We know almost nothing about you, so it was hard to introduce you! There are servers in Germany, Brazil and in the USA. Are there server administrators in all those countries? Do you have normal or secret chars to play on? Do you... well, just tell something about yourself, please...

My name is Thoralf Will, most players will know me as Fad van Nal, and I am one of the three system administrators at CipSoft. Even though we have servers in Brazil, Germany and the USA, the server administrators there are not employed by CipSoft but work at data centres in those countries and supervise the complete network not just our servers. We are supervising all our servers from Germany.

Do you have nine-to-five jobs, or does it happen that Guido teleports to your bed when a server crashes at midnight? What happens if a server crashes?

I do work the normal 40 hours a week, however, not at a fix time schedule. We work when the servers need us or Durin, the head of the system administrator team, is calling. :) We have supervising mechanisms that alarm us if problems occur. Somebody is always in charge to fix the problems as quick as possible.

You know us, we are terrible curious. Why did you change the time for the so-called 'server save' at some servers?

Distributing the server saves caused a reduction of the database load. As a result the single server saves need less time.

Sounds like a fair reason. Now once and for all: Is a clean world a fast world?

No.

Can we help making the game faster by trashing all useless items in dustbins?

No, that is a misbelief that does not help at all. Actually, cleaning up produces a wee bit load, so best of all you leave everything where it is. ;)

Can you explain us what is the reason for what we experience as 'lag', 'kicks' and 'freezes', sometimes? Or maybe there is more than one reason?

There are many reasons that can cause bad connections and often we have no influence on them. Sometimes a provider causes problems or some router on the way between you and our servers. Of course, like all other internet services also we have to deal with the common problems that occur in such a volatile environment like the internet. There are countless problems that can occur and there is not enough space to list them all. I can assure you that we are constantly working on minimising the
problems caused from our side. Just recently we have upgraded the connections to our servers in cooperation with the data centres.

New worlds are created faster and faster. When do you decide to make new ones?

Whenever there is need for it. However, there is also a schedule that we follow to keep the growth of Tibia under control.

Last update we got the login queue. One of the reasons to implement that was to reduce the players that 'hammered' the servers while trying to get online with their Free Account. What is the influence of the queues on the performance?

The login queue has indeed led to a huge load rejection in the database which allows us to start more game worlds. Also everything concerning characters can now be handled much faster, e.g., character creation.

Sometimes, many people get kicked from the game in one single moment, a feared 'mass-kick'. Some people claim that if you was in a dangerous place at the moment of the kick, it is best to stay offline because the real problems start when you try to log in again. Can you give us advices how to avoid a visit to the temple when we are striked by a masskick next time?

If there has been a mass kick and you were in the middle of a fight, it could indeed save your life to call some friends that have been kicked in a safe place to go to the battle field and fight the monsters in the area for you, so you are not killed by them when logging back in.

After a masskick, often there are people demanding the reset of a world, since they lost a lot. Can you tell us in which case you will reset a game world, and in which case not?

Server resets are only carried out in very exceptional cases, e.g., if their have been serious technical problems. After a mass kick, on the other hand, there will not be a server reset. Even though 100 players are kicked at one time and might experience some losses, there have been more than 1000 already played on that day that would be effected as well. For this reason server resets are only made if their is no other resort.

Especially for the nerds among us, can you tell us something about the servers?

Our game worlds run on dual-Xeon 2,6-2,8GHz. The database server have from 2 to 8 3.0 GHz Xeon processors and 2 to 16 GB RAM.
For all devices backup components are at disposal.

What machines and infrastructure were used in the past, and what will be the future? Or, what do you dream about?

One and a half year ago, our database was run on a dual-Xeon with 2,4 GHz, later it changed to a quad-Xeon with 4 GB RAM and since last week we got it on an IBM x445 with 8-Xeon and 16 GB RAM....

What was the worst thing that ever happened to the servers?

Me. ;) No seriously, I would say the hacking attack almost two years ago.

Just to give us something to think about at the end of this interview, how much digital traffic do we cause each month?

We are in the range of over 30 Terabytes. If we shut down our servers for maintenance work, it can happen that our provider calls up to see if everything is alright because his statistic drastically dropps.

[b]Thank you, Thoralf, for your time and all the daily tweaks and improvements that you do to offer a better game experience :)