SurviveTheNight

Hi!

The maintenance on SurviveTheNight is now done, here's what we did:

⇒ BACKEND CHANGES
This maintenance was mainly about backend changes - so basically changes to our systems running in the background and providing all the data STN servers need to work.

As already announced on Discord, I have received a bunch of bugreports over the past weeks saying that main lobbies lag every couple minutes for a few seconds.

After investigating I pretty much instantly found the problem. The problem was caused by 2 of our core systems:

• Wipe Protection: This system saves all of your profile data such as inventories, gold, questprogress and much more every couple minutes directly to our databases. This basically leads into your profile not getting a 6h rollback in case of a server crash
• Leaderboard Update: This system not only updates the giant leaderboard right behind the spawn, but also all the leaderboards in the menus such as Skills and Dungeon Stats.

Both of these systems communicate directly with databases to sync all of their data with the other servers - and that was causing the lag!
When we tested STN before it was public we didn't really experience issues like that as not many profiles were stored in databases.
Over the past months more and more people logged on, databases were used much more frequently by our servers and also had to store more data.

That obviously shouldn't be a problem but due to me being not smart enough to communicate with databases efficiently it easily became a problem!

Conclusion:
The way our systems communicate with databases has been improved and we almost got rid of the massive lag spike the leaderboards were causing.
Unfortunately due to the amount of data your profile may contain there still is a very very short lagspike when the other system saves your profile.

⇒ PLAYER REWARDS
Alot of players asked us in the past on how to get player ranks such as MVP or VIP+.

Some people got them by either GGJay or me as we gave them out manually to friends or people, who tested alot during our development phases.

Today we are introducing Player Rewards!
Player Rewards are some very unique rewards that are locked behind requirements ingame.
These rewards stay for a couple weeks and will then expire and most likely never come back but instead will be replaced by other items/features.

Current Rewards:

• Free Lifetime Player Rank:
  • Requirement: Completing the Crazy Miner Questline
  • Description: Upon claiming this reward a random rank (MVP, MVP+, MVP++, VIP+ or VIP++) will be rolled and given to you. You will keep this rank forever!
• High Level Boots:
  • Requirement: STN Level 15
  • Description: You will receive a pair of boots which have some nice little (customizable) particles while wearing. They come with an edition number and your name on them, which makes every single pair very unique.

These rewards will be available for the next 2 weeks (They will expire on Jan 17th, 00:00 CET), so go grab them while you can!

Other things changed/added/fixed:

• Added the Appearance option to the privacy menu
  • This allows you to select the "Appear as Offline" status, which makes you invisible to all players (e.g. on their friendslist)
• Lobby Selector NPC and Alpha Enjoyer NPC now have their own little area with the Player Rewards block next to the spawn
• Leaderboards now show the total amount of players
  • e.g. "#1 out of 100 players."
• Your STN ranking is now shown on the STN Experience item in the STN menu
• The Coal Miner no longer tells you his dialogue over and over again after talking to him once
  • He opens up the Block Hardness menu immediately after speaking to him once.
• The Alpha Enjoyer reward is now only claimable once per profile instead of once per lobby instance
• Fixed the dungeon scoreboard not checkmarking the BOSS Key after picking it up
• Moved the "Coming Soon" NPC a little bit
• Moved the Bestiary item to the Skills menu
• Changed the Server ID of dungeon instances from stn-... to gdi-...
• Changed prefix of the following ingame ranks:
  • Admin (Red -> Dark Red)
  • Moderator (Blue -> Red)
  • YouTube (Changed the order of colors a little bit)
  • STN (Dark Blue -> Blue)
• Added number formatting to item values in shops
• Patched and reworked some internal systems (e.g. Ban System)
• Fixed a bunch of typos

That is everything for now!
Please report any bugs or lags if you notice some (There are still lags especially when joining lobby instances!).
Also please make sure to check your items (EVERYWHERE!) and see if they are corrupted and look like this:

There will be another (even bigger) Backend Change after the Early Game update which is very much required in order to start working on bigger updates such as Fishing.