It tends to come and go. It usually lasts a short while and then clears up for a longer while. If the Twitch stream is independent of WL servers (should be?) then you could do the stream itself fine. Just warn players that sometimes they may have to refresh their game pages if their orders don't submit immediately.
I don't think it actually has to do with heavy traffic, as this was also occurring late last night when few people were active in the forums (and, I presume, also few people playing the game). I think it's because of some recent updates Fizzer made behind the scenes that inadvertently introduced a bug/design flaw that is putting more pressure than usual on the servers. So, I have a hunch that a tournament should go fine, as long as people playing are made aware of the issue ahead of time so they know that they just have to refresh their game pages if they run into hard problems submitting orders. I could be wrong, and maybe it's worse than I think, but my best guess is it should be okay, with occasional hiccups.
Yeah, usually updates are a common thing to cause downtime, but not when it's Fizzer doing it. I have yet to see Fizzer do an update in which something broke to cause the game or the site to slow down/be unplayable to an extent. He carefully tests out his updates before bringing them live. It might be that something in the server has just gone haywire, kinda like how we had the clan icons just suddenly wiped one day, I'm imagining it's an issue sorta like that.
Maybe you could just change it so there's an extra minute of banked boot time, or turn off auto-boot or something like that. It's really only a problem (sometimes, and briefly, like maybe 30s max) when you try to submit orders.
Until Fizzer gets on it, I think it will continue to go mostly-on and sometimes-off. It seems that something's building up, then hits a critical point, and then the server recovers. Like some log file over-flowing, or a memory leak causing something to restart occasionally, or something like that. My hunch is that it won't fatally ruin a tournament, just be an annoying nuisance occasionally, like an old TV you sometimes have to knock on its side to get the reception to kick back in.
[Just a reminder, this has been occurring for at least 6-8 hours already. I doubt it's going to suddenly make the servers go kaput.]
huddyj: i appreciate your contribution but i think it will get pretty boring pretty fast, everyone already knows how to play that template and the map is quite small so we'll just be seeing the same games over and over again. i could be wrong ofcourse, but that's what my intuition tells me.
