Stop punishing players for network disconnections

Your servers are getting more fragile as time goes on. Longer scheduled maintenance and more frequent emergency maintenance. You only need to jump on these forums to see how common place network disconnections are now more so than ever, yet you still continue to assume that it's the player's fault and punish us accordingly.

We all know that if you put your mind to it, you could come up with a more accurate way to differentiate between network disconnections and force quits.

Halls of Healing goes part way to mitigating your misdeeds, but frankly we shouldn't be forced to autofight a few dozen fights each day to make up for your faulty infrastructure and application design.

Comments

Stewman

There is no way to differentiate between network disconnections and force quits.
Unfortunately this was the answer to an exploit that existed ages ago.

Addyos

Well why don't you help Kabam come up with a way to differentiate between network disconnections and force quits, since you seem to think it's easy to do. Kabam and the wider playing community will be forever grateful to you.

Be mindful that with good intentions, Kabam once did do away with the health penalty reduction for a disconnected fight, but players abused that facility and kept force quitting without penalty to kill AQ and AW bosses. Because of the actions of an unscrupulous few, we all have to pay the consequences.

So again please do say how a network disconnection can be differentiated from a force quit, so that Kabam can remove the health reduction penalty when the game crashes and we can all continue our merry way.

sbb75

The half health penalty exploits the customers and not the game. The only place a forced closed gave people an advantage was in AW, those people get hit with losing an attack bonus.
Kabam should disable the health penalty until they figure out a way to identify the force quits or a system that automatically reimburse just the people affected. This should cover EVERYTHING lost from sn unplanned outage and periods of extreme game instability. Lost health, Pots, Boosts...

RedRooster

Addyos wrote: »

Well why don't you help Kabam come up with a way to differentiate between network disconnections and force quits, since you seem to think it's easy to do. Kabam and the wider playing community will be forever grateful to you.

I never said easy, you did. So it would be nice if you were a little less insincere.

I also don't make money off this game, so I don't see why it's incumbent upon me to make their customer base happy, when they should have a development team working towards that.

So here is a simple, albeit not perfect but better solution.
They are obviously frequently doing network checks during the fight, hence the spinner always appearing and possibly getting dumped out of a fight at any time.

When it detects a network disconnection it saves the state of the fight in a local cache (it could have 3 retries before dumping you out, saving the state each time), it would be nice for it to save buffs/debuffs, power etc, but health would be a good start.

The game can already recover a fight if it hasn't started and both champs on 100% in arena. I got dumped out of two fights consecutively losing 75% of my health, without even getting into the fight, so if the fight had recovered, we would have both been on 100%. A recovered fight can start with both champs rushing in on whatever health they had from the saved state. So, how is this better and less open to exploitation?

Obviously, if you're smashing the opponent in a fight and you lose connection, it will restore with champs on the last saved health, you won't have lost all the hard work you've already done and get penalised for no reason.
e.g. Me: 95% AI: 10% instead of Me: 50% AI: 100%

If you think you are doing poorly in a fight and you decide to force quit, the state of the fight hasn't been saved and therefore when you go to resume the fight, you are penalised as is currently the case.

It doesn't benefit people to turn off their network connection part way through a fight to try and "game" the recovery mechanism, because they can take a hit at any point and that will be the last saved state and they will resume on that health. In which case, I'm better off force quitting (already an exploit).

That's quick and dirty solution with 5 minutes effort. I hope Kabam would spend more time than that. Assuming it's a problem they would want to address.

RedRooster

Come on Kabam... first fight in AW.. I don't get touched by my opponent. So I go into the second fight, I don't touch my opponent and they don't get a touch on me either because I'm stuck in the loading screen for 10 MINUTES!

When I come back I've lost 50% health off a 5/65 sparky. Thanks... that's his attack bonus gone because you insist on punishing us for your bad servers.

Colonaut123

I'd rather have exploitation than the current health punishments. At least exploiters can be punished, if Kabam puts work to it. It is just demotivating to play AW, DC, return and notice your champion is only 50% health. That pretty much means game-over.

RedRooster

@Colonaut123 Agreed, I see the stability of their servers and their game as the cause of most of the disillusionment amongst the player base at the moment rather than feeling that you're being cheated by other players. Right now we are feeling cheated by Kabam.

And now that attacker bonus is counted, not only do you lose potential points from that fight, you lose the health and are at an increased risk of losing more points as you do other fights using a half health champ. That is unless you want to drop resources on pots to heal them back up.