneezing powder"
Oh, how wrong you are. It is incredibly exasperating! I never even noticed (till I saw this thread) that the activity log entry does not say who did it. That is an easy fix :)
Gomez Addams, re "I think this is the first time the server could not handle the load of the people." — Not that it matters much, but just to clarify for those who are interested: server load was fine during this test and that number of people is not a problem in a single location.
Someone sprinkling sneezing powder is no more significant on the server side than is someone sending an IM or moving over a few pixels: the slowness is entirely on the client side (i.e., the software that is running on your computer) because Flash is struggling to drawing all those dozens of "Ah-choo!" animations.
And, for everyone: well before this thread, while the party was going on, loud cries of "argh!" and "dang!" (except, um, more crudely phrased) were heard all over our offices and we started brainstorming ways to limit the negative effects of both sparkle and sneezing powder in big-crowd situations. It will be taken care of :)
That's great to hear stoot.
I love the end of test parties, they're one of the best things about Beta for me, and I like to stay 'till the very last minute before teleporting home before close down.
It would be great if I could carry on doing that in the future, and not have to leave early, like I had to last night, because of flash crashes.
"..the slowness is entirely on the client's side (i.e. the software that is running on your computer) because the Flash is struggling to draw all..."
Umm,what can we do to make this better? ~other than not using so much sneezy-powder!
Is there a better 'Flash',something better than 'Flash'?
Stoot - your response is one the many many reasons I love Glitch so much - that and the simple elegant solutions that you all manage to create. It's so good to know that sneezing powder wasn't meant to be secretly deployed!
You don't need extra negative effects. They should be included in the effects of the power, but nothing more.
Someone mentioned changing the colour of their name. An easy method would be to put some sort of indicator on a person who uses the powder. That way they can be splanked to death by the crowd.
Personally, as much as I hated the sneezing and the fact that it ruined the party for me.
I'd hate for the culprits to be named and shamed. Highlighted in red. Splanked. Shunned. Pointed at laughed at. Pantsed. Whatever.
The fact is, the sneezing effect exists. It's been created. Some people may not realise what it does, and they'll get named, shamed and attacked when they're just attempting to figure things out.
If names do get highlighted, Griefers will find a loophole. For example, using the powder by a signpost and run away asap, wait a while come back and do the same. No consequence, as by the time everyone's got themselves back to their nose-bean free selves, the griefer will be gone and laughing.
As much as I support a good old fashioned splanking when someone is behaving like a numpty, I don't like the idea of a mob splanking.
Who'll end up punished? The poor person that knows no better, who'll use the powder once out of curiosity and stand there and get attacked. Not the one(s) that are being trolls on purpose who'll fire off the powder and run.
Either the sneezing effect needs to be less irritating and long and annoying, or disabled in large groups. I don't think it's so much a user problem as a dev. problem. Users will do what ever they can in a game, however annoying those things may be.
Hi nonpromqueen :)
We were at Gullermo Gamera Way this time, which was ideal for falling through gaps, flying through the air and droping things on crowds. I hope you make the next one :)
Above stoot said: Someone sprinkling sneezing powder is no more significant on the server side than is someone sending an IM or moving over a few pixels: the slowness is entirely on the client side (i.e., the software that is running on your computer) because Flash is struggling to drawing all those dozens of "Ah-choo!" animations.
Which got me to wondering... how do the lag issues look on the Tiny Speck side. There has got to be some sort of indication other than players squawking 'the lag sucks'. Does it appear as a bubble of nothing followed by an increase in the load? Is there another monitoring metric, or is it all in the magic details gathered from bug reports?
I may be experiencing serious lag because my route to their servers is different from your route, and there's some hop between me and their servers that isn't working right.
There's really no reason that Tiny Speck would know about what's happening on millions of connections around the world. There are diagnostics available if someone wants to find out about a specific route, but in general, on the Tiny Speck side, it's invisible.
@WindBorn & PA... I fully understand how internet lag works... what I'm curious about is the specific rendering lag created by Flash working very very hard to generate all the Achoo's as stoot mentioned. Relative to the topic - the rendering of all the Achoo's in a street with 80+ people on it caused several people to crash. The shared crash was an exceptional marker of a particularly large incident.
With all the focus on optimization / loading / lag... it seems there's some other indicator beyond player feedback and first hand experience, and it boggles the mind TS would be investigating individual connections to monitor progress and health of rendering lag.... so I still wonder what it looks like on the TS side.
While mob justice sounds satisfying, adding limits to the powder makes it more self-policing too. Maybe it only affects a max number of people per sprinkle (like 7 or 11) and the user has a cool-down before sprinkling again. "You can't sprinkle sneezing powder again yet. Your nose is still sore!"
WindBorn .. they are not talking about network lag. but if it was, TS could totally know about it if they wanted to, based on having the client do some self reporting. like a network traceroute.
Trav .. i know the flash client records frame rate information. when there is graphical lag in the client, the frame rate drops. i assume this information is recorded and reported to TS.
well, html5 + javascript or silverlight *might* work better inside the browser, but i doubt it would work better than the current client unless similar time [months .. years?] was spent optimizing it.
but you've got the wrong idea to begin with .. even without the client lag, the nature of the sneezing and sparkle powders is to lock players down to varying extents.
i seem to recall that you were firing off sparkle powder at least once during the laggy portion of the last party, perhaps multiple times, despite complaints. i hope this was out of ignorance of the effect it was having on people but it might explain why you are asking for a technical fix that allows for powder use at a high rate.
even with a technical fix for the flash client, there are some innate problems with using those powders in certain settings.
At a project a few weeks back, about 5 minutes before it opened up a player asked if he could get his Sneeze-o-Rama achievement because he/she did not want to disturb us while working. I never punish people if they get a badge because they have likely never used it.
However if a person is just being an overall lousy person I will happily splank them. Why don't you get the bearer of the powder to sneeze twice as long as everyone else so he cant do it constantly on us?
Striatic said "i know the flash client records frame rate information. when there is graphical lag in the client, the frame rate drops. i assume this information is recorded and reported to TS." — Yes, that's about right: the game client software periodically sends in it's current performance statistics which we pool together to get the mean and median performance across the entire spectrum of clients running on all the different systems and versions. With that we can directly compare changes test-to-test and see the effect.
People say "lag" and often think there is a network problem or server-slowness — some reason it is taking a long time for data to get from the server to the client — but 99% of the issues are entirely on the client side. We've pushed Flash beyond what it was designed to do and are constantly fighting a battle to squeeze out more performance (too early to say for sure, but we think we might have another big victory to come).
And now I know what the rendering lag looks like on the TS side, thanks :D
If there *might* be another victory around the corner... so that mean there *might* also be a cool new blog post too? Ooooo I hope so!
I was still frozen in a slanted position there, completely unable to move. I had to reload in order to get back into my house. Fortunately, my avatar made a full recovery at that point. Other people reloaded a bit too late, and were unable to get back into the game at all.
I'll repeat here what I said on the home page feed after the test: sneezing and sparkle powders are just annoyances. Sparkle powder is sort of pretty, and gives a small mood boost, but the graphical lag is icky when there are too many moving parts on a street already. Sneezing powder is funny once, and then it's just annoying: the screen freezes, everything stops, no one can move, and sometimes we can't recover from it without reloading. People love to use it at projects, so we can't get anything done. It's also the least economical way to produce beans. I'd rather see it eliminated.
Instead, how about other powders with nicer effects? I think I had suggested Rainbow Powder, to make a rainbow in the sky, or Firework Powder, to set off small, quiet fireworks (a small popping sound, rather than a big bang, would suffice). Make Flower Powder for temporary petal showers, Chilly Powder for snowflakes, Happy Powder for smiley faces, or what have you, and limit the number of uses per hour or game day or whatever.
Ok, first and foremost, I'm glad that there are others who are as annoyed by the powders as I am, because I was wondering if I was alone in that.
Secondly, thank you stoot! It warms my heart that y'all over at TinySpeck are listening to us. I know how rough Flash can be on users (I work for a company who uses Flash for the interface that displays to end users of the software) especially when there are a lot of things going on screen at once.
I think glum made a good point - powders with nicer effects would be great, but I key into the suggestion of limiting the number of uses per hour or per game day. That would definitely help from having someone fire off all the uses of powder (I assume it's a single use at a time item and not a Use All |1|10|20 item - I don't have the recipe). Quests may have to be adjusted as a result, depending on the requirement, but that shouldn't be too hard to do. Or players are just going to have to take more time to complete the quest.
I just find it hard that there's someone who decided that firing off all that powder sequentially was a good idea - especially as they would also be a victim of being Flash-bound, right? I'm not defending them, but they shouldn't need to be told that it's disabling the game for other players, as it would effectively be disabling it for them as well.
@Ebil - when a person spreads sparkle powder their name shows up in chat already, and I don't think I've ever seen someone get called out for it. I also think we, as a whole, are able to tell the difference between when a person is experimenting or getting the achievement and when someone is griefing.
I also really LOVE the idea of other powders that have cool effects like Glum has suggested - that would be awesome!