A lot of stuff went on last week. A bit too much for my taste, actually 
As discussed in the previous issue, I was mainly working on the “performance system 1.5”. I actually wanted to have most of that finished and shipped to our test server on Friday, but Wednesday night, our beloved cat of almost 16 years passed away, so I was both preoccupied with the necessary arrangements as well as not quite…in the mood 
. That said, my plan is to get this ready for testing this week, so that our data team can hopefully get started on researching the required data soon.
To add insult to injury, we’ve seen a lot performance issues in several game worlds last week, often tripping the ORS and causing it to build backlog. This has kept me busy on and off again, both troubleshooting the issue and holding the hands of the affected servers. Our IT provider has more or less confirmed my theory that this might be related to bots and/or crawlers flooding the affected game worlds, so I am in the process of hardening the game against such overload (while at the same time preventing real user from being rate-limited).
Last but not least, I also mentioned last week that I am looking into automating some support-related things around AirlineSim now that I am the only one doing it. One important cause of support work are exclusive game worlds. This is fine and expected (hence their price-tag). But there are a few things that could (and should?) probably be automated, both to make my life easier and players in those game worlds happier. This includes stuff like adding and removing players, transferring money between companies and generating various reports. As such, I am currently investigating how some of these things could be added as actual features. Especially the “reports” bit could end up bringing an API that a lot of players have been requesting for years and that I am looking into as a prerequisite for a few others things planned down the line anyway. So…I’ll keep you posted.
