Does hoarding many crystals affects the frame rate and drops issues ??

Just curious to know 🤔 i have been noticing some weird things . When i logout and login once again with Kabam ID , the scrolling is very smooth , gameplay is perfect .

Also I currently have close to 14k unopened crystals and i opened close to 1000 crystals of different varieties today and noticed a good change in the speed of the game . But then when i closed the game and opened it again , it was back to normal with laggy frame rates and not so smooth scrolling .

Anybody else noticing something similar ?

Comments

Dash855

I’m no tech expert, but I’m pretty sure that having so much crystal data on your account at once would probably cause some performance issues

Kabam Miike

I'm not an engineer, but from what I understand from my conversations with them is that it should not affect gameplay. Crystal data is not stored on your device so it should not affect the actual performance when playing the game. This sounds like a device-specific issue, and I would appreciate it if you reported this info to our support team to catalogue for us to investigate!

Noobda

I thought I was the only one. I have 2 accounts and when I switch b/w them or logout and login again , game gets so smooth.

Ironside47

I’m a terrible hoarder through laziness as much as anything else (please add an open all button ☺️). I’m glad it doesn’t affect gameplay.

DNA3000

I'm pretty sure the only crystal data actually in your game client when you are playing the game is the small set of numbers that tell your game client how many of each crystal you have (because it has to display that information to the player in crystal inventories). If you have 1 of a crystal, or 100, or 100 thousand of that crystal, the game client holds the same amount of data: one integer (per crystal).

mostlyharmlessn

The only places the number of crystals you have should impact your client side game is:

1) When you login and it pulls your inventory counts from the server.
2) When you go to open the crystals.

This does however impact the Server Side of the system which over a long term could result in slower load times for everyone depending on how the backend service is designed.

DNA3000

The number of crystals you have doesn't impact the servers much either, because the servers are tracking the same one number per crystal for every account.

*Opening* crystals can have a significant impact on the servers if lots of players to it simultaneously, because every crystal opened is a few random numbers generated plus a bunch of database and/or storage operations, all of which are, computationally speaking, expensive operations to perform. That's why popping ten crystals tends to cause pauses or slowdowns, and why applying fifty sig stones takes so long. There's no "add 50" operation for sig levels: the game is adding one sig stone at a time, deducting it from your inventory, then adding another sig stone, deducting it from your inventory, and so on, and these operations take enough time that we can literally see the time it takes to do them, and sometimes the game is too busy to do them quickly.

But just holding crystals has negligible impact on the game.

mostlyharmlessn

*IF* they are designed on the backend that way.

Liss_Bliss_

So that’s why it takes forever. Might do them in smaller batches now when item use is running.

DNA3000

To be frank, that's an anemic "if" in this context. There's no other credible alternative for how they would be implemented given the way they function that would affect client performance.

mostlyharmlessn

Except that they regularly auto open crystals saying it's to keep the servers performance healthy which means that hoarding crystals does in fact have a negative impact on the server side.

mgj0630

They auto-open very old crystals that are no longer offered.

The number of variations of crystals does impact servers. The number of those crystals that individuals have does not.

In other words, if I'm the only person in the game holding onto a [GiveItAName] crystal, that was only issued one time, and I haven't opened it, then that one crystal is bogging down the server.

On the other hand though, if I'm holding 486 premium hero crystals, that's no different than holding 1, as far as the servers are concerned, because the premium hero crystal is an ongoing part of the game that hasn't been retired.

DNA3000

Yes, this is correct, and Kabam also explained this explicitly here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/1988037/#Comment_1988037

mgj0630

Thanks @DNA3000 that's the link I wanted to find, but didn't have the patience.

mostlyharmlessn

Ok then I stand corrected to a point... but hoarding old crystals does in fact impact the servers

unknown

This content has been removed.

DNA3000

To amplify, Kabam doesn't just auto-open crystals, they specifically auto-open crystals they can subsequently delete. Kabam doesn't auto open crystals that are still going to be around, the game auto opens deprecated crystals that are no longer being awarded. The reason is because auto-opening crystals that still are awarded and thus still have to be around helps nothing: the servers do not care if you have 1000 crystals or 1, but also it doesn't care if you have 1 or zero: zero is still a number it must keep track of. The only reason why auto-opening crystals helps the game is because *after* they auto-open those crystals they delete the crystal itself from the game. That causes the game to no longer have to track it across every game account, which can add up fast.

** Technically speaking, there are two independent implementation possibilities, both of which ultimately lead to the same conclusion. One is that every crystal that exists forces every account to have to store the crystal quantities in fixed data blocks, so the number of crystals increases the size of those data blocks and this ultimately slows down performance. The other possibility is that crystal ownership is stored separately and only if the account holder actually owns it, which means the actual data size doesn't grow with the number of crystals if the account holder doesn't actually own it, but the computational effort required to dynamically query the data as to how many of each crystal every account holder has increase faster than linear (probably nlogn) because the number of crystals you have to resolve increases, and the amount of data you have to sift through also increases (slower).

DNA3000

It isn't the hoarding behavior that does anything, it is the fact that more and more crystals exist that is the problem.

Saying hoarding old crystals impacts the servers (enough to causes issues) implies if you are hoarding old crystals, opening them would help the servers. It won't, unless you happen to be the last person on Earth that owns them. But the crystal might not even be actively hoarded: if a single player got one two years ago and quit the game, that one crystal trapped in that one account that will never be played again prevents Kabam from deleting that crystal from the game, and it would continue to cause performance issues by its existence.

Even if you are the last person on Earth that owns that crystal, opening it *still* doesn't help the servers. It does help Kabam, because when they see ownership of that crystal go to zero they can delete it themselves and that helps. However, given the problem I just mentioned, where people come and go, many if not most crystals cannot be removed even if no player hoards them, because no active player is going to be "the last one." Whether players hoard crystals or not, Kabam would probably still have to force them open to delete them, because at least one would be trapped in an inactive account.

Inactive accounts probably make hoarding moot for that reason.