Last edited on 31 July 2016 - 09:53 AM by Mattato

Hey everyone. So this is going to be a special article explaining a huge set of issues that ArenaPvP Season 13 has hit the development team from the perspective of it being a huge new system for us to design. There are a bunch of reasons for why certain decisions were made with certain things, and some of them we are still working to fix at the moment and will hopefully have cleaned up soon.

First I will start off this log with things we are still working on trying to come up with proper solutions for:

The Rating System

The rating system replaced ELO this season. ELO is just a number which is supposed to represent your skill level. A number doesn't really help people to measure most things though unless they understand the scale which for Badlion is a very large one. A representation rating system makes more sense.

The Good

The rating system in itself works from a back-end perspectively perfectly fine. From our graphing data it shows a much nicer bell curve of the ratings of players across the season. The placement matches do a nice job at shoving the player into the right bracket of where they should be starting off the season. The issue is not the representation of the ratings itself, that is fine and is a better system then just a flat number like ELO which doesn't really tell a new player how good they are compared to other players surrounding them. The new Bronze/Silver/Gold/Emerald/Diamond/Master system with the divisions of 1-5 does this a lot better. A player can track their progress as a result.

The Bad And How We Are Fixing It

1. The problem is right now a player has no way to see how close they are to the next rank. This can be resolved with a progression bar and some kind of point system for you to see how many more points you need to advance to the next rank.
2. The other issue is that a player can switch between Silver II and Silver III back and forth if they keep winning and losing matches alternating each time. Most other game systems that use a system like we are have the idea of a promotion and demotion match. I hated the concept because it weighs more emphasis on one match versus another, but now I understand why they are needed. A promotion/demotion match makes it so you cannot swap between ranks back and forth like you currently can on Badlion.

By removing ELO we removed the tracking of your goals such as how close you were to a rating of 2000 in BuildUHC. We will be working on adding some sort of progression system so you can see how close you are to being promoted to Silver III from Silver II. We will also make it so you cannot switch back and forth between ranks so quickly as you can now.

We feel by making these two changes the rating system that we have put into place will work perfectly as we had hoped. Right now the desire to climb is not as strong as it should be.

The Chat

The chat for the old style of ArenaPvP servers was having 1000 players on a single server sharing a cross chat system. This created a very populated environment but had some drawbacks such as people spamming for /duel requests. /duel was meant to be a tool to play against your friend, not a way to get around limitations we had put into place for how many matches a free player can do a day.

The Good

There is nothing good about the current way chat works. It was never finished completely and as a result we have nothing but improvements lined up for it.

The Bad And How We Are Fixing It

1. There is no cross-server communication via /msg or /r. This is a huge issue since you can’t talk to your friends now on other servers.
2. There is no way to find other players to join up to play on team game modes on Badlion’s Arena server at the moment (such as 2v2/3v3 ladders). Nor is there the opportunity for players to recruit players to join a party event such as Party FFA or Party Fight.
3. The Arena Lobbies are really quiet now. There are about 50-100 players per Arena Lobby at the moment and as a result there is not much communication between them. You can’t just log on and have a random conversation with someone like you used to be able to.
4. When you are in a match you are on a random server now with your team against another team. The communication methods for talking with your team and your enemies is very little to non-existent at the moment.
5. Party Chat doesn’t exist anymore. Another uncompleted feature that needs some love and attention.

#1 is already being built as I write this post. Hopefully will be done by today.

#2 and #3 we think we will resolve by setting up some chat servers for the different regions. By default it will try to populate one chat server with as many people as possible and then when it hit’s some threshold (let’s say 500 players) it will start populating another chat server. Players will be able to change chat servers if there are slots still available (Donator+ ranks and higher will probably bypass this limitation).

#4 and #5 will be resolved by re-creating the concept of party chat. We will also have a “match chat” created which you are put into by default unless you have opted for party chat. You will then be able to communicate with the people in your match directly such as your opponents without seeing other people on the server talking. It will be more of a closed environment.

The Party System

The new party system will help to support cross-network gameplay and is an absolute must for Badlion going forward. It will make things like team SG and clan gameplay and other things possible on Badlion which has been a high request for a while.

The Good

We now can transfer a group of people from server to server without losing their party information. Players can now jump between different game modes with their friends and continue to play various game modes on Badlion Network.

The Bad And How We Are Fixing It

The problem that users have experienced so far is that parties will sometimes glitch out and you cannot join or leave them because the system thinks you are already in one. We need to do a better job of handling disconnects and some weird edge cases in our code where players can become bugged out due to matches starting and such. Another thing that is bad at the moment is we prohibit the modification of a party when you are in a match. We should be copying your party data to the match like we did back in season 12 ArenaPvP so that the party does not have to remain completely in tact for the match to be played. We will be working on reworking our code base to support a more stable version of parties going forward so that we can have smooth team gameplay.

______________________________

I will now spend a bit of time explaining some of the issues that the development team has faced towards the start of Season 13 with the huge amounts of instability.

The Dynamic Servers

Players need to understand that we have never made a system as dynamic and scalable as the one we have now. Setting up an Arena server is a matter of a few seconds for us now instead of taking hours of uploading files and configuring etc. At the same time we have never tried to create servers when needed and shut them down when not needed. This new approach allows us to make better usage of the servers we are paying for and use more of the hardware. We used to just have one arena server per box that we paid for, and were overpaying for it. The new system makes our lives easier going forward.

We have never had a system with hundreds of servers communicating with a middleman system such as the Badlion Mainframe before like we do now. There were definitely some challenges getting all of the servers to properly sync information with each other, but we have continued to try and improve the reliability of this system.

Also very important to mention is we needed to create a system where servers could be created and destroyed upon demand for the ESL America partnership we recently announced. This new dynamic server system will also be used for SG 2.0, Skywars, CTF, and any other new game modes we release later on.

The Matchmaking System

Matchmaking was once worked once a long time ago when we were much smaller. The community did not react positively to it and we did not have a large enough of a player base to support it. As a result the concept was scratched until we became much bigger. Now that we are over 10x as big as we were back then during our peak, it made sense to revisit the matchmaker.

We wanted to increase the number of players in a particular ladder by sharing the matchmaking pool across an entire region (such as NA or EU which had 3 populated servers each during their respective peaks). We also wanted to try and match make players who were closer in rating to each other than just taking the first two players that joined a queue and throw them into a match together.

This system has worked very well minus the bugs with it breaking completely (which was caused by multiple different issues). There is still some room for improvement such as trying to prevent the same players from being match made again and again with each other.

Badlion Mainframe

So the mainframe has made our lives as programmers a lot easier, but has caused the users a ton of headaches with chat and commands randomly breaking through the network. The stability of the system has not been as good as it could have been and this has been due to the bad design decisions with Season 13. So imagine you are in a plane at airport waiting to take off. Normally there are several lines on the runway for planes from different companies (e.g. United, American Airlines, Lufthansa, Air Berlin, Austrian, etc) that combine into one line to be able to take off. The control tower is telling the planes when it is their turn to merge into this one gigantic line (by the way a really exhausting job with lots of stress). This example is how the memory management behind the Badlion Mainframe works. Only one task can be executed at a time just like only one plane can take off at a time. Unfortunately when too many tasks queue up to be executed the system starts to lag really badly and become unstable and sometimes takes several minutes to recover from the overload.

What we did for Season 13 after the launch (which should have been done before) was we created multiple memory management systems, specifically one for each region. Using the example above we basically made more runways and are now sending the planes that are from the same company to the same runway. In our practical example we are now sending all of the same region data to a dedicated memory management system so the queue does not get too long.

There are some further stability changes that are going to be made to the Badlion Mainframe in the near future to help stabilize it and make it into the glorious system it is meant to be. I have faith still that it can be fixed to properly handle the load it needs to.

Conclusion

I just wanted to take a bit of time to explain the complicated systems that had to be designed in season 13. Meanwhile during all of this I was:

1. Moving from America to Europe
2. Working with ESL America to finalize the partnership that we recently announced and the roadmap of what we are going to do with them
3. On vacation in Europe with a planned vacation from a few months ago

I have done my best to try and help the developers design season 13 but ultimately I could have done a better job. I did not have as much time as I wish I did to help them out and it probably should have been delayed a bit longer than it already was. For this I offer my sincerest of apologies to the community. I am now finally in a stable situation and am hard at work with the developers to close up these last issues described at the start of this post and try to smooth out some miscellaneous bugs. Hopefully we will have everything smoothed out sooner rather than later and ArenaPvP can become the shining beauty it is meant to be here at Badlion.

~Adam

Last edited on 31 July 2016 - 05:29 AM by JusserBuilds

Great to see some detailed feedback :D

EDIT: For smaller regions and/or ladders I think the placement should be wider in who you fight for two reasons. One is that if there aren't very many players online/you are high in a ladder it can take a very long time to wait for a fight. The second reason is that if you only ever fight people who are of equal skill level to you, you will never improve. I know for a fact that I've improved the most in S12 by fighting people 400-500 ELO above me and learning what makes them fight well, etc. Scrapping the system entirely isn't really fair because then a Diamond III could die to a laggy Bronze II or something, and that makes everyone salty >.>

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:27 AM

Perfect MasterGberry . ;)

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:29 AM

Would it be possible to make a single big chat server for each region?

Also would you be able to tab their names?

Last edited on 31 July 2016 - 05:43 AM by 59_astro

S12 : +3500 players in ArenaPvP at peak hours.
S13 : -2000 players in ArenaPvP at peak hours.

gg

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:35 AM

Looks to me that they have understood and are trying their best to make this season improve.

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:39 AM

gg

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:40 AM

Also, u cant do ./stats and /list while in the match.
please fix and reply .

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:42 AM

I have confidence that we will gain these players back plus more once these issues are sorted out. In the long run, this is the best for Badlion.

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:44 AM

corrected

Last edited on 31 July 2016 - 05:59 AM by Etai007

Well s13 may be a good season…
if most of the bugs will be fixed.
mybe can you do a thing that showes what rank is what elo like:
1000 elo= Bronze V
(sorry for bad english im tierd)

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:52 AM

We will work on trying to make it possible so you can tab names for these chat lobbies.

The issue with making one gigantic chat server is it might flat out be too much chat spam. We will design the system so it can be several chat lobbies and if we think we can just survive with one we will do just one then and expand outwards again if need be. Better to have the system there in case we need it and not have to make it again later.

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:53 AM

I will look into getting both of those resolved :)

Added to our list.

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:54 AM

Thanks ;)

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 05:57 AM

Btw, i cant see any kind of : Uhc meetups , Sg LMS , in arena pvp ,

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 06:08 AM

Automatically Deleted

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 06:11 AM

Everything that I have a problem with in S13 so far looks like it is going to be resolved here. Thanks for the great work. Also hope you enjoyed your vacation while it lasted.

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 06:13 AM

UHC Meetup is being worked on (should be out very soon) and the LMS servers should follow sometime after that.

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 06:21 AM

good stuff!

Posted on 31 July 2016 - 06:22 AM

mmmmmh… maybe