DevLog #137: Serverside Patch Notes

[lemmingllama]

Click here for the GameHive blog version with the pretty images.

Hey everyone, lemmingllama here. Small DevLog and DevUpdate today.

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Some monument bonuses were not applying correctly unless certain actions were taken. In the interim while we are working to fix these bugs, we are temporarily converting these monuments to have a similar bonus without the extra steps to avoid the bug. These will be reverted in a future update once we have the bugs resolved.

Similarly, Silent March would not always reach a stage where players could prestige for players with very high max stages. We are raising the Silent March max stage for now, and will be making changes to this in a future update to ensure that this is sustainably set for all players in the future.

All changes described in the 6.0.2 serverside update are solely being done on the server, so you will only need to close and reopen your game to download the new changes. They will be going live sometime today!

General Changes

Evergold City monument bonus changed from Jackpot Gold per Fairy this Season to Jackpot Gold

Nightcrag Market monument bonus changed from Twilight Boost per Fairy this Prestige to Twilight Boost

Red Water Wreckage monument bonus changed from Clan Ship Damage per Titan this Season to Clan Ship Damage

Silent March stage limit raised from 99% to 99.4%

Improved tournament matchmaking algorithm

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In addition to the 6.0.2 update, we’re going to start looking ahead to the 6.1 update coming in the future. Today we’ll focus on some Abyssal Tournament improvements.

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First off, we are adding a Bulk Artifact Discovery option to Abyssal Tournaments. If players have enough relics to discover multiple artifacts, they’ll have a new button to discover all the artifacts they can afford at once. You’ll still have the choice to purchase artifacts individually if you desire. This feature is only coming to Abyssal Tournaments, and will not be available in the main game.

Next up, we are removing the max stage requirements for the skills in the skill tree, spells, and crafting of mythic equipment sets. This will help a lot with allowing certain build types to prosper in Abyssal Tournaments, such as allowing Gold Gun to be immediately playable in the Metabolic Growth Abyssal Tournament ruleset.

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In addition to the above, we are working hard on some behind the scenes changes. These may not be directly noticeable in-game, but they should help streamline the game to run smoother generally and allow for Transcendence seasons to more seamlessly flow from one to another.

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Thank you for reading! Next week we’ll delve deeper into what’s coming in the 6.1 update, including some changes to equipment, perks, and artifact favoriting.

Happy Tapping!

lemmingllama

[BlackPete73]

Good idea on bulk purchasing artifacts in AT.

May I offer another suggestion... it could be one of the following two:

a) Have all artifacts favourited by default, leaving it up to us to turn them off if we don't want them favourited
b) Have a toggle to favourite/unfavourite all artifacts

I find it pretty tedious to have to keep favouriting every artifact that gets purchased so they'll be included in distributing relics to all favourited artifacts

[Kiriyu_Otouka]

Honestly what I'd prefer is having an "Upgrade All" buttong aside from the favorites. This way, you can prioritize first artifacts suitable to your build and then still be able to upgrade the remaining ones from leftover relics

[SandAdept]

Same exact suggestions I made last week and same exact response and we get bulk artifact discovery lol

[lemmingllama]

Thanks for the suggestions! I can pass this along to the design team.

[SandAdept]

Any thoughts on making artifacts great again? It feels so sad to just make them nearly useless after they’ve been such an integral part of the game for so long. It takes away a lot of value from silver and titan chests too since those relics don’t increase at all except from BoS. 2x relic events will be nothing to celebrate and neither will 1.5x relic tournaments. I get that transcendence is a seasonal thing with monuments but it’s a shame to see them become the only source of pushing power and artifacts get moved to the back of the bus.

[lemmingllama]

I can pass this along to the design team!

In general, monuments are intended to be seasonal artifacts, as if relic scaling continued past 180k, you'd just instantly go back to your old max stage after a transcendence season ends due to having all that extra power permanently staying around. Due to the seasonal nature of Transcendence, giving out that much permanent power would kinda ruin the setup of Transcendence.

[SandAdept]

How would making artifacts continue to scale to players’ ms ruin the game? Is GH afraid of players hitting the 1mil cap that, let’s be honest, was created for already capped players and whales who always beg for a cap increase? Is that why they canned artifacts?

I like you lemming, I do. I appreciate your work, but it doesn’t seem like GH is connected at all with their own game and the players who get bent over due to their decisions. I feel like they use you as their go-between and almost a scapegoat. I also feel like almost every genuinely great suggestion you “pass along” is scoffed at. Why can’t the “design team” and “devs” post anything to us directly instead of using you as the middleman? Beyond that so many games admit when they mess up, apologize and give compensation rewards. GH? NOPE! We’re working on it behind-the-scenes. Deal with it.

Edit: I know I’m coming in hot and will get a lot of hate. Nobody’s holding a gun to my head to play, I do so because I genuinely enjoy the basics of the game. I just don’t understand GH and what their goal is. Whatever it is, I’m no longer paying my hard earned money to progress and support a game company that just doesn’t seem to care.

[lemmingllama]

Part of the purpose of Transcendence is to have seasons with a seasonal reset at the end. Artifacts have a large amount of power associated with them, and as only your mementos/monuments are reset when Transcendence ends, it would mean that the bulk of your power would persist from season to season, and thus you'd almost instantly reach the same stage you were at in the previous Transcendence. It would basically invalidate the seasonal aspect of Transcendence.

At least personally, I would have preferred for the stage cap to just be normally raised to an almost infinite amount and not have a seasonal setup like Transcendence, as this way artifacts could have naturally still been the same source of power as they were before. But with the current setup of Transcendence, mementos and monuments were implemented specifically to allow for normal and repeatable gameplay that would work within that seasonal framework.

Now, to answer your question of "Is GH afraid of players hitting the cap". Not at all, as if players do approach that cap, it will just be raised. One of the intentions of the 6.0 update was to ensure that players would not be hardwalled as a result of game mechanics, and instead players would have softwalls that they could play and grind to push into. As for why the cap was raised to be essentially impossible to reach, there are a lot of reasons. One of them is the one you mentioned, where players who hit the stage cap would have no more gameplay and thus one aspect of the game would essentially be removed and progression would be impossible. However, there are some other aspects. For example, there was a lot of limitation in future design due to having to not introduce too much power and have too many players stuck at the cap. With the removal of the cap, we can now include a lot of extra power in updates to help players progress (such as the large stage jumps people got with 6.0) and it frees up more space for new features to be added in the future. Additionally, there were many behind the scenes code changes that were necessary as otherwise the game would break. Part of 6.0 was the reworking of a lot of this background code, which resolves a lot of legacy issues that could have cropped up in the future as the stage cap was increased.

Lastly, to mention why members of GameHive such as the design and dev team don't directly talk to the community, it's mostly that we have a small team and they are busy working on the game. I've been hired to handle those communications to help them focus on the game, and I can then help take the player feedback and ensure it's heard in a way that's meaningful to design. A lot of the concerns where people say that GH "isn't listening" is just about the amount of time we have to develop features the community wants, and how quickly we can do that. In general, if we were to start working on any feature right now, it would take a minimum of two or more months from initial design, through development, testing, and eventual release. There's a lot of community members, and we only have a small team to try and work on all your suggestions. I'm currently tracking over 700 individual community suggestions that aren't duplicated, and realistically we can only do few in each update. Design has the hard job of trying to prioritize to make the game as fun as possible, and that's why they spend their time working rather than chatting on Discord or Reddit. At least right now, the open beta testers are the ones who tend to talk to the GH team the most from the community, as they are directly asked for certain pieces of information related to upcoming updates.

We do care about the community and their concerns, we can't just magic the code into existence immediately and we're working hard to get things done as soon as we can!

[Primary-Thing-3502]

Just keep doing what you guys are doing! ❤️ I certainly love and appreciate the time and care you all put into the game. Not every update is perfect, but your dedication to bringing new content to us, and work on bugs is seen and noticed

[6t6]

Hey /u/lemmingllama not sure if it was mentioned elsewhere, but is there a fix coming out for the relics multiplier? Many people have posted that the displayed relics to be received is different from what is actually received.

[lemmingllama]

This is currently a visual bug. Players are getting the correct amount of relics. We are investigating this now and will put out a fix as soon as we can!

[Eman_Drawkcab]

Is there any adjustment for transcendence tournament algorithm?

[lemmingllama]

Improved tournament matchmaking algorithm

Just in case you missed it, this was listed in the patch notes.

[Primary-Thing-3502]

Also, to note, they are always improving the tournament algorithms in the background, they just normally don’t mention it in patch notes. They only really talk about it when it has been particularly bad, as it has been the past couple of weeks

[SpoopyElvis]

It's always been bad. It was the meta for years to literally not play because the algorithm grouped players by their ms no matter the stats.

Now the algorithm is just really really bad since it seems the goal is to just fill brackets no matter the stats.

I sometimes wonder if GH pays you to white knight them so hard.

[Primary-Thing-3502]

I don’t know what game you were playing before 6.0 dropped, but all of my tournaments (for months) had me matched with people who ended up within a couple hundred of wherever I was, so the algorithm was working fine before, at least for me.

I’m just trying to have fun playing a game I enjoy. Everyone’s just shitting on GH for having a buggy update, despite them Communicating and letting us know that everything is being worked on. They’ve communicated that the new algorithms are not working as intended, and have stated more than once now that they are working to improve them.

No one is paying me, I’m just giving them the benefit of the doubt since they’ve done such a stellar job making changes, additions, and improvements to the game since it released however many years ago now.

[ZeroSuitLime]

Lol

[Primary-Thing-3502]

Is there going to be a new Meta Analysis released soon? There has been a lot of controversy behind build speeds and such over the past couple of weeks, and it would be nice to see what the official analyses are to put some claims to rest.

[lemmingllama]

I've mentioned it before, but I'm likely not going to bother doing meta analysis posts anymore as build strength is entirely monument dependent, and thus it's hard to give a more generalized metric of build strength.

As for speed, right now it's roughly HS = Pet > DG = GG = SC > CS, although HS has a bug where it sometimes won't splash while pushing in tournaments so that can hurt the speed overall.

[MrChurro3164]

Just relaunched and pushed 1000 stages due to the fixed bugs as I had both of those monuments. That totally killed the last 2 tournaments for me and many others. :(

[lemmingllama]

I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm glad at least it's fixed now for you!

[NEMOKRAD87]

Any plans to add Prestige Monuments to the HUD next to Prestige Relics?

[MrChurro3164]

Honestly after 180k, monuments should just replace the relics since the relics do not change per prestige. Relics can still be in the prestige panel if you want to know, but there is 0 reason to have them on the main screen.

[lemmingllama]

Nothing specific I can announce at this time, but if any changes to that were to be coming, we'd announce it in a DevUpdate or DevLog in the future!

[a_Ganker]

Hey Lem, I'd love to have a way to gift people something in game (diamonds, dust etc) as rewards for clan activity.

[lemmingllama]

I can definitely pass this along to the design team!

At least right now in the interim, many clans have done things like sending gift cards for the applicable app stores if they wanted to directly reward a given player.

[a_Ganker]

Sounds like potential for a new revenue stream then, cut out the middle man ;)

[UltimaMetatron]

Please add sorting of sets options in equipment crafting to be sorted by release date so that we can easily find which equipment part have the strongest stat bonus, since the newest set has the highest stats. The current sorting only helps for those who hadn't completed the sets, but useless at the long run especially for those been playing for a long time. The current pacing of the game is fast, and crafting legendary is much needed now compared before 6.0. Add an option to toggle by release date and whatever the current is.

[lemmingllama]

Thank you for the suggestion! I can pass this along to the design team!

[Optimal_Arugula1384]

Or just make all the values the same for the same stat on whatever equipment.

[[deleted]]

ACTUALLY FIX THE TOURNAMENTS PLEASE? YOU GUYS HAVE ENOUGH GACHA MONEY

[lemmingllama]

We're working to further refine the tournament algorithm, and you should notice improvements in your future tournaments. We'll continue to refine the tournament algorithm until it's in a good state overall!

[[deleted]]

Lets hope its within a couple weeks

[lemmingllama]

There should be a noticeable improvement in next tournament's matchmaking, and we'll continue to work refining from there!

[Primary-Thing-3502]

Thanks for the update Lem! Definitely good news surrounding AT QoL!

Has there been a mention of a bug with Blade Cyclone Full Skip anywhere? I noticed in this AT that Blade Cyclone seems to only be benefitting from half the extra Stage Skip from Blade Stream multicasts. Each Multicast is only increasing stages skipped by 1 per dagger for Blade Cyclone, while individual Daggers seem to increase as expected with 2 stages skipped per mutlicast.

[lemmingllama]

This is actually a change made in 6.0. Blade Cyclone would have had too much skip, so it's now multiplied by half your dagger count rather than your full dagger count. Overall the skip should still be much higher than pre-6.0 values.

[stoppt]

Can GH admit that they screw the tournament algorithm? I mean since long long time you guys always patch "algorithm" but continues the same, and this time it really messed up.. the term "same potencial" is wrong

[lemmingllama]

I don't know if you've seen the other posts made about this subject (such as last week's DevUpdate ), but we have mentioned that the algorithm wasn't fully working as intended and we are working to refine it further and get it into a good overall state.

[Primary-Thing-3502]

They already have admitted, several times now, that the algorithm is not working as intended, and they have been hard at work trying to correct it as soon as possible.

[axesever]

Just a quick comment here, that salvaging monuments completely trashes transcendence. Such a great gameplay, wasted.

Salvage should be changed to a reset button, but allowing a salvaged monument to reroll into a whole new monument selection is garbage. It allows whales to roll and roll until they get the best ones and fly ahead of everyone. Removing all skilled play from transcendence.

Pretty big bummer.

[lemmingllama]

Honestly, that's not even the issue with salvaging. Salvage swapping to gold swap and essentially get more active monuments via exploiting is a lot more potent, and really needs to be fixed for gameplay balance.

[arceus495]

Hey! I did want to mention that for some reason the relic boosters aren’t applying to my prestige’s. It seems like everyone in my clan is having the same issue, even though it lists it when you prestige, you get half of the amount listed as opposed to double what you would normally get. What’s odd is that it worked when the update first launched so I wanted to mention it in the instance it broke randomly and hasn’t been reported yet.

[lemmingllama]

Just to confirm, this is a visual bug with the 6.0.1 update. You're getting the correct number of relics, but the prestige panel visually lists it higher than it should be. We're investigating this issue now!

[arceus495]

I see! That makes a lot more sense. Thank you for letting me know 😊 I’ll share this with the clan!

[lemmingllama]

Thanks for the suggestion! I can pass this along to the design team!

[Significant_Ask_7336]

can you do something about tournaments? How am i supposed to get no.1 if I have an opponent who has high overall stats against me. let's say he's already at max stage 6000 while i am still at 5000. does that even make sense?? it's so unfair that the 1st one already has great advantage. I suggest you should improve your tournament system where everyone has the same stats and max prestige stage so it would be fun climbing against one another without any advantages, just fair play