Should we be able to sell high end rank up materials? (Poll)

As many remember, we used to be able to sell T4CC... however, because many were doing so accidentally, Kabam took away this ability for player safety. While that was good at the time, the meta of the game has changed.

Today most veterans of the game have hundreds, if not thousands of T4CC crystals unable to be opened, and their overflows are filled with expiring T2A....

As such, in 2022, is it time to let us sell these items for next level up materials? Is it time for us to be able to sell T4CC, T2A, and T5B?

Comments

Colonaut123

I think it is too early for T5BC, T5CC and T2A, but not T4BC en T4CC.

I understand the latter is because it would be an extra source of T5CC and Kabam want to push easier access to Thronebreaker as much to the future as they can. But meanwhile, players are hoarding T4CC crystals and shard crystals like a hermit because they get to overflow with no use whatsoever, cluttering the servers. They have to let go sometime, but probably not before rank 4 are more prevalent.

Shadowstrike

There's still too much money to be made out of tier 5 catalysts.

Ancel

When I have t4cc about to expire I want to get something out of it

dot_ditto

I'm not a fan of selling too much stuff ... but since they put item caps on us, and expire old items .. yes, we should have option to sell anything that will/can expire ..

And more importantly ... we should get something "worthwhile" out of it ... O.o (at moment, all we get is some laughably token gold ... O.o )

unknown

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DNA3000

cluttering the servers

Crystals do not clutter servers. Crystal *types* clutter servers. If you can get every single player to sell *all* of their T4CC crystals and promise to *never* earn one ever again, you could delete the T4CC crystal definition and free resource space. But if even one single person holds a T4CC at any moment in time, the exact same amount of resources are spent as would be spent if everyone had a million of them.

Think about it this way. Every player has some T4CC and the servers must track that. If you sell all of them, the server still must track that you have exactly zero of them. Whether the server has to remember that you have 100 or I have zero, the amount of server resources spent tracking that is exactly the same. But if T4CC crystals disappeared completely, the game would no longer have to track that at all, it could basically remove several million "zeroes" out of its databases, freeing space.

That obviously cannot happen with T4CC crystals, so it doesn't matter how many players keep. It matters for things like one-off time limited crystals, which is why Kabam periodically forces them open and deletes them from player accounts. Every crystal type that exists is data it must track, multiplied by all the accounts that exist. And even though there might be a million active players, there's over a hundred million accounts. Every single one of those accounts has hundreds of crystals being tracked for it, of which that player probably has zero of them. But the game still has to track that the account has some number of them, and that number happens to be zero.

unknown

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DNA3000

cluttering the servers
Crystals do not clutter servers. Crystal *types* clutter servers. If you can get every single player to sell *all* of their T4CC crystals and promise to *never* earn one ever again, you could delete the T4CC crystal definition and free resource space. But if even one single person holds a T4CC at any moment in time, the exact same amount of resources are spent as would be spent if everyone had a million of them.

Think about it this way. Every player has some T4CC and the servers must track that. If you sell all of them, the server still must track that you have exactly zero of them. Whether the server has to remember that you have 100 or I have zero, the amount of server resources spent tracking that is exactly the same. But if T4CC crystals disappeared completely, the game would no longer have to track that at all, it could basically remove several million "zeroes" out of its databases, freeing space.

That obviously cannot happen with T4CC crystals, so it doesn't matter how many players keep. It matters for things like one-off time limited crystals, which is why Kabam periodically forces them open and deletes them from player accounts. Every crystal type that exists is data it must track, multiplied by all the accounts that exist. And even though there might be a million active players, there's over a hundred million accounts. Every single one of those accounts has hundreds of crystals being tracked for it, of which that player probably has zero of them. But the game still has to track that the account has some number of them, and that number happens to be zero.
I'm not even going to pretend I'm a coder... but I would assume having data on every account costs server space. Also, as I understand it, the reason Kabam servers are always full is because the game is run a very old engine... ie if they updated the engine and servers almost all issues (including bugs) would go away.

Almost 100% wrong, but don't feel bad: people are constantly guessing wildly based on google searches and undergraduate textbooks and getting just as wrong.

Server space isn't exactly the issue: the issue is the speed at which data can be manipulated, and that doesn't always scale linearly or predictably. And space issues are not due to "old engines." They may be due to deep architectural issues that were created at the beginning of time and cannot be easily changed, but that's not the same thing.

In fact, systems are being upgraded all the time. The "parry timing" bugs that were introduced late last year and still plague the game today are not due to running an old engine, in fact they were introduced as part of a mandatory upgrade of the core Unity components Upgrading them created a discrepancy in how the higher level meta mechanics of the game worked and how the underlying engine processed them, creating timing issues that required them to completely rebuild those systems.

This is not the first time something like this happened either. A Unity engine upgrade around the time of 12.0 created similar problems for the game that took months to resolve.

I suspect you're probably using the words "engine" and "server" without really fully understanding what either of them refer to. "Engine" is a bit ambiguous. The game is built on Unity, which is a game system framework. It is often referred to as the core game engine. However, the "game engine" as a whole is a constellation of software with Unity at its core and the game's fundamental mechanics and systems constructed around it as interlocking software modules. But even that doesn't fully represent the entire game "servers" as the back end of the game runs within Google's cloud: there are Google cloud components that work with the Unity components to fully implement the back end of the game. That's why sometimes when Google's services have an outage, the game is also down or malfunctioning.

All of this is the server side part of the game. The client side is completely separate. The part that runs on people's phones itself has a core "engine" that is also based on Unity but also has MCOC-specific additions and modifications. The game client is being modified and updated constantly, and it is primarily here where the "Parry Bug" resides.

Some of the performance issues people see are due to server side issues or constraints, and some are due to client side issues, and some are due to a combination of both. Unless you understand how the game works and test diligently, it isn't easy to know which one you're looking at.

Hoitado

If we can spend money to get a 3-4 6* Rank Up Gem then we should definitely be allowed to have this

Shadowstrike

If we can spend money to get a 3-4 6* Rank Up Gem then we should definitely be allowed to have this

But this isn't readily available to anybody for purchase like rank up gem have been in the past. This is an exclusive gem that's only going to be given to 30 people and it's literally at who can ever throw their life savings into it.

I mean you have more of an argument if we're talking rank 1 to Rank 2 or even an a generic AG

Badass84

You should at least be able to sell a T4CC for a T4B, same for T3CC for T3B or A1. This would be great.

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Jcobra25

I wanna be able to sell T2 alpha

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GrandOldKai

I have a few T2As in stash I wish I could just sell instead of letting expire...

Buttehrs

You tell me 🤣

doctorb

The reason ppl hoard is because they don't have enough of everything they need to rank up a hero. And if they open all crystals, a whole bunch of stuff would just wasteful expire and can't be sold. I think kabam just needs to start letting ppl sell T4CC for T5CC shards. The T5CC has been out for a long time already.

doctorb

cluttering the servers
Crystals do not clutter servers. Crystal *types* clutter servers. If you can get every single player to sell *all* of their T4CC crystals and promise to *never* earn one ever again, you could delete the T4CC crystal definition and free resource space. But if even one single person holds a T4CC at any moment in time, the exact same amount of resources are spent as would be spent if everyone had a million of them.

Think about it this way. Every player has some T4CC and the servers must track that. If you sell all of them, the server still must track that you have exactly zero of them. Whether the server has to remember that you have 100 or I have zero, the amount of server resources spent tracking that is exactly the same. But if T4CC crystals disappeared completely, the game would no longer have to track that at all, it could basically remove several million "zeroes" out of its databases, freeing space.

That obviously cannot happen with T4CC crystals, so it doesn't matter how many players keep. It matters for things like one-off time limited crystals, which is why Kabam periodically forces them open and deletes them from player accounts. Every crystal type that exists is data it must track, multiplied by all the accounts that exist. And even though there might be a million active players, there's over a hundred million accounts. Every single one of those accounts has hundreds of crystals being tracked for it, of which that player probably has zero of them. But the game still has to track that the account has some number of them, and that number happens to be zero.
I'm not even going to pretend I'm a coder... but I would assume having data on every account costs server space. Also, as I understand it, the reason Kabam servers are always full is because the game is run a very old engine... ie if they updated the engine and servers almost all issues (including bugs) would go away.
Almost 100% wrong, but don't feel bad: people are constantly guessing wildly based on google searches and undergraduate textbooks and getting just as wrong.

Server space isn't exactly the issue: the issue is the speed at which data can be manipulated, and that doesn't always scale linearly or predictably. And space issues are not due to "old engines." They may be due to deep architectural issues that were created at the beginning of time and cannot be easily changed, but that's not the same thing.

In fact, systems are being upgraded all the time. The "parry timing" bugs that were introduced late last year and still plague the game today are not due to running an old engine, in fact they were introduced as part of a mandatory upgrade of the core Unity components Upgrading them created a discrepancy in how the higher level meta mechanics of the game worked and how the underlying engine processed them, creating timing issues that required them to completely rebuild those systems.

This is not the first time something like this happened either. A Unity engine upgrade around the time of 12.0 created similar problems for the game that took months to resolve.

I suspect you're probably using the words "engine" and "server" without really fully understanding what either of them refer to. "Engine" is a bit ambiguous. The game is built on Unity, which is a game system framework. It is often referred to as the core game engine. However, the "game engine" as a whole is a constellation of software with Unity at its core and the game's fundamental mechanics and systems constructed around it as interlocking software modules. But even that doesn't fully represent the entire game "servers" as the back end of the game runs within Google's cloud: there are Google cloud components that work with the Unity components to fully implement the back end of the game. That's why sometimes when Google's services have an outage, the game is also down or malfunctioning.

All of this is the server side part of the game. The client side is completely separate. The part that runs on people's phones itself has a core "engine" that is also based on Unity but also has MCOC-specific additions and modifications. The game client is being modified and updated constantly, and it is primarily here where the "Parry Bug" resides.

Some of the performance issues people see are due to server side issues or constraints, and some are due to client side issues, and some are due to a combination of both. Unless you understand how the game works and test diligently, it isn't easy to know which one you're looking at.
can I ask your credentials? You made a few condescending points here that you were very wrong about (IE I know what a server vs engine is)... I've also had coders explain to me this game's biggest issues are server space and the old engine being used.

In fact, in one of Brian Grant's recent videos he talks about a kabam dev telling him this exact same thing.

So again.. where is your expertise to make assumptions about me personally?

Well said!!

unknown

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DNA3000

cluttering the servers
Crystals do not clutter servers. Crystal *types* clutter servers. If you can get every single player to sell *all* of their T4CC crystals and promise to *never* earn one ever again, you could delete the T4CC crystal definition and free resource space. But if even one single person holds a T4CC at any moment in time, the exact same amount of resources are spent as would be spent if everyone had a million of them.

Think about it this way. Every player has some T4CC and the servers must track that. If you sell all of them, the server still must track that you have exactly zero of them. Whether the server has to remember that you have 100 or I have zero, the amount of server resources spent tracking that is exactly the same. But if T4CC crystals disappeared completely, the game would no longer have to track that at all, it could basically remove several million "zeroes" out of its databases, freeing space.

That obviously cannot happen with T4CC crystals, so it doesn't matter how many players keep. It matters for things like one-off time limited crystals, which is why Kabam periodically forces them open and deletes them from player accounts. Every crystal type that exists is data it must track, multiplied by all the accounts that exist. And even though there might be a million active players, there's over a hundred million accounts. Every single one of those accounts has hundreds of crystals being tracked for it, of which that player probably has zero of them. But the game still has to track that the account has some number of them, and that number happens to be zero.
I'm not even going to pretend I'm a coder... but I would assume having data on every account costs server space. Also, as I understand it, the reason Kabam servers are always full is because the game is run a very old engine... ie if they updated the engine and servers almost all issues (including bugs) would go away.
Almost 100% wrong, but don't feel bad: people are constantly guessing wildly based on google searches and undergraduate textbooks and getting just as wrong.

Server space isn't exactly the issue: the issue is the speed at which data can be manipulated, and that doesn't always scale linearly or predictably. And space issues are not due to "old engines." They may be due to deep architectural issues that were created at the beginning of time and cannot be easily changed, but that's not the same thing.

In fact, systems are being upgraded all the time. The "parry timing" bugs that were introduced late last year and still plague the game today are not due to running an old engine, in fact they were introduced as part of a mandatory upgrade of the core Unity components Upgrading them created a discrepancy in how the higher level meta mechanics of the game worked and how the underlying engine processed them, creating timing issues that required them to completely rebuild those systems.

This is not the first time something like this happened either. A Unity engine upgrade around the time of 12.0 created similar problems for the game that took months to resolve.

I suspect you're probably using the words "engine" and "server" without really fully understanding what either of them refer to. "Engine" is a bit ambiguous. The game is built on Unity, which is a game system framework. It is often referred to as the core game engine. However, the "game engine" as a whole is a constellation of software with Unity at its core and the game's fundamental mechanics and systems constructed around it as interlocking software modules. But even that doesn't fully represent the entire game "servers" as the back end of the game runs within Google's cloud: there are Google cloud components that work with the Unity components to fully implement the back end of the game. That's why sometimes when Google's services have an outage, the game is also down or malfunctioning.

All of this is the server side part of the game. The client side is completely separate. The part that runs on people's phones itself has a core "engine" that is also based on Unity but also has MCOC-specific additions and modifications. The game client is being modified and updated constantly, and it is primarily here where the "Parry Bug" resides.

Some of the performance issues people see are due to server side issues or constraints, and some are due to client side issues, and some are due to a combination of both. Unless you understand how the game works and test diligently, it isn't easy to know which one you're looking at.
can I ask your credentials? You made a few condescending points here that you were very wrong about (IE I know what a server vs engine is)... I've also had coders explain to me this game's biggest issues are server space and the old engine being used.

In fact, in one of Brian Grant's recent videos he talks about a kabam dev telling him this exact same thing.

So again.. where is your expertise to make assumptions about me personally?
Well said!!
they seem to have ghosted after asking that

Since you put it that way:

1. I am a veteran systems engineer. I build these things like this for a living.

2. I have experience with game systems specifically. I've studied how they work architecturally for over twenty years. I started with the MUDs back in the day. In modern commercial terms, mostly MMOs, but MCOC has more in common architecturally (at least in this context) with MMOs than side scrolling fighting games.

3. I have experience with working on game systems on a professional contract basis, so I'm familiar with things like how game systems are partitioned and worked upon in general. My work was on systems design for reward threshold calculations for custom assembled content.

4. Most of my knowledge of MCOC (architecture) in particular comes from three sources: one: examining how it works. That sometimes happens when system engineers get bored during long downtimes. Knowing that the game uses Google cloud components, for example, is something I figured out during the first Big Downtime Event years ago. Kabam later confirmed that when other Google-related downtimes occurred. Second, Kabam has revealed technical information, although you sometimes have to be knowledgeable to understand what they are saying. For example, back around 12.0 Kabam referenced "vendors" working with them to solve the Parry issues. In this context, there are only two significant "vendors" - service providers like Google (who could not be responsible for Parry timing issues) and the software vendor for their underlying engine, in this case Unity. They later confirmed that as well. And third, it comes from conversations with the developers directly. For example, in the case of the Parry timing issue I was part of the beta looking at that problem, and in the case of the memory leak issue I was conducting my own investigation (along with a few other players) and communicating those results directly to the developers.

It is specifically my direct knowledge of how MCOC works, captured by directly conversing with the developers of the game, combined with the public statements they've made about how the game works, that informs my opinion of the nature of many of the technical problems with the game. My knowledge of what a knowledgeable person would know (I'm not the only person around here that knows these things, for example) combined with what I know is actually true about the game informs the basis for when I judge that someone is actually knowledgeable or just randomly guessing. So I stand by my assertion that you're just randomly guessing. Either you misunderstood your "coder friends" or they set you up with equally random guessing.

For example you don't have to take my word for it when I describe the source of the Parry timing bug, Kabam spelled this out themselves here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/281785/input-system-update-sept-2021-engine-upgrades-robots-and-more. They also explain how it was an update to Unity that created the Parry timing issue on iOS, and not the fact that the software was old. The input system built upon it was old, but it was old because it was designed to work with the way Unity originally worked, and there was no awareness of a need to change it until Unity's timing behavior changed. Any reasonably knowledgeable systems engineer would understand their explanation and find it credible. You could also search Unity forms to see if other developers were running into similar related issues with iOS timing on Unity at the same time (I did).

I don't recall Brian making the assertion you mention, but I don't watch all of his videos either. If you link to this statement, I'll go watch it and then ask him about it directly.

unknown

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DNA3000

cluttering the servers
Crystals do not clutter servers. Crystal *types* clutter servers. If you can get every single player to sell *all* of their T4CC crystals and promise to *never* earn one ever again, you could delete the T4CC crystal definition and free resource space. But if even one single person holds a T4CC at any moment in time, the exact same amount of resources are spent as would be spent if everyone had a million of them.

Think about it this way. Every player has some T4CC and the servers must track that. If you sell all of them, the server still must track that you have exactly zero of them. Whether the server has to remember that you have 100 or I have zero, the amount of server resources spent tracking that is exactly the same. But if T4CC crystals disappeared completely, the game would no longer have to track that at all, it could basically remove several million "zeroes" out of its databases, freeing space.

That obviously cannot happen with T4CC crystals, so it doesn't matter how many players keep. It matters for things like one-off time limited crystals, which is why Kabam periodically forces them open and deletes them from player accounts. Every crystal type that exists is data it must track, multiplied by all the accounts that exist. And even though there might be a million active players, there's over a hundred million accounts. Every single one of those accounts has hundreds of crystals being tracked for it, of which that player probably has zero of them. But the game still has to track that the account has some number of them, and that number happens to be zero.
I'm not even going to pretend I'm a coder... but I would assume having data on every account costs server space. Also, as I understand it, the reason Kabam servers are always full is because the game is run a very old engine... ie if they updated the engine and servers almost all issues (including bugs) would go away.
Almost 100% wrong, but don't feel bad: people are constantly guessing wildly based on google searches and undergraduate textbooks and getting just as wrong.

Server space isn't exactly the issue: the issue is the speed at which data can be manipulated, and that doesn't always scale linearly or predictably. And space issues are not due to "old engines." They may be due to deep architectural issues that were created at the beginning of time and cannot be easily changed, but that's not the same thing.

In fact, systems are being upgraded all the time. The "parry timing" bugs that were introduced late last year and still plague the game today are not due to running an old engine, in fact they were introduced as part of a mandatory upgrade of the core Unity components Upgrading them created a discrepancy in how the higher level meta mechanics of the game worked and how the underlying engine processed them, creating timing issues that required them to completely rebuild those systems.

This is not the first time something like this happened either. A Unity engine upgrade around the time of 12.0 created similar problems for the game that took months to resolve.

I suspect you're probably using the words "engine" and "server" without really fully understanding what either of them refer to. "Engine" is a bit ambiguous. The game is built on Unity, which is a game system framework. It is often referred to as the core game engine. However, the "game engine" as a whole is a constellation of software with Unity at its core and the game's fundamental mechanics and systems constructed around it as interlocking software modules. But even that doesn't fully represent the entire game "servers" as the back end of the game runs within Google's cloud: there are Google cloud components that work with the Unity components to fully implement the back end of the game. That's why sometimes when Google's services have an outage, the game is also down or malfunctioning.

All of this is the server side part of the game. The client side is completely separate. The part that runs on people's phones itself has a core "engine" that is also based on Unity but also has MCOC-specific additions and modifications. The game client is being modified and updated constantly, and it is primarily here where the "Parry Bug" resides.

Some of the performance issues people see are due to server side issues or constraints, and some are due to client side issues, and some are due to a combination of both. Unless you understand how the game works and test diligently, it isn't easy to know which one you're looking at.
can I ask your credentials? You made a few condescending points here that you were very wrong about (IE I know what a server vs engine is)... I've also had coders explain to me this game's biggest issues are server space and the old engine being used.

In fact, in one of Brian Grant's recent videos he talks about a kabam dev telling him this exact same thing.

So again.. where is your expertise to make assumptions about me personally?
Well said!!
they seem to have ghosted after asking that
Since you put it that way:

1. I am a veteran systems engineer. I build these things like this for a living.

2. I have experience with game systems specifically. I've studied how they work architecturally for over twenty years. I started with the MUDs back in the day. In modern commercial terms, mostly MMOs, but MCOC has more in common architecturally (at least in this context) with MMOs than side scrolling fighting games.

3. I have experience with working on game systems on a professional contract basis, so I'm familiar with things like how game systems are partitioned and worked upon in general. My work was on systems design for reward threshold calculations for custom assembled content.

4. Most of my knowledge of MCOC (architecture) in particular comes from three sources: one: examining how it works. That sometimes happens when system engineers get bored during long downtimes. Knowing that the game uses Google cloud components, for example, is something I figured out during the first Big Downtime Event years ago. Kabam later confirmed that when other Google-related downtimes occurred. Second, Kabam has revealed technical information, although you sometimes have to be knowledgeable to understand what they are saying. For example, back around 12.0 Kabam referenced "vendors" working with them to solve the Parry issues. In this context, there are only two significant "vendors" - service providers like Google (who could not be responsible for Parry timing issues) and the software vendor for their underlying engine, in this case Unity. They later confirmed that as well. And third, it comes from conversations with the developers directly. For example, in the case of the Parry timing issue I was part of the beta looking at that problem, and in the case of the memory leak issue I was conducting my own investigation (along with a few other players) and communicating those results directly to the developers.

It is specifically my direct knowledge of how MCOC works, captured by directly conversing with the developers of the game, combined with the public statements they've made about how the game works, that informs my opinion of the nature of many of the technical problems with the game. My knowledge of what a knowledgeable person would know (I'm not the only person around here that knows these things, for example) combined with what I know is actually true about the game informs the basis for when I judge that someone is actually knowledgeable or just randomly guessing. So I stand by my assertion that you're just randomly guessing. Either you misunderstood your "coder friends" or they set you up with equally random guessing.

For example you don't have to take my word for it when I describe the source of the Parry timing bug, Kabam spelled this out themselves here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/281785/input-system-update-sept-2021-engine-upgrades-robots-and-more. They also explain how it was an update to Unity that created the Parry timing issue on iOS, and not the fact that the software was old. The input system built upon it was old, but it was old because it was designed to work with the way Unity originally worked, and there was no awareness of a need to change it until Unity's timing behavior changed. Any reasonably knowledgeable systems engineer would understand their explanation and find it credible. You could also search Unity forms to see if other developers were running into similar related issues with iOS timing on Unity at the same time (I did).

I don't recall Brian making the assertion you mention, but I don't watch all of his videos either. If you link to this statement, I'll go watch it and then ask him about it directly.
So to sum it up.. you don't have experience with a mobile fighting game or its engine.. you have experience with MMO's that run completely differently, but also believe that gives you expertise here? That even though people with direct coding knowledge of a game like this gave me information.. even though people that work on the game itself have told people (hear say) that the issues of the game are exactly what I (an admitted lay person on the issue) spelled out.... you still feel you know better than that and had to passive aggressively insult me multiple times to boot?

Are you kidding? I talk to the developers of the game directly and have helped diagnose issues. For that matter I talk to Brian directly and I know his knowledge of the technical details of the game is mostly superficial. And you’re telling me your uninformed interpretation of something Brian said off handedly about something a developer probably said off handedly puts you in a strong position to debate the technical details of the game’s implementation with anyone?

This time, I am in fact ghosting you.

unknown

This content has been removed.

Shadowstrike

cluttering the servers
Crystals do not clutter servers. Crystal *types* clutter servers. If you can get every single player to sell *all* of their T4CC crystals and promise to *never* earn one ever again, you could delete the T4CC crystal definition and free resource space. But if even one single person holds a T4CC at any moment in time, the exact same amount of resources are spent as would be spent if everyone had a million of them.

Think about it this way. Every player has some T4CC and the servers must track that. If you sell all of them, the server still must track that you have exactly zero of them. Whether the server has to remember that you have 100 or I have zero, the amount of server resources spent tracking that is exactly the same. But if T4CC crystals disappeared completely, the game would no longer have to track that at all, it could basically remove several million "zeroes" out of its databases, freeing space.

That obviously cannot happen with T4CC crystals, so it doesn't matter how many players keep. It matters for things like one-off time limited crystals, which is why Kabam periodically forces them open and deletes them from player accounts. Every crystal type that exists is data it must track, multiplied by all the accounts that exist. And even though there might be a million active players, there's over a hundred million accounts. Every single one of those accounts has hundreds of crystals being tracked for it, of which that player probably has zero of them. But the game still has to track that the account has some number of them, and that number happens to be zero.
I'm not even going to pretend I'm a coder... but I would assume having data on every account costs server space. Also, as I understand it, the reason Kabam servers are always full is because the game is run a very old engine... ie if they updated the engine and servers almost all issues (including bugs) would go away.
Almost 100% wrong, but don't feel bad: people are constantly guessing wildly based on google searches and undergraduate textbooks and getting just as wrong.

Server space isn't exactly the issue: the issue is the speed at which data can be manipulated, and that doesn't always scale linearly or predictably. And space issues are not due to "old engines." They may be due to deep architectural issues that were created at the beginning of time and cannot be easily changed, but that's not the same thing.

In fact, systems are being upgraded all the time. The "parry timing" bugs that were introduced late last year and still plague the game today are not due to running an old engine, in fact they were introduced as part of a mandatory upgrade of the core Unity components Upgrading them created a discrepancy in how the higher level meta mechanics of the game worked and how the underlying engine processed them, creating timing issues that required them to completely rebuild those systems.

This is not the first time something like this happened either. A Unity engine upgrade around the time of 12.0 created similar problems for the game that took months to resolve.

I suspect you're probably using the words "engine" and "server" without really fully understanding what either of them refer to. "Engine" is a bit ambiguous. The game is built on Unity, which is a game system framework. It is often referred to as the core game engine. However, the "game engine" as a whole is a constellation of software with Unity at its core and the game's fundamental mechanics and systems constructed around it as interlocking software modules. But even that doesn't fully represent the entire game "servers" as the back end of the game runs within Google's cloud: there are Google cloud components that work with the Unity components to fully implement the back end of the game. That's why sometimes when Google's services have an outage, the game is also down or malfunctioning.

All of this is the server side part of the game. The client side is completely separate. The part that runs on people's phones itself has a core "engine" that is also based on Unity but also has MCOC-specific additions and modifications. The game client is being modified and updated constantly, and it is primarily here where the "Parry Bug" resides.

Some of the performance issues people see are due to server side issues or constraints, and some are due to client side issues, and some are due to a combination of both. Unless you understand how the game works and test diligently, it isn't easy to know which one you're looking at.
can I ask your credentials? You made a few condescending points here that you were very wrong about (IE I know what a server vs engine is)... I've also had coders explain to me this game's biggest issues are server space and the old engine being used.

In fact, in one of Brian Grant's recent videos he talks about a kabam dev telling him this exact same thing.

So again.. where is your expertise to make assumptions about me personally?
Well said!!
they seem to have ghosted after asking that
Since you put it that way:

1. I am a veteran systems engineer. I build these things like this for a living.

2. I have experience with game systems specifically. I've studied how they work architecturally for over twenty years. I started with the MUDs back in the day. In modern commercial terms, mostly MMOs, but MCOC has more in common architecturally (at least in this context) with MMOs than side scrolling fighting games.

3. I have experience with working on game systems on a professional contract basis, so I'm familiar with things like how game systems are partitioned and worked upon in general. My work was on systems design for reward threshold calculations for custom assembled content.

4. Most of my knowledge of MCOC (architecture) in particular comes from three sources: one: examining how it works. That sometimes happens when system engineers get bored during long downtimes. Knowing that the game uses Google cloud components, for example, is something I figured out during the first Big Downtime Event years ago. Kabam later confirmed that when other Google-related downtimes occurred. Second, Kabam has revealed technical information, although you sometimes have to be knowledgeable to understand what they are saying. For example, back around 12.0 Kabam referenced "vendors" working with them to solve the Parry issues. In this context, there are only two significant "vendors" - service providers like Google (who could not be responsible for Parry timing issues) and the software vendor for their underlying engine, in this case Unity. They later confirmed that as well. And third, it comes from conversations with the developers directly. For example, in the case of the Parry timing issue I was part of the beta looking at that problem, and in the case of the memory leak issue I was conducting my own investigation (along with a few other players) and communicating those results directly to the developers.

It is specifically my direct knowledge of how MCOC works, captured by directly conversing with the developers of the game, combined with the public statements they've made about how the game works, that informs my opinion of the nature of many of the technical problems with the game. My knowledge of what a knowledgeable person would know (I'm not the only person around here that knows these things, for example) combined with what I know is actually true about the game informs the basis for when I judge that someone is actually knowledgeable or just randomly guessing. So I stand by my assertion that you're just randomly guessing. Either you misunderstood your "coder friends" or they set you up with equally random guessing.

For example you don't have to take my word for it when I describe the source of the Parry timing bug, Kabam spelled this out themselves here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/281785/input-system-update-sept-2021-engine-upgrades-robots-and-more. They also explain how it was an update to Unity that created the Parry timing issue on iOS, and not the fact that the software was old. The input system built upon it was old, but it was old because it was designed to work with the way Unity originally worked, and there was no awareness of a need to change it until Unity's timing behavior changed. Any reasonably knowledgeable systems engineer would understand their explanation and find it credible. You could also search Unity forms to see if other developers were running into similar related issues with iOS timing on Unity at the same time (I did).

I don't recall Brian making the assertion you mention, but I don't watch all of his videos either. If you link to this statement, I'll go watch it and then ask him about it directly.
So to sum it up.. you don't have experience with a mobile fighting game or its engine.. you have experience with MMO's that run completely differently, but also believe that gives you expertise here? That even though people with direct coding knowledge of a game like this gave me information.. even though people that work on the game itself have told people (hear say) that the issues of the game are exactly what I (an admitted lay person on the issue) spelled out.... you still feel you know better than that and had to passive aggressively insult me multiple times to boot?

Pretty sure if he's getting kudos from Kabam Miike and other members of the Dev team for correctly explaining issues in greater detail on past threads, it means he does know what he's talking about.

This is why DNAs statements are usually held in some regard.

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BitterSteel

cluttering the servers
Crystals do not clutter servers. Crystal *types* clutter servers. If you can get every single player to sell *all* of their T4CC crystals and promise to *never* earn one ever again, you could delete the T4CC crystal definition and free resource space. But if even one single person holds a T4CC at any moment in time, the exact same amount of resources are spent as would be spent if everyone had a million of them.

Think about it this way. Every player has some T4CC and the servers must track that. If you sell all of them, the server still must track that you have exactly zero of them. Whether the server has to remember that you have 100 or I have zero, the amount of server resources spent tracking that is exactly the same. But if T4CC crystals disappeared completely, the game would no longer have to track that at all, it could basically remove several million "zeroes" out of its databases, freeing space.

That obviously cannot happen with T4CC crystals, so it doesn't matter how many players keep. It matters for things like one-off time limited crystals, which is why Kabam periodically forces them open and deletes them from player accounts. Every crystal type that exists is data it must track, multiplied by all the accounts that exist. And even though there might be a million active players, there's over a hundred million accounts. Every single one of those accounts has hundreds of crystals being tracked for it, of which that player probably has zero of them. But the game still has to track that the account has some number of them, and that number happens to be zero.
I'm not even going to pretend I'm a coder... but I would assume having data on every account costs server space. Also, as I understand it, the reason Kabam servers are always full is because the game is run a very old engine... ie if they updated the engine and servers almost all issues (including bugs) would go away.
Almost 100% wrong, but don't feel bad: people are constantly guessing wildly based on google searches and undergraduate textbooks and getting just as wrong.

Server space isn't exactly the issue: the issue is the speed at which data can be manipulated, and that doesn't always scale linearly or predictably. And space issues are not due to "old engines." They may be due to deep architectural issues that were created at the beginning of time and cannot be easily changed, but that's not the same thing.

In fact, systems are being upgraded all the time. The "parry timing" bugs that were introduced late last year and still plague the game today are not due to running an old engine, in fact they were introduced as part of a mandatory upgrade of the core Unity components Upgrading them created a discrepancy in how the higher level meta mechanics of the game worked and how the underlying engine processed them, creating timing issues that required them to completely rebuild those systems.

This is not the first time something like this happened either. A Unity engine upgrade around the time of 12.0 created similar problems for the game that took months to resolve.

I suspect you're probably using the words "engine" and "server" without really fully understanding what either of them refer to. "Engine" is a bit ambiguous. The game is built on Unity, which is a game system framework. It is often referred to as the core game engine. However, the "game engine" as a whole is a constellation of software with Unity at its core and the game's fundamental mechanics and systems constructed around it as interlocking software modules. But even that doesn't fully represent the entire game "servers" as the back end of the game runs within Google's cloud: there are Google cloud components that work with the Unity components to fully implement the back end of the game. That's why sometimes when Google's services have an outage, the game is also down or malfunctioning.

All of this is the server side part of the game. The client side is completely separate. The part that runs on people's phones itself has a core "engine" that is also based on Unity but also has MCOC-specific additions and modifications. The game client is being modified and updated constantly, and it is primarily here where the "Parry Bug" resides.

Some of the performance issues people see are due to server side issues or constraints, and some are due to client side issues, and some are due to a combination of both. Unless you understand how the game works and test diligently, it isn't easy to know which one you're looking at.
can I ask your credentials? You made a few condescending points here that you were very wrong about (IE I know what a server vs engine is)... I've also had coders explain to me this game's biggest issues are server space and the old engine being used.

In fact, in one of Brian Grant's recent videos he talks about a kabam dev telling him this exact same thing.

So again.. where is your expertise to make assumptions about me personally?
Well said!!
they seem to have ghosted after asking that
Since you put it that way:

1. I am a veteran systems engineer. I build these things like this for a living.

2. I have experience with game systems specifically. I've studied how they work architecturally for over twenty years. I started with the MUDs back in the day. In modern commercial terms, mostly MMOs, but MCOC has more in common architecturally (at least in this context) with MMOs than side scrolling fighting games.

3. I have experience with working on game systems on a professional contract basis, so I'm familiar with things like how game systems are partitioned and worked upon in general. My work was on systems design for reward threshold calculations for custom assembled content.

4. Most of my knowledge of MCOC (architecture) in particular comes from three sources: one: examining how it works. That sometimes happens when system engineers get bored during long downtimes. Knowing that the game uses Google cloud components, for example, is something I figured out during the first Big Downtime Event years ago. Kabam later confirmed that when other Google-related downtimes occurred. Second, Kabam has revealed technical information, although you sometimes have to be knowledgeable to understand what they are saying. For example, back around 12.0 Kabam referenced "vendors" working with them to solve the Parry issues. In this context, there are only two significant "vendors" - service providers like Google (who could not be responsible for Parry timing issues) and the software vendor for their underlying engine, in this case Unity. They later confirmed that as well. And third, it comes from conversations with the developers directly. For example, in the case of the Parry timing issue I was part of the beta looking at that problem, and in the case of the memory leak issue I was conducting my own investigation (along with a few other players) and communicating those results directly to the developers.

It is specifically my direct knowledge of how MCOC works, captured by directly conversing with the developers of the game, combined with the public statements they've made about how the game works, that informs my opinion of the nature of many of the technical problems with the game. My knowledge of what a knowledgeable person would know (I'm not the only person around here that knows these things, for example) combined with what I know is actually true about the game informs the basis for when I judge that someone is actually knowledgeable or just randomly guessing. So I stand by my assertion that you're just randomly guessing. Either you misunderstood your "coder friends" or they set you up with equally random guessing.

For example you don't have to take my word for it when I describe the source of the Parry timing bug, Kabam spelled this out themselves here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/281785/input-system-update-sept-2021-engine-upgrades-robots-and-more. They also explain how it was an update to Unity that created the Parry timing issue on iOS, and not the fact that the software was old. The input system built upon it was old, but it was old because it was designed to work with the way Unity originally worked, and there was no awareness of a need to change it until Unity's timing behavior changed. Any reasonably knowledgeable systems engineer would understand their explanation and find it credible. You could also search Unity forms to see if other developers were running into similar related issues with iOS timing on Unity at the same time (I did).

I don't recall Brian making the assertion you mention, but I don't watch all of his videos either. If you link to this statement, I'll go watch it and then ask him about it directly.
So to sum it up.. you don't have experience with a mobile fighting game or its engine.. you have experience with MMO's that run completely differently, but also believe that gives you expertise here? That even though people with direct coding knowledge of a game like this gave me information.. even though people that work on the game itself have told people (hear say) that the issues of the game are exactly what I (an admitted lay person on the issue) spelled out.... you still feel you know better than that and had to passive aggressively insult me multiple times to boot?
Pretty sure if he's getting kudos from Kabam Miike and other members of the Dev team for correctly explaining issues in greater detail on past threads, it means he does know what he's talking about.

This is why DNAs statements are usually held in some regard.
I have a pet peeve about people talking down to others... agree to disagree.

I have a pet peeve about people ignoring information from experts who clearly know what they’re talking about tbh

You can be annoyed about someone talking down to you without refusing to take on expert insight for personal reasons.

unknown

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Wicket329

cluttering the servers
Crystals do not clutter servers. Crystal *types* clutter servers. If you can get every single player to sell *all* of their T4CC crystals and promise to *never* earn one ever again, you could delete the T4CC crystal definition and free resource space. But if even one single person holds a T4CC at any moment in time, the exact same amount of resources are spent as would be spent if everyone had a million of them.

Think about it this way. Every player has some T4CC and the servers must track that. If you sell all of them, the server still must track that you have exactly zero of them. Whether the server has to remember that you have 100 or I have zero, the amount of server resources spent tracking that is exactly the same. But if T4CC crystals disappeared completely, the game would no longer have to track that at all, it could basically remove several million "zeroes" out of its databases, freeing space.

That obviously cannot happen with T4CC crystals, so it doesn't matter how many players keep. It matters for things like one-off time limited crystals, which is why Kabam periodically forces them open and deletes them from player accounts. Every crystal type that exists is data it must track, multiplied by all the accounts that exist. And even though there might be a million active players, there's over a hundred million accounts. Every single one of those accounts has hundreds of crystals being tracked for it, of which that player probably has zero of them. But the game still has to track that the account has some number of them, and that number happens to be zero.
I'm not even going to pretend I'm a coder... but I would assume having data on every account costs server space. Also, as I understand it, the reason Kabam servers are always full is because the game is run a very old engine... ie if they updated the engine and servers almost all issues (including bugs) would go away.
Almost 100% wrong, but don't feel bad: people are constantly guessing wildly based on google searches and undergraduate textbooks and getting just as wrong.

Server space isn't exactly the issue: the issue is the speed at which data can be manipulated, and that doesn't always scale linearly or predictably. And space issues are not due to "old engines." They may be due to deep architectural issues that were created at the beginning of time and cannot be easily changed, but that's not the same thing.

In fact, systems are being upgraded all the time. The "parry timing" bugs that were introduced late last year and still plague the game today are not due to running an old engine, in fact they were introduced as part of a mandatory upgrade of the core Unity components Upgrading them created a discrepancy in how the higher level meta mechanics of the game worked and how the underlying engine processed them, creating timing issues that required them to completely rebuild those systems.

This is not the first time something like this happened either. A Unity engine upgrade around the time of 12.0 created similar problems for the game that took months to resolve.

I suspect you're probably using the words "engine" and "server" without really fully understanding what either of them refer to. "Engine" is a bit ambiguous. The game is built on Unity, which is a game system framework. It is often referred to as the core game engine. However, the "game engine" as a whole is a constellation of software with Unity at its core and the game's fundamental mechanics and systems constructed around it as interlocking software modules. But even that doesn't fully represent the entire game "servers" as the back end of the game runs within Google's cloud: there are Google cloud components that work with the Unity components to fully implement the back end of the game. That's why sometimes when Google's services have an outage, the game is also down or malfunctioning.

All of this is the server side part of the game. The client side is completely separate. The part that runs on people's phones itself has a core "engine" that is also based on Unity but also has MCOC-specific additions and modifications. The game client is being modified and updated constantly, and it is primarily here where the "Parry Bug" resides.

Some of the performance issues people see are due to server side issues or constraints, and some are due to client side issues, and some are due to a combination of both. Unless you understand how the game works and test diligently, it isn't easy to know which one you're looking at.
can I ask your credentials? You made a few condescending points here that you were very wrong about (IE I know what a server vs engine is)... I've also had coders explain to me this game's biggest issues are server space and the old engine being used.

In fact, in one of Brian Grant's recent videos he talks about a kabam dev telling him this exact same thing.

So again.. where is your expertise to make assumptions about me personally?
Well said!!
they seem to have ghosted after asking that
Since you put it that way:

1. I am a veteran systems engineer. I build these things like this for a living.

2. I have experience with game systems specifically. I've studied how they work architecturally for over twenty years. I started with the MUDs back in the day. In modern commercial terms, mostly MMOs, but MCOC has more in common architecturally (at least in this context) with MMOs than side scrolling fighting games.

3. I have experience with working on game systems on a professional contract basis, so I'm familiar with things like how game systems are partitioned and worked upon in general. My work was on systems design for reward threshold calculations for custom assembled content.

4. Most of my knowledge of MCOC (architecture) in particular comes from three sources: one: examining how it works. That sometimes happens when system engineers get bored during long downtimes. Knowing that the game uses Google cloud components, for example, is something I figured out during the first Big Downtime Event years ago. Kabam later confirmed that when other Google-related downtimes occurred. Second, Kabam has revealed technical information, although you sometimes have to be knowledgeable to understand what they are saying. For example, back around 12.0 Kabam referenced "vendors" working with them to solve the Parry issues. In this context, there are only two significant "vendors" - service providers like Google (who could not be responsible for Parry timing issues) and the software vendor for their underlying engine, in this case Unity. They later confirmed that as well. And third, it comes from conversations with the developers directly. For example, in the case of the Parry timing issue I was part of the beta looking at that problem, and in the case of the memory leak issue I was conducting my own investigation (along with a few other players) and communicating those results directly to the developers.

It is specifically my direct knowledge of how MCOC works, captured by directly conversing with the developers of the game, combined with the public statements they've made about how the game works, that informs my opinion of the nature of many of the technical problems with the game. My knowledge of what a knowledgeable person would know (I'm not the only person around here that knows these things, for example) combined with what I know is actually true about the game informs the basis for when I judge that someone is actually knowledgeable or just randomly guessing. So I stand by my assertion that you're just randomly guessing. Either you misunderstood your "coder friends" or they set you up with equally random guessing.

For example you don't have to take my word for it when I describe the source of the Parry timing bug, Kabam spelled this out themselves here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/281785/input-system-update-sept-2021-engine-upgrades-robots-and-more. They also explain how it was an update to Unity that created the Parry timing issue on iOS, and not the fact that the software was old. The input system built upon it was old, but it was old because it was designed to work with the way Unity originally worked, and there was no awareness of a need to change it until Unity's timing behavior changed. Any reasonably knowledgeable systems engineer would understand their explanation and find it credible. You could also search Unity forms to see if other developers were running into similar related issues with iOS timing on Unity at the same time (I did).

I don't recall Brian making the assertion you mention, but I don't watch all of his videos either. If you link to this statement, I'll go watch it and then ask him about it directly.
So to sum it up.. you don't have experience with a mobile fighting game or its engine.. you have experience with MMO's that run completely differently, but also believe that gives you expertise here? That even though people with direct coding knowledge of a game like this gave me information.. even though people that work on the game itself have told people (hear say) that the issues of the game are exactly what I (an admitted lay person on the issue) spelled out.... you still feel you know better than that and had to passive aggressively insult me multiple times to boot?
Pretty sure if he's getting kudos from Kabam Miike and other members of the Dev team for correctly explaining issues in greater detail on past threads, it means he does know what he's talking about.

This is why DNAs statements are usually held in some regard.
I have a pet peeve about people talking down to others... agree to disagree.

A person being (what you perceive to be) rude and a person being wrong are two very different things. Personally, I didn’t see anything in there that seemed condescending. It is extremely easy to veer into down-talk when breaking down intricate concepts to laypeople (an obstacle I also have to navigate in the professional world), and I felt like this was a well-handled explainer.

DNA has been around these parts a very long time and I’ve never seen him just pull claims out of thin air. Whether you like him as a person or not, that doesn’t impact his credentials. I frequently didn’t like professors but that didn’t change that they knew better than my google searches or what my friends told me because they had applied, practical experience.

I don’t know a thing about programming. Like, not even a rudimentary understanding. But I’ve been around here long enough to know that DNA is a reliable source. Not infallible, nobody is. But if he’s saying something, I’m listening. Even when I don’t agree, there’s always relevant information included.

Also, last thing: not responding to a forum post from a stranger on the holidays isn’t ghosting. Y’all aren’t dating. Chill.