Buying a Travian franchise for South Africa

[w1z4rd]

Do you guys think it would work? I know how big local only traffic is... and I imagine this game could become pretty large in local only community..

Problem is, I think it costs around 16500 Euro to buy into the franchise...

[Vortex]

OMW - make it stop! lol

Evol evol evol!

/me vaguely remembers having a life before Travian..

[w1z4rd]

OMW - make it stop! lol

Evol evol evol!

* Vortex;108124 vaguely remembers having a life before Travian..

Thats propaganda spread by SWAT to get you to quit. Dont believe it!

[SosmanSA]

could work !!
I must look into it

[senorblinky]

Problem is, I think it costs around 16500 Euro to buy into the franchise...

I'm not completely sure how travian works, but if it's a free game, how do you make your money back? advertising?

[Vortex]

I'm not completely sure how travian works, but if it's a free game, how do you make your money back? advertising?

People buy gold in order to get an unfair advantage on other people, thereby pouring the money into your coffers ;)

It's not totally necessary to use gold to get anywhere in the game, but you have things like +25% resource production, Instant build, +10% attack or defense power, instant resource adjustments (NPC merchant). These things give you a HUGE advantage over anyone who doesn't use gold. People who have lots of money have an extremely unfair advantage, because instead of waiting for 10 hours for a building they click the 'insta-build' link! :ras:

Once you've used gold you feel obliged to buy more too... Grrr..

[rainy]

And where would you like to find close to R200k?

[stoke]

How long will you own the license to use the software?
How many servers are you allowed to run on one license?

Assuming that this can be hosted like any PHP site :

Income = It was something like R120 for the gold, which you buy once a month.

Expendature =
Running costs: R100 a month for 25GB traffic local hosting
Running costs: R2500 a month for advertising every month
Running costs: R10179.16 a month to pay back the 200K loan over 2 years @ 20% interest ...
Running costs: R550 a month for the credit card payment services and silly fee's.

That's a monthly expenditure of R13329.16 without paying somebody to be the administrator of the system, this person is required to respond to "cheating" accusations and system bugs and failures.

So .. to cover the monthly expense excluding the Administrator, you'll need R13329 / R120 = 112 people buying gold every month to break even without tax, so 170 people with tax.

Hmmmm ... not too bad a proposition hey.

If you throw in a big prize at the end of the game, (something that I thought was missing from the game), I think you may be able to do this.

So ...

Next question is ... can we find a way of gauging local interest in the game before forking out the fee's for the franchise? Do like a pre-signup marketing campaign, and if you get 250 - 300 pre-signups then it's a go says I, but you'll have to pay for the marketing campaign first.

[Askari]

Is this game still as popular as it was when most of us were playing? Id be in for a bit of investment..

Using Stokkies figures even 170 players a month seems very small. Surely one could expect at least a few thousand in which case there would be some good profits to be made.

[rainy]

Where do you come up with the R100 for hosting?

[stoke]

http://www.axxess.co.za/hosting.php ... the S option.
I did assume that it can be hosted like any PHP site. I have no idea what kind of "width" the site will need of course.

[rainy]

Err... no.

What you're looking at there is shared hosting. Which is fine for small sites, but not for a full-blown application like Travian. Shared hosting means that several websites are hosted on one server, in a typical scenario it can be a few dozen, even more than a hundred. Which means that in order to not let websites impact each other, script resources are usually limited on servers like that. For Travian, you'll have to think a bit bigger. You'd want a dedicated server, possibly two, depending on the number of users you're expecting - one for the frontend and one for the database. Calculate at least R2.5k a month for server hosting and you're approximately there, considering the prices for local dedicated servers. If it wasn't for local traffic, I'd say rent servers overseas, which usually turns out cheaper, but that would defeat the point.

[Vortex]

There was already a www.travian.co.za though - hosted overseas and FLOODED with Ints..

[SintaxErr]

How much do you pay for the franchise?

Check with your provider. Dedicated server = 1 of 10 virtual machines on one server.

Also. Hosting a server is expensive. If you have a server. Leasing a decent server will put you back about R15k pm

[stoke]

Erm .. Rainy ... they run 2 BF2 servers on one machine, so .. it all depends hey.
But, definitely local hosting will make all the difference.

[Askari]

Well if travian.co.za is taken this is all really a mute point isnt it?

[sss]

Erm .. Rainy ... they run 2 BF2 servers on one machine, so .. it all depends hey.
But, definitely local hosting will make all the difference.

yeah, thats 128 max connections and 2 main exe's that have totally predictable resource requirements

[stoke]

yeah, thats 128 max connections and 2 main exe's that have totally predictable resource requirementsWell, that's why we'd need to do some research to see if we can get a prediction on numbers.
I do think that jumping from R100 -> 2500 a month is a bit of a beeeg jump though.
It's a freaking simple web-site.

[SlappY]

I think it might be pretty resource intensive to be fair.
The website will be one component.
Then it will prolly be running a service (like windows service, not web service) or something in the background for the realtime calcs, troop movements, current builds, and all that gumf for every player.
Then obviously the DB which I reckon will have a truckload of IO happening.

Most likely will need 3+ machines.

[rainy]

Check with your provider. Dedicated server = 1 of 10 virtual machines on one server.

No. A dedicated server is a machine that is only used by you. If the provider is worth the money that is. The virtual server hosting exists as well, but a decent provider will draw a line between virtual server and dedicated server hosting.

[stoke]

@Slappy : KE? Nooooo!
Troop movements work like this:
You click on send troops:

- Put into table X that troops will be @ destination @ time & experience nnn casualties & will be back @ time

Done. No "background processing rubbish. It's all done at point of insertion.

If somebody sends reinforcements to the site being attacked, the details above are recalculated when the reinforcer clicks.

Travian won awards for it's design cos it's soo simple to host it.

[SlappY]

But how can it project what the other player is doing.

For instance I launch an attack travel time of 5 hours. The guy I am attackinh has 10 troops. By the time my guys get there the guy I am attacking has increased his troops to 100. The attack can only be calculated at the point the troops arrive. I.E.: You going to need a process polling for attacks and do the calcs at that time.

Same goes for return times, if I attack with a Teuton knight and a cat. Cat gets taken out, my return time will be faster, but I did not know upfrom that the cat is going to get destroyed.

There has to be some form of background processing....surely?

I am aware that the troops dont phsyically move in realtime. But every game event needs to have a central process churning them over.

[stoke]

Basically, every time an instruction is submitted, the web server calculates the effect of the instruction at that point in time.

When you send your 1 attack, the results of the attack are already known to the server.
When the guy clicks on build new troops, he affects the known results.

The attack can be calculated at the point that the new troops were requested to be built by the guy you're attacking.

On the return times issue, the return times are only displayed on the interface if you "ask for them" after the attack has completed. But, either way, the server knew the return time because it knows the result of the battle based on the latest information that it has.

Background processing is only justified where the process being done can be better performed as a batch-run, e.g. Tables are re-indexed to be optimised to perform a task, and then the indexes are removed after the task.

Lets look at your Background processing model:
1 - User A attacks user B to arrive in 5 hours. Entry is put into action table that must be executed in exactly 5 hours.
2 - User C reinforces user B to arrive in 4hours59minutes59seconds. action table that must be executed in exactly 4hours59minutes59seconds.
Now, if the engine running the background processing is even 1 second late, wham ... incorrect result. And, if the engine died and was restarted .. then .. insanity prevails. Sure you can add checks and balances, but it's still a nightmare, and you cannot franchise a nightmare because the skills requirement to keep it running are too high.

[rainy]

A pseudocron essentially. An engine dying and restarting should not influence future calculations, because it will use the system time for them. Either way, the processign power is needed, the more players, the more power. You'll need at least one dedicated machine for starters, and then you'll still have no redundancy in case of a failure. If you expect people to buy gold, they will expect you to provide a stable and reliable service.

[stoke]

The "processing power" you're talking about is handled by queuing each operation requested by the users, and then handling them one at a time. If the machine running the site is not powerful enough, then the queue just gets longer, and so does the wait time experienced by the user.

The "backup" you're talking about is achieved by the website writing a script that you store separately that can be re-enacted. Server up-time is more crucial than the backup, and most ISP's guarantee 99.5% up-time anyway.

But, you have a valid point, I'm pretty sure that AXXESS makes no guarantee regarding their up-time, and details on redundancy implemented on their servers are unavailable. So, perhaps the budget is more like R5000 for 2 hosted servers at 2 different ISP's.

I wish I could find the article where they won the award. It seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth(internets).

[SintaxErr]

I dissagree. You have a resource hungry application as far as calculations goes. You do NOT calculate multiple times what can be done once. So.. you save the state of your attack object and put that into a queue. Everytime there is a change to a village object, you save that state. When your queue comes up for processing, you get the attack object with it's saved state out of the queue and run your calcs against the current state of the village object.
You do not parrallel process the queues, you parrallell process the attack calculations, thereby avoiding the risk of concurrency issues. This layout will reduce your resourse needs drastically. I think this is how Travian is done as you cannot cancel an attack.

[stoke]

You're probably right Sintax. I cannot back my claims up, and my memory is know to be leaky. :o

But, back on - topic ... hows about investigating hosting this one locally : Travianer : http://www.galaxy-news.net/content/13_what_is_next_from_travian.html.

It will be newer, and therefore higher risk.

[gus]

Yes, I also think some kind of pseudocron/scheduler has to be running on the server, since it has to generate those messages one gets when an attack happened, resources arrived etc., which cannot be done beforehand. I would also think it means dedicated hosting is the only option.

The new travianer looks interesting. Moving a bit closer to WoW type games.

[SosmanSA]

travians??? don't like it....will tie me down too much to play it.... pick up this...fetch that... paint this .....aaarrrrggghhh