Looki g forward to increased stability of the game for sure. Even today I surrendered a match and lost connection while in the queue twice. Small potatoes compared to some stuff going on but people need reliability that the good witnesses here offer, not the subpar witness nodes over on Steem.
Looking forward to the new cards, feel like it was just yesterday that the new Zaku was released!
One thing I’m not sure of, will claiming account creation tokens spike in cost? Isn’t the token creation relative to how much the blockchain is being utilized? Glad I claimed 15 so far at least lol
Was the instability on Steem due to witness centralization / subpar setup? Or was it due to softforks (freezing funds) that caused blocks from the 21st witness to get orphaned?
Does anyone know?
There are two main things causing various issues on Steem. The first is the fact that a significant number of backup witnesses are not producing blocks. As you mentioned, this causes constant micro-forks, which the blockchain can easily handle, but can cause a number of user experience issues for applications using the chain. In Splinterlands, for example, we have had to increase the waiting time to confirm every transaction to account for this, so that means players have to wait at the loading spinner longer for everything they do.
The second issue is that api.steemit.com is the only Steem RPC node available for people to use. In the past there were many public RPC nodes run by community members, including one that we ran ourselves to support the game, but now all of the other ones have left and we refuse to run the latest Steem code for our own node for obvious reasons. The game is set up to try a different node on the list if one fails for any reason, but now there is only one node so if that has any issue whatsoever (which it does with relative frequency) then transactions don't go through or API requests fail.
I expect there will be some bumps after the transition to Hive, but once those are sorted out I expect things will run MUCH more smoothly for players going forward.
Thanks for this great explanation! Makes sense that a large part of the degraded experience is the single API, preventing falling back to alternative APIs.
So the frequent micro-forks were more of a consequence of backup witnesses being offline than backup witnesses including transactions violating Softfork 0.22.888 causing their blocks to be orphaned?
It was the rules of Steem 0.22.8888 softfork that were violating consensus rules of Steem (
v0.22.1- latest official release). Ifaliceis scheduled for block production and her node is offline, then it misses the block, and next scheduled witnessbobproduce the block with all the transactions that were supposed to be included. In this case user can experience 3 seconds of extra delay.Malicious Steem witnesses (a.k.a. technologically illiterate bunch of idiots) colluding, running their softfork code that were refusing to accept blocks with valid Steem transactions (but ignored by softfork) were causing not only such delays but also microforks and other side effects.
Steem is no longer decentralized blockchain. It's 100% Justin S. controlled piece of garbage.
I think it’s related to subpar witnesses. Since the major witnesses over here stopped the blocks over on Steem months ago, from the beginning of that period I had performance issues in game. Those issues have persisted.
When the game was run on the blockchain that was supported by the major witnesses here, I never had dropped games besides during hardcork 21 time.
It boils down to these witnesses just being propped up on probably basic machines, not the powerful stuff that some witnesses here use. I think perhaps Justyy may be the only one using a solid witness node but who knows.
@edicted I think you mentioned this in one of your posts. Any idea?
I assumed it was from the rogue witnesses.
Then again I'm sure the nodes weren't great either.