Has anyone explored Inno's bandwidth usages with current system
versus a 1 click to help all FS, and 1 click to help all disc. neighbors ?
all these xtra clicks cost Inno Bandwidth ........ l o l
I haven't done any rigorous testing, but I do have a bandwidth monitor set up on my PC. I've switched graphics there from high to low in an (unfortunately untested) effort to reduce bandwidth usage based on the idea that the devs were smart enough to put into code to not send the full animation for buildings when it requests still images. And I occasionally monitor bandwidth usage on my mobile device.
On mobile, many of my more full sessions takes about 2-10MB of data, though it could be slightly more as I normally don't do neighborhood collections on data.
On PC, it takes me about 5-10MB just to load a large city, which is really visible in the desktop graph of my monitor software (I use Bitmeter for this), and on some days in which I take a stroll throughout the world to visit peoples' cities, I rack up anywhere between 300MB to over a GB of downloaded data.
When I mentioned this to my friend, who happens to deal a lot in the server space, he told me that bandwidth like this is cheaper than dirt, on the order of ~$0.02 per GB (found via quick Google search on AWS bandwidth pricing as a benchmark; no idea what services are actually being used). This leads me to believe that whatever the actual costs are in bandwidth and server usage, it likely wouldn't be higher over whatever time period Inno would use for this metric versus the possible/probable costs of developing that one-click feature.
Which makes me believe one of three things:
(1) Inno really doesn't want to do this because design choice reasons
(2) Bandwidth is so abominably cheap that it makes sense not to do this
(3) Adding that feature is harder than they previously thought.
(3.5) And going back to point #2, they found that it'd just be cheaper to let it lie after digging into it for a little.
(3.55) Or it really is a problem and someone is getting gray hairs and caffeine poisoning trying to solve this and not getting far.
*sigh*. Now I'm really curious as to the costs associated with this. Thanks
@BrinDarby ; now this question won't leave my mind 'till I get closure.