"Dedicated Player's" request

Devs... can you please ensure you have stable servers that can handle the load of your so called desire for "dedicated players" for the special arenas? This is getting beyond frustrating!

Comments

Demonzfyre

I wish more people understood how these types of things work. Then there wouldn't be ignorant comments like this all the time.

ReignkingTW

wut

Mattstafari

I wish more people understood how these types of things work. Then there wouldn't be ignorant comments like this all the time.

I'm curious, what is your analysis of the cause of the downtime?

asgadion

I wish more people understood how these types of things work. Then there wouldn't be ignorant comments like this all the time.

not exactly sure where my ignorance is...

Moot4Life

I wish more people understood how these types of things work. Then there wouldn't be ignorant comments like this all the time.
I'm curious, what is your analysis of the cause of the downtime?

I wish more people understood how these types of things work. Then there wouldn't be ignorant comments like this all the time.
not exactly sure where my ignorance is...

dont worry guys, hes a troll.

Crcrcrc

I wish more people understood how these types of things work. Then there wouldn't be ignorant comments like this all the time.

Exactly. The servers can have unseen issues. You can’t just ensure permanently stable ones.

xandersrevenge

I agree. I don't want a compensation, but something needs to be figured out with servers going down. Was doing arenas and it's valuable time I missed when I could've done a lot.

Demonzfyre

I wish more people understood how these types of things work. Then there wouldn't be ignorant comments like this all the time.
I'm curious, what is your analysis of the cause of the downtime?

I don't know what causes the crash as I don't work for the company that hosts the games' server (Google Cloud I believe). I just know that most people think there's some sort of magic button that needs pressed when a server crashes. There's a ton of reasons a server can crash but i'll never pretend to know the exact cause.

I also know this happens from time to time and MCOC isn't the only game it happens to. Kabam doesn't run the servers. When the game does down, they have little control if any over it. They work with the host to get the game running but thats about it.

Mattstafari

Servers are a hosting environment and if the downtime was occurring because the server had experienced an issue, then disaster recovery procedures would run to fail over to another live server hosting the same services as the server that has gone down. This would be very quick, especially with Google cloud or any of the other big cloud providers.

A better gamble is that there is a runtime error in the latest build and they are trying to resolve it or rollback.

DrZola

I’m going to ask a question that’s probably best addressed to @DNA3000 but here goes:

If it is a Google cloud server that supports the game, does any account information collected by the game get shared with Google?

Just curious. I confess an ignorance about many of these things. But I’m always curious about how F2P games use info they collect.

Dr. Zola

DNA3000

Devs... can you please ensure you have stable servers that can handle the load of your so called desire for "dedicated players" for the special arenas? This is getting beyond frustrating!

I haven't seen an issue in the celebration shard arenas, except for an occasional minor slowdown. But it is possible other players are and I'm just not, which actually highlights an important fact about the game architecture.

It is a common misunderstanding that the game runs on "servers" in any discrete sort of sense. They don't. Given what we know about the architecture of the game, there are some dedicated servers that serve certain functions, stuff related to Unity platform processing, say, and there are probably (as is usual with massively multiplayer games like this) "instance servers" that handle certain game loads that spin up and shut down depending on the current game load, and then on top of that there are probably many game functions that are processed within Google's cloud - we know this (or at least I'm pretty sure of this) because of Google cloud dependencies that have come up in the past, along with other information about how the game works I may have looked at from time to time. All these things have to work together for the game to function correctly.

Game crashes or other problems aren't just an issue with an "unstable server" they tend to be more complex problems with the system as a whole, and the system as a whole isn't something that can always be tested outside of the live production environment. Certainly, Kabam could do much better with maintaining a stable game environment: the complexity of the problem is not an excuse for things going wrong. But a large part of the problem is organic development.

Games like this, much like enterprise systems of similar size and complexity, are often incrementally improved upon over time, "organically grown" as it were, and as they get larger, they get less predictable and less trivial to fully understand. At some point no one person understands the system holistically, and everyone is relying upon changes they make here to not affect the rest of the game over there. Which *usually* is true, but the 1% of the time this is false there's no way to see the problem to prevent it, and often the solution is non-trivial because the problem sits under a large weight of other game improvements above it. In other words, sometimes a bug is hard to fix because the rest of the system has been written to rely upon the bug.

But to specifically address the comment, it is possible for the game to be dead while all of its components are still happily humming along. "Stability" is not always, and maybe not even usually, the source of game problems that *look* to the players like stability issues.

DNA3000

I’m going to ask a question that’s probably best addressed to @DNA3000 but here goes:

If it is a Google cloud server that supports the game, does any account information collected by the game get shared with Google?

Just curious. I confess an ignorance about many of these things. But I’m always curious about how F2P games use info they collect.

Dr. Zola

Not implicitly. Of course, if Kabam has some information sharing contract with Google, that's a separate issue. But if the Google Play services are basically identical to general Google Cloud services, the agreement with Google specifies that Google will not look at your customer data except as necessary to perform the processing necessary. So if Kabam's game systems ask Google through their APIs to take XYZ data and do ABC to that data and return the result, Google has to look at the data to do that work obviously, but will only look at that data to perform the desired work, and that's it. Google does not look at or use the data beyond that, without explicit consent from their hosting customers.

In other words, hypothetically speaking Google's servers might "know" that player D10089205531 aka "DNA3000" spends too much time in the arenas, but that information stays within the Google Play servers as part of game processing, and no one outside of the servers actually doing the work at Google knows this: that information isn't stored at Google somewhere that anyone at Google could look at.

ShiroMikazuki

less stable servers means more compensation