I'll make this short so people can yay or nay. It would be nice with an ~uptime command that shows the time from the latest server reset. For example, ~uptime; The server has been up for 1 day, 13 hours and 9 minutes. Thank you.
Imma say yay. It can potentially give more insight as to when bosses might spawn which is information that everybody should be able to have so there is a fair chance to get them.
If I could please suggest that we also consider having the uptime displayed on the home page right under status?
If this doesn't get in the way of any other plans that are already in progress, I'm all for it. An alternative might be to create a thread of when the last server check has happened and people posting the latest server restarts.
The only issue I can see with this is that it might be potentially misleading in terms of when bosses are due to spawn, depending on whether or not we killed the bosses before opening the server to players. What a command like this doesn't take into account was when the previous server restart(s) occurred, and that (time between restarts) is a key factor in determining whether or not we kill bosses before opening the server to players.
I think then its the player's prerogative to interpret the ~uptime command. Say, they should not rely 100% on it. Moreover, BF respawn times varies a lot. It would just be lovely if us BFers have a hint of the BF respawn timing. Just would like to note that the ~uptime command can potentially be an indicator to server stability as well.
As the single "no" vote, I'll throw in my .02 here. - this wouldn't be useful for most boss respawn times after the first respawn. The first respawn for Bigfoot can be anywhere between 17 and 22 hours (iirc?) after he was last killed - so for the first respawn, you have a 6 hour window (because you won't know how quickly this particular map was killed after the last restart.) The third respawn could be anywhere - 17+17 = 34 hours post-restart, if he was killed right away both times and came up as soon as possible, or 1+22+22 = 45 hours post restart if he was one of the last ones killed, and had a long respawn time. More than a half a day of difference. So this doesn't help there. - if you're willing to look for it, you can usually find the approximate reset time within the next 12 hours, so for people who are tracking boss respawns, this is just a way for them to be lazy. - people already take advantage of tracking respawn times to grab FM spots when people don't reset. People with (accidentally) overlapping shops already have a very small opportunity to get their spot back, and giving the exact time of the reset puts them at even more of a disadvantage to keep the spot by increasing the pool of people who are going to be fighting for it. so short answer: This info is already generally available. Its not super helpful to have, and its annoying for a small number of people on a fairly regular basis. I'm against it.
I say nay. If Royals happens to implement server routines that run every so many x seconds , minutes or hours, this could help hackers reverse engineer the server, or help hackers in different ways by exploiting certain bugs in the source or java. (If Royal's happened to pick up someone like that). Maybe if the uptime command was not accurate and would update every 6-12 hours but at a different interval. For example if it started 6 hours ago, it might update every 6 + 2 hours so that no one knows the exact uptime. This will just leave the command active for trivial* purposes such as just finding out approximately how long since the last crash or restart. It will also not allow for players to get a competitive advantage in calculating boss spawn times. *I think I mean a different word here, but I can't get it out.
That is not and never will be a concern. There are plenty of ways things could be "reverse engineered" right now. A timer isn't going to put us in any danger.
