Last edited on 21 July 2016 - 03:33 PM by MasterGberry

Introduction

Hey everyone. Back with the latest and greatest for ArenaPvP. The past few months have been very chaotic between the Kohi merge, some changes to the development team, me moving to Europe (lots of time of mine gone preparing), and all of the crazy new complicated systems we have been building for Season 13. This season is a bit later than we would have wanted it to be released but we think it will have well been worth the wait.

New Regions

South America and Asia are being launched with season 13. We are still putting the last pieces into place for each of these regions but here is what to expect:

1. Separate matchmaking pool for each region
2. Lower latency for players living in the areas where these new regions are launching
3. Further improvements to the regions based on donations/requests

You can read more about what we expect to see for the new regions here: https://www.badlion.net/forum/thread/126475

New Lobby System

Right now the way ArenaPvP is setup we have several “mega-instances” configured to host up to 1000 players concurrently on the same server. You play on the server you join and never switch to another server throughout your play time as shown in the diagram:



Each Arena “mega-instance” is separated and you can only play with the players on that specific server. This system used to make sense when we only had one “mega-instance” running in each region (NA/EU/AU) but now that we have several running in NA and EU this system no longer makes sense.

The new system takes advantage of multiple servers and smaller instances as shown in the diagram:



There are now multiple arena lobbies per region and there are also multiple arena servers per region. It is also possible to play against someone in another lobby from you now which you could not do before. Commands like /duel, /spectate, /party and such now work across all of the arena lobbies instead of just the one you were in before. You can play with a friend who is on NA arena lobby 1 while you are on NA arena lobby 2 without any issues.

New Matchmaking

In the “New Regions” section the term “matchmaking pool” was introduced. I want to explain a little bit more about the changes in how players are matched against each other now in ArenaPvP. As previously noted, it is now possible to play with friends who are in different lobbies than the one you are in. As a result, we are now matchmaking all players for each ladder based on their region.

If I get put into NA Arena Lobby 5 and Archybot gets put into NA Arena Lobby 1 and we both join the BuildUHC and have a similar rating, then we will most likely end up playing each other. This is great because you can now play against people in the same region who are on other arena lobbies, expanding the BuildUHC ladder queue go from about 100 players per server to upwards of 300-500 players per region.

Another big change that I slipped into the previous paragraph was matchmaking people based on similar rating. We have implemented a matchmaking similar to the one found on Kohi Practice. Players will be matched against opponents with a similar rating to their own in order to provide a better, more fair PvP experience for the player.

New Rating System

Up until now we have used ELO as our rating system and many other servers have copied and followed us down this road. ELO used to make sense when the maximum rating was around 2000 for season 1 and the number of players we had on our server was around 100 during peak. Today with us hitting peaks of at least 8000 up to 10000 the rating system does not really make sense anymore. We are dropping ELO support and are opting for a rank based system with tiers and divisions, a system found in many popular games such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, Starcraft II, and many others.



Above you see Qualifying, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Emerald, Diamond, Masters in the icons respectively. Each of the tiers (the names just mentioned) have 5 divisions (except Qualifying and Masters). Division 1 is the highest, and Division 5 is the lowest. You will work your way from Division 5 up to Division 1 in order to be promoted from a lower tier to a higher one (e.g. Silver to Gold). The number of games in order to do this will vary based on your “MMR”.

An image showing how this works from an ordering perspective (Thanks @Ny_)





MMR is the new system we will be using in place of the term ELO. MMR means Matchmaking Rating. The new MMR system that we are opting to use will help solve some of the issues that ELO has. The new MMR system more accurately places players based on their initial skill into the appropriate tier and division. This takes quite a few games to figure out exactly where a player’s skill is. As a result we have introduced the concept mentioned earlier of qualifying matches. You will have to play 20 matches before you are able to see your tier/division for your rank in a specific ladder. The new MMR system also allows for mistakes to be made without punishing too harshly, for example if someone like Danteh who has a rating of 2800 lost to someone who has 2000 rating once, he will not lose 32 rating. Granted if he continues to lose games against people with much lower rating than his, his rating will start to plummet. The new MMR system also accounts for win and loss streaks. You will gain/lose more as you continue to win/lose.

More information about this new system can be found here: https://www.badlion.net/forum/thread/125891

Leaderboards

Now that we are removing ELO and trying to do a better job at supporting multiple regions, the leaderboards need some updating too. We will still be displaying rank numbers, but instead of displaying ELO we will be displaying your tier and division (e.g. Diamond 3). You will still be ranked based on your hidden MMR so that if two people are Diamond 3, the player with the higher rating will still appear higher on the leaderboards.

There will now be two sets of leaderboards as well. There will be a leaderboard for all regions across Badlion (global) and there will be an individual leaderboard for each region as well. Your rating across Badlion is still one consistent rating no matter which region you are playing on. The region leaderboards (NA/EU/SA/AU/Asia) will be based on which server you have the most ranked matches on. If I have 1000 ranked matches played on NA and then 300 ranked matches played on EU I will show up on the NA region leaderboard but not the EU region leaderboard. You can only be on one region leaderboard at a time. This region leaderboard can change during the season based on which region you are playing on. You will always be on the global leaderboard as well though. We hope that this encourages regional based competition and makes players proud of their regions.

Ranked/Unranked Matches

Ranked matches have slightly changed in Season 13. In order to promote a more competitive and cheat free environment, we have added a requirement of 10 unranked wins before you can partake in any sort of ranked matches (donators bypass this requirement). There are several benefits to this:

- Makes it harder for people to come onto alt accounts when banned and continue to disrupt ranked gameplay.
- Helps new players learn more about Badlion and the different styles of PvP before jumping right into ranked and damaging their rating against veteran players.
- Creates a more competitive environment.

We have also made some changes to the unranked ladder system. We are tired of seeing the spam of “/duel me BuildUHC” on the servers. We want players to have more of a chance to play against other people who do not want to play ranked or are out of ranked matches. As a result we are making all ladders available in unranked as well as ranked.

There is a new limitation system setup for unranked as well. While all ladders are being made available in unranked, there is a limitation of 20 matches per day for unranked (30 if you are registered on the website) or unlimited if you are a donator. Every 24 hours, two of the unranked ladders will be marked for unlimited game play (no limitation on the matches per day for anyone). These two unranked ladders will change daily automatically every 24 hours.

Tournaments

We have long been waiting on releasing a new tournament system on Badlion. As we have continued to grow it has become increasingly hard to run tournaments when we are getting thousands of players signing up at a time. We went to the drawing board and tried to figure out what the best approach was to make tournaments going forward. We came up with a system that supported two types of tournaments: (1) Hosted Tournaments (2) Automatic Tournaments.

Automatic tournaments (once enabled) will be running at whatever discretion we choose. At the moment we will be looking to have automatic tournaments run every weekend for every region. You will be able to simply join a tournament via the arena lobby when it becomes available to join. The full plan for these has not yet been finalized and they will begin next weekend (July 23rd).

Hosted tournaments are a better designed system that will allow us to put together tournaments for single players, teams, or clans. These new tournaments can also be paused and resumed and be able to work on various servers. The existing system we use for tournaments has severe problems when a server reboots. This new system will allow us to also run weekly tournaments or leagues if we so choose to. The tournament system is also designed to work with any game mode, e.g. SG, SkyWars, CTF, etc.

1.7/1.8/1.9/1.10

Cross versioning is being changed to how it was done in season 12. We are reverting back to the old system (and used by some other networks already) of trying to support as many versions as possible with a 1.7 back-end. What this means is players who are on 1.9 or 1.10 will be able to connect to the servers that already exist on Badlion, but they will not have the 1.9 or 1.10 features activated. The gameplay will feel like 1.7 does/did. There will be some minor alterations here and there, but for the most part it should feel like 1.7 PvP.

FFA Worlds

With the increasing size of the ArenaPvP servers, we wanted to revisit the FFA worlds and try to upgrade them. We are going to have FFA Worlds available in the various regions (depending on the region the FFA Worlds available might change) that dynamically change in size. What we mean by this is that certain new sections of the FFA world will open up and close down based on how many players are playing in that specific FFA World. This feature is not yet ready and will be released in the next few days from launch when we have finalized the maps/plugins to properly operate.

Clan Leaderboards

We feel that the idea of competitive 5v5 gameplay is the future we want to drive Badlion forward. One of the first things we are doing to promote a more competitive clan atmosphere on Badlion is the inclusion of a new special ladder in Season 13 to replace the existing 5v5 BuildUHC/SG ladder that was in Season 12. This new ladder will only be able to be played by people who are in a clan together and are all in the same party together.

This new ladder consists of the following kits: BuildUHC, SG, UHC, NoDebuff and Debuff (renamed from Kohi). When you queue up you will be put into a best of 5 with the opposing team. The first team to reach three wins will win the best of 5 series. The kits will be randomly selected each round, so every best of 5 series you play might have a different kit order. This new system should help to start promoting more clan gameplay behavior which is going to shortly be followed up with clan battles in SG (coming soon with SG 2.0 release).

Events

Events were originally introduced into ArenaPvP back during BadlionPvP 2.0 as a fun side thing to do to create some extra PvP. Originally starting off with LMS (Last Man Standing) and then eventually adding War (Huge party battle). Other events started to become standardized such as Slaughter, UHCMeetup, and KOTH. We feel that we have grown to the point where these events deserve their own servers rather than being shoved into ArenaPvP and that ArenaPvP should focus on straight up fighting rather than these special game modes.

As a result of the above we are going to pull all of the events out of ArenaPvP. We will slowly be adding them into their own separate servers that you will be able to join either from the Hub Lobby or the ArenaPvP Lobby. The first of these new events to be re-created is UHC Meetup (by far our most popular event). Players will be able to join a queue for UHC Meetup the same as you will be able to join any queue for a game mode on Badlion. Once at least 32 players have joined the queue a UHC Meetup match will start automatically. The maximum number of players that can be in a match is 64. The UHC Meetup game servers will be running 24/7/365 as a result instead of requiring a Donator to start an event off.

Raw Patch Notes

Now that you have read about the high level changes to the ArenaPvP system I will break down the full sets of changes to be found in this season.

Features

- New Regions
- New Lobby System
- New Ranking System
- New Matchmaking System
- New Leaderboards
- New Maps
- New Tournament System
- New Ranked System Requirements (10 wins in unranked before you can play)
- New Unranked Queueing System
- New Clan Best Of 5 Leaderboard
- New UHC Meetup Event Queue
- Reworked 1.7/1.8/1.9/1.10 cross-network compatibility
- New FFA Worlds (Pending Release)
- Create a 1v1 tournament within your party
- Arenas have glass now instead of wool walls
- There is a side bar now for the Arena Lobby and Arena Servers (can be turned off)

Kits

- UHC Kit now has 64 arrows instead of infinity 1
- Kohi kit renamed to Debuff Kit
- Soup kit is now Prot 2 Iron, No Strength, Infinite speed 2, Sharp III Diamond Sword w/ full inventory of Soup
- SkyWars Kit was removed
- AdvancedUHC was removed

Commands

- /party command redesigned
- /duel command redesigned
- /msg command redesigned (network wide now)
- /spectate command redesigned
- /follow command redesigned
- /unfollow command redesigned
- /vote command redesigned

Fixes/Tweaks

- Fixed ELO
- Fixed Pot Lag
- Fixed Hit Detection
- Fixed Knockback

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:44 AM

FIRST

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:47 AM

Amazing, looking forward to the great changes for season 13, sounds great ! :D

Last edited on 16 July 2016 - 05:51 AM by Syzaro

What kind of 'elo' is it that matches with the masters section.

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:52 AM

The only complaint I have about S13 is that Horse is being taken away. Then again, we already have enough bow kits to satisfy the balance for people who want to achieve high global elo. Still miss Horse though :(

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:52 AM

4th

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:52 AM

GGGGGGGGGGGG

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:53 AM

Awsome! :)

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:54 AM

In which country will be the host of South America ?

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:56 AM

Hype !!![size=5][

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:56 AM

Hype !!!

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:57 AM

Sounds absolutely fantastic! Can't wait to get to play the actual Season13! Superb!

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:58 AM

This sounds so amazing cant wait for s13 to go live

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 05:59 AM

"If I get put into NA Arena Lobby 5 and Archybot gets put into NA Arena Lobby 1 and we both join the BuildUHC and have a similar rating, then we will most likely end up playing each other. This is great because you can now play against people in the same region who are on other arena lobbies, expanding the BuildUHC ladder queue go from about 100 players per server to upwards of 300-500 players per region."
So if I fight a hacker with a similar rating on EU 1 and he kills me changing the lobby won't exclude that I could fight him again.

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 06:00 AM

Automatically Deleted

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 06:01 AM

Exact release time?

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 06:01 AM

Looks awesome :D

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 06:07 AM

Thanks to all the developers for their hard work, this looks great :)

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 06:11 AM

please add infinity back to UHC kit. UHC was the best bow ladder. UHC ladder requires more skill than archer cause it's harder to strafe without speed. I'm sure everyone in reddit UHC community will agree.

Posted on 16 July 2016 - 06:12 AM

@prplz @MasterGberry what time will s13 release