sorry for late response, very busy setting this up _properly_ ...
I cant keep up with PM's atm, but I will get back to everyone who was interested, we are in the finish line for launching the event, but not tonight.
here is what happened tonight and what we learned:
- even during off-peek hours, its fairly time consuming to match IP. will probably take an hour on avarage, and thats with the contributor searching pretty much without taking breaks, for an hour.
- matching IP's are getting the SOJ messages as, other games dont
- most likely all servers have a starting counter of 2, so first SOJ sold will always display "3 SOJ's sold"
This is one of the most important findings:
- when event is hosted on EU for example, and an US buyer comes in with his native connection, he will never be able to find the IP without using VPN to Germany.
- US player is getting a completely different range of IP's compared to native EU players creating games. VPN to a Frankfurt server solved the problem, and he was able to create matching IP's with the EU pool.
Main concerns atm:
- Giving out hot IP more than 1 hour before the event will lead to leaks and a very bad time for contributors trying to find games.. So we decided its best to hand out IP 1 hour before walk. Also holding games for over 1 hour is extremely risky in D2R due to disconnects (i know games still perm after a few mins, but still I wouldnt risk it)
- Because of how hard it is to match IP currently, downscaling the contributor size from 125 to 63 could be a viable option to increase success rate by a lot. This will however increase entry cost to 2 sojs.
- We decided Diablo will walk on Sunday night CET. You have to be available from 11pm to 3am CET. Once you contributed, you will know the exact 1 hour time window where you need to find your game IP.
Guys, please understand, I want to do this properly. Currently if you hop on an event that is going on, you pay and receive an IP lets say 2-3 hours before you might have about 50% chance to find Diablo. Im trying to pump that up to at least 80%.
Also after this event, for the next one we will have a system where we can live track each contributor, and see when they found the right IP. This will allow adjustments on the go, like extending the search time, or making the walk earlier once everyone got their games.
With this, we can even pump the success rate to 95% or so, for later events. This can also avoid issues where lets say only 20% can find games for whatever reasons (like IP gets megaleaked)... event can be just called off and sojs refunded or event can be moved to another time.