Done Side-Server for Battling When Server Is About To Restart

[WailordWails]

As a reg, the one thing that a lot of people like me really hate when the server is restarting is the fact you can’t battle anymore, and a lot of chats now have modchat + on.

My solution would be to host a permanent (listed or unlisted, take your pick) sideserver with a name such as battling.psim.us, or something like that. It could be tacked onto the end of those ‘server is restarting’ messages, where players are told to copy their teams and go to that address to continue battling.

There would be only 1 room in the server, and it would be called ‘Notifications’, ‘Main’, or any other name it could be, where modchat was set to % and it would only display notifications about the main server, where it would say ‘The main Pokemon Showdown server is up again’, or something like that.

I hope you consider my suggestion, and have a good day!
Mia edit: moving this to in-progress because what was eventually decided on is currently in-progress

 

[HoeenHero]

Running a server for up to 20,000 concurrent users is a resource intensive task, one that feels really pointless if we are simply going to redirect users back to main in 15-20 minutes. In addition ladder ranks from that server would not apply to the main server, opening a can of questions and concerns from users. I honestly do not see the worth of this, just wait for the server to reboot. We try to avoid doing it as much as possible anyways.

 

[WailordWails]

Would it not be possible to just inform them that ladder rankings wouldn’t work? That would probably thin down the stream of users anyway, bc some users prefer to chat, others want to ladder, and some people just want to battle without the stress of laddering. I feel like it would just be simple to cater to the (majority) of users who don’t want to ladder competitively. My thoughts, anyway.

 

[HoeenHero]

Would it not be possible to just inform them that ladder rankings wouldn’t work? That would probably thin down the stream of users anyway, bc some users prefer to chat, others want to ladder, and some people just want to battle without the stress of laddering. I feel like it would just be simple to cater to the (majority) of users who don’t want to ladder competitively. My thoughts, anyway.

Quite a few users get upset when the ladder goes down, but regardless the main blocker is we do not have the resources to spin up another server. Also investing large amounts of money into another server so people can battle during the 15 minutes main wont let you every usually no more commonly than a week seems like a massive waste.

 

[Zarel]

Hm. While a second server isn't a very feasible solution to this problem, it is possible to save battles in a way that they can be resumed after a server restart. That might be worth looking into.

(This is what I originally wanted to use Redis for, but a regular filesystem implementation might make more sense.)

 

[Hecate]

I'm working on persisting battles.

 

[WailordWails]

Is this considered half accepted then?

 

[Hecate]

Not sure if this should be moved to in-progress or not, but, PR to support battle persistence is open.

 

[Annika]

This is done.