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| Hey , why we have cooldown times in private mail ? | | to stop people spamming | | Topic moved from "General game forum" to "Queries and help". | | oh it does make sense | | Why will someone spam someone? | | To be annoying, duh | | but isnt there blacklist option for that , sometimes when u got like 10 msg it is just annoying to wait | Agree
sometimes you gotta reply to several people at once, and due to cool down you take quit some time to answer
Then they answer back, etc
Still, it makes sense that there is a cool down i suppose, for the previously mentioned reason | sometimes when u got like 10 msg it is just annoying to wait
That's the thing. If you have no cooldown, I guarantee you that someone will script a way to send those 10 messages at once. If you can create a script to send 10 messages at once, why not 1000?
It's the same reason you have a one minute cool-down on the forum. Prevent spammers from abusing the forum/private mail and reduce the server load from mails being sent. | | the way i see it - it exists to limit the load on server. That and it hinders pointless flooding between two idiots :p | I believe there's only value in preventing automated spamming.
educe the server load from mails being sent
the way i see it - it exists to limit the load on server
The load of sending an in-game mail is negligible, just like the one of posting on the forums. They are merely inserts into a database table.
I say that they are negligible in the sense that the game already processes many AI decisions in every PVE game happening which are far more intensive on the server's resources. | Sometimes missclick also happens, like I click 'Send' button 2 times.
In such cases, I receive message about cooldown. So to avoid such unintentionally duplicate message, such timers are needed. Well, also about what Corey said. Such scripts are not hard to make. | | It would be better to have cooldown of 10s for say 3-5 messages, and from 4-6th onwards 60 seconds (within a time scale of say 5min). For scritps sending 1000 mails that would make no difference compared to present cooldown, but for normal people trying to msg each other it would make life a little easier | The load of sending an in-game mail is negligible, just like the one of posting on the forums. They are merely inserts into a database table.
The content itself may be not but when you press send and it takes a moment to transfer that message and record it in inbox/outbox. I think if thousands of people were doing silly without PM cd, it could become significant. Now thousand may seem like a lot but this game used to have 20k or maybe had a higher target so idk. | People are over-complicating it, it's just to prevent spamming.
Also VV, I don't think it's for server load issues.
Think about it, you said a thousand people mailing at about the same time. If it's possible without the 20 sec cooldown, it's possible even with it. The only thing that changes is someone can now send mails even 10 sec after another, or even 5. Anything below that counts as spamming so that returns us to the point of "prevents spamming."
With mails being sent at least 5 or 10 sec after previous ones, the max load is increased by a factor of 4 or 2. But obviously just because you can, doesn't mean you will. So in reality, if you don't account for spamming and if you take into account that most people very infrequently go below 20 sec, the server load increases by at most (and I'm being generous) 10% regarding mailing. And 10% on something this small is negligible.
However, obviously if one person could find a script to send a million mails in a second, that might be a problem. But that's just spamming which only has an indirect corollary effect on server load. | The load of sending an in-game mail is negligible, just like the one of posting on the forums. They are merely inserts into a database table.
I wish this were true :) But it is not :( 'merely inserts into a database table' :( If this were true, there would be no need for databases to have to be eventually consistent or for AWS to make write bandwidth and throughput more expensive. Also, threads (and in some cases, processes) that write to a table are not dedicated to particular tables, they exist for the database or the database shard as a whole. I used to consult for Amazon Web Services. If your words became true, we could reduce our headcount by 40% on the RSD team :))
I say that they are negligible in the sense that the game already processes many AI decisions in every PVE game happening which are far more intensive on the server's resources.
Think about it, you said a thousand people mailing at about the same time. If it's possible without the 20 sec cooldown, it's possible even with it. The only thing that changes is someone can now send mails even 10 sec after another, or even 5.
I understand why AI moves might seem like a lot of load. So many moves in each combat, right? :D Let me try to offer you an ethical (I can't stress this enough :P) hacker's point of view -
If I wanted to flood the origin servers, I cannot use combats. The problem is that each player can only be part of 1 combat at a time. I cannot parallelise this. The next logical step would be to try to make the combat faster. But I am limited by the latency, SSL negotiation time, etc.. So, I can only use combats to overload the server if I control a lot of players. That is beyond the scope of your statement, so I won't go into that :D
Now, let us look at private mails. With a cooldown, I am limited to again being able to send 1 mail at most every x seconds. However, without cooldown, I could easily send a few hundred million requests a second consistently for around 30 minutes (~ $200 in compute time). The server would not be able to naively detect which messages are legit.
It is not really the number of messages over a long run which matter but rather, the burst in traffic. With a cooldown, it becomes impossible to do the bursts in a short amount of time unless you control various agents (characters) :D
If you follow so far, you would also see a flaw in my arguments :) The cooldown prevents a message from being sent but it does not prevent the HTTP request from reaching the application layer. I will leave you to figure out further but let me leave you with a few hints -
1. Is it easier to scale the datastore layer wrt throughput or the application layer?
2. Is a cooldown the best way to prevent a denial of service attack (do HTTP requests still reach the server even when you see the cooldown message)?
3. If you were lordswm game developer, would you do the cooldown on the client side or the server side?
4. Why did they choose to do the cooldown implementation on the server side?
5. Can you think of an easier way to protect against spam? Think of a famous CDN.
6. Does a cooldown really protect the datastore layer? Think of CRUD. | for shubhamgoyal:
Of course I understand for hackers or others who are intentionally spamming to bring the game's server down mail spamming is an easy target without cooldown. However, from what I understood when VV mentioned server load he was referring to people in general being able to mail more frequently. He was NOT talking about hackers and their likes from what I understood. And as I mentioned, if you don't consider people who are intentionally mass-spamming to bring game server down, then the regular number of messages would increase by at most 10%, which is being extremely generous. Realistically 1% will be a much better estimate for the total number of mails increasing over a given period of time. And this is obviously negligible.
Also there are many other ways to put large loads on the server. An example I remember is when someone not too long ago made thousands of characters and spammed tavern with thousands of those bot characters playing thousands of tavern games against each others. | for shubhamgoyal:
Oh and thanks for the detailed response :) I am not experienced with computer science, hacking, etc. just to clarify, but what I said was simply based on a little bit of logic. | | [Post deleted by moderator Corey // L.R 7 // If you cannot answer someone’s question or have nothing to add to the discussion, please av] | I think the question has been sufficiently answered. We can agree that it is a necessary feature.
QATC | | closed by Corey (2018-03-20 10:27:37) |
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