No. 3 Regular speed events or “Please stay stable servers, please”

Tobias Axenbeck, Technical Director and handling all our infrastructure in 2015

“Once a year at our Bytro christmas party we have a ritual we stick to no matter what.

We play internal speed rounds within one of our games. But not the ones you know with 2x, 4x or 8x speed, but rather 250x speed with teams of 5. Two persons manage one nation and the other team members run around the office and do diplomacy. It is nearly like a full blown roleplaying event with alliances and betrayals. It is a lot of fun and actually quite exhausting, luckily after 2 hours we normally have a winner. What we all agree on: We love speed rounds!

Nevertheless, speed rounds on a regular basis, even with smaller speed factors, were always a challenge for us.

First of all, they totally change the balancing and not everybody is made for coping with the speed of it. So getting their balancing to work is a long process with many iterations and still many people remain who prefer the game to be rather slow and steady. It can be really enjoyable to only login twice a day.

Secondly, we hesitated to implement speed rounds in the game, due to our experiences with server stability during our office speed rounds. We definitely wanted players to have a similar fun experience like we had during those Bytronian christmas speed rounds, but those Bytro events frequently killed our office servers, an experience we clearly wanted to avoid our players from having.

Thirdly, extremely high speeds also create quite a few bugs during the gameplay, because some mechanics and checks are not meant to be triggered every second.

Still, 3 things were clear for us:

• We want to be able to offer you speed rounds on a regular basis
  
• We want that all the normal game rounds do not suffer from this
  
• We want those speed rounds to be enjoyable and bug-free
  

Back then speed rounds were a special off-track topic for us so it took us a long time to really be able to let them run on a bigger scale. During that time, whenever we ran speed rounds, we constantly, and I mean 24/7, had to monitor everything. And that at the time before we had automatic alarms being sent to our mobile phones to wake us in the middle of the night. (Ahh thinking about it, I miss those days…)

Today we run speed maps every day and even the ones with higher speed pretty regularly. And we already know what we need to do in order to allow even higher speeds in our games.

So perhaps one day you might be able to also enjoy the ludicrous speed rounds we play internally once a year. But until then we are still proud today that speed maps finally have a place in our games - especially in Call of War.”