Tired of the guild battle system

[kabiddo]

Honestly, I was really frustrated with this from the get go. However, it was then the basis for a whole Arena, and now is part of Festival... My beef is with the short amount of time available to collect the rewards from guild battles...

I work approximately 100 hrs a week, and I just don't have time to participate in every guild battle etc... Which is fine, I understand I will not get as many points as others due to my busy schedule. However, out of the 100 guild style battles (arena, guild, and festival) that I have participated in, I have been lucky enough to maybe collect from 10 of them total...

I just hate it... At least with monsters and other things you have about a day or so to collect, or in terms of feats of strength and the like you can get on for 5 mins and burn through them and have no need to wait an hour or two to collect...

So in my frustration and inability to get guild points, I was almost considering purchasing favor points to get guild abilities... However, I ran the numbers and it seems like if this is the direction the game is going, I will just continue to get more frustrated with future events...

In conclusion, I am seriously considering quitting because the game used to be balanced that despite being busy I could just lag behind the curve... Unfortunately, inability to collect from victories due to being busy places me off the curve... You can't lag if you never get the points...

[J.Smullins]

So you are mad because they do not cater to people with busy schedules?

Sorry if you work that may hours then what time you have should be spent with friends and family. It's I what did and barely logged into CA.

To blame them because you have a life and can't do much is just absurd.

[Kerowyn]

I work pretty long hours myself, but I usually don't have much trouble collecting from GB's, nor participating in them - because they last for five hours, and the collection time afterwards is quite a bit longer than that (up to 9 hours more). I can't do Festival Battles most of the time because of work (and because most of my guild is in Europe/Asia and we set our time to be best for the majority), but regular GB's are not really a problem because we don't do ours at a set time every day.

With rotating times, that means that if one starts before I go to bed, I can participate until bedtime and then usually still collect first thing in the morning. If it starts just before or just after I get up, I can participate and sometimes still collect when I get home from work. If it starts in the latter part of my workday, I can usually participate in the last hour or two of it when I get home, and collect immediately after. The ones I will miss will be those that start right after I've gone to bed, or else that started in the first half of my workday. The collection time for regular GB's is actually longer than the battle itself is, so it's more common for me to miss the battle itself than to miss the collection for the battle, no matter when the battle was.

[King Hrothbeort]

I'm going to disagree with fluffy on this one. When Castle Age started and continuing all the way until guilds were introduced; it was a game in which people who didn't have a ton of free time could play for several minutes a day and not get sucked into hours of gameplay as is required to advance in many MORPGs.

The introduction of guildwars was a significant change and the very short collection timers make it more so. It is much harder for a working or busy person to play now than it was over a year ago. The only real alternative is to ignore the guildbattles and only play the other aspects of the game.

[Defyeler]

I don't do many battles because of my schedule. I miss alot of my coin collecting because of my schedule. I dint much care though. I dint have many abilities and I dint have the general. And I really don't care either.

[Death of Rats]

Fortunately, guild battles are really a separate part of the game from the monster hunting, the PvP, and the questing. It can be completely ignored without loss to the rest of the Castle Age experience.

[J.Smullins]

I'm going to disagree with fluffy on this one. When Castle Age started and continuing all the way until guilds were introduced; it was a game in which people who didn't have a ton of free time could play for several minutes a day and not get sucked into hours of gameplay as is required to advance in many MORPGs.

The introduction of guildwars was a significant change and the very short collection timers make it more so. It is much harder for a working or busy person to play now than it was over a year ago. The only real alternative is to ignore the guildbattles and only play the other aspects of the game.

While that is true some what. We all know you do not have to be in a guild or do battles as it is just one part of the game. Hence my some what blunt comments.

[Wicked Intentions]

Err I'm sorry but 9 hours collection time after what in most guilds happens to be a known 5 hour battle period is plenty fair.

Now to complain about the festival battles i feel is even more absurd because when the pringinal battles people wanted them shorter so that they could get int battle, stick around for about an hour or two then collect.

Now you have two different methods u can enjoy guild battles. Pick one or the other or both. But for heavens sake ppl need to quit blaming CA for the lack of effort on thie rend when it's their own guilds that set when the battles happen or because your life is too busy for a game.

[xxco2xx]

As a fellow ex addict gamer, my advice to you would be. Dont let a game takes control of your life. I used to play tons of mmos of which CA was one of the many. Back then i was in college and has since graduated. Almost 90 percent of my free time was spent on games(Must admit i broke ToS and had mutiple accounts but im sure alot here does that as well.) Well yea i've achieved alot ingame but reality will come back and haunt you. All those time wasted on these games cost me dearly in life. Time which can be better spent with your loved ones, getting better education or enriching one's life. It came to a point when i realised that i've wasted so much of my time online that i quitted for about a year and a half from gaming. Now i simply game for leisure (though 1 surprising fact is that i actually spent real money this time round for CA as compared to last time.) Guild battle wasnt made for people like me imo thus i normally doesnt take part in them. I've actually jumped between alot of guilds since most guilds just wanted active people for GBs. Well just take a step back and reflect on your time spent, im sure CA has certain aspect that attracted you in the first place. Just focus on those aspects and have a fun time instead of stressing yourself out.

*sorry if my english's bad

[Galados]

It's not quite as fun as it used to be for me either I admit.

[kabiddo]

Alright, maybe I should somewhat retract my statement with regard to GB specifically. However, the fact is that Festival and Arena III have 1 hour collect times... Which is especially ridiculous because, at least in festival, you have one battle every 24 hours... Do not see why you can't have 20 hours or so to collect.

[Mage Gamete]

Don't agree with the OP. You don't have to join a guild. If you do, the festival battle time is set by the guild master. If the time is not convenient for you to participate and collect perhaps you should shop around to find a guild that has a festival battle time that fits your schedule. The guild I am in, we have people show up during the last 10-20min of the one hour festival battle and do some damage and collect afterwards. That way they don't have to stay the full hour and then some. Also, I myself have not had a chance to collect my reward afterwards on a few occassions. Didn't pitch a fit, just joined another battle the next day.

[Wicked Intentions]

Can't we all just let the horrid abomination that was Arena 3 go die in the screaming depths of hell in which it was born?

However with that said i Do happen the like the current set up for the festival battles. They're short, simple, and at a customizeable time so that it can fit what ever schedule you happen to have.

[Dragonomine]

100 hrs? Wow. I remember working 93 hrs a week for a few years at a pizza place. Open to close 7 days a week. Course that started changing when I hit 21. :) 40 hrs on the clock and the rest cash under the table. No overtime pay. You know, I do believe they were taking advantage of me. lol But I digress.

There's no need to be in a guild at all. It's just one small portion of the game and it matters not one iota in the long run. You get no FPs or SPs. You get coins that you can use to purchase stuff to use in the guild battles. Just play the game how you want to. No need to try to do everything.

[Scorps]

I only agree with the OP on the collection time for Festival battles. Not sure why there is only an hour collection time when the next battle isn't for another 23 hours. Sometimes I start the battle and dump my tokens, then go out to eat with the family and come back 2 hours later and I can't collect. Not a huge deal but still the shortened collection time serves no purpose.

[niamh O'Toole]

"Why is the collect window 1 hour when there's a battle every 24 hours" is a valid question I would have thought.



If busy people feel they can't play CA, and if poor people feel they can't play CA, and so on and so forth, and if it's not CA's fault seemingly, but those people's (!), there will soon be no one left to play CA.

Wait...we're heading that way pretty fast, aren't we.

[vos]

wouldn't it be easier to just automatically award points to each member at the conclusion of a battle? That would remove that aspect of the "holding" pattern that is required to collect. Let folks drop a few coins and go...would that really hurt the game, if the collection was not automatic?

[thomasj8]

Can't we all just let the horrid abomination that was Arena 3 go die in the screaming depths of hell in which it was born?

Are you saying you liked Arena III and want a repeat?


:p

[Kerowyn]

"Why is the collect window 1 hour when there's a battle every 24 hours" is a valid question I would have thought.



If busy people feel they can't play CA, and if poor people feel they can't play CA, and so on and so forth, and if it's not CA's fault seemingly, but those people's (!), there will soon be no one left to play CA.

Wait...we're heading that way pretty fast, aren't we.

Because there isn't a battle every 24 hours; there is only a battle for each of us every 24 hours. The battles are every hour. Which, I realize you know - just not sure anyone realizes what the full impact of that is or would be, from a database standpoint.

Right now, all they have to hold data-wise is info on the current battles going on, and the ones just past. When a new set starts, the old one drops out. So at any given time, they're only holding (reading/writing) data on two hours' worth of total battles across the entire game. Not sure how many that is, but just for the sake of argument, say there's 40 battles going on every hour. That's 80 battle's worth of data, at any given time around the clock.

If they held that data for 24 hours, that would be 960 battle's worth of info they would have to hold at any given time around the clock. That's a significant amount more data to have to store and retrieve.

Databases are like closets - the more stuff you cram in there, the harder it is (the longer it takes) to find one specific item (or multiple specific items) in there. Even if it's well-organized, or even if you put it into a bigger closet, still - it takes longer. And that means more lag, for everyone.

I tend to agree with the idea of just have it award everyone their points, no collection. At least for FGB's; collecting from regular GB's is less of a problem.

[Dragonomine]

wouldn't it be easier to just automatically award points to each member at the conclusion of a battle? That would remove that aspect of the "holding" pattern that is required to collect. Let folks drop a few coins and go...would that really hurt the game, if the collection was not automatic?

That's just too brilliant for the devs to think of it on their own. Monsters too! No more spinning toilets and lost loot.

[niamh O'Toole]

But there are auto-battles every few seconds all over the world, so really there is a way to make it better, otherwise we'd never be able to collect at all on those it seems to me?

[Kerowyn]

But there are auto-battles every few seconds all over the world, so really there is a way to make it better, otherwise we'd never be able to collect at all on those it seems to me?

I would suspect that the difference on those is just that there are actually fewer of them at any given time; both because they're longer timewise, and also because every guild doesn't opt-in to an auto-battle as frequently as they are able to. With the FGB, once you're opted-in to a particular time, you'll be battling (and that data will have to be stored) whether anyone actually shows up for the battle or not; where in a GB, there has to be at least one active (officer or GM) on either side for there to be a battle at all. Meaning only that if someone isn't there to opt you in, the battle won't take place; which means one less battle during that time period to store data for.

Just a guess on my part, though, from what I know of databases in general coupled with Tass's comment awhile back about how much of a headache balancing even the regular GB's has been.

[Kuko]

Because there isn't a battle every 24 hours; there is only a battle for each of us every 24 hours. The battles are every hour. Which, I realize you know - just not sure anyone realizes what the full impact of that is or would be, from a database standpoint.

Right now, all they have to hold data-wise is info on the current battles going on, and the ones just past. When a new set starts, the old one drops out. So at any given time, they're only holding (reading/writing) data on two hours' worth of total battles across the entire game. Not sure how many that is, but just for the sake of argument, say there's 40 battles going on every hour. That's 80 battle's worth of data, at any given time around the clock.

If they held that data for 24 hours, that would be 960 battle's worth of info they would have to hold at any given time around the clock. That's a significant amount more data to have to store and retrieve.

Databases are like closets - the more stuff you cram in there, the harder it is (the longer it takes) to find one specific item (or multiple specific items) in there. Even if it's well-organized, or even if you put it into a bigger closet, still - it takes longer. And that means more lag, for everyone.

I tend to agree with the idea of just have it award everyone their points, no collection. At least for FGB's; collecting from regular GB's is less of a problem.

what about to hold collect info only, once battle is over ? you know, activity for each person, that's all you need, money is set amount, XP is random when you click collect anyway

EDIT: it can be added to each person DB info, no need to keep separate data-table for whole guild, and it expires when new festival battle starts

[Kerowyn]

what about to hold collect info only, once battle is over ? you know, activity for each person, that's all you need, money is set amount, XP is random when you click collect anyway

EDIT: it can be added to each person DB info, no need to keep separate data-table for whole guild, and it expires when new festival battle starts

Might be workable if they dumped just that data off into another table (playerID, points with win/defeat factored in), collection flag (collected yes/no). But to do that, they'd also have to alter the interface, to not display 'the battle' to you once it's done; and unless you also wanted to lose stuff like the battle chat/attack log the moment the battle ended, they'd still have to store two hours' worth of data and then have some function that would dump just the coins/points earned data over to the other table when it was about to expire in the one it's being stored in now.

And that sort of thing can get a little intensive. Good example from one of my own projects; an abbreviated pick-list of available data/records is stored locally on the user's machine, and when they select something to look at, the full dataset for that item is retrieved from the remote central/main database and displayed to them.

But, how to update each individual user's local pick-list without overwhelming the back-end database every time someone goes to that screen was a problem (and also wasn't necessary, the stuff changes on a daily basis but not so much on a minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour one), so it was solved by letting the user update their picklist with a button, manually.

When they press that button it might seem like an easy thing, to just update any changes to fields in their abbreviated list (to capture changes others have made from other machines), add anything new (that was entered by another user on another machine), and delete anything no longer there (that was deleted by another user on another machine); but what's actually easier is to just delete everything on their end, and then copy it all from the remote. If I am evaluating for changed, new, and expired, that can mean having to make three queries of (or passes through) the same data both locally-stored and remotely-stored (once for individual field comparison in matching records to update changes, once to find unmatched records in remote that aren't in local in order to add them to local, and once to find unmatched in local that aren't in remote and delete them from local). If I just drop everything from local and copy it back over from remote in one chunk instead, it's just one pass through it to accomplish the same end goal.

Which is why I'm thinking that they may be doing something similar, just shoving all battle data in one chunk from a 'current' table to '1-hour old' table, deleting whatever was in '1-hour old' just before they do so. Adding another step to that (storing selected bits of that 1-hour-old data somewhere else before deleting it, and then adding a screen for the user to get to it) wouldn't be impossible if that's what they're doing, but it might be a bit time-intensive. Adding a script at say 5 mins or 10 mins to the hour that auto-credits each player in the 1-hour-old table with their coins if they haven't already collected (and sets their collected flag so they can't collect manually after that) probably would be easier even if they're storing the data in the same table and just expiring it after 1 hour rather than moving it to another holding spot to clear out for the new battle(s).

(sorry if any of that is overly technical, or overly simplified either - I realize that not everyone knows much about databases, and also that some here probably know a lot more about them than I do, LOL).

[Kuko]

not going to quote your whole post :p

yes and no

I think it is easier to add it to set of tables containing player info, similar to where your feats progress is, last activity made and collected or no or expired

then just keep existing code and add bit of a code to collect in other location if not collected normally within 1 hour from f.battle