question

jwang avatar image
jwang asked

Title Limits: Character Data Value Updates vs. Player Data Value Updates

I've noticed the following limits appear to be in place for titles by default:

Player data value updates per 15 seconds
10 update operations

Player data value updates per 5 minutes
150 update operations

Player data value updates per hour
3,600 update operations

Character data value updates per 15 seconds
5 update operations

Character data value updates per 5 minutes
30 update operations

Character data value updates per hour
60 update operations

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The character update limits are significantly more restrictive than the player update limits.

The Game Manager page for these values suggests that these limits cannot be increased based on a pricing tier, unlike certain other limits (e.g. # of catalog items in a player's inventory). I assume these limits are more fixed?

The current design for our title require us to update character custom data frequently, but rarely (if ever) update player custom data. Currently this is causing us to bump into the character data update limit.

Is there a way to swap the limits for our title? That is, allow frequent character data updates in exchange for infrequent player data updates?

The alternative workaround I have for this would be to restructure and move the per-character custom data we have into player custom data. (e.g. a table of player custom data that is indexed by characterId) This isn't as clean as using character custom data, however.

Thanks for any info you can share on this.

10 |1200

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1 Answer

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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

That's correct. The Character limits are more restrictive because a player can have multiple characters. The limits on certain things, like the frequency of updates, are ones that cannot be changed in our shared service, as they are there to protect all titles. In an Enterprise agreement, we can go well beyond those limits, as we can set up an agreement in which we have dedicated server resources which are solely dedicated to that customer's titles.

However, it's worth highlighting that you really shouldn't be updating data values every second. In general, the goal should be to be making only a few calls per minute, averaged over the lifetime of the session. Bursts are fine, but sustained high data rates can be problematic. If you need to have a high rate of data updates, you should consider using a custom game server that loads the player info locally and can manage a very high rate of data exchange with the client, updating the backend store periodically.

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jwang avatar image jwang commented ·

Thanks for the reply Brendan!

Our game definitely wouldn't require updating custom data values every second, even in the worst case. However, more than 60 times in an hour is definitely a possibility.

I was hoping for a rebalancing of the limits. Granted that I don't know the underlying architecture of the Playfab service, I conceptually don't believe the game would want to impose a heavier or more frequent load than a typical title using the shared service. Since players can only use one character in our game at a time, the overall # of data updates would be the same as if there were only one character. I simply wish to store the data per-character rather than in the overall player.

If the adjustment of these limits per-title just isn't possible with the shared service, we'll look into other options.

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brendan avatar image brendan jwang commented ·

Correct - we can't really make that change. The problem is that while I understand your intent, if you were to have a bug that caused you to have more characters than expected and update them more than expected, that could cause a problem on our side.

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