Thread by @TCOKeyforge

This is a long one, bare with me. TL;DR Refresh your browser if you have issues on TCO, lag might be better now. I've just deployed an update to TCO that I've been working on on and off for a few months now. It overhauls the way game messages are exchanged between 1/11

the client and the server. It should hopefully help with the lag some players get. I've also recently had a player send me the MTR data that I've been asking for and it has identified a possible issue at my ISP's upstream provider that they've now opened a ticket to try 2/11

and get this resolved. The server lag issue that some people get has been a source of frustration for me as much as those people who experience it for some time now but unfortunately the fix is not as easy as you might think. 3/11

It's been reasonably upsetting and disappointing to see things like "TCO is running on a server under my desk or in my basement" get perpetuated. I also get a lot of criticism for not caring about the issue or dismissing offers of help. 4/11

The truth of the matter is new servers won't fix this issue. TCO barely puts a dent in the one we have. In fact, I recently conducted an experiment of hosting a game node in AWS in the UK. Unsurprisingly, it didn't fix the issue, people still had high ping and lag. 5/11

I was never going to move the server to the US as that would have just shifted the problem to a whole other group of users and not solved the problem at all and the regional usage data I have did not support that as a viable option. 6/11

The fix for the problem was to do what I've just done, improving the messaging code so that as little data flows as possible between the client and server. Before the update the game state would get increasingly large as the game went on and if you were on a bad connection 7/11

this make the lag get progressively worse. Now the average game state message is 3000 bytes in size(from 40k+). So this should lessen the impact of poor (or distant) connections. If this doesn't fully resolve the issue the next step is to rewrite the infrastructure code 8/11

to support game nodes in multiple locations so that each player can connect to a node local to them. I don't think this will be necessary, but I'm ready to do it if it is. As wonderful as it is to have help with card implementations the main core infrastructure and 9/11

client code is still only really done by me, so it's vulnerable to my motivation, available time and in the case of this particular update, just technical difficulties to overcome. I do however remain committed to making TCO as good as I possibly can. 10/11

Thanks for reading this essay! 😂The update means that you will need to refresh your browser before you play on TCO the next time. Please do let me know if this makes things better, worse or indifferent! #tco #keyforge 11/11

I've just realised that this update breaks The Crucible Tracker add-on. This wasn't on purpose or by design, and I should probably have realised before I deployed it that it would be an issue. I've notified the developer of this add-on what the problem is and how they can fix it!