I almost responded to this with my gut response but whatever I would have said would wind up making certain people angrier than they already are.
I refrain from saying a lot of things that I want to say on these forums because I have to be civil to everyone. As long as I have been here I have tried to say only constructive or nice things, and when I can't I don't say anything.
Please, xtkiller, think about things. Do you truly believe that I don't realize what's going on? I have already decided that in order to fix the problems here I have to rewrite the game. It cannot be fixed in it's current state, and anything that I have done has only been temporary band-aids while making the code more complicated and less manageable.
As I see it, I can do one of two things while I get a new version of the game working. The first option is we can shut down the game until we have a rewrite completed. This would cost PTW money and players for every day that it is down, and it would make everyone (players and admins) angry and irritable until things are up again. Honestly I don't want to deal with the stress to get it finished while managing the rest of my life. Things would get done hastily and the game would probably be launched in a sorry state for the umpteenth time, and we'd have problems all over again.
I don't think anyone wants that.
What I feel is the best course of action is to attempt to 'clone' the current Pirate The World into a much nicer, cleaner programming language that will allow for a better future. If you're interested, the programming language is Ruby, and the web development framework is called Rails...or, together, Ruby on Rails. Look it up if you want.
While I work to 'clone' the current code, I can (hopefully) eliminate what I think are the bad, messy parts that might cause lag or the other problems. I can also set up the scaffolding for future improvements that have already been suggested. Very few other games like this require the time synchronization that PTW does, where having a good connection to the server in Los Angeles becomes such an important part of the gameplay. I currently don't have an answer for how to solve this dilemma...We can either change the game so that lag doesn't matter (i.e. you would no longer be chasing moving ships anymore...whenever that happens now anyway), or we can try to come up with a high-speed, low latency codebase that might be able to deal with it.
Yes, it takes time. No, I don't have a lot of it. You might not know it, but there are only two of us here at Pirate The World, LLC. Neither of us have an abundance of time on our hands (in fact, as I'm sure you can see, it is quite the opposite). We don't have the resources to hire someone else to do a project of this magnitude.
Please, be patient. Report anything suspicious that you see, and be specific about times and dates and players. Try not to jump to conclusions--leave that to us. Remember, though, that just because you don't get a response it doesn't mean that we didn't read it.
Lots of people, it seems, have problems with the game. Some people are pointing fingers at other players, saying that they are using cheater scripts or something. I've said this before--if you have information, please pass it along. We don't take cheating lightly, but we're not going to go banning everyone based on hearsay.
If it's that bad, would you rather the game be shut down?
_________________ To find, explore the funds off shore and skirt the shoals of bankruptcy!
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