Server Full?

I pretty much want the cap raised. Even though I am a supporter, I will not be sometime late January and won't be able to get on. I'll be around when school ends like most people who play emc that go to school. That means I'll be unlucky.
I don't really care about lag. I just want to get on my favorite server. SSP Is pretty boring, I just want to get on. I pretty much agree with ajmyers34. For all us players that just want to get on, please raise it for us Aikar... please..?

sorry if this was off topic

Don't know if this is related, but is it possible for the server to run a check on the players when switching servers, so it won't disconnect you when you /smp# to a full server? Instead a message would just come up in chat (the same one that comes up when the server kicks you) and you'll stay on the same server?

You may not care about the lag but what about the 59 other players on the server?

Based on the responses here, I gather players would rather lower entity caps then be left not being able to get on. What's the point of leaving them at 100/250 if few can get on to "farm" anyway. A 20% reduction (80/200) would probably be agreeable to most town and wild base farmers. I'm not saying it'll get player cap back to 60, but it'll at least be a balanced approach.

I went around this morning and egg'ed 200 villagers, 100 chickens and 300 cows from my res's on 9 (I wasn't really actively farming them, but working on other projects). Maybe this will help. I'm sure lots of other long time players would do the same if it meant they could get on to move goods and build, just ask.

In addition, we could also ask that players with large redstone generators suspend operations until the holiday period is over. There are multiple players with enough DCs of sugar cane, pumpkins, and stone stored up that it will last at least the next week or so.

From other discussions with Aikar I know there is an issue with passive mob spawns in the wild (they are out of control and don't appear to have any density checks - the grass spawners (horses, cows, pigs, sheep, chickens) in particular. I'm sure with many players camping out for Blizz Ard this is causing some issues. At a minimum, stop grass based natural passive mob spawns during these events! Truth is, I'd prefer them off all the time, at least in the frontier as they are a nuisance.

New players and loaded servers should be a boon to shop owners, but we've cut players available by 1/3 on any given server. Personally, I'd rather have a large vibrant community with some entity limitations over new and old players alike being kept from playing. We can look at bumping up entity count, as well as player caps after the holidays.

I really wish it wasn't lowered, lag was never an issue for me, and it's pretty unfair considering I can't find myself a job where I live, and I cannot pay for supporter right now. Being an adult without a job really has its downsides, especially considering I come on to Empire to relieve myself from stress. Can't even do that anymore =/

Also with that holiday sale, a lot of people became supporters, this was kinda a bad time to reduce the cap in my opinion.

To anyone saying "I wasn't lagging" or "why do it now?", here's what I've got to say to you:

It didn't happen now specifically. In fact, I'm 99% sure I remember talking to Aikar about this back when I was still a mod (June 2014), and the initial plans to do this were there (with very solid technical justification). The reason it happened now is probably because there's actually been time to get round to doing it now, or because the load due to the holidays has made it so it NEEDS to be done now if you want stable servers.

And if you're complaining that you weren't lagging, then great. However, it doesn't even matter that you weren't lagging, because this isn't client lag, this is server lag. You won't notice server lag much. The server will. And when server lag happens, it messes up playing for absolutely everyone on the server.

So basically, even if you weren't lagging and even if you don't like that it was done now, that's nice, but it needed to be done for technical reasons. Just spam login for about a minute and you'll easily get on.

We don't really have control over how many people log in and the limit is set in order to maintain a quality experience. I think this is only going to be a problem until next week when many of us return to school.

Looking ahead I think MatthewDA has a good idea regarding using our Residences responsibly. What we can control is the burden we put on the server by how we use it. I have been thinking of what I could do to limit the resources I use.

(As soon as and if I can get on ) I plan to egg the animals I am not using. I can always rebuild my herds as I need them for projects.

There are a few things I'd like to understand better as far as entities are concerned. One is that I have a lot of Wheat and Cane on my Residence. Do they count as Entities? If so, would it help to remove them when I don't need them? Does Wheat count once it is grown? What about Trees?

Another thing is the Hoppers in my Cane farm. I had plans to sell Cane for free which haven't followed through on and now I've let the Hoppers fill with Cane. Does a full Hopper cause any more burden than an empty Hopper?

I've also noticed that some of the Pistons in the farm have gotten stuck in an extended state, which I haven't corrected because they are a hassle to fix and I'm not using the machine anyway. Does a Piston that is stuck like this add to the problem? I will probably be removing the Cane and disabling the timer for now at least.

I think that when Entcount was introduced that we were able to see the number of Entities we had active. Is this information still available through some other command or mod in a format that is better than the Debug screen? How accurate is the Entity count in the Debug screen in regards to reflecting those that I have active?

We Forum users are some of the most active on the servers. I would like to think that if we all made changes in the way we play and help others do the same that we might be able to lessen the restrictions placed on us at times like this.

Controlling our lag output is a good idea. This page has a good list of entities if you want to limit them on your res. A hopper that isn't actively transferring items shouldn't be a burden and neither should a piston staying in one state. None of the farming things are mentioned in the wiki so I think those are just special blocks.

Thanks. What about Hoppers that are full? Wouldn't they be checking to see if the items in them can be transferred?

Also, I can see how a fully grown Wheat or Tree might be a block but I would expect that the server has to check growing crops to see if they can go to the next stage. I mainly wanted to be sure I was right about that and could leave fully grown crops without worries.

Would one persons res having no entities compared to having 100 make a difference I am assuming its the large scale amount of entities

Maybe you can make a post and list out all the things that are causing a lot of lag so players can remove those things from their res'.

It'll be easier if it's all in one place.

I turned my massive sugar cane farm off, quit blaming me!! hahaa

Some things such as server lag need to be kept private for the time being possibly also more Aikar spends time on the forums less time he has attempting to help better EMC's server lag

Yeah I gotcha but unless we know what causes the lag we'll just keep on doing whatever we want. However, if we know something we're doing is causing server lag then we can change our behavior.

There are several of those massive sugarcane farms that use pistons on EMC so we know that's one of the causes. You also mentioned keeping entities in 1x1 boxes is an issue so that's anyone with a villager farm pretty much. What else? We can share this info and if we get enough people to change their behavior we can all collectively reduce the server lag.