Hello friends,
Four months ago, we launched Season 2 of Axis & Allies 1942 Online— introducing fresh leaderboards and adjustments to the ladder ranks. Since this launch, we've seen a tremendous response and expansion to our competitive community. It’s been exciting to watch the progress of the game’s competitive players, and we're extremely grateful to all of you for your enthusiasm and support.
Today, I’m excited to share details on Patch 13: Season 3 of Axis & Allies 1942 Online. With this patch we will:
- Launch Season 3 of Competitive Play
- Reset the Leaderboards
- Focus on Stability & Bug Fixes
I’d also like to share some insights into what the future holds for Axis & Allies 1942 Online— in particular, some plans for dice development. We know there have been long-running concerns about the dice rolls, and we have a few ideas how we might address this.
***Please expect an outage between 1pm - 2pm PT, September 24, 2020. ***
PATCH 13: SEASON 3
Patch 13 resets all player rankings, kicking off Season 3 with a fresh start. Congratulations to our Season 2 Platinum-Ranked players!
Season 2 Highlights:
- Competitive players increased by more than 100%!
- Thanks to the changes introduced at the start of Season 2, we saw a healthier distribution of players across all ranks.
- We saw much more movement and variety in the Platinum tier— partly due to the increase in players, and partly due to the rank decay feature. It was not uncommon to see new players enter/exit Platinum throughout the entire season.
PATCH NOTES
FEATURES AND IMPROVEMENTS
- Complete Rollover to Season 3
- Player ranks will reset to base rankings
- Players will need to participate in placement matches
- Players may now view multiple seasons worth of records from the Player Profile via a drop down menu.
- Historical Win/Loss data is now viewable for previous seasons
- Please note: Due to Patch #11 in May, we no longer have the historical win/loss data for Season 1. We apologize for the inconvenience. Season 2 ranks will be preserved and viewable in the Player Profile.
BUG FIXES
- Resolved error for “Unhandled Rejection Error committing phase: PHASE_COMMIT_ERROR_CRASHING_AIRCRAFT_COULD_BE_SAVED.”
- Resolved error for “Carriers under construction not properly recognized as landing spots when mobilizing from different factories into the same region”
- Resolved error for “URE may fire for Cannot read property 'game' of null”
- Resolved error for “Error message: Unhandled Rejection Cannot read property 'moves' of undefined.”
- Resolved error for “URE may fire for getChildAt: Index (0) does not exist.”
- Users can no longer interact with ICs in purchase menu in Observer mode
- Resolved error for “"You cannot repair an IC you do not own" Error when playing against the AI.
- Resolved error for “URE Fires for Error in GameControllerAdapter.doCombatRoll.”
- Resolved error for “URE fires for Error sending doCombatRoll with args ...”
- Resolved error for “URE fires for BoardController renderStage variable is null”
DICE & AXIS & ALLIES
There’s been a ton of discussion in our community around dice rolls. We’ve heard you, and we understand that the randomness of the dice just doesn’t feel right.
Our goal is for the combat to feel satisfying and strategic while staying true to the element of chance at the heart of the board game. So, based on community feedback, our development team is working on a “Stabilized Dice” option for the game.
What does Stabilized Dice Mean?
Stabilized Dice will still be random, but will control for extreme outcomes, and should feel more natural as a result. Our objective is to allow player strategy to play a larger part in the overall game by reducing the chances that dice can swing a whole game in a single roll.
Under Construction
We’re currently in the testing phase for this new dice option, but we’re looking forward to releasing the new dice mode in a future update!
UI OVERHAUL
The team has been working on a major overhaul to the UI system, designed to bring more control and clarity to the game. Our hope is that these changes will improve the game for existing players, and make it much easier for new players to jump into the world of Axis & Allies 1942 Online. We’re not ready to showcase the new UI just yet, but you can rest assured that we’ve got some significant changes coming down the pipeline!
FAREWELL TO CODY OUIMET
All of this brings me to my final announcement today, which is that I will be departing Beamdog at the end of September, 2020. Although I'll be sad to leave such an incredible team, I've made the tough decision to pursue some exciting new adventures.
It has been an absolute pleasure to work alongside the talented team of developers, artists, designers, and quality assurance professionals during my time at the studio. It has been my honor to collaborate with you, the community, to keep making the game the best it can be.
Rest assured that Axis & Allies 1942 Online is in good hands. Beamdog's veteran developers are joined by some extremely talented new game designers and programmers— I can't wait to follow future development as an avid fan. Huge thanks to everyone who has contributed to the development of this legendary game over the past year.
See you on the battlefield,
Cody Ouimet
Producer, Axis & Allies 1942 Online
A DEEPER DIVE ON DICE
For those of you who are interested in the technical side of our dice investigations, here’s a deeper dive for you.
Axis & Allies 1942 Online uses a fairly common PRNG called XorShift128+ to randomize its dice rolls (for more details on XorShift128+, check out our previous post on the topic).
In January 2020, we began to experiment with other algorithms— internally we were confident in our RNG system, but based on community feedback, we wanted to see if there were better options. Over the course of the Winter and early Spring, we compared three major PRNG algorithms:
- Xorshift128+
- PCG
- MersenneTwister
All three systems returned similar internal test results (which was the expected outcome).
Next, to help us verify whether or not we had a flaw in our game’s implementation of Xorshift128+, we decided to create a live, in-game experiment. With the release of each patch since February 2020, we’ve alternated between different PRNG systems to monitor whether the community feedback around the dice changed at all.
Community feedback remained relatively constant throughout the changes to different PRNG systems. As of Patch 12, we have rolled the PRNG system back to the original XorShift128+ algorithm, as it appeared to be the most stable of the three options.
As mentioned above, our development team is working on a Stabilized Dice option that controls for extreme outcomes. Stay tuned for more details on this...
Thanks again for your enthusiasm and support— now it’s back to the trenches for us!