In the April Status & Update we had this to say:
We’re adjusting on our cadence (monthly instead of bi-weekly) but I’m happy to report the following:
Application Performance Monitoring
This has been implemented and we’ve already used it to make improvements to the game’s performance. You can see this here:
Around May 03 is where we finished our monitoring setup, and we used that information to track down and make improvements, which we pushed out around May 10. You can see the response time in the graph drop significantly.
In short: the game is now faster for everybody.
We’re not done here though, and interestingly most of the gains were from changes to the API, not optimizations to the game’s database. That’s unexpected, but still useful.
Features, finally!
The really cool thing here is that further optimizations will now come through changes to the game’s visual design and feature work. Whereas before I had prioritized optimizations over new features, we have arrived a point where the biggest performance gains are to be had by working on the features themselves.
So, instead of focusing on infrastructure work I am going to focus on improving the actual playing experience itself and making optimizations along the way.
Player Support Experience
Last month we added a new and easier help system at https://imperialconflict.com/help and it’s been a huge improvement over everything we’ve tried before.
We’re still working out some kinks and improvements, and to be completely honest we need to get better at responding to tickets more quickly, but even then the fact that we finally have a unified help system has done wonders to cut overhead from managing the game.
That means our mods’ job is easier, I have more time to develop, and players have a single place to request support for anything. Everybody wins!
Commitments
By 2021-06-15T07:00:00Z I plan to:
- get the redesign in front of players, even if it’s just as a preview on a few pages
- create a plan for specific features (not just pages) for July
You can track our work at https://imperialconflict.com/plan.