The ranking algorithm has been improved such that it gives substantially greater gain/loss in RP for 4 and 5 player games, to reflect that they take longer to complete. This has been done by using a variable K1 value according to the number of players. A new K2 parameter has also been introduced, although this is primarily of interest to other game developers who wish to implement the algorithm.
Server security improved
Each account now becomes temporarily blocked after five failed password attempts from the same IP address, to prevent brute-force password cracking attempts. A warning message is displayed after the fourth failed attempt advising the user to use the Tropic Euro forum to reset their password using the registered email address.
Performance improvements
This update also includes some major performance and scalability improvements to the Tropic Euro server and a few tweaks in the client software as well.
Under the hood:
- The way that Tropic Euro retrieves the ranking leaderboards has been improved substantially, and should now run extremely fast up to a million users or more.
- The welcome message that appears in the chat window upon each online login can now be updated by me dynamically from the server command line, whereas previously this required a software update whenever I wanted to change the message.
