[hardy263]

The purpose of the visibility feature was for positioning purposes. Determining player position is not a trivial task, and the information is not unnecessary, it was an engineering generalization that made certain game features easier to develop. It was not because of poor programming.

For instance, if you were to equip a Maya Purple card, all it would simply do is turn the visibility on, rather than the server doing a check for every player who has the card and changing the size of the packet for that particular person.

Walking animation is implemented by the client as well. If the invisible person was in the middle of walking and they were detected, how would you position a player with only their end position since initial position wasn't sent to the client? You can't. They'd just appear to the end position instantly, skipping the walking animation.

While you feel can feel superior to the developer and believe the programmers at Gravity are being bad programmers, you have to think about the reasons behind it, so you don't spring more leaks by fixing what you think is a trivial bug. It's sort of like a leaky water pipe. Fixing the leak in one area may induce pressure in other areas and cause leaks elsewhere.

"Let me give you an example of server load: On RO, potions can be consumed at a most, 10 per second. With 2,000 players all consuming on average 5 potions per second in Siege War, there are about 20,000 MySQL inserts per second, counting inventory and logs - which is taxing enough by itself."

I'm being nitpicky, but if you're using eAthena, I believe that inserts are batched rather than instantaneous. And each player is not consuming 5 potions per second on average, that'd be ridiculous. If you were to average it, it may amount to maybe 1 per second at most. 5 per second is only if you're tapping furiously. I'm sure if each person averaged 5 per second, all your players would either be cheating by packeting or have carpal tunnel.

[Shenglong]

eAthena is batched inserts, which actually makes the problem worse. I'm not speaking from theory when I pose this problem - potion consumption actually caused the server to lag every few seconds (players at the time will attest). If you believe players are consuming one potion per second, I don't think you've played competitive WoE.

For an accurate representation of how fast you can hit a button: http://www.blamethepixel.com/files.php?a=b&type%5B%5D=11... Download "tapometer". I believe the world record (can't confirm) is 33/second. I can manage about 14 myself on a desktop keyboard.

[mukyu]

You are saying every player goes through 36k whites/slim whites a WoE, 5 times a week. I can see going through that many if you are an LK running around trying to break the precast, but if you are just sitting in a wizline you might go through 200 in two hours.

[Shenglong]

I should clarify... 5/second, during battles. Battles don't happen the entire two hours. More realistic is 6000 slims a WoE. Also, things have changed. Wiz no longer pot slims because they're too heavy.

[ldar15]

it was an engineering generalization that made certain features easier to develop

The rallying call of poor programmers everywhere.

Its not about ease of engineering. Its about consequences. The game designers wanted an invisibility card. There were two ways to program it, one easy and one hard (you're talking to HN, so I imagine a lot of people here can think of ways to implement a system with all of the constraints you describe).

They chose the easy one. Either because they couldn't think of the hard one, they didn't think the easy one would have consequences, or they were overruled. The OP's surprise seems to suggest a lack of forethought.