Would you want a HELP ALL button for refreshing arena champs?

Comments

#servercrash

Honestly, I'd prefer they remove the function from arena entirely. Shorten the refresh timers to what they are with help. Maybe keep quest energy help, but increase loyalty elsewhere and not tie it to the help button.

Meowthedestroyer21

Yeah

DNA3000

I think what most people want is a more responsive champion help feature. I don't think anyone wants a literal help all button, because pushing it would almost certainly screw up your gameplay given the current state of the game's backend.

Consider all of those "check network" messages you see in Youtube streamers' rank up videos. They often happen when they are using a lot of rank up resources to rank up a champion. Something about doing that is getting serialized and taking a long time, causing client delays. We can wish upon a star for that backend work to be faster, but until it is faster any client control that can flood the back end is a dangerous thing to give to the players.

What ever is going on, it appears to be worse than it was six months ago or a year ago. There's a number of technical possibilities, from Google architecture changes to back end server changes to meltdown patching, unpatching, and repatching. Whatever it is, it is clearly mucking up more than just champion help requests.

CallmelaFleur

DNA3000 wrote: »

I think what most people want is a more responsive champion help feature. I don't think anyone wants a literal help all button, because pushing it would almost certainly screw up your gameplay given the current state of the game's backend.

Consider all of those "check network" messages you see in Youtube streamers' rank up videos. They often happen when they are using a lot of rank up resources to rank up a champion. Something about doing that is getting serialized and taking a long time, causing client delays. We can wish upon a star for that backend work to be faster, but until it is faster any client control that can flood the back end is a dangerous thing to give to the players.

What ever is going on, it appears to be worse than it was six months ago or a year ago. There's a number of technical possibilities, from Google architecture changes to back end server changes to meltdown patching, unpatching, and repatching. Whatever it is, it is clearly mucking up more than just champion help requests.

Thanks for the good input here!! Was hoping for it to be a productive conversation even though I made some of the choices a bit snarky.

RichiesDad79

Fluffy wrote: »

#servercrash

Would not be a server crash as you d be sending only one packet of information instead of many back to back to back. This would actually relieve a ton of strain on the server.

Hammerbro_64

Fluffy wrote: »

#servercrash

We don’t want our servers to go kaboom. They are sketchy enough that we don’t need worse ones.

DNA3000

RichiesDad79 wrote: »

Fluffy wrote: »

#servercrash

Would not be a server crash as you d be sending only one packet of information instead of many back to back to back. This would actually relieve a ton of strain on the server.

The network is not the problem. The problem seems to be the processing of the requests. The suggestive evidence of this is the fact that we do have buttons that ask the server to do a lot of stuff at once: when we rank up champions we are asking the server to spend a lot of ISO simultaneously to increase out champion rank. A year ago and more this was an instantaneous operation virtually all of the time. Now, that button seems to actually cause a noticeable delay in the game.

There's also some strong evidence that the actual requests (and most game activity) gets sent to Google cloud systems for initial processing before being sent to the back end game servers (I traced the traffic a while back when we had the Really Big Slowdown). It seems more likely that the bottleneck is in the back end servers than the Google cloud app servers. So allowing the game client to send a lot of requests to the front end (with a big button that submitted all the requests in one single super-request) would most likely just flood the back end servers with work which are more likely to be outpaced by the front end servers than vice versa.

nIHSEAN

I just want to get rid of this help button.
No more pressing button, automatic cool down

Bahamut

Fluffy wrote: »

#servercrash

Unfortunately, he’s probably got a point

Snaggle

Was it necessary for the 36 options?

CallmelaFleur

Yes.
Yes it was.
Yes I was just having fun.

jojodeth101

LOL LOL LOL LOL I love this option (points to the poll choice above).

CallmelaFleur

Bump! Give me a few more opinions and insights. I want this to be something that Kabam takes a peek at and gives us a little insight from their POV.

MorbidCuriosity

Who remembers when you actually had to enter each champs' arena profile--and then press the "Ask for Help" button? When the current "help" button was implemented it was seen as a God-send. My my my... look at how spoiled these Millennial gamers are.

I kidd... A "Help All" button would be an amazing feature to implement.

Dexman1349

JohnnyVsTheContest wrote: »

Honestly, I'd prefer they remove the function from arena entirely. Shorten the refresh timers to what they are with help. Maybe keep quest energy help, but increase loyalty elsewhere and not tie it to the help button.

This. Just get rid of helps altogether.

Tie your energy refill and stamina refresh times to your position in an alliance. If you're in an ally, energy refreshes at 1 every 5min instead of 6, and stamina refresh is reduced by 10%. Tie loyalty to the login calendar or the daily crystal.

Then this whole Help system crash stuff can go to the same place the Bases went.

CallmelaFleur

MorbidCuriosity wrote: »

Who remembers when you actually had to enter each champs' arena profile--and then press the "Ask for Help" button? When the current "help" button was implemented it was seen as a God-send. My my my... look at how spoiled these Millennial gamers are.

I kidd... A "Help All" button would be an amazing feature to implement.

Been playing less than a year and I'm 36 years old. I am an OG atari 2600 gamer.

Batpotter1

Maybe they could make them automaticity ask for help

Gamer

No Becasse. Dont wont a sever crash

ShinyMew2

It’s honestly **** that it isn’t already a feature.

Dexman1349

Another option to fully eliminate the help system:

Arena stamina helps are simply eliminated and their refresh timers are reduced by __% if you're in an alliance. That suggestion is unchanged.

However,
For solo quest energy, earn one "+20" energy item every 8 hours when you run out of energy if you're in an alliance with a certain minimum amount of other players (to prevent solo players from creating 1-man alliances). It would expire after 8 hours.

So basically, you start with your base 70 energy (or however much you have based on in-game progression). Use it up moving around solo quests would earn one "+20" refill. You have 8 hours to "use it or lose it". Then, 8 hrs *after you earned your previous refill* you are eligible to earn your next one.

Tropical_Chris

DNA3000 wrote: »

RichiesDad79 wrote: »

Fluffy wrote: »

#servercrash

Would not be a server crash as you d be sending only one packet of information instead of many back to back to back. This would actually relieve a ton of strain on the server.

The network is not the problem. The problem seems to be the processing of the requests. The suggestive evidence of this is the fact that we do have buttons that ask the server to do a lot of stuff at once: when we rank up champions we are asking the server to spend a lot of ISO simultaneously to increase out champion rank. A year ago and more this was an instantaneous operation virtually all of the time. Now, that button seems to actually cause a noticeable delay in the game.

There's also some strong evidence that the actual requests (and most game activity) gets sent to Google cloud systems for initial processing before being sent to the back end game servers (I traced the traffic a while back when we had the Really Big Slowdown). It seems more likely that the bottleneck is in the back end servers than the Google cloud app servers. So allowing the game client to send a lot of requests to the front end (with a big button that submitted all the requests in one single super-request) would most likely just flood the back end servers with work which are more likely to be outpaced by the front end servers than vice versa.

That’s interesting. I’d just like to add something.

Technically, they can leave the server as is. Another possible solution is to make the Help request asynchronous. Currently, it’s synchronous - that is, once you press a single help button, the whole game freezes. You can verify this by observing the background and watch it freeze as you click on a Help button. And I dont think that’s by design. Generally speaking, you never block the UI for a background processing. That’s what loading indicators are for.

JasonMBryant

A help all button would not hurt the servers at all.

It's the exact same number of champs getting help. It's not going to create any more work for the servers, it's going to be the exact same number of help requests whether they're being sent in 48 individual requests or one packet that has a list of 48 champs.

It *should* be less work on the servers. Less packets means less headers and footers (less data), less file opens and closes (less processing), and doing things in a loop instead of starting 48 individual processes (much less processing).

Let's assume all of this is somehow wrong. They could *still* make a help all button. I would love a button that makes me sit there and wait as it sends the requests one at a time. It would take the exact same amount of time as me tapping the screen for two minutes, just without me having to tap the screen for two minutes. I'd take that option every time.