Constructive views on Colosseum

[Barathor]

I would like this thread to be a place to post your experience and opinion on the different aspects of Colosseum. Please keep constructive and provide deep feedback, just in case devs care to read and analyze it.

Info provided - placement:
- In time:
a) some people like to start discovering things on their own, once the event is running. Some don't. Nothing can be done in that sense.
b) in my opinion, the info provided before an event starts should be: duration, single player event or team event, prizes/rewards. I think Gaia failed to clairfy the first 2, though we could figure out both on the first hours.
- In place:
a) Maybe the info/rules should be displayed on a tab instead of a small question mark. There are still people who don't seem to be able to track small symbols.
- In content:
a) The overall explanation is more or less ok. It is not illiterate-friendly, though (again, not much can be done in that matter)
b) Regarding "time": it would help to remind people if it is PST, UTC... Unlike Arena, were you could join at any moment and then wait for it to start, you can't join Colosseum outside of its hours: this could be also clarified.
c) Regarding single/team: should be clear that chosing single will provide 4 other partners (randomly? similar level? similar tier?) and chosing team will allow you to invite people who also chose team (and state WHERE that invite will appear; it is not intuitive at all to expect the invite in main screen, allies tab -I expected it INSIDE the Colosseum thing-)
d) It says we lose stars when losing battles, but it doesn't say if we also lose ranks once we lose all stars (nice info to know, though it will be discovered sooner than later)
e) It doesn't say how many stars each rank has, though like d) it can be discovered easily.
f) Honor point: the limit depends n your rank, but it doesn't say what happens if your rank goes down (can it go down? see d). If you go down, do you lose the extra honor points? Do they remain? Easy to discover too, by really nice to know it beforehand.

Format:
- 5vs5 seems balanced and different enough from 10vs10 to be fun on itself.
- Being given the option to either be "auto-teamed" or select your partners is nice. Allowing to select partners makes it easier for cheaters, but it also encourages people to make friends, work together and create bonds; that's good.
- Being able to play as many matches as you can in the 3h window is also a plus. You can either start as soon as you end the previous one or schedule fights. Good job there.

Matches themselves: (please take into account that performance has its own section)
- You need to refresh the screen often for the match start to be noticed; the buttom usually takes longer to appear. Not a real problem, but could this be reworked?
- Duration: 20 minutes seems ok, long enough to have some strategy involved and allow late players to make the difference (late =1-2minutes); short enough to not be bored and punish last minute people or inactive people.
- Pairing: awful. A-W-F-U-L. Maybe it is due to the system trying each team to battle almost immediately, but it has been totally unbalanced for me. I have faced teams with members in higher ranks AND three times our level (talking about us being level 13xx the bigger and their lower 28xx).

Performance:
- HORRIBLE. Lots os blue orbs and lots of time being unable to drop a single token. The idea of limitng the amount of honor points you can earn weekly should help here (less people participating when reaching full honor points), but it seems not to be enough. I thought this would go better after the initial rush with everybody trying colosseum for the first time, but it has gone worse in my case. Not being able to perform actions is very discouraging and makes people complain (with full reason). I hope thing will start to change in the next weeks, as they did in 10vs10; if not, something must be done.

"Elements" involved:
- Allowing classes, runes and piercing/resistance seems right. It makes battles fast and thrilling. I see most classes involved, a healthy mix of everything (even less mages than expected, but that might be only my case).
- Some people complain about damage/health runes being too unbalanced. Maybe, but if matching systems worked better, I think there would be no problem (or lesser problems)

Duration:
- Everything points that is a permanent event or at least a longer than usual event (minimum of 2 weeks). Around 2months (8-10 weekes) would be nice. More might devalue the prizes; less might make them not achievable for most of us.
- Maybe devs still have to evaluate the performance of the event before announcing its duration. Maybe it is something like World Monster and lasta xx months then become replaced, that would also be fun.

Prizes / shop:
- I like the items offered in the shop. I don't know yet if their prices are well balanced or not (it partially depends if the event becomes permanent or not).
- I like the possibility of gradually adding more items to the shop, like colored crystal, which is something devs might want to think about.


OVERALL:
- I really like the overall, you have a thumbs up here BUT if you don't enhance performance, it will be a fiasco, and it's a pity.
- As noticed by many people, a TIMER would help notice the beginning of the 3h event without need to convert PST into other time system. It is a nice bonus which I guess might be easy to code.

[gogoo]

Several things you're wondering about are already answered on the wiki:

https://castleage.wikia.com/wiki/Colosseum

In Bronze and Silver apparently you don't even lose a star when you lose a match. At least I never did. When you reach Gold, you begin losing stars for losing a match. And you can drop back to Silver I (then I'm not sure whether reaching Gold actually "enables" the star loss possibility and you could then drop even within Silver - I think I saw a teammate lose a star in Silver I but may have completely dreamt that).

Matchmaking seems to be using rank/tiers above all. Probably considers level after that.

I think the matchmaking will improve with time. There should be less and less high level / strong players in lower ranks as time goes by, since they will rank up. That's an assumption though.

You don't lose the Honor Points in excess when you drop a rank. Ofc you have to rank back up to be able to earn more though.

I believe this feature is here to stay. I don't think it was ever announced as an event? It doesn't look like one, the way it works, the rewards costs, the "weekly limit" etc. to me make it look like at least a semi-permanent feature, like the World Monster was. May be suspended and maybe come back later, who knows. World Monster was here for almost a full year.
Also Treasure Island just started, which IMO is further evidence that Colosseum is not an event.

About the rewards from the shop, the price is pretty low if it stays that way. For all items but probably especially for the unbind stone, and probably also for the Time Keeper if you compare it to how it was to get it in CoT. But I'm definitely not going to complain about this
Frankly the rewards prices is the only thing that can make me doubt about the duration of the feature.

Maybe the info/rules should be displayed on a tab instead of a small question mark. There are still people who don't seem to be able to track small symbols.

Definitely. It's kinda silly to have all the info only displayed when clicking this tiny button. Now I know CA does that so I always look for it, but I'm sure it took me a few years to realize this button was actually helpful, I used to only go on the wiki for info and didn't even know this button was there, or maybe never thought it would be useful to click it.


Other than that, a lot of stuff has already been reported / suggested to the devs, through Ghost Brotocol.
I guess it should be noted that the Colosseum has been announced as being in beta, at least on FB and on forums. Probably doesn't excuse the huge performance issues though :P

[Shadow Reaper]

Performance:
- HORRIBLE. Lots os blue orbs and lots of time being unable to drop a single token. The idea of limitng the amount of honor points you can earn weekly should help here (less people participating when reaching full honor points), but it seems not to be enough. I thought this would go better after the initial rush with everybody trying colosseum for the first time, but it has gone worse in my case. Not being able to perform actions is very discouraging and makes people complain (with full reason). I hope thing will start to change in the next weeks, as they did in 10vs10; if not, something must be done.

Limiting amount of points that can be earned isn't going to do anything. People will just keep doing them because they can, just as they keep doing regular guild battles even though there is nothing left for them to get there. (Before anyone says guild coins, how many people have more coins then they know what to do with now?)

I've suggested this before in Discord but the only way to make this better performance wise is to reduce the number of actions that are being sent to the servers. Right now we are effectively sending a three hour DOS attack to the servers twice a day where the only impressive thing to note is that the servers don't go down.

What I suggest is this:

1: Reduce starting tokens from 20 to 5.
2: Reduce token regen from 10 tokens every 2 minutes to 2 tokens every 2 minutes.
3: Add a damage multiplier to retain the fast paced nature of the format.
3A: As needed, add a cap on how much health a player can bring into battle.
4. Add a multiplier to healing actions to remain on par with the damage output.

In a nutshell, lower the number of tokens we get to spend while making it easier to kill people in battle.

Potentially they may also need to consider capping some other things such as maximum warrior damage output or confuse strength to not make the format a cookie cutter battle format. However, reducing the number of actions sent to the servers should be priority #1.

(Before anyone starts about nerfing things they worked hard to build up, no. Just no. You built for regular guild battles which flowed into festival battles and then 100v100. Later on you built for 10v10. This is a new feature and you literally did not build for that. The devs are free to implement which ever restrictions they deem needed to improve this new feature. However, they do have a window of opportunity to do this in before you -do- get the right to complain about any nerfs.)

Duration:
- Everything points that is a permanent event or at least a longer than usual event (minimum of 2 weeks). Around 2months (8-10 weekes) would be nice. More might devalue the prizes; less might make them not achievable for most of us.
- Maybe devs still have to evaluate the performance of the event before announcing its duration. Maybe it is something like World Monster and lasta xx months then become replaced, that would also be fun.

It's my understanding that this is a semi permanent feature.

I say semi permanent because the world monster was expected to be permanent and it ended up getting replaced by Colosseum.

[Shadow Reaper]

) Honor point: the limit depends n your rank, but it doesn't say what happens if your rank goes down (can it go down? see d). If you go down, do you lose the extra honor points? Do they remain? Easy to discover too, by really nice to know it beforehand.

You can drop rank, but my understanding from asking my guildies is that you do not lose honor points.

[RenoOfTheDwarves]

I've suggested this before in Discord but the only way to make this better performance wise is to reduce the number of actions that are being sent to the servers. Right now we are effectively sending a three hour DOS attack to the servers twice a day where the only impressive thing to note is that the servers don't go down.

I agreed with most of of your other general points although we might quibble about specifics, but I wanted to emphasize this point in particular.

Releasing a feature that encourages scripting, all the while seemingly doing nothing to combat that activity, implicitly condones the behavior. And when that behavior effectively reduces player ability to even access the feature, then it seems a little tone-deaf to the main player community.

[John944615]

The idea of tiers is the worst idea. It greatly favors scripters because it's impossible to advance levels because you are always facing scripting. Especially those mages that script confuse where they can confuse every opponent within the first 2 or 3 seconds of a match. It's hard enough just to even get 10 hits off in a match but then having to deal with being confused for every single token because of these scripts. They need to at least remove the 50% increase in effective attack in confuse and need to make it 50% reduction in attack. Unless they fix the programming where the program can handle a bombardment of hundreds to thousands of requests per second, this is the worst idea. You can't even have a regular battle without tripping and now they introduce a feature is even worse than battles. There's already enough battles as well as one can battle 15 1/2 hours a day, and to add 6 more hours of battles is ridiculous.

[Mellisa The Hun]

I have nothing good to say about the effn worst execution on a brilliant NEW feature.

On the other hand, I would like to start throwing the "n" word at whoever was responsible for this EXTREMELY effn aggravating situation.

("nuts", not what you thought it prolly was lol)

[Mellisa The Hun]

Maybe, and like other successful games do, the devs should implement a sort of tester program using knowledgable players who can keep their effn mouth shut about NDA controlled ideas.

[gogoo]

A bug I had, didn't see it reported yet:

Sometimes matches are counted twice. It happened twice to me, once for a win (I won 2 stars & 2 x 250 points) and once for a loss (I lost 2 stars). I see the same match twice in my match history (with a slightly different time, by 20 or 30 seconds).

[Needcoffee]

A couple of more general reasons I think this format is great in concept (not yet in execution unfortunately):

1. Favors PvP builds in a game that hasn't had lots of content for them.
2. Greatly favors real players as opposed to alt armies. I've seen a couple teams that seemed to be run by a single person trying to run all toons (you know: out come the guards, then he switches to a second toon, etc.) and this is not going to work in this format.
3. Truly free. Obviously spenders have stronger builds (all other things being equal) than free players, but access to colosseum and ability to succeed can't be bought by purchasing more stam, tokens, or other in game resources.

I hope the devs figure out the lag and matchup issues. There are a lot of positives to this format. Unfortunately, the lag is an overwhelming negative that is quickly turning many people off.