EZ Server

Code was reactivated this afternoon to combat the rampant use of fan botting instances. This code will cause you to go link dead if you are fanning out multiple single characters across instances. Players are makings dozens and dozens of instances, and in many cases zone pulling all of them simultaneously, which causes extreme, and unnecessary load on the server. This was partially the cause of the server shutdown this afternoon. During a routine update of the test server, the load generated by the code compilation, coupled with multiple, simultaneous zone pulls caused a memory usage spike that was enough to shut down both servers. This type of fan botting is not allowed, as the majority of these consist of one click zone pulls that automatically begin looting following the successful zone pull. Continued abuse may result in some extreme measures to combat it, up to, and including large cast time increase on Scorpion Spears, or we will rescind the allowance of automatic loot macros and plugins, with zero tolerance for their use.

Our server hardware is quite robust, it is in line with PEQ's hardware, yet has much, much higher resource usage, despite a much smaller population (1/3rd at best), but there's only so much hardware can do against what amounts to an internal DDOS attack on server resources.

General Guidelines:
 • Minimum of 6 man groups in each zone being zone pulled.
 • Stagger zone pulls amongst your boxes by at least 30 seconds.

*EDIT* To clarify, this code is not specific to people zone pulling, or creating multiple instances. It will also disconnect zones with 1 or 2 characters in the zone.


-Draca

This really ruins it for people like me who make instances for single character to single kill specific mobs. I don't even ZP. Not sure why stuff like this is done. The obvious fix is to either ban those people ruining the bandwidth, not collective  punishment. This doesn't even fix the problem. The people can just bring bots in and continue ZPing away.

It has actually had quite an impact on the problem, and I have been watching for individuals who continue to hog resources, and so far people have been generally going along with the program. I understand it's a slight inconvenience, but you must have 3 characters to keep a zone open, not 30. Log 2 more characters in and have them jump instances with you at zone in, they don't even need to be grouped. It's a bigger issue for people who may just be getting into the server and haven't made any alts, so that may need to be looked at.

Any chance that we will be allowed to make our own private instance of HW and ZP it?? We all promise to be good.

No. I added the aggro range increase, which helps manually pull the zone quite a lot, but no zone pulls or private instances.