I've been following this for the past few days and finally feel compelled to put in my two cents. First of all, it seems clear that communication from Inno has been poor. There was no announcement of the change, and we're all left speculating about what prompted it, and that's caused a lot of unnecessary arguments. "Inno is trying to stop people from exploiting RQs," "Inno is completely destroying a method of gameplay people have invested in for years," "Y'all are idiots for complaining, you're such snowflakes," etc. In the note about RQs last month, Inno mentioned an impact on their servers that they were expecting resulting from changes to RQs. My hypothesis is that the impact to Inno servers is at least a component of why the change was made, and I'd like to address that aspect. One thing I've noticed through the years wherever computers are concerned is that everyone always wants more processing power and memory, and no one wants to go back and fix the crappy code that is actually causing all the problems. I've had issues with the way FOE works for years, but now if there's a chance those issues are driving this change, I might as well speak up.
First of all, the way many things are coded in FOE is crap. There's no way around that. RQs are the most obvious place, but it shows up tons of other places as well. Every time you abort a quest, it hits up Inno servers. Has anyone asked why? There's a very short list of RQs in each era. We all know them very well. Sometimes when my internet is slow, it takes 10-15 seconds for the next quest to show up after I abort one. Sometimes I have to reload the entire game to get a second RQ to show up after aborting one. That's absolutely insane. The game knows what quests come next. When you abort a quest, just show the next one. There's absolutely no reason to hit up Inno servers. One you interact with a quest, fine, hit up Inno servers to take away coins/supplies, whatever. I don't care. But when I'm skipping over the same 5 quests over and over, there's no way that should be taxing servers anywhere. That one change would have a significant impact on server load. All those operations that are trivial, push them to the client side. It's that easy. (To be clear, I'm not complaining about slow internet speeds. I'm saying there are game elements that ping the server when there is no reason to do so.)
Another place that shows up is aiding other players. Similar to aborting quests, there are times when it takes 5-10 seconds to aid a single player when internet speeds are slow. Has anyone at Inno heard of parallel processing? When I hit the Aid button, we all know what happens. I get some gold, there's a chance for a BP, and depending on what GBs I have, there's a chance I get some other goodies as well. First of all, an Aid All button would be super nice. Currently it takes 5-10 minutes to go through and aid everyone in my guild, FL, and the neighborhood. That's just stupid. When I'm aiding 100 people in a row, just queue all of those actions. Let me aid everyone, and give me the rewards later. Wait 30 seconds and then tell me if I got any BP or anything. Of course y'all are going to complain, "But what about when there are quests???" So? Have some sort of "pending" mo/pos. When I aid someone, hold that request for 3 seconds to see if I aid someone else. If I aid someone else within that timeframe, send both requests together assuming I don't aid someone else. Have a little counter. If I need to aid 50 people for a quest, I can aid until I get up to 50 people, wait 3 seconds, have the batch request go through (or have them all queue in the background and only give me the results from them periodically), and then I can see how many more I people I need to aid. Sure, that only saves the user 20 seconds a day in response times, but multiply that by how many thousand players and the savings on Inno servers could be massive.
These are just two areas in the game, but there are plenty more. I can't count the number of times I've collected a building on mobile by sweeping over buildings, and in the middle I pass the FP limit. The building gets registered as being collected, but the response never comes back from the server giving me the goods/FP. Locally there is nothing left to collect from that building, but on the server it hasn't been collected. Because of that, I have to reload the game to collect the building after spending down some FP.
I fully admit that this post seems a bit off topic, but if the issue with RQs is processing on Inno servers, there are tons of easy solutions that would have a bigger impact than limiting everyone to 2000 aborted quests a day. Even if that's not the reason Inno placed the limit on quests, these changes would have a major impact on their servers, and the game would seem a lot more "snappy" to everyone. And no, it's not an issue with network speed. The network speed issues just make it obvious that the way Inno has programmed some of these things is crap. Fixing these issues is better for Inno, better for advanced players, better for beginning players, better for the planet. You can only throw more processing power and memory at a problem for so long before you need to go back to the drawing board and actually fix the problem.