February 2nd 2017 Update Discussion

[BillLion]

Still don't think you are the only one out there taking a break, Arena is kind of quiet since the update, many probably wait for a fix..

I'm not surprised. Here are my thought of what needs to happen (obviously in addition to the bugs being fixed) for people to stay engaged w/ PVP:

1. Implement some kind of fast-pass system for missions already cleared w/ 3 skulls -Yes, I've said it before and will keep saying it. It gets long and boring to go through 50 troopers a day even on double speed auto. These passes can be farmable and/or daily rewards, etc. But the amount of time PVP takes makes doing both unmanageable for many (myself included for the long term).
2. Cut down on the trophy losses for defensive defeats. You really shouldn't lose 100% of what your opponent gained because they can beat the AI version of your team. It should maybe be 50% lost for players on the same par as you (maybe a little lower if they are much higher than you and a little higher if they are much lower than you.
[If you think this is not a problem then explain to me why less than 10% of the 250 players who qualified for the Warlord III rank had enough trophies to go with their rank this past cycle?]
3. Don't spend forever balancing characters before you go live w/ worldwide PVP release but take care of the elephant in the room - Yes, the Prisoner! It really is unbelievable after all the talk that other characters were nerfed while the one who disables every passive effectively remains untouched. (Sorry for those who have him, but you know it's true.)

Nothing new here. But for me this is some of what it would take to keep me in PVP longer term. And of course new content will be needed ASAP to keep me interested in PVE.

[IceManFerrar]

Lol That's just awesome!

I am also getting quite the hang at the 75% load up point when starting the game. The game will eventually finish loading. I haven't actually timed it yet, but its probably in the 30-45 second range. This also started right after updating, and happens every time I start the game.

I'm having the same issue with the game loading stuck at 75%, and then after a long wait, it finally loads the "Start" button.
I thought about uninstalling and reinstalling the game, but I'm afraid that it may get totally screwed up and not load at all. Sigh, the game is taking up more than 1.8 Gigs on my iPhone.

[Sag7272]

I'm not surprised. Here are my thought of what needs to happen (obviously in addition to the bugs being fixed) for people to stay engaged w/ PVP:

1. Implement some kind of fast-pass system for missions already cleared w/ 3 skulls -Yes, I've said it before and will keep saying it. It gets long and boring to go through 50 troopers a day even on double speed auto. These passes can be farmable and/or daily rewards, etc. But the amount of time PVP takes makes doing both unmanageable for many (myself included for the long term).
2. Cut down on the trophy losses for defensive defeats. You really shouldn't lose 100% of what your opponent gained because they can beat the AI version of your team. It should maybe be 50% lost for players on the same par as you (maybe a little lower if they are much higher than you and a little higher if they are much lower than you.
[If you think this is not a problem then explain to me why less than 10% of the 250 players who qualified for the Warlord III rank had enough trophies to go with their rank this past cycle?]
3. Don't spend forever balancing characters before you go live w/ worldwide PVP release but take care of the elephant in the room - Yes, the Prisoner! It really is unbelievable after all the talk that other characters were nerfed while the one who disables every passive effectively remains untouched. (Sorry for those who have him, but you know it's true.)

Nothing new here. But for me this is some of what it would take to keep me in PVP longer term. And of course new content will be needed ASAP to keep me interested in PVE.

#1 = 100% with you

#2 = 100% with you... Main reason to not fight within your "rank" (Beside stupid refresh who send me highest player at around 1700 when I'm 3k + points)
You have to fight lower rank to prevent the yoyo effect of powerful players fighting back & forth if you want to progress witch kill the very idea of not bashing lower ranked players at first..

#3 = Even if it seem like a great idea(Of course I'm having one) we're risk of render him useless since he can't do much more than that anyway & have to be combined to be of any use so unless making him AoD or makes radical changes skillwise changing his passive would probably kill him for good, dev said they have something up their sleeves hence his "non nerf status", let's see what it is first, he's at risk of being rendered useless like the AoS and as a native 5* Gunner who eat a lot of skillshards it should never happend.. Half of top 10 don't have him & still fare well even if he definitely help, let's see what future bring for him.. And for us lol

[Sparton_LOTB]

any info on the instant-crash fix, which happens to some of the android players here? (game starts and directly force-closes)

We have a lead as to why it is occurring and are ensuring we have a thorough fix (and a way to ensure this doesn't crop up again).

1. Implement some kind of fast-pass system for missions already cleared w/ 3 skulls -Yes, I've said it before and will keep saying it. It gets long and boring to go through 50 troopers a day even on double speed auto. These passes can be farmable and/or daily rewards, etc. But the amount of time PVP takes makes doing both unmanageable for many (myself included for the long term).

The main bottleneck is to ensure all 50 of your troopers are used, yes? This is definitely a growing concern for the team as well, and we're looking into either new solutions for re-prioritizing solutions we were going to implement later.

2. Cut down on the trophy losses for defensive defeats. You really shouldn't lose 100% of what your opponent gained because they can beat the AI version of your team. It should maybe be 50% lost for players on the same par as you (maybe a little lower if they are much higher than you and a little higher if they are much lower than you.
[If you think this is not a problem then explain to me why less than 10% of the 250 players who qualified for the Warlord III rank had enough trophies to go with their rank this past cycle?]

In this update, we actually do have a mechanism that reduces points you gain from any loss... but currently we have this implemented only at the lower ranks.

The expectation is that it will be easier to climb when there are more people around you in points... so by reducing point losses for the lower ranks, we will have people struggling in the 1000-1400 area be able to more easily climb during the week. We don't want to reduce point losses entirely across the board, though, because we don't want there to just be rapid point inflation; we want the higher brackets of VP to transition into competing more on rank, and we want having a capable defense to be important in addition to a consistently successful attack record.

That said, we know there's not as many people competing for the top 100 division, but since there's such a point disparity between the top and everyone else, people on both ends are more likely to matchmake each other. Once the leaderboard is populated with more of the total playerbase, we expect you'll more often be matched with people around your VP, which will make climbing more consistent (and thus filling out the mid and upper divisions more evenly).

3. Don't spend forever balancing characters before you go live w/ worldwide PVP release but take care of the elephant in the room - Yes, the Prisoner! It really is unbelievable after all the talk that other characters were nerfed while the one who disables every passive effectively remains untouched. (Sorry for those who have him, but you know it's true.)

We are 100% aware. Solutions we wanted to take were not possible in time for this release, so they were held back. We are committed to ensuring he is not so pervasive in PVP, but we are also committed to not nerfing him into oblivion, so we want to be careful about any changes we do (to him directly or to affect the meta in general).

When opening up the team selection screen in PVE, I see what looks like the PVP team selection screen for a brief second. Pretty sure its from PVP, because it says things like streak bonus. I am not involved in the PVP beta. This happens every single time, and started the first game I payed after updating.

Yeah, the team selection screen's base file is shared between the two features (with certain things shown or hidden depending on which feature you're accessing it from), so it looks like some stuff is not properly initializing. I'll make sure we have that tracked to get fixed eventually.

I am also getting quite the hang at the 75% load up point when starting the game. The game will eventually finish loading. I haven't actually timed it yet, but its probably in the 30-45 second range. This also started right after updating, and happens every time I start the game.

We're still investigating what the cause of that is. Rest assured, if you're seeing it sit on 75%, as far as we can tell it will eventually load, it just may take a long amount of time (unsure what variables cause it to take longer, though).

Sigh, the game is taking up more than 1.8 Gigs on my iPhone.

This update should reduce the footprint by a fair bit, and over the next week or two it should better reflect the actual data needed for the game.

[BillLion]

The main bottleneck is to ensure all 50 of your troopers are used, yes? This is definitely a growing concern for the team as well, and we're looking into either new solutions for re-prioritizing solutions we were going to implement later.

Yes, that's the concern -time/life balance w/ keeping up daily responsibility to our troopers AND competing in PVP. Something will have to give. Fast pass system would be great I think. Another idea is reduce the max # of troopers allowed and just changed some of the cost structure in the shop.

Thanks for the detailed response -much appreciated.

[scott-5496]

Thanks very much for the update Sparton - appreciated.

[IceManFerrar]

I echo BillLion's comments...thanks Sparton for the detailed responses and explanations.

[Chaosego888]

Another idea for using troopers would be to allow players who have reached level 100 with all gold skulls to no longer be limited to one per battle. We could just fill all slots available and reduce the amount of battles to 10 or 12 depending on our Eddie to Ally ratio. This would make for playing PvE and PvP both more realistic.

[konstifik]

Another idea for using troopers would be to allow players who have reached level 100 with all gold skulls to no longer be limited to one per battle. We could just fill all slots available and reduce the amount of battles to 10 or 12 depending on our Eddie to Ally ratio. This would make for playing PvE and PvP both more realistic.

This would be great! Even just allowing for one Eddie trooper and one ally trooper in the same battle would make a big difference.

Perhaps they can make it a two-step thing. After clearing the game with all gold skulls, you can use two troopers (one Eddie and one ally) per battle and when reaching lvl 100 we can use 1-3 additional troopers on top of that.

[MoonShadow]

I've tried the CR thing in AMOLAD madness. First try, I use Scythe skill all the way through the boss. I have no stats change. No increase nor decrease occurs.

Things get interesting when I replay the battle and use Wither instead. The magic & magic resistance buff seem to always occur and accumulate for the next round. Here are the screenshots I took every start of the round (1-2-3-4-boss respectively)

...

I remember that back then Wither skill benefits from this bug, it gets stronger as the battle progresses. But it was fixed in a past update. This is probably a comeback bug.

As for the problem that ToTameAGame and everybody else suffer, I'm not sure what happen there, but it seems like the update doesn't really works in a same way for everybody. Some got it right, some got it wrong.

Is this normal, or is it a bug after the update?? This morning I’ve played SL Endless Rain & SL Lightbringer, both of madness, with the following team: CR Eddie + Sentinel Allied Bomber Boy + Sentinel Pyro Soldier. So, in the 1st round of the last stages of those SL, CR Eddie had the following stats raised:

Lightbringer
ATK: +50%
DEF: +300%
MAG: +300%
M.RESIST: +300%

Endless Rain
ATK: +50%
DEF: +300%
MAG: +350%
M.RESIST: + 400% !!!

I guess then, that CR Eddie can’t be untouched by magic… which is useless against Hellhoundz & Axis Bomber Boys attacks anyway… but still…