Just gonna make a few comments here. 1. Very puzzled when you say this is an IOS problem, because from what I've seen its actually Android users who say they are most affected by this.
What they’re saying is there are two issues.
The larger parry/dex timing issue is specific to iOS only. It literally hasn’t changed anything in the android operating system so there is 0 chance, nada, that the android users are experiencing the parry/dex timing issue.
However, Miike also says that there is the secondary issue of lagging and stuttering, and they believe that this is what is causing android players to have parry dex issues.
The difference is that IOS players have the Parry dex issue. Android players have a Parry dex issue.
They hope to fix this stuttering and lagging in 32.3 and 33.0, which should take care of the parry and dex issues for android players if (as they suspect) the parry dex issues are caused by the stuttering and lagging. But for iOS players, the unity problem won’t be fixed for another few months.
They aren’t saying you don’t have any issues, they’re saying you don’t have THE issue.
I want to say a huge thankyou to the team for sharing this. Fantastic info, very clear , very concise, no emotive rubbish of “hold on with us , please keep spending “etc, just cold hard useful facts, love it! Treats us like adults instead of idiots, I hope this style of info can continue long term.
It validates our concerns and even better shows you guys have got a good grip on root cause issues, which is music to my ears. Thanks!
Really appreciate knowing we have 2 separate simultaneous issues, makes much more sense, and even better allows me to stop thinking I might have some kind of crazy motor control deficiency which has slowed my reactions so badly I can’t even play a video game.
Also the explanation makes total sense which is great: We all know MCOC plays 2nd rate on Android, the Android devices need the users input of a swipe to have started travelling across the screen before registering as a swipe rather than a tap. IOS has always felt solid and responsive in comparison as the swipe is recognised as soon as the users thumb starts to move, so dex triggers instantaneously instead of a after a pause. Moving this dex earlier from this engine bug fix causes confusion as the on screen action and input are disjointed, and hence the whole game feels is unresponsive and overall just not fun and engaging.
Also proves why in SOP final week I was frustratingly totally incapable of dexing a special based on on-screen contact point and had to push my timing earlier, just like the parry timing being shifted way before on screen hit box contact point. Problem of course is now I try to push my dex early as a dirty fix, and often go way too soon getting special attacked in the face trying to guess the new timing. If there is even a hope of regaining the old timing that’s great news and may save me quitting MCOC. As if we are stuck with the new timing forever there’s no way I’ll be playing this game, it’s just not got that fun feeling , which is the whole reason I picked this game up 6 years ago.
Some feedback: One big concern I have is : I picked up that the game felt weird within 15 mins of playing when the new update came out. Therefore: If it was indeed so obvious to a very average player, surely this update issue should have picked up straight away by a QA test? Maybe you guys knew and there was no other option but to push it live. But rather than hide it , or assume it’ll all be okay and we won’t notice, instead maybe some upfront warnings/info would have been appreciated so we didn’t have to go through all this rubbish for the last few months of wondering what on earth was broken. Just some words of advice for the next time you have a tech issue…
Bravo on the post, very brave to share info with the community, huge applause for it. Good luck for the fix, any progress is appreciated to help get this game fun again.
Obviously doesn’t excuse other issues in the game, like the recent horror of torturing us with incredibly tedious objective based side events, … sigh…but let’s fix one thing at a time. We’ll get there. Let’s make MCOC fun again!
I'm an IOS player. I'm not happy about my options for normal game play (wait til 2022 for final fix or switch to Android). I truly hope the iterations along the way to the final fix are significant enough for me to have a good "FEEL" long before 2022.
iOS only issue my ass..... Are you saying your update made me forget how to play by installing?
iOS is the only device they have tested. They were saying that they know it occurs on iSO. They haven't tested any of the 10000 different Andriod devices yet.
I think every single andriod user out there agree and see the issue. Some worse than others I am sure. I for one feel the pain and flustration with you on my Samsung s20 ultra.
It’s been a little while since we’ve communicated on the ongoing Control issues, and today we wanted to give you all a different kind of post, where we’ll explore the cause of the issue, what it entails, and the progress we’ve made on our journey so far in addressing the inconsistencies and changes in control timing.
We also want to take a moment to better outline what the issue actually is, as we know there’s some confusion surrounding the exact symptoms of this issue. We’ve seen players reporting issues such as framerate drops or lag that are not related to this issue, and are being addressed separately with some fixes coming your way soon.
We also want to give you more insight into why this process is taking some time to address, why it’s difficult to address issues based on “feel”, and introduce you to a new member of our team!
Hello I just want to point out that I am an android user and I definitely have an issue with parry and dex. It's not consistent, it's not each and every fight, but it is there. It may come once every 100 fights (I grind the arena daily) or it can also come twice in a row as I enter aq. I don't understand a single thing about coding and game engine, I'm just saying you should take a better look into android interactions as well. Because if all you're working on is fixing the timing for apple devices, then I may never be able to rely on parry and dex as well as before. I mean... as far as arena goes, if I fail 2 parries in a row and get hit by 2-3 combos, I still survive and I have a way to come back. But when it comes to endgame content or even more importantly aw... I mean what am I supposed to do exactly? If I get comboes 2-3 times I may just die without being able to do anything. And same goes with dex issue. I fail to dex a special, I just die. This is an important issue to address. It's not just ios, it's android too. I can safely say that when the issue first popped out all my alliance mates playing on ios were affected while android users (myself included) weren't noticing any issues. I mean the difference was clear: ios players were saying the game was unplayable while us android players were fine. Ever since the first patch to fix the issue, I started noticing that sometimes my parry window was off. And the same goes for other android users. I believe that maybe the fix that was pushed through had an effect on all devices. I can't see another possible explanation. I play the game several hours a day and I can safely say that I can go on for hours without failing a parry but then again I know that at some point I will touch the screen to parry with the same timing as ever, as I do countless times everyday, and the parry will indeed fail. Knowing this, I've tried to adapt my gameplay to rely less heavily on parry and more on intercepting, but that too proves risky and doesn't necessarily pay off as much as I'd like to. Also, there are abilities and node interactions that pretty much force you to parry (i.e. playing against evade or miss champions without a proper counter, nodes such as icarus and flux dispersal...). As for dexing, the timing is occasionally off. This summer I had my first run in the abyss. I remember the howard the duck fight was long and I can't dex his sp2. So I was just always dexing his sp1, pushing him to sp1 and baiting. Always. I baited and dexed dunno how many of his sp1. But sometimes I would just stand there as if I wasn't dexing. And get hit in the face. This with howard the duck sp1 also happened a few times in aq or eq. I mean it's really easy to dodge but sometimes I swipe and I just stand there and get hit.
Also something else I want to report is that from my testing in the last months since the issue appeared I find that most of the failed parries are on the opponent's medium dash. I somehow have less troubles to parry a light attack when I'm close to the opponent. This is because the moment he moves I just tap to parry and it works. On medium dashes, sometimes my input is late and sometimes it's early. So I either get caught off guard and take a combo, or I get hit on the block. Either way fighting champs that require to parry their medium has proved more troublesome. On my old phone I had a lag in my inputs and the issue was different. In fact I couldn't parry a light, since my input wouldn't come in time and I'd get hit. Instead, I'd be able to parry a medium dash by anticipating it. This was a matter of lag in my control inputs. When I bought a new phone I had no troubles anymore. For example I couldn't properly use captain marvel movie on my old device... doing 12-13 parries to charge her was a nightmare. With the new phone I used her a lot and I came to love her. Now, since the issue came out, I have her sitting on the bench. I ranked up other champs that rely less on parry for the sake of my items stash and my units stash.
All this to say that android users are also suffering an issue with parry and dex. It may be less frequent than with ios, I don't know... but I don't want to think that Kabam will only work towards fixing ios version of the game. All this time I've been hopeful that the next update the issue would be resolved. And now I'm reading that you're not even convinced there's an issue on android to begin with? That's really horrible to find out... Basically I'll have to spend more than others to do endgame content and I won't be reliable in aq/aw because anytime I could just miss a parry and die? And what about an alliance then? Should there be a purge of android users if you want to push? Because only ios users will be able to rely on their inputs? This is not good for the health of the community and the game
They don't care about android issues because they're harder to solve & smaller community. Funny how every other game can optimise for both, but mcoc can't. We moan for years about the issues- nothing.. iOS has an issue it's the end of humanity.
From one android user to another allow me to assist with the oversimplification many seem to have about this issue...
1.They pointed out that android is having a SIMILAR issue but that is a memory leak that'll be patched with the next two updates.
2. IOS is a bigger issue because to fix it, they HAVE TO BUILD IT AGAIN FROM SCRATCH.
3. There is no benefit for any mobile game to be loyal to one type of OS because that's potentially alienating half the planet. No major business would ever fundamentally prefer that. No small business would intentionally want that. Please try to see this from all angles and don't fall into this belief that it's a conspiracy against anyone.
@rockykoston to continue our conversation here, I’m not saying the unity engine only updated for IOS. I’m saying that update only caused the parry dex issue for IOS and not Android. I’d encourage you to read the entire post again, because I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood that aspect. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, just that if you think Kabam are saying Android players don’t have an issue with parry or dex, then you haven’t read the whole thing.
Please read it again, but I’ll direct you to this part which explains the IOS issues.
“ When we refer to the “Parry and Dex issue”, we’re not actually talking about an issue with Parry or Dex, but a framerate and control input issue exclusive to iOS devices that is most noticeable when trying to Parry or Dex, since these are two mechanics players rely on quite often.
Marvel Contest of Champions is built on a 3rd Party Game Engine built by our partners at Unity, which has an input system built-in. We’ve relied on Unity's input system since the game was built, and have regularly updated the Engine as they have released updates. With the most recent update to the Engine, a bug was fixed where iOS devices had been operating at the device’s own frame rate, instead of being capped to 30fps as it was set to. This meant that iOS devices had a slightly different input window than Android devices, but this was never identified.
Since this is how iOS devices had always worked with our game since launch, we had built game interactions around that input window. Now, because this bug in the engine has been fixed, it changed the input window of inputs for all iOS devices and pushed back the input window by mere milliseconds, but that is enough that it is noticeable when playing the game.
This is the issue that we are working to address, and our fix for it is to integrate an entirely new control input system from our partners at Unity. But this is not a quick or easy task.”
Only the IOS input window was pushed back, therefore it cannot be the cause of the Android issues.
Sry, but my English is not so good, so I can’t understand few things. I’m iOS user, so can someone tell me, will they fix the lag and stuttering issue? I’m using iPhone XR, and FPS and stuttering is the top issue for me right now, because game unplayable for me. If they fix this, can I ask when? I found some issues will fix October and November update, and other in 2022. Tnx
Sry, but my English is not so good, so I can’t understand few things. I’m iOS user, so can someone tell me, will they fix the lag and stuttering issue? I’m using iPhone XR, and FPS and stuttering is the top issue for me right now, because game unplayable for me. If they fix this, can I ask when? I found some issues will fix October and November update, and other in 2022. Tnx
I have a bit of trouble digesting this whole “feel” thing .. if i can consistently produce the “bug”, how is it just a feel thing?
I think all it means is that they couldn’t definitively find the problem by feel alone. They mention that in the beta test they gave half the players a fix, and half the control with no fix. And the results were inconclusive because players were asked to “feel” whether it was wrong. 61% of the players with the fix said it was better, 63% without the fix said it was better.
Android users even said the fix was better or worse. And this shows that it was a psychological change, not anything measurable.
All it means is that this test they tried didn’t work. It would be like a coffee company testing a new coffee and giving the test group a new one, and a control group the old one then, the control group says that their coffee tastes better than before, even though it’s the same coffee.
They’re not saying the bug is just a feel thing, the feel direction was one way they tried to solve it, and in the end decided it wouldn’t work. They then decided to create the robot Sir Tapsalot, to give them something to actually measure.
So instead of asking you or me whether we felt like parry was better or worse, they made the robot that can map when the window of input for parry is.
Yeah, I'm an iOS player and I definitely felt like Player B at the beginning and could tell something was really off but I feel like I have adjusted to Player A because I rarely experience the issues I was originally having anymore (and adjustment likely due to me just playing too much 😅).
Still get some lag/frame drop & numerous daily game crashes but happy to hear that will be fixed in the Asset Memory leak correction 🤘🏼
@rockykoston to continue our conversation here, I’m not saying the unity engine only updated for IOS. I’m saying that update only caused the parry dex issue for IOS and not Android. I’d encourage you to read the entire post again, because I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood that aspect. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, just that if you think Kabam are saying Android players don’t have an issue with parry or dex, then you haven’t read the whole thing.
Please read it again, but I’ll direct you to this part which explains the IOS issues.
“ When we refer to the “Parry and Dex issue”, we’re not actually talking about an issue with Parry or Dex, but a framerate and control input issue exclusive to iOS devices that is most noticeable when trying to Parry or Dex, since these are two mechanics players rely on quite often.
Marvel Contest of Champions is built on a 3rd Party Game Engine built by our partners at Unity, which has an input system built-in. We’ve relied on Unity's input system since the game was built, and have regularly updated the Engine as they have released updates. With the most recent update to the Engine, a bug was fixed where iOS devices had been operating at the device’s own frame rate, instead of being capped to 30fps as it was set to. This meant that iOS devices had a slightly different input window than Android devices, but this was never identified.
Since this is how iOS devices had always worked with our game since launch, we had built game interactions around that input window. Now, because this bug in the engine has been fixed, it changed the input window of inputs for all iOS devices and pushed back the input window by mere milliseconds, but that is enough that it is noticeable when playing the game.
This is the issue that we are working to address, and our fix for it is to integrate an entirely new control input system from our partners at Unity. But this is not a quick or easy task.”
Only the IOS input window was pushed back, therefore it cannot be the cause of the Android issues.
Either they've not tested enough or they're afraid to acknowledge that Unity update is affecting android devices.
Now you'd ask why would they not accept it, because of the sheer variety of android devices, models, OS etc. They've never really been able to fix the android issue so if this is the same thing then it's nothing new.
iOS is clearly much easier to identify and fix because of the small environment.
But the fact that they are dismissing android as a generic lag and stutter is what they've been doing forever.
The fact that android now has configurable screen refresh rate with phones going UpTo 144hz and no update to make that compatible, tells us everything.
@rockykoston to continue our conversation here, I’m not saying the unity engine only updated for IOS. I’m saying that update only caused the parry dex issue for IOS and not Android. I’d encourage you to read the entire post again, because I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood that aspect. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, just that if you think Kabam are saying Android players don’t have an issue with parry or dex, then you haven’t read the whole thing.
Please read it again, but I’ll direct you to this part which explains the IOS issues.
“ When we refer to the “Parry and Dex issue”, we’re not actually talking about an issue with Parry or Dex, but a framerate and control input issue exclusive to iOS devices that is most noticeable when trying to Parry or Dex, since these are two mechanics players rely on quite often.
Marvel Contest of Champions is built on a 3rd Party Game Engine built by our partners at Unity, which has an input system built-in. We’ve relied on Unity's input system since the game was built, and have regularly updated the Engine as they have released updates. With the most recent update to the Engine, a bug was fixed where iOS devices had been operating at the device’s own frame rate, instead of being capped to 30fps as it was set to. This meant that iOS devices had a slightly different input window than Android devices, but this was never identified.
Since this is how iOS devices had always worked with our game since launch, we had built game interactions around that input window. Now, because this bug in the engine has been fixed, it changed the input window of inputs for all iOS devices and pushed back the input window by mere milliseconds, but that is enough that it is noticeable when playing the game.
This is the issue that we are working to address, and our fix for it is to integrate an entirely new control input system from our partners at Unity. But this is not a quick or easy task.”
Only the IOS input window was pushed back, therefore it cannot be the cause of the Android issues.
Either they've not tested enough or they're afraid to acknowledge that Unity update is affecting android devices.
Now you'd ask why would they not accept it, because of the sheer variety of android devices, models, OS etc. They've never really been able to fix the android issue so if this is the same thing then it's nothing new.
iOS is clearly much easier to identify and fix because of the small environment.
But the fact that they are dismissing android as a generic lag and stutter is what they've been doing forever.
The fact that android now has configurable screen refresh rate with phones going UpTo 144hz and no update to make that compatible, tells us everything.
Ok, well I don’t think spreading conspiracy theories and claiming Kabam is lying is going to help anyone. They’ve said what they’ve said, they have no reason to lie.
With the sheer number of people who use Android, do you honestly believe they'd intentionally alienate them? I mean, that's not even logical. And yes, it's more difficult to optimize a plethora of devices running it. That much they've been upfront about for years. What they're saying is the updates should improve both, but what they discovered was there were separate issues going on. With 2 different platforms, that's not unheard of. This conspiracy that they don't care about Android users is as old as the Legends program.
@rockykoston to continue our conversation here, I’m not saying the unity engine only updated for IOS. I’m saying that update only caused the parry dex issue for IOS and not Android. I’d encourage you to read the entire post again, because I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood that aspect. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, just that if you think Kabam are saying Android players don’t have an issue with parry or dex, then you haven’t read the whole thing.
Please read it again, but I’ll direct you to this part which explains the IOS issues.
“ When we refer to the “Parry and Dex issue”, we’re not actually talking about an issue with Parry or Dex, but a framerate and control input issue exclusive to iOS devices that is most noticeable when trying to Parry or Dex, since these are two mechanics players rely on quite often.
Marvel Contest of Champions is built on a 3rd Party Game Engine built by our partners at Unity, which has an input system built-in. We’ve relied on Unity's input system since the game was built, and have regularly updated the Engine as they have released updates. With the most recent update to the Engine, a bug was fixed where iOS devices had been operating at the device’s own frame rate, instead of being capped to 30fps as it was set to. This meant that iOS devices had a slightly different input window than Android devices, but this was never identified.
Since this is how iOS devices had always worked with our game since launch, we had built game interactions around that input window. Now, because this bug in the engine has been fixed, it changed the input window of inputs for all iOS devices and pushed back the input window by mere milliseconds, but that is enough that it is noticeable when playing the game.
This is the issue that we are working to address, and our fix for it is to integrate an entirely new control input system from our partners at Unity. But this is not a quick or easy task.”
Only the IOS input window was pushed back, therefore it cannot be the cause of the Android issues.
Either they've not tested enough or they're afraid to acknowledge that Unity update is affecting android devices.
Now you'd ask why would they not accept it, because of the sheer variety of android devices, models, OS etc. They've never really been able to fix the android issue so if this is the same thing then it's nothing new.
iOS is clearly much easier to identify and fix because of the small environment.
But the fact that they are dismissing android as a generic lag and stutter is what they've been doing forever.
The fact that android now has configurable screen refresh rate with phones going UpTo 144hz and no update to make that compatible, tells us everything.
We've worked directly with Unity and are sharing our Android data with them. As far as we and our Partners can see, the issue does not exist on Android because the bug fix was for iOS only. However, as we continue to share data with Unity, they may tell us differently.
We do believe that the input refactor will make control consistent across both platforms, so even if there is an issue that we just can't see, it would fix it on Android as well (in theory). We're still working on this and will continue to discover more as we develop the system.
@rockykoston to continue our conversation here, I’m not saying the unity engine only updated for IOS. I’m saying that update only caused the parry dex issue for IOS and not Android. I’d encourage you to read the entire post again, because I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood that aspect. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, just that if you think Kabam are saying Android players don’t have an issue with parry or dex, then you haven’t read the whole thing.
Please read it again, but I’ll direct you to this part which explains the IOS issues.
“ When we refer to the “Parry and Dex issue”, we’re not actually talking about an issue with Parry or Dex, but a framerate and control input issue exclusive to iOS devices that is most noticeable when trying to Parry or Dex, since these are two mechanics players rely on quite often.
Marvel Contest of Champions is built on a 3rd Party Game Engine built by our partners at Unity, which has an input system built-in. We’ve relied on Unity's input system since the game was built, and have regularly updated the Engine as they have released updates. With the most recent update to the Engine, a bug was fixed where iOS devices had been operating at the device’s own frame rate, instead of being capped to 30fps as it was set to. This meant that iOS devices had a slightly different input window than Android devices, but this was never identified.
Since this is how iOS devices had always worked with our game since launch, we had built game interactions around that input window. Now, because this bug in the engine has been fixed, it changed the input window of inputs for all iOS devices and pushed back the input window by mere milliseconds, but that is enough that it is noticeable when playing the game.
This is the issue that we are working to address, and our fix for it is to integrate an entirely new control input system from our partners at Unity. But this is not a quick or easy task.”
Only the IOS input window was pushed back, therefore it cannot be the cause of the Android issues.
Either they've not tested enough or they're afraid to acknowledge that Unity update is affecting android devices.
Now you'd ask why would they not accept it, because of the sheer variety of android devices, models, OS etc. They've never really been able to fix the android issue so if this is the same thing then it's nothing new.
iOS is clearly much easier to identify and fix because of the small environment.
But the fact that they are dismissing android as a generic lag and stutter is what they've been doing forever.
The fact that android now has configurable screen refresh rate with phones going UpTo 144hz and no update to make that compatible, tells us everything.
Ok, well I don’t think spreading conspiracy theories and claiming Kabam is lying is going to help anyone. They’ve said what they’ve said, they have no reason to lie.
Never said they're lying.
There's a slight difference between what I've said and lying.
It's not the same to not have tested or researching the root cause and simply saying that this engine update does not affect android.
It's very much possible that for now their efforts have been focused on iOS and that's the root cause they've found for but for Android due to the huge number of scenarios, they've AGAIN clubbed it into a generic lag/stutter bug.
There's a Android lag thread that's been going on forever, which is what kabam is referring to here again.
@rockykoston to continue our conversation here, I’m not saying the unity engine only updated for IOS. I’m saying that update only caused the parry dex issue for IOS and not Android. I’d encourage you to read the entire post again, because I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood that aspect. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, just that if you think Kabam are saying Android players don’t have an issue with parry or dex, then you haven’t read the whole thing.
Please read it again, but I’ll direct you to this part which explains the IOS issues.
“ When we refer to the “Parry and Dex issue”, we’re not actually talking about an issue with Parry or Dex, but a framerate and control input issue exclusive to iOS devices that is most noticeable when trying to Parry or Dex, since these are two mechanics players rely on quite often.
Marvel Contest of Champions is built on a 3rd Party Game Engine built by our partners at Unity, which has an input system built-in. We’ve relied on Unity's input system since the game was built, and have regularly updated the Engine as they have released updates. With the most recent update to the Engine, a bug was fixed where iOS devices had been operating at the device’s own frame rate, instead of being capped to 30fps as it was set to. This meant that iOS devices had a slightly different input window than Android devices, but this was never identified.
Since this is how iOS devices had always worked with our game since launch, we had built game interactions around that input window. Now, because this bug in the engine has been fixed, it changed the input window of inputs for all iOS devices and pushed back the input window by mere milliseconds, but that is enough that it is noticeable when playing the game.
This is the issue that we are working to address, and our fix for it is to integrate an entirely new control input system from our partners at Unity. But this is not a quick or easy task.”
Only the IOS input window was pushed back, therefore it cannot be the cause of the Android issues.
Either they've not tested enough or they're afraid to acknowledge that Unity update is affecting android devices.
Now you'd ask why would they not accept it, because of the sheer variety of android devices, models, OS etc. They've never really been able to fix the android issue so if this is the same thing then it's nothing new.
iOS is clearly much easier to identify and fix because of the small environment.
But the fact that they are dismissing android as a generic lag and stutter is what they've been doing forever.
The fact that android now has configurable screen refresh rate with phones going UpTo 144hz and no update to make that compatible, tells us everything.
We've worked directly with Unity and are sharing our Android data with them. As far as we and our Partners can see, the issue does not exist on Android because the bug fix was for iOS only. However, as we continue to share data with Unity, they may tell us differently.
We do believe that the input refactor will make control consistent across both platforms, so even if there is an issue that we just can't see, it would fix it on Android as well (in theory). We're still working on this and will continue to discover more as we develop the system.
Thanks for the response. That makes sense but hope won't get us anywhere boss, until Android is exhaustively tested. Anyways...
I'll give an example, I have Xiaomi Mi 10T pro device, the specs don't get any better than this. There's almost zero lag and when there is (usually after an update) , I simply reinstall and it's perfect again.
But, I've taken combos to the face as soon as the fight starts because the parry didn't register. Never in my 4-5 years of mcoc has this happened so many times.
Maybe an isolated case but looking around the forum and reddit, I don't think so.
While the robot is a brilliant way to get at actual measurement and to be able to test fixes with a controlled "fixed" input and response. It definitely will be impractical to test on even the few models of iOS, let alone the multiple manufacturers and models of android phones and tablets. If I could suggest, you might be able to use something like the parry training ground to crowd source some data for a beta test. Have something where you have to parry like 10 medium hits from 5-6 different characters and you should be able to gather a bunch of data from hundreds or thousands doing the exact same test on the same characters. I'm not saying this would prevent a robot uprising...but maybe delay it a bit
This robot thing looks to me like a bit of glitter to distract from the real issues. I get they want to show they are trying things and look isnt this cool? Yeh, it's interesting and all but I can't help (especially as an Android player) to feel discouraged coz it seems like a drop in a bucket. As someone above mentioned, take consideration of numerous phone types, etc. Poor Mr Tapsalots got his work cut out for him
While the robot is a brilliant way to get at actual measurement and to be able to test fixes with a controlled "fixed" input and response. It definitely will be impractical to test on even the few models of iOS, let alone the multiple manufacturers and models of android phones and tablets. If I could suggest, you might be able to use something like the parry training ground to crowd source some data for a beta test. Have something where you have to parry like 10 medium hits from 5-6 different characters and you should be able to gather a bunch of data from hundreds or thousands doing the exact same test on the same characters. I'm not saying this would prevent a robot uprising...but maybe delay it a bit
Unfortunately, it won't help. As we mentioned in the post, there is no way for us to measure this in software because the issue resides between the Game Engine and the Hardware.
@rockykoston to continue our conversation here, I’m not saying the unity engine only updated for IOS. I’m saying that update only caused the parry dex issue for IOS and not Android. I’d encourage you to read the entire post again, because I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood that aspect. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, just that if you think Kabam are saying Android players don’t have an issue with parry or dex, then you haven’t read the whole thing.
Please read it again, but I’ll direct you to this part which explains the IOS issues.
“ When we refer to the “Parry and Dex issue”, we’re not actually talking about an issue with Parry or Dex, but a framerate and control input issue exclusive to iOS devices that is most noticeable when trying to Parry or Dex, since these are two mechanics players rely on quite often.
Marvel Contest of Champions is built on a 3rd Party Game Engine built by our partners at Unity, which has an input system built-in. We’ve relied on Unity's input system since the game was built, and have regularly updated the Engine as they have released updates. With the most recent update to the Engine, a bug was fixed where iOS devices had been operating at the device’s own frame rate, instead of being capped to 30fps as it was set to. This meant that iOS devices had a slightly different input window than Android devices, but this was never identified.
Since this is how iOS devices had always worked with our game since launch, we had built game interactions around that input window. Now, because this bug in the engine has been fixed, it changed the input window of inputs for all iOS devices and pushed back the input window by mere milliseconds, but that is enough that it is noticeable when playing the game.
This is the issue that we are working to address, and our fix for it is to integrate an entirely new control input system from our partners at Unity. But this is not a quick or easy task.”
Only the IOS input window was pushed back, therefore it cannot be the cause of the Android issues.
Either they've not tested enough or they're afraid to acknowledge that Unity update is affecting android devices.
Now you'd ask why would they not accept it, because of the sheer variety of android devices, models, OS etc. They've never really been able to fix the android issue so if this is the same thing then it's nothing new.
iOS is clearly much easier to identify and fix because of the small environment.
But the fact that they are dismissing android as a generic lag and stutter is what they've been doing forever.
The fact that android now has configurable screen refresh rate with phones going UpTo 144hz and no update to make that compatible, tells us everything.
They are not dismissing Android as a generic lag and stutter problem. And the fact that Android has configurable screen refresh rates means diddly, because the game is built upon Unity. As I'm not a Unity expert (certainly not 2020 era Unity) if there are any out there feel free to correct me, but Unity uses a composite clock. There's one clock that runs the internals of Unity - the physics, the geometry calculations, etc - and another that runs the rendering. In theory you can run the render pass at any refresh rate you want, subject to vsync limitations (to prevent screen tearing) but the update clock cannot run at arbitrary rates. I mean, you can, but if you attempt to run it faster than the platform can calculate you'll get strange behavior, and if you run it at an arbitrary rate calculated dynamically based on how fast the device is you will end up with weird update/render beat-mismatches.
A custom game engine might use a single clock and cram everything into intra-frame calculations, or they might use staggered clocking and perform physics and motion in a divide down clock, but if you attempt that in Unity you'll almost certainly create problems in MCOC because that's basically what's happening in iOS now.
While I'm on the subject of reminding people the game is built on Unity, it is worth pointing out that since Kabam doesn't write Unity, the information that their current Unity build changed timing for iOS comes from Unity. They are the only ones who would know what they changed in any particular Unity build.
Another thing to point out: while anything is possible, if Android has as widespread timing problems as many assert then Tapsalot will find them. Tapsalot does not need to test a thousand different Android devices to find a pervasive Android problem that appears to be affecting a substantial percentage of the Android players of the game. It is just like crystal conspiracies: anything is possible when it comes to one crystal. But a massive crystal rigging conspiracy that is affecting all crystals for all players in noticeable ways is detectable with trivial testing. You can't disprove that one crystal is rigged. But you can disprove that all of them are. Tapsalot changes the Android situation because we no longer need to rely on anecdotes. If there's a pervasive Android problem, Tapsalot will find it. Conversely, if Tapsalot doesn't find it, there is no pervasive Android problem. There might still be rare marginal problems because of Android heterogeneity. But widespread problems affecting a large percentage of Android players can be proven to either exist, or not exist, with certainty. To be honest, such clarity either way will be welcome, at least by those of us interested in the bottom line facts.
Belief doesn't matter. 60% of Android testers thought that one of two *identical* game clients worked noticeably better (and not to pick on Android players, because iOS players appear to be equally vulnerable to that self deception). Belief is for churches, not for troubleshooters.
While the robot is a brilliant way to get at actual measurement and to be able to test fixes with a controlled "fixed" input and response. It definitely will be impractical to test on even the few models of iOS, let alone the multiple manufacturers and models of android phones and tablets. If I could suggest, you might be able to use something like the parry training ground to crowd source some data for a beta test. Have something where you have to parry like 10 medium hits from 5-6 different characters and you should be able to gather a bunch of data from hundreds or thousands doing the exact same test on the same characters. I'm not saying this would prevent a robot uprising...but maybe delay it a bit
Unfortunately, it won't help. As we mentioned in the post, there is no way for us to measure this in software because the issue resides between the Game Engine and the Hardware.
Absolutely, I get that you can't actually measure the input timing that way. What I was thinking was more of a way to quantify if the fixes worked for players. So like if you repeated the "Does parry/dex feel better" experiment but instead of asking about feel could measure that it took say 16 mediums to get 10 parries on average for those with the released version, vs say 12 mediums to get 10 parries on the hotfix beta. Then no matter what they say parry felt like you would have data to show that parry was working better with the hotfix.
It just seemed like that type of data (parry success rate) could be gathered, since the training mode already recognizes when you landed a successful parry. But I have no real idea if that data is available under the hood or not.
I have a question for every android user who experience these problems? Are you recording when it happens? As a android user myself i was testing bishop alot when this bug first occured and def found it to be a big issue, but i was also recording every fight to share with my ally mates. Then suddenly the issues stopped and I figured i was just getting used to the new timing. Then some weeks later i was gonna record some stuff and the issues was back. I shared this info with the people i know and it seemed like the android users i known also had these issues only when recording.
We ofc also experience the lag and framrate drop and the god awful game freeze when u throw a special so the foe suddenly recovers and blocks. But its important to keep these issues seperate. From trusted good players i know i can't think of any android users that struggle with a specific parry dex issue.
I have a bit of trouble digesting this whole “feel” thing .. if i can consistently produce the “bug”, how is it just a feel thing?
I think all it means is that they couldn’t definitively find the problem by feel alone. They mention that in the beta test they gave half the players a fix, and half the control with no fix. And the results were inconclusive because players were asked to “feel” whether it was wrong. 61% of the players with the fix said it was better, 63% without the fix said it was better.
Android users even said the fix was better or worse. And this shows that it was a psychological change, not anything measurable.
All it means is that this test they tried didn’t work. It would be like a coffee company testing a new coffee and giving the test group a new one, and a control group the old one then, the control group says that their coffee tastes better than before, even though it’s the same coffee.
They’re not saying the bug is just a feel thing, the feel direction was one way they tried to solve it, and in the end decided it wouldn’t work. They then decided to create the robot Sir Tapsalot, to give them something to actually measure.
So instead of asking you or me whether we felt like parry was better or worse, they made the robot that can map when the window of input for parry is.
But how did they select the players? I know people playing for 6 years who get hit by iron mans sp1, what good is their input to this process?
They’ll have been chosen randomly from those who signed up for the beta. Any statistical test will be random to make sure there’s no bias
While the robot is a brilliant way to get at actual measurement and to be able to test fixes with a controlled "fixed" input and response. It definitely will be impractical to test on even the few models of iOS, let alone the multiple manufacturers and models of android phones and tablets. If I could suggest, you might be able to use something like the parry training ground to crowd source some data for a beta test. Have something where you have to parry like 10 medium hits from 5-6 different characters and you should be able to gather a bunch of data from hundreds or thousands doing the exact same test on the same characters. I'm not saying this would prevent a robot uprising...but maybe delay it a bit
Unfortunately, it won't help. As we mentioned in the post, there is no way for us to measure this in software because the issue resides between the Game Engine and the Hardware.
Absolutely, I get that you can't actually measure the input timing that way. What I was thinking was more of a way to quantify if the fixes worked for players. So like if you repeated the "Does parry/dex feel better" experiment but instead of asking about feel could measure that it took say 16 mediums to get 10 parries on average for those with the released version, vs say 12 mediums to get 10 parries on the hotfix beta. Then no matter what they say parry felt like you would have data to show that parry was working better with the hotfix.
It just seemed like that type of data (parry success rate) could be gathered, since the training mode already recognizes when you landed a successful parry. But I have no real idea if that data is available under the hood or not.
Tapsalot eliminates the need for that kind of testing. Prior to Tapsalot, the devs had to guess at what changes might have caused a change in player feeling. But now that this can be quantified, either the new build replicates the old timing sufficiently well or it doesn't.
Keep in mind the task for Kabam is not to change the game until everyone's Parry skills improve. The task for Kabam is to replicate the old behavior. If they do and players are still missing Parries, that would be a psychological problem in their heads that the game client can't fix and can only be solved by the players readjusting to the old-new-old normal.
Comments
The larger parry/dex timing issue is specific to iOS only. It literally hasn’t changed anything in the android operating system so there is 0 chance, nada, that the android users are experiencing the parry/dex timing issue.
However, Miike also says that there is the secondary issue of lagging and stuttering, and they believe that this is what is causing android players to have parry dex issues.
The difference is that IOS players have the Parry dex issue. Android players have a Parry dex issue.
They hope to fix this stuttering and lagging in 32.3 and 33.0, which should take care of the parry and dex issues for android players if (as they suspect) the parry dex issues are caused by the stuttering and lagging. But for iOS players, the unity problem won’t be fixed for another few months.
They aren’t saying you don’t have any issues, they’re saying you don’t have THE issue.
I want to say a huge thankyou to the team for sharing this. Fantastic info, very clear , very concise, no emotive rubbish of “hold on with us , please keep spending “etc, just cold hard useful facts, love it! Treats us like adults instead of idiots, I hope this style of info can continue long term.
It validates our concerns and even better shows you guys have got a good grip on root cause issues, which is music to my ears. Thanks!
Really appreciate knowing we have 2 separate simultaneous issues, makes much more sense, and even better allows me to stop thinking I might have some kind of crazy motor control deficiency which has slowed my reactions so badly I can’t even play a video game.
Also the explanation makes total sense which is great: We all know MCOC plays 2nd rate on Android, the Android devices need the users input of a swipe to have started travelling across the screen before registering as a swipe rather than a tap. IOS has always felt solid and responsive in comparison as the swipe is recognised as soon as the users thumb starts to move, so dex triggers instantaneously instead of a after a pause. Moving this dex earlier from this engine bug fix causes confusion as the on screen action and input are disjointed, and hence the whole game feels is unresponsive and overall just not fun and engaging.
Also proves why in SOP final week I was frustratingly totally incapable of dexing a special based on on-screen contact point and had to push my timing earlier, just like the parry timing being shifted way before on screen hit box contact point.
Problem of course is now I try to push my dex early as a dirty fix, and often go way too soon getting special attacked in the face trying to guess the new timing.
If there is even a hope of regaining the old timing that’s great news and may save me quitting MCOC. As if we are stuck with the new timing forever there’s no way I’ll be playing this game, it’s just not got that fun feeling , which is the whole reason I picked this game up 6 years ago.
Some feedback:
One big concern I have is : I picked up that the game felt weird within 15 mins of playing when the new update came out.
Therefore: If it was indeed so obvious to a very average player, surely this update issue should have picked up straight away by a QA test?
Maybe you guys knew and there was no other option but to push it live. But rather than hide it , or assume it’ll all be okay and we won’t notice, instead maybe some upfront warnings/info would have been appreciated so we didn’t have to go through all this rubbish for the last few months of wondering what on earth was broken.
Just some words of advice for the next time you have a tech issue…
Bravo on the post, very brave to share info with the community, huge applause for it.
Good luck for the fix, any progress is appreciated to help get this game fun again.
Obviously doesn’t excuse other issues in the game, like the recent horror of torturing us with incredibly tedious objective based side events, … sigh…but let’s fix one thing at a time. We’ll get there. Let’s make MCOC fun again!
I think every single andriod user out there agree and see the issue. Some worse than others I am sure. I for one feel the pain and flustration with you on my Samsung s20 ultra.
My newer One plus8t has much lesser issues compared to my older One Plus5t
From one android user to another allow me to assist with the oversimplification many seem to have about this issue...
1.They pointed out that android is having a SIMILAR issue but that is a memory leak that'll be patched with the next two updates.
2. IOS is a bigger issue because to fix it, they HAVE TO BUILD IT AGAIN FROM SCRATCH.
3. There is no benefit for any mobile game to be loyal to one type of OS because that's potentially alienating half the planet. No major business would ever fundamentally prefer that. No small business would intentionally want that. Please try to see this from all angles and don't fall into this belief that it's a conspiracy against anyone.
Please read it again, but I’ll direct you to this part which explains the IOS issues.
“ When we refer to the “Parry and Dex issue”, we’re not actually talking about an issue with Parry or Dex, but a framerate and control input issue exclusive to iOS devices that is most noticeable when trying to Parry or Dex, since these are two mechanics players rely on quite often.
Marvel Contest of Champions is built on a 3rd Party Game Engine built by our partners at Unity, which has an input system built-in. We’ve relied on Unity's input system since the game was built, and have regularly updated the Engine as they have released updates. With the most recent update to the Engine, a bug was fixed where iOS devices had been operating at the device’s own frame rate, instead of being capped to 30fps as it was set to. This meant that iOS devices had a slightly different input window than Android devices, but this was never identified.
Since this is how iOS devices had always worked with our game since launch, we had built game interactions around that input window. Now, because this bug in the engine has been fixed, it changed the input window of inputs for all iOS devices and pushed back the input window by mere milliseconds, but that is enough that it is noticeable when playing the game.
This is the issue that we are working to address, and our fix for it is to integrate an entirely new control input system from our partners at Unity. But this is not a quick or easy task.”
Only the IOS input window was pushed back, therefore it cannot be the cause of the Android issues.
October and November for lag/stutter.
Android users even said the fix was better or worse. And this shows that it was a psychological change, not anything measurable.
All it means is that this test they tried didn’t work. It would be like a coffee company testing a new coffee and giving the test group a new one, and a control group the old one then, the control group says that their coffee tastes better than before, even though it’s the same coffee.
They’re not saying the bug is just a feel thing, the feel direction was one way they tried to solve it, and in the end decided it wouldn’t work. They then decided to create the robot Sir Tapsalot, to give them something to actually measure.
So instead of asking you or me whether we felt like parry was better or worse, they made the robot that can map when the window of input for parry is.
Still get some lag/frame drop & numerous daily game crashes but happy to hear that will be fixed in the Asset Memory leak correction 🤘🏼
I just don't believe it.
Either they've not tested enough or they're afraid to acknowledge that Unity update is affecting android devices.
Now you'd ask why would they not accept it, because of the sheer variety of android devices, models, OS etc. They've never really been able to fix the android issue so if this is the same thing then it's nothing new.
iOS is clearly much easier to identify and fix because of the small environment.
But the fact that they are dismissing android as a generic lag and stutter is what they've been doing forever.
The fact that android now has configurable screen refresh rate with phones going UpTo 144hz and no update to make that compatible, tells us everything.
What they're saying is the updates should improve both, but what they discovered was there were separate issues going on. With 2 different platforms, that's not unheard of. This conspiracy that they don't care about Android users is as old as the Legends program.
We do believe that the input refactor will make control consistent across both platforms, so even if there is an issue that we just can't see, it would fix it on Android as well (in theory). We're still working on this and will continue to discover more as we develop the system.
There's a slight difference between what I've said and lying.
It's not the same to not have tested or researching the root cause and simply saying that this engine update does not affect android.
It's very much possible that for now their efforts have been focused on iOS and that's the root cause they've found for but for Android due to the huge number of scenarios, they've AGAIN clubbed it into a generic lag/stutter bug.
There's a Android lag thread that's been going on forever, which is what kabam is referring to here again.
Thanks for the response.
That makes sense but hope won't get us anywhere boss, until Android is exhaustively tested. Anyways...
I'll give an example, I have Xiaomi Mi 10T pro device, the specs don't get any better than this. There's almost zero lag and when there is (usually after an update) , I simply reinstall and it's perfect again.
But, I've taken combos to the face as soon as the fight starts because the parry didn't register. Never in my 4-5 years of mcoc has this happened so many times.
Maybe an isolated case but looking around the forum and reddit, I don't think so.
I'm not saying this would prevent a robot uprising...but maybe delay it a bit
A custom game engine might use a single clock and cram everything into intra-frame calculations, or they might use staggered clocking and perform physics and motion in a divide down clock, but if you attempt that in Unity you'll almost certainly create problems in MCOC because that's basically what's happening in iOS now.
While I'm on the subject of reminding people the game is built on Unity, it is worth pointing out that since Kabam doesn't write Unity, the information that their current Unity build changed timing for iOS comes from Unity. They are the only ones who would know what they changed in any particular Unity build.
Another thing to point out: while anything is possible, if Android has as widespread timing problems as many assert then Tapsalot will find them. Tapsalot does not need to test a thousand different Android devices to find a pervasive Android problem that appears to be affecting a substantial percentage of the Android players of the game. It is just like crystal conspiracies: anything is possible when it comes to one crystal. But a massive crystal rigging conspiracy that is affecting all crystals for all players in noticeable ways is detectable with trivial testing. You can't disprove that one crystal is rigged. But you can disprove that all of them are. Tapsalot changes the Android situation because we no longer need to rely on anecdotes. If there's a pervasive Android problem, Tapsalot will find it. Conversely, if Tapsalot doesn't find it, there is no pervasive Android problem. There might still be rare marginal problems because of Android heterogeneity. But widespread problems affecting a large percentage of Android players can be proven to either exist, or not exist, with certainty. To be honest, such clarity either way will be welcome, at least by those of us interested in the bottom line facts.
Belief doesn't matter. 60% of Android testers thought that one of two *identical* game clients worked noticeably better (and not to pick on Android players, because iOS players appear to be equally vulnerable to that self deception). Belief is for churches, not for troubleshooters.
It just seemed like that type of data (parry success rate) could be gathered, since the training mode already recognizes when you landed a successful parry. But I have no real idea if that data is available under the hood or not.
Keep in mind the task for Kabam is not to change the game until everyone's Parry skills improve. The task for Kabam is to replicate the old behavior. If they do and players are still missing Parries, that would be a psychological problem in their heads that the game client can't fix and can only be solved by the players readjusting to the old-new-old normal.