Official Tale of Woe Solutions

[Cranberry]

At least with battling, people couldn't cheat. There wasn't really lag during the gravemarking; people were just cheating to "warp" to the back of a graveyard, so they were getting all the graves marked before people with a slower computer or who wanted to play by the rules got a chance. (Also, before a bug was fixed, some people were warping to unlisted graveyards and marking tons of graves with no competition at all, and bragging about it!) I laughed when I saw that TNT called those people "clever" in the solution. Serves them right if TNT follows the original plan and makes gravemarking not count.

Same thing with the mayor... people were using the back-button trick to enter a fight with 0 HP and die instantly. Cheating. People also cheated during the potions, using the same ingredient five times when we were supposed to be able to use it only once in a composite (the solution page confirms this was a bug), but I guess they're letting that go because it was such a huge step and the instructions weren't completely clear.

I think we all need to chill until we know for sure how things were weighted, though. There's no point complaining about it yet.

[psyco_chick32]

..serves them right if TNT follows the original plan and makes gravemarking not count...

You keep stressing this as if you were in on the conversation of point-directing.
Was just wondering... is there something you know that we should (or perhaps shouldn't)?
Just something I've noticed; you've been talking a lot more like a member of TNT and less like a rabid fan.

[Cranberry]

That's not my intention, sorry. I have very little knowledge of the inner workings of Neopets, and I'm definitely not on staff! I do occasionally talk to a couple of the programmers, mostly to let them know if things are broken (like Food Club, which goes down a lot... or flash games, a little while back, which were running terribly) or if something in the plot is messed up (had to get my cave fixed; one of my rooms had no doors... and I had a glitch involving my stick and meepits in the forest as well). I had complained to one of them about people cheating with the gravemarking, and learned that gravemarking wasn't going to count, so it didn't matter. Like I said, though, that was back in October and the staff could have changed their minds. I'm just hoping they haven't. Aaaand that is all.

[psyco_chick32]

That's not my intention, sorry. I have very little knowledge of the inner workings of Neopets, and I'm definitely not on staff! I do occasionally talk to a couple of the programmers, mostly to let them know if things are broken (like Food Club, which goes down a lot... or flash games, a little while back, which were running terribly) or if something in the plot is messed up (had to get my cave fixed; one of my rooms had no doors... and I had a glitch involving my stick and meepits in the forest as well). I had complained to one of them about people cheating with the gravemarking, and learned that gravemarking wasn't going to count, so it didn't matter. Like I said, though, that was back in October and the staff could have changed their minds. I'm just hoping they haven't. Aaaand that is all.

No problem. I thought it might be neat to know somebody on staff... and you often seem as if you were. But it's great to have somebody here at PPT in basic communication with some of the programmers.

[_ei]

Aaah I see, your posts in this thread make much more sense to me now Cranberry I'd just assumed it was a baseless assumption before... I retract all of my stroppy comments

[theonlysaneone]

That's not my intention, sorry. I have very little knowledge of the inner workings of Neopets, and I'm definitely not on staff! I do occasionally talk to a couple of the programmers, mostly to let them know if things are broken (like Food Club, which goes down a lot... or flash games, a little while back, which were running terribly) or if something in the plot is messed up (had to get my cave fixed; one of my rooms had no doors... and I had a glitch involving my stick and meepits in the forest as well). I had complained to one of them about people cheating with the gravemarking, and learned that gravemarking wasn't going to count, so it didn't matter. Like I said, though, that was back in October and the staff could have changed their minds. I'm just hoping they haven't. Aaaand that is all.

The thing is, in the Solution page, they didn't see it as cheating. At the very least, people who did a lot of gravemarking should get SOME kind of prize for their efforts, even if it's a completely different one (like the team selection or MVPs in the Altador Cup).

[Cranberry]

Well, you could always say... why would they even bother calling out cheaters when the section isn't going to count for points? And the "clever" in the solution could have been sarcastic. We'll see. I hope it doesn't count, though, because like I said, the people who marked the most did so by "warping" to unlisted yards and marking as many as they wanted with no competition (I think that was later disabled, though, even if going straight to the back of a listed yard wasn't).

[psyco_chick32]

Well, you could always say... why would they even bother calling out cheaters when the section isn't going to count for points? And the "clever" in the solution could have been sarcastic. We'll see. I hope it doesn't count, though, because like I said, the people who marked the most did so by "warping" to unlisted yards and marking as many as they wanted with no competition (I think that was later disabled, though, even if going straight to the back of a listed yard wasn't).

I'd be if it wasn't... simply because I didn't...

But, hey, if they don't, they don't, and like I said before, plots are fun and the prizes/point distribution for one help me shape my outlook on the next.

[AySz88]

EDIT: I mean really, how much do 100 more servers cost? (Plus a few people to setup and maintain them)?

Considering servers cost multiple thousands of dollars each, I'd say a lot.

Considering the amount of Premium payers, that should be mostly solved by now, since it should have been prepared for long ago, mainly 'growth.'
...
BTW: I can build a server for about $2000 I bet. (Just depends how big, of course.)

This should be informative, since this is a nice real-world example with all the things (colocation, electricity, etc.) that have to come together to keep a site going just from the hardware side: The budget it takes for Wikimedia, the site which hosts Wikipedia and related projects, to almost keep up with growth. (If you're worried about the notice at the top, click "history" and check that no one's tampered with the numbers, but nobody has in a long while.)

That omits staff (Wikimedia almost has no staff at all), and that's not the budget for this quarter - that's back when Wikipedia was yet smaller. (The current fundraiser, that takes into account the site's current size, is trying to raise 1.5 million dollars. Neopets gets about 1/4 of the current traffic according to Alexa - but 1.5 million a quarter probably accounts for all the expenses including staff to a very rough approximation.)

$300k plus recurring ~$10k a month costs is an awful lot of excess profit that'd be needed to pay for a hundred servers plus the supporting hardware for it plus electricity, space, etc... That's probably about 10 staff members' pay for a year (and two staff members thereafter), or 4500 excess premium subscribers for a year (and 2000 thereafter), or maybe 50000 excess ad clicks a day. (another rough estimate, of course) I doubt they have 10k premium subscribers total, they sure don't need to lay people off, and ... well, trying to get more ad clicks = more annoying ads.

Hope this illustrated something