Why penalize players in aq 50% health
Chitlins
Member Posts: 164 ★★
I am honestly getting so sick and tired of the times I get penalized 50% health in aq because fights will not load. I have full bars of wifi, and the no connection signal doesn't even flash.
What is the point of this mechanic. There has never been a time where I have lost the 50% health due to an error of my own. It seems totally pointless. You are penalizing players for your shoddy servers/coding. It makes no sense.
Can anyone explain this absolute junk mechanic? It makes me feel so stupid for buying the aq questing bundle yesterday.
What is the point of this mechanic. There has never been a time where I have lost the 50% health due to an error of my own. It seems totally pointless. You are penalizing players for your shoddy servers/coding. It makes no sense.
Can anyone explain this absolute junk mechanic? It makes me feel so stupid for buying the aq questing bundle yesterday.
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This game doesn't require a specific phone. If it can't run properly then it shouldn't be allowed. Androids have had trouble with this game for years, but it's not about the phones it's about poor game development. Just because it doesn't happen to you doesn't mean it's not happening to tons of players.
I wish the servers allowed some grace period for this, where if it doesn't see you actually actively enter the fight and it terminates you don't get the penalty, but the problem is the game servers don't actually know this: the game client doesn't send every single game input to the servers, so the servers don't actually know if you're playing the fight or sitting there waiting for the game client to restart. It just knows the fight started, ran for a while, and then ended for some reason. It doesn't know if you tried for the initial intercept and failed and decided to force close to reset the right, or got the wrong random combination of buffs on Venom and decided to restart to retry, or the game client just died at the start of the fight. It doesn't know, so it has to treat all fight crashes as an attempt to exploit the game client, unfortunately.
To me, the philosophy of much of their fail safes are punitive and based on the assumption that the player is at fault or trying to exploit the system.
This seems particularly unfair given that a) game hangs are more frequent now (at least for me) than ever before and b) I only force quit the game because it's unresponsive or there is the persistent charges bug.
@Chitlins Coincidentally, I was almost amped up enough 30 minutes ago to post here on this exact issue, screen froze, I tasked switched away from the game because I thought it was going to pick back up... nope, game had crashed and I lost 50% health.
But it is worth mentioning that periodic status messages are better than nothing. Consider the case where you enter a fight and then shortly after the fight begins something permanently disconnects you from the servers. It could be a problem on your end, or it could be a problem on their end, but either way your game connection is permanently lost. Right now, after about ten seconds or so the game client will drop the fight and show you the connection was terminated. Suppose it didn't do that, it only checked at the end of the fight. Now, you could fight the entire fight from beginning to end and *then* be told the entire thing would have to be thrown away because the connection was gone. This would mean a player could fight through a difficult fight all the way to the end only to be told that none of it counted. The game client design is a compromise between not disconnecting you too quickly (after all a network failure could be temporary and resolve itself) and not letting the player continue to play in a lost cause.
Unfortunately, in this case they have to be. If you presume that disconnections are *not* exploits unless you can prove otherwise, you open the door to uncatchable exploits. It is impossible, in the general case, to tell the difference between an otherwise innocent network failure and someone attempting to exploit the game's network connectivity, using only a trivial amount of network trickery. Someone like me would never, ever have to lose a fight if I didn't want to.
I'm not sure what you mean by backwards.
Is it better then nothing? Because I can tell you that that red (albeit faint) pulsing loss of connection icon is distracting as anything, because you're wondering at any moment if you're going to get dumped from the fight and hoping that it will reconnect and the fight will count. That distraction alone has definitely cost me during fights. As soon as the status comes up, you know there is a risk that that fight will not count I don't know anyone who would see it and just stop fighting because the fight isn't worth completing because it might not count.
I can tell you that one of the surefire ways to get me disconnected is a hard network change, i.e. I switch from one wifi connection to another, or drop from wifi to cellular, which I might have to do so that there IS a connection at fight conclusion. If I do that during a fight even while paused, it often results in the match getting booted. There is absolutely no reason for them to do it unless they're assuming that you are trying to intercept the traffic, yet I would say that 99.99% of players would have no capacity to exploit that.
Because this game is played on a mobile device, it's pretty common to have transient network issues, you could be on a train and go through a tunnel, or you could be switching between hotspots. Punishing players so harshly for a problem that is inherently part of the platform doesn't seem reasonable.
That's not what I was saying. What I said was if the game client didn't check for connection status during the fight, the player could fight an entire fight only to discover at the end of the fight that the entire fight was for nothing. That's very likely to be far more frustrating than losing connection much earlier in the fight. At least, that is what I would presume if I was the one designing the network code.
As to the issue of moving from one network to another, like say from wifi to cellular, I've seen that break session state in many other mobile games and I suspect for similar reasons. Many of these games use cloud front ends like Google Game Cloud. I don't do development with those APIs, but I suspect many of them either use or optionally use persistent HTTPS connections. Those wouldn't survive client roaming, and you'd then need some form of session recovery to deal with that change, which not all games implement.
The number of variables to establish the state of a match is significant, but ultimately finite. Each champ can only be at a finite number of locations on the screen, in a finite number of possible positions in their animations and status of their active buffs, debuffs etc etc. Lots of variables, but ultimately finite. So it's a case of not impossible, but too hard basket relative to what Kabam get out of it. I'm not saying I don't know the technical reasons for why it could happen, my point is that it shouldn't happen the way it does. As you point out, they can store state at the client for recovery. The point is that their development philosophy seems geared more towards preventing player exploitation than ensuring players have an uninterrupted experience and then penalizing them for when there is a problem with the game that is probably not their fault.
Kabam just needs program it take 50% of your health after the fight physically starts.
A loading screen is just a loading screen.
Theres not hitboxes, no ready that flashes across the screen, not health ticks.
Maybe if they programed the anti-quit feature to start after "the words -READY, then FIGHT flashes across the screen?
Use the word "fight" as the trigger command or something?
Because when you get stuck in the loading screen..... there is nothing.... just a spinning wheel.... with the words loading..... as far as i can tell it just freezes on you and then penalizes you for it.... which sucks
the only way i see this not working... is if its actually glitched out, with the fight somehow actually running & playing out in the background.
That's why I said it is not about sending too much, but rather sending too little. You cannot trust the client. The only way to know what's happening at the client is if the client sends real time telemetry to the server, so the *server* contains the real time state of the client implicitly. That's not how you do this. The server sends the client a randomly generated initializing PRNG seed that the client uses to initialize all of its random number generators, if any. Then the client sends the server all of the player inputs, timestamped frame-accurate. That's it. With those two pieces of information, the server can calculate the precise state of the game client, because if you think about it that's all the game client does: it takes player inputs and deterministically calculates the state of the game. If your random number generators reproduce the same values because they are initialized identically, replaying the player inputs into a copy of the game, or a server state engine that does the same thing, you should get back exactly the same results.
It is a little more complicated because you have to account for things like client-side frame drops or clock-quantum skips, but that's just a little more telemetry. The problem is that this has to be built into the way the servers process things right from the start, because it is very difficult to retrofit this sort of thing down the road. Consider how long it took Kabam to add the ability for the game servers to figure out how long a fight took for the purpose of legends run rankings. That is a strong hint about how much knowledge the game servers have about the running state of the game clients. Which is to say, almost none.
It still doesn't answer the question of why keep connecting to the server if you are doing nothing with the connections other than deciding if you're going to boot a player from a match... unless the only reason to connect is to determine if the player is somehow trying to exploit the game.
And this is only anecdotal, but if anything has a connection issue, it's almost always MCOC rather than anything else. It is the first thing that has connectivity issues whenever my connection waivers. I'm definitely not the first and most likely not the last to say that.
This doesn't make it ALWAYS an issue on their end, but their punitive measures ALWAYS make it as if it is our fault.