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Comment by gfysfm | Hacker News Reader

>Write game bots to test your load non-synthetically.

Can you expand a bit more on that? Cool tips, for sure. Personally I'd appreciate a flip-switch between ads and mining, as long as it defaulted to ads.

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In my particular game, for core gameplay, I'm just sending the angle and whether the action button is down or up. So I just slapped together a Node.js script to spawn N clients that, according to some simple logic send that input to server. They don't even interpret what server sends back to them, because I'm testing the server-side with them. Bonus is that you can test your algos in extreme circumstances, like send all clients to particular spot on the map, so you can see how it performs with different distributions of locations.

This was invaluable to almost all multiplayer games I did.

Wrt mining/ads, I'm considering to default to mining if I detect ad-blocker, or you're on Chrome + Desktop PC (not laptops).

> Wrt mining/ads, I'm considering to default to mining if I detect ad-blocker, or you're on Chrome + Desktop PC (not laptops).

Do what you've gotta do to get paid for your work, but if I found out this was happening it would strongly discourage me from remaining on the website.

Thank you, that's great feedback and exactly what I'm after. Nag popup after every few sessions to turn on mining or whitelist the site in adblocker would be better compromise then?

That would work for me.

Honestly this would be a great use for attention grabbing full screen notification (gasp).

"We're cool with adblock, but to continue on this site click here to enable mining, here for paid accounts, or just disable adblock and report inappropriate ads so we can forward that to our syndication."

Yeah, actually I think that'd be great place for full disclosure and help user get opportunity to make as informed decision as possible.

"how dare they consume my compute resources to make money?" I mean, what the hell is internet advertising if it's not consuming your compute resources to make money?

The amount of resources required to load a blob of json, some images and do a shitty js callback matroska dance is relatively well understood and accepted as a necessary evil by those that don't/can't block such things. Yes there are bad actors that will churn through your mobile data while your phone is locked, endlessly reloading shitty video ads, but who knows how well miners will be coded or perform.

I'm betting on hearing some horror stories fairly soon as the first gen is rolled out.

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