The Voluntary Devs and Voluntary Helpers have made the difficult decision to temporarily freeze the Warfare system in order to address excessive lag we've been observing the past 12 hours. The lag has been identified as an issue that is beyond the control of the Voluntary helpers and Voluntary Devs, and we have informed Zorg to look into the matter.

We understand that the Warfare system is a popular and important feature for many players, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. However, we believe that taking the time to properly address the lag issue will ultimately lead to a better overall experience for all players. During this time no side shall gain any metal therefore no one gains or loses points during the downtime. The map will essentially be frozen.

We are hopeful that Zorg will be able to quickly isolate the cause of the lag and push out a fix. In the meantime, we ask for your patience and understanding as we work to improve the system. We will continue to keep everyone updated on the progress of the fix and will work as quickly as possible to bring the Warfare system back online.

Thank you for your support and understanding.

The recent wasteland browser lag has been fixed in an upcoming patch (available whenever Zorg has a chance to sync the codebase next).

This 'browser lag' specifically refers to the lag/slowness nearly all WLers have reported when on the wasteland page for too long, leading to really slow cursor movement on the map or making it hard to even type a chat message (or do anything on the page really) unless you refreshed.

The issue, for anyone curious, was a memory leak on our end in the rendering code that for some reason wasn't a big issue before but has now become a majorly apparent issue in recent browser versions (likely due to changes in the browser's rendering capabilities). I've fixed that memory leak so once the patch is live, things should be pretty smooth.

Note: This lag does not affect 'network lag', which is the lag in your responses from the server (i.e. here's what the map looks like now!) and your requests to the server (move here, click this, use this ability..etc).

I'll comment below once I know the update is live.

~Aldo

Looking into remedies for the lag. I've pushed some code I'm hoping will help reduce server/database stress initially, and over time we'll try to make some more optimizations to help deal with the current load.

We are seeing unprecedented numbers in wasteland active at the same time (unprecedented in the sense that it's been a very long time since we've had this many online) so as activity evens out, it'll get a better there as well. That + live wl = server stress.

As a volunteer dev, without direct server access, it's tricky to do deeper, more granular debugging of the server or database utilization but generally the live WL is a problem so will keep trying some fixes over the course of this week, starting tomorrow.

As a little "sorry your day sucked in WL" token, I'll be running double gains for the game November 14th and 15th (Saturday and Sunday) starting at 12:01 AM Server Time Saturday (right after midnight) and ending at the end of the weekend at night - Sunday 11:59 PM.

Please stop pm'ing me asking me what is AM and PM which part of the day is which.