[chibiarc]

Back to the ring thing (tm). My suggestion to the stay online problem is as follows:

First:
One Scenario per Account. Not per Char, per Account.
Free. No additional charging like buying a piece of virtual land.

<> Now where to get the resources from? Well...

Second:
All the published Scenarios won't be running nor taking any resources.
They will just show up on the list and only start running once a player demands access.

It is similar to a manual upload/launch of a scenario, just in this case the server has a huge list of available scenarios and is autolaunching those as requested.

All of the above is of course only valid for Masterless Scenarios. Mastered Scenarios can't run alone obviously. For those the rules should apply as we have them now.

<> Resources, Limits and Player Choice...

Third:
Once launched Scenarios should stop again. When?
Naturally if the last player leaves and it's empty.

However in case of people falling asleep or other odd cases I suggest adding a thing similar to a watchdog. If there hasn't been any activity / player movement / action triggered within half an hour or so the scenario is considered stalled and shuts down.

The afk Player will be booted aswell.

Fourth:
In case the server load is too much, because of countless scenarios activating at one time, there is only one solution, to limit the number of active scenarios.

But how? I suggest a simple system. Player voting for the top 5 Scenarios to be put online might work, but I see some danger of abusing this system.

My solution is to add a credit system.
Every scenario not running will get credits over time. Like 1 credit / hour.
Once a scenario is launched the credits will be reset to 0.

Now if there are more scenarios in the launch queue than available free slots, simply the scenario with the highest credits will be launched. If the same amount of credits, first come first serve.

This way it is always guaranteed for scenarios to have a chance and go online. If a scenario is always running and another one has to wait all the time, it will accumulate lots of credits and the running one will be at zero credits.

The next time a scenario is supposed to launch the one waiting before has a great chance to get launched and the one just running all the time has to sit out.

With this system new Scenarios always have the chance to get launched and the queue can't be blocked with the 3-4 most popular ones. The longer the new one has to wait out, the more credits it gets and the higher the chance on the next round to go online.


So far my ideas, what do you think about this? I think a problem might be if scenarios will run within all rules and just stay online. E.g. due to macros or other tricks. Would it be useful to add a maximum running time? E.g. it has to relaunch / go back to queue after running 24hrs straight? But how to stop the scenario?

My problem atm is, what to do if the server resources are exhausted and the scenarios have to be limited.
How to make it fair and as elegant as possible.

arc