How long has RWL survived?

[austfit]

I remember this place being my only source of friends years and years ago, hundreds playing and fighting and backstabbing...back when I was 13 and 14. Volkov, Windhound, Retto, Vulpine Imperium...I checked and other Promisance games folded years ago. How on earth have we lasted this long? How awesome is that?! And what has happened since I stopped playing almost a decade ago?

I never thought online communities would last this long. Incredible.

[windhound]

Limping along :P
Going on 16 years, this October. 
RWL is legally allowed to have a driving permit, and there's a disturbing number of people online who weren't born when Boze launched the site. 
There was a Reddit post today asking what the deal with Freebird was, I can't even.

Currently we have an active 15ish players, which historically is quite decent..  I think reg has been as low as five or something.  Turbo went un-reset for an embarrassingly long time
The reduction to one server is relatively new, I think most people are okay with it. 

Ollie (aka Peace Alliance) added Google Analytics to RWL in Feb 2008, so I've got a decade of user tracking -

RTR in late 2016 did breath some extra life into the site

I sorta drift in and out, the last two rounds are the first I've played in quite a few years. 
Shadow has been pretty good at keeping half an eye on things. 

The only thing that really endangers the game server is it's horrifically old code, one day PHP is gonna update/remove something that'll require a major rewrite and that'll be it. 
Well, that, and as a game Promi is getting very long in the tooth.  There are simply much better games out there (but no better community <3)

But hey, til then Peace will always have webhosting space, and if he doesn't I will.   RWL doesn't take up much room or resources, esp. at it's current activity level.   
So as long as a couple people want to play we'll keep it up. 

[austfit]

Is there another, more secure code/alternative that would allow us to play the same sort of game if PHP changes? This game has been so close to my heart for so many years, I'd be so sad if it ever truly died. I found an old photo album of a bunch of RWLers, including little 12-year old me. What a ride this place has been, even if the game itself has gotten too old. The frustrating nature of the game is why I always stop playing after a while... I, for one, always got tired of the primacy of leaders in this game because it became all about ratios and loyalty and spells. Barracks and workers and markets and towers are all basically useless if you want to be competitive- or am I missing something? Have we ever successfully addressed the balance between armies and leaders?

[windhound]

There are better, more modernized Promi game codes we could migrate to.
The idea was played around with years ago.. FAF, Beatle's game long shutdown, is probably one of the cleanest.  At one point it had four people working on it to clean up bugs and streamline the code.
Buut there's a long list of RWL-specific features and game formula tweaks, much of it would have to be rewritten.
It'd be quite an effort to try to duplicate RWL, and there's the issue.  Aint nobody got time for that.

RWL3 was the remake you were looking for, and missed. 
A complete re-balance of the game and tweaking of game formulas.  It made the economy actually matter, nerfed leaders, and significantly reduced the value of food, so no food massing.
For a while Turbo was RWL3 and Reg remained classic.

imo classic is easier to play, which I guess is why when we consolidated to one server the vote was to use the classic code.

As it stands, in classic leaders are still OP, but with Sack it's difficult to stack resources.
Sack is scaled based on how many leaders the attacker has, the more they have the less the take, so a leader player can't sack an indy - but they can steal/poison/murder/attack.

The classic code worked best when there was an RP element to the game (and noone really knew what they were doing).
When attacking more than 5x raised an eyebrow, and maxing was an act of war.
When just because the game allowed you to do something, didn't mean you should.
Can't play like that anymore, competitively anyways.
/shrug.

[Shadow]

FAF was fully cronless if I recall. Pretty neat. But yea, I had my fill of RWL code with RWL3, I don't plan on doing any significant code changes past this point. I'll help keep things running as long as there is interest in having a server, though.

[Sharptooh]

FAF was fully cronless if I recall. Pretty neat. But yea, I had my fill of RWL code with RWL3, I don't plan on doing any significant code changes past this point. I'll help keep things running as long as there is interest in having a server, though.

What's the real benefit of having it work without a cron script?

There's surely the potential there for one user to get a bad experience due to the cron code running on their request (and potentially taking a bit of time).

I suppose it's easier to setup?

[Shadow]

I'm not sure there is a huge practical advantage, it's just a much more elegant way of coding the game to only use resources when required.

[Sharptooh]

Eh, in some ways. It's a very small amount of resources though.

Running a cron feels like a better way to do it to me. I can see your point though.

I do vaguely remember the FaF codebase from when I was learning PHP and had no idea what I was doing haha. Does anyone know if it's available somewhere? Github or Sourceforge *shudder* perhaps?

[windhound]

Yep, Github - https://github.com/jbarbero/frostnflame
But Sourceforge is better now, new owners as of a couple years ago.. 

QMT eventually did cronless too, I'm assuming there's a few additional benefits

[Death]

No, Q just liked to change everything except what we wanted him to. Mention for years that the mage fix did nothing, he responds by "correcting" BM sale prices and giving every race the gnome prices. I don't know what your gnome is anymore. Musk ox maybe.