ThrobbingCerk said:

This issue shows how incompetent the Plarium staff are.  Not trying to be rude, but honestly, what imbecile over there at Plarium decided to have EVERY single artifact upgrade attempt ping the server?  You realize that whoever made that poor decision essentially caused an internal DDoS attack against your own servers?

This kind of has to be done though, otherwise you will inevitably have duping or client side manipulation. Essentially, if it’s entirely client side you would 100% have some form of cheating. 

It was just a bad idea to combine the enhancement event with several other events simultaneously. Still enjoyed doing  the fusion and Maulie’s passive is pretty fancy, her damage is left a bit wanting, but she definitely has a place in a few lineups.

With one post all the complainers suddenly disappear... lol.

Hammered said:

With one post all the complainers suddenly disappear... lol.

Hammered said:

With one post all the complainers suddenly disappear... lol.

I don't understand. Why would people continue to complain when the problem has been fixed to most people's satisfaction?

xxcheeseyxx said:

Hammered said:

With one post all the complainers suddenly disappear... lol.

I don't understand. Why would people continue to complain when the problem has been fixed to most people's satisfaction?

The people who are still upset are the ones who are extremely competitive and who spent a lot of coins.  The problem is that they spent millions of coins to get the same thing that some have now paid absolutely nothing for.

There are some players who really don't have any gear upgrades, so they level gear up to 12 and sell it.  So, many of them lost tons of coin, and have nothing more to gain from it than others who literally spent nothing.

I am not one of those players, but I do understand their frustration that because of Plarium's mess up, other players are getting the same exact reward they spent millions to try to earn.

Cirilla said:

Hey-hey! I would like to let you know that you will receive the two champions-rewards from Artifacts Enhancement event (Hill Nomad and Ragemonger) as compensation for the canceled event. Also, we will give you some nice gifts to make up for the yesterday's lagging issues. We will keep you informed about when exactly you will receive the compensation. Have a marvelous week ahead!

Thanks!

kalo said:

xInspireRuin said:

If I can be a voice of reason here.

sure, go ahead...

Understandably a lot of people are upset at the latest issue with the servers.  I, myself, spent a fair amount of silver to attain one of my last champions for the Maulie fusion.  While it was a surprise that the event was cancelled, I knew that there were issues when my enhancements started to take longer to proc the "Success" or "Fail" result.

so far so good...

Working at a tech company (website servers), I can say this much.  No piece of hardware is 100% reliable. 

It's 2019, nobody's talking about hardware anymore, check AWS or any other cloud provider's uptime SLA - 99.9999%. Simply following best practices you can achieve comparable results on-prem. It's not their first game, so supposedly they have some supposedly smart people working on server setups, databases and game back-ends.

Especially under cases of extreme traffic. 

Extreme traffic is Black Friday in Walmart. This game has 0 real-time features. It's traffic load is nothing compared to any real-time MMORPG, where you actually have to coordinate millions of connected players in near real time. Talking about ping below 100ms? What real time feature do we have here? A chat?

Given the circumstances, I wholeheartedly believe that Plarium did everything in their power to prepare for this event.

Like what? Checked the average of daily active players, checked 95th and 99th (three sigma anyone?) in server loads over the last month, ran a comprehensive stress test on staging environment, then used them results as a projection of expected load in production? Eliminated all the memory leaks in the code? Deployed an auto-scaling cluster with fail-safe load balancers?

It doesnt hurt to mention that Raid is one of the most popular mobile games available; not only in the US but in other countries as well.

It's around #70 in "top free iPhone games", according to SensorTower. Compared to many games it's player base is small.

(The sheer amount of server space and resources needed to handle all of our accounts must be pretty insane)

Insane is setup for Blizzards WoW realms. Here? Seriously, google "server setup for 1m concurrent connections" or "1m rps on single server" - you will find some good reads from 2014 (5 years ago).

What mustve been unexpected, was the sheer volume of players that woke up in anticipation of gaining this character.

Again, they have full statistics. Not anticipating something like that is incompetence.

If I had to bet, I would say that large majority of players were waiting for this event, as Ragemonger is a character that has recently been released and was not acquired by a lot of players.  This leads me to assume this was one of the last pieces of the puzzle for a lot of players to unlock the sought after legendary.  With the legendary being one small step away, I'll assume again that every active player who was close to finishing Maulie began upgrading away.

But for some reason, whoever planned this event didn't think that way and didn't see how this one champion will become a bottleneck. They probably didn't check it with PR department as well and they never heard of a very similar fiasco with previous limited legendary fusion.

Theres close to 0 chance that Plarium has their 'upgrade artifacts' data/scripts running on one server.  So what this may mean, is that we ran a very real threat of overloading multiple servers.  So, who knows what other aspects of the game could have been made unavailable..

Plarium made the right choice for our experience, as unexpected as it was.

They turned off a feature to avoid complete server crash, as simple as that. It doesn't matter what's their server(s) setup in the context of damage mitigation.

Plus, they are a company who I've seen first hand compensate their player base for even the smallest of downtime. (Ever gotten a spare boss key or some energy after a prolonged update?)

Now you do sound like a new player OR Plarium employee.

All things aside, Plarium has mentioned that an announcement will be made tomorrow about what will happen with the event moving forward.
Hopefully you can see that theres not too much cause for alarm, and while it is frustrating, I'm certain Plairum has a plan.
P.s. I'm not quite sure how the upvote system works here, but if it helps with visability give this comment a rating so more people can see it. (This is essentially just a different perspective on this issue.)  Thanks!

No offense, but it's a very long version of "it's not their fault, they are the good guys" BS, sugar coated in some distantly technical mumbo jumbo to make it sound more plausible.

No, it is their fault, and it's twice as painful to see something like this after Foli.

I'd ask "Who hurt you..?"

But I already know the answer to that question.

For all intensive purposes, I agree with both sides of the arguement. 

I wrote a much less friendly post directed at Plarium for the Foli contest. One of my arguments was aimed towards the large amount of money that would ultimately be required to even contemplate finishing that tournament. I did not agree with the way the tournament preyed upon those who wanted to better their teams; given the hundreds of dollars required to make that fusion even remotely possible (shard openings, energy packs, silver for artifact upgrades).

I made my comment on this thread because I noticed a trend that the posts initially were riddled with insults instead of arguments. While feedback is critical to any player based system, it felt like the criticism towards the company was blurring over the actual argument. It just so happens that I thought the argument deserved a new perspective.

Now, looking into your highly critical hyperanalysis of every minuscule detail that I added (with good intentions, mind you), to my initial post, I can strongly assume that you care more about stirring the pot and letting others know that you've been made upset than resolving an issue. Look man, it's going to be okay.

Look, your takeaway should be this.  

Plarium may not have calculated properly the amount of resources needed.  

Plarium made a choice to cancel the event.

Plarium did not want to cancel the event.

Plarium had no other choice.

Plarium decided what to do in terms of compensation for the players.

Plarium went about their business.

Then this thread started.

I got the general notion that while some of us were upset, rightfully so, others were much more prone to frustration worthy of bursting a blood vessel. My initial post was a reminder to not stress so much, mistakes happen, and that theres probably an answer to the question that will be made clear, soon.

If you somehow found an argument out of that, well, to each their own.

Hello all! I will elaborate a little on the whole cancellation thing. As you know, we had to cancel the Artifacts Enhancement event because it caused increased load on the server, which led to intermittent lagging issues in the game. Thus, we had to take a radical step to ensure stable game performance. We cannot relaunch the event, for now, but it will return to the game, of course. 

We also understand why a lot of you feel frustrated about this situation. However, the thing is that we cannot give out individual compensations. Also, the Silver used for the upgrades was not just lost. Artifacts, after all, even those that were upgraded for the sake of event points, are going to strengthen your champions (with the Faction Wars in the game no Artifacts should remain unequipped). 

This one was a force majeure situation and we will do our best to not let something like that happen again in the future.

I for one, am generally satisfied with the situation. I am glad the compensation allowed for me to continue the fusion event despite some loss of some more short term items that I would have gained; small losses, tough situation. I get it.

If I may make recommendations for the future. My biggest frustrations with this incident, and I suspect many people's biggest problem, was with how it was handled initially.

I think an in-game notice would have been immensely helpful. 

Also I understand it takes time to make a decision on what to do, but about a full day of being in limbo, wondering whether our time invested on the fusion event would be wasted, and for some of us whether we would continue playing, was frustrating.

I feel like at this point the team running the game is developing and learning how to handle situations, and as a player, I appreciate it.

Hello! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We certainly agree with you regarding the points you've touched. We have certainly learnt the lesson and we will do our best to avoid such situations in the future.

xxcheeseyxx said:

I for one, am generally satisfied with the situation. I am glad the compensation allowed for me to continue the fusion event despite some loss of some more short term items that I would have gained; small losses, tough situation. I get it.

If I may make recommendations for the future. My biggest frustrations with this incident, and I suspect many people's biggest problem, was with how it was handled initially.

I think an in-game notice would have been immensely helpful. 

Also I understand it takes time to make a decision on what to do, but about a full day of being in limbo, wondering whether our time invested on the fusion event would be wasted, and for some of us whether we would continue playing, was frustrating.

I feel like at this point the team running the game is developing and learning how to handle situations, and as a player, I appreciate it.

Cirilla said:

Hello all! I will elaborate a little on the whole cancellation thing. As you know, we had to cancel the Artifacts Enhancement event because it caused increased load on the server, which led to intermittent lagging issues in the game. Thus, we had to take a radical step to ensure stable game performance. We cannot relaunch the event, for now, but it will return to the game, of course. 

We also understand why a lot of you feel frustrated about this situation. However, the thing is that we cannot give out individual compensations. Also, the Silver used for the upgrades was not just lost. Artifacts, after all, even those that were upgraded for the sake of event points, are going to strengthen your champions (with the Faction Wars in the game no Artifacts should remain unequipped). 

This one was a force majeure situation and we will do our best to not let something like that happen again in the future.

I get it. 

But I've got to say: you have to know that most players aren't busily upgrading the artifacts they want to actually use for this event. I know tons of players who spent Sunday morning (myself included) upgrading their 5* Curing Boots/Shields just for the points, since they've already upgraded the stuff they actually want. 

If the point rewards actually made sense for the amount of silver invested (as in "it actually makes sense to take an artifact to 16 for 2.5 million silver vs. 50 to 8 for the same cost"), then sure, that'd be perfectly fine reasoning. But the truth is that artifact enhancement events universally do not give enough points for silver expenditure to go from 1-->16, or even 12-->16. 240/270 simply isn't enough, because there's so much RNG involved. Sure, you might get super lucky and get something to 16 for 1.2 million, but the next one could take you 3 or 4 million. So players like me instead limit how much I can get boned by RNG by instead upgrading dozens of artifacts to 8 and a comparatively small number to 12, because silver is indeed limited. 

Hello

When are you planning the next: Artefacts Enhancement event?

Hello Plarium, when are you planning our next artifacts enhancement event??
The last one stopped so fast that we couldn't invest all our money to upgrade...

please dont! I never have silver in this damn game

really, man, the events make no sense what so ever you will need a minimum of 6,000 points just to get a lego book 1 epic book and a 5* chicken???

there is Really nothing to do without adding money. how many times we need to complain about the events and we get no response I really believe they don't give a crap.

600 Ancient shards will cost like  $1,000 

this game has no other way for players to enjoy the game really sick and tired of this. always out of energy and always out of silver always asking for money

double the energy to 260 so we can play the damn game and farm more silver lower the cost of upgrading an artifact.

I agree with you about those events, its not possible for a F2P to complete them and achieve the "big reward".
It's really upsetting that every new player who invest $$ can actually be much stronger than a F2P who plays for months..

But I'm not talking about that.
I only want them to make an artifact enhancement event (which in this type of event you could actually complete if you save your silver for ~month)
The last artifact enhancement event they ended it after few hours, I know they gave a compensation, but I could get much better since I already had enough silver to complete it...

Hello all! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We will, of course, return the Artifacts Enhancement event, only there is no ETA, for now. We need to make sure that things go smoothly once the event has appeared in the game. 

Neophytos said:

really, man, the events make no sense what so ever you will need a minimum of 6,000 points just to get a lego book 1 epic book and a 5* chicken???

there is Really nothing to do without adding money. how many times we need to complain about the events and we get no response I really believe they don't give a crap.

600 Ancient shards will cost like  $1,000 

this game has no other way for players to enjoy the game really sick and tired of this. always out of energy and always out of silver always asking for money

double the energy to 260 so we can play the damn game and farm more silver lower the cost of upgrading an artifact.

and make a way to play events without adding money every time. 

I totally agree well said !!!

Is this event ever coming back? I've been prepping gear for this but now I'm curious if it's been pulled from the lineup after this issue was posted.

Hello! We are certainly planning on bringing it back. But we need to make sure first that the event goes smooth next time, so there are some preparations server-wise that we still need to do. We will keep you updated.

Gateway inc said:

Is this event ever coming back? I've been prepping gear for this but now I'm curious if it's been pulled from the lineup after this issue was posted.

Please let me know so I know whether to just finish off my gear or keep building up. I've seen different events repeat 2-3 times already since this originally posted