complaints

Too many bots on we killed it for a minute there :D

CLICKING INTENSIFIES

Server seems pretty slow today, getting "timeout" randomly every couple of trains/fights.

Only 9 bots online, got a long timeout as I posted that one above.

Same here. Thought it was my new router, but you are getting them too! Thanks for your post mate!

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on your perspective), this doesn't seem to be a problem with the game. I haven't been able to find any evidence of a slowdown on the game side from Apache web server logs, PHP error logs, or Uptime Robot monitoring. Battles are consistently completing in 30-60 milliseconds since yesterday through today, with no 500-level HTTP errors.

Only 9 bots online, got a long timeout as I posted that one above.

Thanks, really specific data points like this help me look at exact requests. Here's the forum post completion/redirect and then forum thread load:

1994 [08/Apr/2026:05:01:53 -0400] "POST /forum/7/8284/reply HTTP/1.1" 302 - 21518
1994 [08/Apr/2026:05:01:53 -0400] "GET /forum/7/8284 HTTP/1.1" 200 5112 49220

From the game's perspective, it took 22 milliseconds for the forum post completion/redirect (status 302 Found) and then 49 milliseconds for the forum thread load (status 200 OK). This likely points to something on your end / your ISPs end.

When you guys are seeing this problem, what exactly are you seeing? bots4 error pages (suggests a problem I can address) or generic browser white error pages (suggests a problem on your/ISP end)?

Hey thanks for the research, what happens to me when this happens is that I click the link (usually train/fight) then the browser starts loading.. and loading, and then the "timeout/cannot connect" white page pops up, sometimes it takes a few seconds.. sometimes a minute or longer (like the one I got on the first post I made on this thread).

First I though it was my browser but as it happend in both of them (MS Edge and Opera) I figured maybe it was the game, it sorted itself out though after an hour or so, just quite annoying when it happens :)

Yeh, everything else internet related was working fine when this happend, just my bots4 tabs that didn't work, webradio, WoW and WoW related tabs was working.

This is the top-10 slowest fights/trains in yesterday/today's logs (first number is bot id, last number is response time in microseconds), ignoring the 3 minute period after the daily database backup:

$ egrep 'GET (/train/[0-9]+/[0-9]+|/fight/[0-9]+/[0-9]+)' 2026040{7,8}.log | grep -v Googlebot | cut -d ' ' -f '2,5,12' | sort -nrk3 | grep -v ':00:0[5-7]:' | head

71775 [07/Apr/2026:06:27:48 881751  
26897 [08/Apr/2026:06:27:20 763233  
101556 [07/Apr/2026:12:30:17 607002  
105627 [07/Apr/2026:08:43:05 501677  
83650 [08/Apr/2026:10:10:14 500707  
58 [07/Apr/2026:10:55:16 493896  
100840 [07/Apr/2026:00:00:01 490903  
56096 [07/Apr/2026:13:59:24 489378  
105771 [08/Apr/2026:10:10:15 434516  
84598 [08/Apr/2026:06:20:11 409074

So the very slowest load times, from the game server's perspective, were all less than a second.

What you're describing is almost surely an issue happening somewhere between you and the game server (whether your computer, your router, your ISP, or somewhere along that path), as opposed to on the game server. I see both of you are in Europe. The game server is in the US (Atlanta, specifically), so that could potentially explain what you both saw.

And things like streaming radio and an MMO client seemingly continuing to function could be explained by audio buffering and clientside prediction. bots4, being a browser-based game, uses stateless/synchronous communication, so every single action you take here requires a round-trip between you and the game server. Any network blip at all will result in a generic browser error after some time.

All that said, if anyone else is observing slowdowns too, please do post here. More people independently seeing problems would boost the likelihood of there being something going on on the game side, which would be actionable for me.

P.S. Obligatory bots2 + WoW screenshot from like...20 years ago? :)

Dang that old AIM buddy list too

Haha awesome, that screenshot was nostalgic.. I'll never go back to single screen again xD

Heh, and I still dislike WoW. :P

So it stands out. To point to the issue occurring not on your PC, or the server, but more likely on the trip FROM your PC to the server and back.

Just cause the battle completes doesn't necessarily mean it isn't the servers fault that it doesn't load/display the page for the client. Pretty sure that behavior has happened before for whatever reason(s).

I know what you're talking about - I think that should be a different kind of issue though. In the scenario where the battle completes serverside and gets recorded, but then there's some sort of additional serverside issue that prevents the load/display, I strongly suspect there'd be either PHP errors logged or a different HTTP status on the responses.