A couple of months ago, the long awaited 3.0 version of Omerta was launched.
A lot of changes were made, some small, others affecting the entire game-play.
TraBot News interviewed Oyaji (Game Manager) and Robin (Developer) about the changes, the wars, the 50x errors, new image codes and more!

Q	Version 3.0 has finally been launched. Why did it take so long to get it to this point?
Oyaji	Mainly because we have a small team and there is always lots to do in Omerta, from maintenance to chasing after scripters to resets to minor improvements. So there was never much time to put into development on a major new version. In the end 3.0 got planned and re-planned a couple of times as well, as original plans were too ambitious to realize in any realistic time frame.
Q	During beta testing the admins stated that they wanted longer wars and more equal. The wars we see now, are they how you thought it would go, how did you envision it?
Oyaji	Yes, mostly, but: It definitely wasn't easy for players to adapt to the new system.
Robin	(and still isn't)
Oyaji	We would like to see a few more, but the play style with massive groups pitted against each other doesn't support that. That's something that will only erode with time i guess, but I've definitely seen some nice things happening when people weren't just blasting 60k each way.
Robin	With one huge group against another huge group, the eventual outcome is going to be quite hard to judge because tactics go out the window obviously. And there has been a conscious effort to introduce more of a strategy than just waiting until someone is taking a (well earned) nap and blowing them to pieces in a few minutes :p
Bloodyslow	In my opinion the wars are so boring... In the old days you shot 60 k and you had him/ died in bf/ survived, now you shoot Rob with 60k
Oyaji	Boring how? They aren't 1 or 2 hours of condensed excitement no, instead they can be many hours or even days... Large parts of which you might spend offline or hiding. Overall I'd say that's more fun, but i guess that's personal.
Oyaji	Now you shouldn't shoot 60k you mean ;)
Q	A lot of people complain about Rob and that it is making a war way too difficult because you need a lot of extra bullets to get your target down and more shooters. Also it is possible for people to just buy a new Rob from Obay whenever you lose it. Players have suggested to make it harder to get Rob or even completely remove it. What is your opinion about it?
Oyaji	Well, I made a conscious decision to make him easily available via Obay, so that's intended. Does it mean more bullets are needed? Yes, but not as many as is often stated... If you do it smart. (again, never shoot 60k) Is it bad to need more bullets? Not really, if we know in advance there are fewer wars. Which means more time to stock up between wars. I wouldn't mind giving new strategic options to help deal with Rob however... Like alternative bodyguards. Such things would be possible, but there really isn't a need. I would expect some new bodyguard in the new year.
Q	There have been a lot of 50x errors around lately. Where do they come from?
Robin	Simple explanation: Imagine that I'm a juggler, I have 10 balls in front of me.. I start by juggling one, and as people throw a ball at me, I juggle it for a minute before I put it down, a person can only throw one ball per minute. If I have one person throwing balls at me, I can keep up easily. As more people join in, obviously, it becomes impossible to keep up without dropping balls. There's two approaches to fix this, the most obvious one being to put the balls back down more quickly (the other is to get less people, obviously not a solution!)
Robin	Now, in more detail: Omerta is comprised of three layers (more or less). Load balancers which direct traffic to the webservers (some caching is also involved, but let's not go into that), and the database servers. Obviously, most pages involve at least one query to fetch user information, which involves a database connection. When the databases are 'juggling too many balls', the number of people waiting to throw balls (connections) start piling up, making the problem worse. As that continues to spiral, we start dropping balls by giving 50x errors. Basically, the database gets overloaded, and things start getting pie shaped. So obviously we need to find what is taking too much time, and sort that out. The problems can be caused by lack of planning on our part in new code and features (though thankfully that doesn't tend to happen too often), or more likely that we simply underestimated the way a feature would be used or to what extent. So we might need to go back and revisit that technically to find ways to make it perform better (or in some cases apply limits, temporarily or not).
Enigmatic	Isn't the handling speed of the databases something you could've anticipated on?
Robin	Yes, and we do of course do our best - but we're only human :) Sometimes we make mistakes there or overlook details.
Oyaji	+ it's hard to test the impact of many users without testing it with said number of users ;)
Enigmatic	Well since the time you decided to switch to those servers in Canada to the players it seems no real progress was made in speed
Robin	So much changed since that switch, that I don't think the two can really be compared. And I certainly think that progress has been made (2.3? 15 minute pageloads.. at least now you get told that the load failed, sometimes). This is something I am working on full-time at the moment though, I realize that it's not ideal sometimes.
Trace	So basically the errors now come up to prevent endless pageloads which we had in previous versions?
Robin	That's a bit oversimplified (obviously, we shouldn't have them *at all*), but that's the technical cause, yes. (and I'm going to keep making sure that percentage of problems goes down more ;))
Oyaji	They just tell you it's not going to happen instead of making you wait to see if it will ;)
Bloodyslow	Ok woman question ... so it cant be fixed with a bigger server?
Oyaji	No, it can be fixed by processing requests from players quicker
Robin	Not really.. it might appear to go away if you keep throwing faster computers at it, but if there is a problem there, it won't fix itself, it does need intervention to fix it properly. Otherwise over time you will need to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger computers. We do have a new server on the way to test out some new technologies which might also help out hide these problems from you lot though I believe.
Bloodyslow	So there is something that causes those errors and you don't know what till now
Oyaji	We do, but there are many and variouss causes... We're working on them and you should have noticed errors becoming quite rare in the past week+ or so ;)
Enigmatic	True Oyaji, tho after the new codes it seems to have picked up a bit again
Robin	Unrelated. We had to temporarily re-purpose a server last night for some testing which did cause them to pick up a tiny bit, but that has been re-enabled since. So it shouldn't be bad anymore.
Q	Could you add something you are currently working on, or what you have worked on that decreased the amount of errors?
Robin	Jail colours is one of the more recent examples that was fixed up. No user-visible changes, but it was made significantly faster behind the scenes (that was one example of not anticipating usage.. some people have over 1,000 entries hilighted). As a result those people constantly got 50x errors on the jail (as well as slowing everything down a bit for everyone else while the servers tried to process their page ;))
Q	Anything else you'd like to add about the errors?
Robin	Just that we are actively working on them and have made (a lot of *very* good) progress recently, and that we are treating it as the #1 priority at the moment (and a short apology for last night's testing interfering with anyone's playing - it won't happen again)
Q	Since yesterday there are new image codes (capchas) in the game. There have been a lot of complaints because the images seem significantly harder to read for some people. What was the reason for changing the old ones and what is going to happen with it?
Oyaji	The reason is quite simple: the old codes could be read by OCR software. Since the change yesterday, OCR can no longer work with the codes (for as long as that takes).
Bloodyslow	OCR software?
Oyaji	OCR may refer to: * Optical character recognition, conversion of images of text into characters from wikipedia. So, the change stopped scripts based on OCR technology dead in their tracks. Whenever we make any change, there will be a lot of complaints about it. we see this every time. Personally I think these are easier to read but that's personal. like always, it will take ppl some time to get used to them
Robin	Every time we have changed codes, there have been masses of complaints (as indeed there frequently are with any small change) while people get re-adapted to things... humans are creatures of habit and tend to be a bit cautious about their attitude to change. We did do testing before rolling them out yesterday (I looked at around 1,000 test codes as well as busting people for around half an hour after they were rolled out) to make sure they weren't too hard to read. Of those, I got one that took too long (more then 3 seconds) to read.
Oyaji	We threw out another proposed variant that was a lot harder to read btw
Robin	Oh yes, that was terrible. (and this is actually more effective at breaking the OCR anyway)
Oyaji	We do keep usability in mind
Q	We have seen less hacks lately, any new ways to avoid them?
Oyaji	I'd say it's generally users being more careful, but it will help people now log in with email instead of nick. Harder to try accounts and guess weak passwords that way if you don't know their email. And kill passwords probably discouraged hacking as well.
Q	Can you share some information about how the punishments/limitations system acts when you rank actively for too long?
Oyaji	It basically keeps track of how many rankpoints you gain from crime/car/smuggle in 24 hour periods, and starts putting the breaks on at certain levels (balanced for rank etc.)
Enigmatic	I was told it was 24h after the point where you started your 10h ranking period :x
Oyaji	Actually, the measurement periods are 24 hours and penalties can kick in at any time, purely depending on how much rank you gain from those 3 features.
Enigmatic	So if you were to purely rank on b/n, you could go for more then 10 hours?
Oyaji	Loosely speaking: if you were to not miss a single crime/car/smuggle at all during continuous hours of playing, you would start to get penalties after about 10 hours. Which would then reset 14 hours later. But that's starting from blank, it doesn't always reset back to 0.
Enigmatic	So the more crimes you miss the longer you can rank?
Oyaji	Yes, it's about rankprogress gained from those 3 features.
Enigmatic	Do group crimes get included in that?
Oyaji	Nope. Only the 3 mentioned, nothing else affects it. Bullets and Joe work in the same 24 hour periods but have nothing to do with the activity level.
Enigmatic	Bullets is just 4k per 24h right, and only from lbf
Oyaji	yeah, rest is unlimited. Just ends up being more expensive for you obviously.
Q	Just the usual last question left... Who do you think has an interesting story to tell?
Oyaji	You could try to seek out ppl who have more 'unusual' ways of having fun in Omerta. Not everyone is just here for massive wars (or busting) after all. Or some 'fresh' crewmember... explaining why he/she is masochistic enough to join the most hated group in Omerta