I got a Gportal server for the primary reason of controlling building and thrall decay, it’s a PVE server and works fine.
It’s a 10 slot system and I let anyone on who wants to play.
At the moment I have the decay system disabled. My primary question is regarding performance. Building, Thralls, any user placeable objects have to be accounted for somehow. There has to be some sort of database on a game server that keeps track of it all. As that dataset increases we could expect performance issues at some point. Right or wrong? I don’t know anything about the internals of the game.
This has got me to thinking that a decay time of some sort might be appropriate. I’m thinking 30 or 45 days, that gets us past long vacations, etc.
Have any of you other server owners thought this through, done some experimenting or just flat out know things about all this?
A secondary issue is clutter in the world. There’s campfires and little things all over my world and looks a little messy. That got me to thinking about decay also, purely a vanity issue I know.
So far I do not have the problem of running out of places to build due to clutter. I can see how that is a great reason for decay, I’m trying to be careful about rationalizing a decay setting as that is the reason I abandoned the Official servers in the first place.
In any case I’m interested in comments regarding performance in particular, comment on the vanity stuff also if you want to.
I don’t claim to be an expert (or 100% correct on any of this) but I’ve been watching community manager responses to questions regarding decisioning by the development team. Generally speaking, they use Official servers as the bench mark. So they are referring to 40 person servers and that type of server performance when making choice to reduce or limit features like the 100 thralls per clan as an example. So performance may be dependent on how many players are logged in and how many different areas are being rendered at the same time. It’s a lot to do at once. As for as accounting for all items in the world and their locations, this is probably stored in a database and sits there until the system tries to render it for a player in an area. The rendering is probably what taxes the server, so having 500,000 items spread across the map unrendered is not an issue, but 1,000 items in a 5 foot foundation area might be an issue because each database entry needs to be rendered at that point in time… I am not sure if a provider like G Portal ups your server’s processing power based on your subscription size. If you only have a 10 slot server it may reduce the work your server may have to do if it becomes full vs a possible full 40. Just something to consider on how some of this may work.
As for decay timers and clutter vs land claim areas - you may be able to tweak the land claim areas via unexposed server settings. Some of these settings are hidden because they do adversely affect the server. For example, I tweaked a hidden setting allowing me to place thralls next to each other shoulder to shoulder.
But if you’re worried about clutter and opening this up to public, decay timers is probably a good idea.