BfEC performance and loading issues

Dear Players,

This week, many of you brought to our attention the increased lag and performance issues during the last BfEC event. While our team is working on optimizing our processes and setup to resolve these issues, we want to share details as to what happened this weekend.

As you all know, the current international Covid-19 pandemic is changing quite a lot of things for you, us and everyone around the globe. While the impact on our working processes is very small at Deca Games, one of the side-effect we did not foresee is related to our traffic distribution.

The servers used for CC are placed in different regions of the world. The point here has always been to avoid any dependency to one single location so that we do not run into issues if anything happens in that single location. A storm, a power blackout, any natural disaster to this one region would otherwise cause the full game to be unavailable for a certain time. To a lower degree, any traffic increase in said region can also slightly impact the game performance.

Because of that, we always have a few different locations (also called availability zones) for the game to run. Since there are quite some locations, it is not always possible for us to ensure that the traffic is not directed to our server using any public network along the way. These public networks are currently quite crowded due to the Covid-19 situation and this can lead to bigger performance issues and bigger performance discrepancies between accounts.

To limit this side effect, we will be using only one location for our CC server over the next few weeks. It comes with a risk. Would anything happen to said location, the game would be temporarily unavailable but, at the very moment, this risk is lower than the side effect described above. Having only one location for our servers will also give us a better control over the traffic flow and avoid any public network routing for the players.

Loading times were also brought up by many players, especially being stuck at 40% and 80%. After looking into this issue, it seems that the dataset loading happening at 40% and the Game elements loaded at 80%(buildings, items, etc.) are two of the biggest elements to load and give easily the impression that nothing happens until it's fully downloaded. We will move to a more dynamic loading progress bar that does not work per element but takes into consideration the overall volume and estimated loading time.

We would like to thank you again for your loyalty and support through these particular times. Stay home, stay safe!

Your Deca team