Rosehill wrote: ↑December 13th, 2023, 7:44:50 am
kunigund wrote: ↑December 13th, 2023, 7:29:21 am
Since 3 months (date of this thread) we know that gold mining (= massively open creature links, usually adults) causes lag and errors, probably since many years (which, in turn, also caused the number active users to drop significantly) and it is now forbidden. In these three months, however, there were still some severe server problems (cloudflare errors, mysql errors), luckily they never lasted as long as prior to the updates/new rule. Still, it's annoying, even though I don't know if the recent ones were related to gold mining or something else.
I just checked, clicking an adult creature still gives me gold. I simply do not understand why it is still possible and not deactivated to remove it from the potential list of culprits.
Why is gold for clicking adults not set to zero and end of story?
Because disabling gold from adults is not just that simple from the programming point of view, and coding efforts have been directed to more pressing matters. Removing gold from adults is on the list of things to do nevertheless. And because disabling gold from adults doesn't in itself stop goldmining without people knowing of it.
The latest lag of the past couple days has no evidence of being related to goldmining.
How bad is MagiStream's code base?
Based on the API, surely one could add a check along the lines of if("stage" == 2) then {no gold}?
I also think that if mining was never intended to be part of MagiStream, then prices should always have been much lower. Without mining it's an awful lot of work clicking growing creatures or making posts to get enough gold to pay for shop creatures.
If the cheapest shop creature is 1000g that would have been 1000 clicks in 2013, or still hundreds of clicks now, or 5 large posts without mining. Possible, but only really viable for the creatures currently at the cheapest prices.
As for the climate impacts of MagiStream, banning/removing mining is a good move and will reduce the game's CO2e emissions but it was already possible to make then very small with efficient hardware client-side or using renewable energy.
My most polluting mining period was likely when I first joined the site in 2013, and even then it was maybe 32g of CO2e per hour mining for gold. In 2022 it would have been ~5g per hour, except lower as I had renewable energy, not a grid standard mix.
The average person releases more CO2 by breathing, so I don't think MagiStream's climate impact is anything to worry about.