Greetings to all! This is GM XiangYu, the Herald of the League. I am here to directly deliver the words from our developers.
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We, the devs of the Dexintgames, have been persevering to find an answer to one of the most essential questions since our server merge:
How can we let users play a fair match in a stable network condition?
As you all do, we ourselves have some experiences of missing our skills that would have definitely hit due to harsh lag, or unnecessarily being killed by opponents because of it. Simply saying, it is not a pleasant memory indeed. And we understand that you are angry and frustrated since there hasn't been a word from us about how our global server works.
With our recent 2.4 patch, the Iron League has changed a lot once more. We decided that this would be a right moment to tell users about our game's matching mechanism.
Merging many to one: A path to a global server and its specifics
A few months ago, we have merged our separate regional servers to one so that more users can play games with each other. We have also expected that through this server consolidation, we might be able to (at least partially) resolve our AI bot issues that numberless users have been complaining about.
Originally there were four regional servers that we were running:
- Northeast Asia
- Southeast Asia
- North America
- Europe
And as our server consolidation patch, we gave to our game 3 major changes.
- Establishment of a new server: South America We have received from our South American users numerous requests to open their own regional servers. We have accepted their requests and opened up our South American gameplay server.
- All region's "Lobby Server" merged into one. Every regional server of the Iron League is composed of two parts: the "Lobby" server where users chat, make friends, and go to the market to buy goods, and the "Gameplay" server where you are matched with others and play games. The "server merge" that we have done was the process of converging all regional servers' lobbies to one. In other words, the gameplay servers are still separated according to regions, and our ultimate objective of the global server patch was to connect these 5 gameplay servers.
- "Webbing" the regions
Establishing a web of a network among the 5 regions around the globe was certainly not an easy task. We have spent a lot of time and effort in this matter. The basic principle that we brought out is this:
we allocate our users into the regional server that provides the most optimal gameplay environment.
- Rule A: When the users of the same regional server are matched, they are allocated to the server of that region.
- Rule B: When the users of different regional servers are matched, they are allocated to the server depending on the number of people in that party. For example, when there are 2 American users and 4 Brazilian users in one game, they will all play the game in the South American server.
- Rule C: When there is the same number of people from each regional server, they are allocated to the server of the user who has started the match queue the earliest.
Of course, we are still experiencing some difficulties to provide users most suitable conditions for gameplay. The initial network instability between the regions far far away was somewhat inevitable. Imagine the situation in which you are the only Korean in a game and the other 5 users are Southeast Asians. Or imagine that you are a Brazillian and you party up with your friend in Europe server.
Our current goal is to stabilize this global web to much higher level and we are constantly working on it. Thankfully, our global lobby server's stability has actually been improved due to packet minimalization and optimization.
Inside View: What about AI?
Aside from our work on the global network and further development of gameplay contents, we are obliged to talk about our AI problems here. The devs are now experimenting with how to utilize them instead of contemplating to get rid of them instantly.
As mentioned far above, we expected that converging our user pool would naturally let us decrease the number of AI. But the recent statistics displayed that the situation did not get much better.
We know you all hate them. We always hear you say "Kick out the bots or I'll quit!!" But we will be honest here. If we do eliminate AIs, our matching time will certainly be longer due to our thin playerbase. And this would dissatisfy another type of users, those who want to play games no matter who they fight with.
We decided that instead of annihilating the bots right now, it would be better in the short term to inform the users the possibility of matching against bots and establishing a fair&fun gameplay environment even with the bots included. But we've been gradually decreasing the number of bots, and we promise you that it will decrease more and more in the long term.
Thank you for reading this long note. Every single moment we genuinely appreciate your support.