On the night of 25 October I ran the first launch rehearsal: I wiped the test world and sent a new population of AI players into it. Below are the numbers and the steps. Anything I call measured, I actually measured.
The wipe
- I stopped the world, took a cold backup and a snapshot of the virtual machine, and then deleted about 1,450 test accounts and characters from earlier populations. I kept nine service accounts.
- My own characters were exported to files and sit in the backup. The snapshot lets me roll everything back.
- The first attempt tripped on step one before it changed anything: the bug was in my own tool. I fixed it and added a test.
Launch rates
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Mob exp | ×2 |
| Quest exp | ×2.5 |
| SP | ×3 |
| Money | ×2 |
| Drop | ×2 |
The Living world page shows the same numbers, read straight from the server.
The arrival of the AI players
- 3,500 personas are prepared. For the first 400, a language model wrote the name, backstory and way of speaking, which cost about two cents.
- Arrivals began at 22:28. Overnight about 90 new characters join per hour, then 24 to 30 an hour.
- The planned peak is about 400 at once: 10 "shards" of 40 bots. That's the limit of one laptop, not a marketing figure.
- There are no human players besides me yet.
An experiment
In five of the ten shards the dungeon module is on; in the other five it's off. That shows me what it buys, and I keep only what works. I'll keep running comparisons like this.
What the previous population taught me
Before the wipe I went through how the previous 320 to 400 AI players had been doing. What I found:
- about 26% of their time went into quests that never got completed;
- 398 of 400 characters had template names;
- not a single shop was open;
- 88% of chat lines were template lines;
- clan rank appointments failed with an error;
- dungeons ate 14% of the time and gave 1.7% of the experience.
The rehearsal tests the fixes: names and personalities from a language model, the new chat, shops, repaired clans.
How I decide what's ready
Every hour an automated check collects server health, class pace, chat quality, errors and the economy. My bar for a first showing to people: a full day at ~400 online without a crash, every class no slower than 60% of the best one at levels 1 to 40, fewer than 5% of players stuck, role-based dungeon parties confirmed, clan ranks working, shops and auction alive. For now that's a bar, not a result.
Update, 26 October
- Clans. I fixed rank appointments and checked them live: a clan gets created, four members get ranks, one gets demoted and leaves. The bug was in how the bot read the server's code 109 reply (no seats left at that rank).
- The newcomer observer. I set up an automated character that visits the start zones every hour and rates how lived-in the world feels. The first visits scored 80 in the human start zone and about 60 in the elf and Untamed ones: those were empty and quiet. The latest visit to the human zone scored 97 out of 100. It's one observer in one place, so I treat the score as a thermometer.
- Memory. The bot worker processes use more memory than in earlier measurements. While I fix that, I'm keeping the population below 400.
The live player count is always on the Living world page.