No, I am not therefore admitting those two things. A single recalc time has proven only that those few who participate in GvG do so almost exclusively at that time by their own choice. In fact, the way that one recalc time has affected the timing of guild activity in GvG has prevented many, many players from participating in GvG. I know that the current recalc time has never been convenient to most players due to time zones, and if you can't fight then it's extremely frustrating to be part of a GvG-focused guild. I've tried many times. As for #2, changing the recalc time so guilds can't focus their activity on one brief moment of the day will open up GvG to many players who haven't been able to participate because of that one brief focus of activity. That's just common sense. Sure, if the present recalc time is convenient to you, you don't want it changed. But people who play these servers don't all come from one time zone.
Does that mess with the status quo of the large, established GvG guilds? Yes. Is that bad for the game? Emphatically no. Because the status quo has resulted in relatively small GvG participation in comparison to the overall number of active players. And that's not just my opinion, that's what Inno has stated.
? If it's working, then there's no issue to fix. If there's an issue to fix, then it's not working. That's just simple logic.
You don't do gvg enough to understand how things work for top GvG guilds imo. Heck, even a lot of players in those guilds that actually gvg don't understand the tactics etc. It really takes the gvg leaders that are actually doing the planning to understand the tactics, attendance issues, etc.
It's like saying b/c someone sold something on eBay or made a little website, they can advise amazon about eCommerce.
I already said it once, but it's worth repeating. There are plenty of opportunities outside of recalc for players to fight. If they choose to fight the top guilds that bubble/"put up a wall" that's their choice. More recalc times will not increase participation over the course of 3-6 months. There might be a quick flurry until everyone is out of goods/units and/or realize it's pointless for most guilds b/c everything flips so fast.... After that, nada. I've talked with a couple dozen or more gvg leaders from different guilds, different sizes, different servers, different rankings. It's obvious to all of us how unhealthy this is going to be for those that actually gvg right now.
Good leaders will get their off-hours players involved in other ways. Period. Simple. If you try and can't get involved, either your gvg leader is not creative or you don't know what you're doing. Join a new guild. Start a ghost.
Find a different enemy to attack.
This 4hr change is about overthrowing top guilds. You said it yourself. I'm telling you from experience, this is going to be the wrong fix for accomplishing that goal in most cases.
This is such a red herring. There is no business in the world that designs its capacity based on maximum usage. Whether it is employee scheduling, building size, vehicle fleet, or whatever. It just isn't good economics to pay for maximum anything based solely on peak usage times and then have much of it sit unused most of the time. Lag is attributable to one thing and one thing only, recalc "forcing" players to all fight at the same exact time. Spread that out through the day and most of the lag issues go away.
You could not be more mistaken about this. I can tell you without question businesses DO design based on max usage. I can say that from real-world experience - not just classroom theory, stoner pontificating, or discussing stuff on forums. In fact, a lot only give a crap about max usage cases because that's when they win or lose business to their competitors. Do you want data about why it's so important? Here's a start (with respect to eCommerce/websites):
https://neilpatel.com/blog/loading-time/
If someone expects a full website to load in under 2 seconds, we damn well expect to be able to open a sector in less than 2 seconds. During peak use, 10 seconds is definitely not exaggerating (30-40 seconds probably is excessive, but it sure feels that long when you watch shields and swords flying). That's why elastic computing and cloud hosting solutions like AWS are so popular among large successful businesses.
Performance testing is a huge part of having successful products...
https://www.thinksys.com/qa-testing/5-types-performance-testing-you-need-to-know/
Spreading the fighting throughout the day, but still having shields all drop at the same time will only have the effect of burning players out and making them quit playing. For the "main recalc" - top guilds will still show in force until they're too fed up with a poor product. There will still be peak usage lag issues.
Now, if shields drop staggered at different times throughout the day (rolling resets), that would help ease peak load without reducing the player base.
I doubt the primary issue is the servers though. I usually have a good ping even at recalc. I hate to say it, but the issue is more likely in the code itself. Optimizing code can cut load times by huge amounts. I've seen application processing time drop from 30 min to 5 min with rewritten/optimized code (it took 6 months and a badass dev to fix the code though). Inno has mentioned several times that FE/AA was thought to be the end of the game. It's pretty clear GvG improvements have been on the back burner. I recently came to understand that the developer who was largely responsible for GvG passed away suddenly (
there's a building created in his honor) just before FE was rolling out. Correlation or causation? Impossible to know on our end. Kind of hints that the old codebase might not have been optimized for the current demand. Good problem to have
as long as it gets fixed.
Participation will only increase if players in non-gvg guilds start becoming interested in GvG. There's not much room to increase the participation of players in GvG guilds without adding a mobile version. No point in getting more participation if it's just going to sink a product that cannot handle max load.
