The way bots are putting spaces between letters in their URLs, or switching to new URLs altogether, it seems pretty clear some of their sites are getting added to the word filter. It also seems some of the bots are adding random characters to the end of their messages, presumably to avoid setting off some form of detection of identical messages being sent dozens of times.

These measures only seem to be slightly inconveniencing the bots, but they are making the spam less presentable which is probably helping discourage players from responding to them.

It'd risk a little vulnerability to abuse, but I wonder if shadow-muting accounts globally for 24-72 hours if a threshold of players block or report them would help. Mostly because if they don't know they're muted they'd still automatically run around between lobbies sending messages, unaware they're never being seen.

I think it would help to announce some kind of public discouragement though. Games announcing RMT is forbidden or even that they've suspended or banned x accounts in a ban wave for buying game currency from third parties has been a thing for years, and surely stops some easily-influenced players from doing it. That may not be enough to kill bots through lost profitability, but surely reducing their income is still a good thing?

@Tri-Edge said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

for me anyway there's a sweet spot as they're getting up that's been consistent to where I can guarantee hit them before they can dodge or retaliate

Yeah, I don't think that window lasts long enough to overcome higher pings. Or rather, because I don't get to know when the window starts I can't take advantage.

@Tri-Edge said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

with Talis you can actually just throw it and it will stay in the air at it's max distance. It will disappear if you hit an object.

Yeah this was me not understanding the mechanics after all. I can get more out of those now.

@Tri-Edge said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

No comeback story games today lol.

Welcome to my world haha.

To be honest? I think it's gotten a little better since the campaign began. Or at the very least it's increased the distribution of terrible players on both sides.

And I am seeing some terrible players. You shouldn't be able to take mid with Protect and then have the opponents you wiped out arriving to take it back without a single teammate being anywhere near mid between when you initiated Protect and when you either retreated or got KO'd. That's five players who just don't know how to play.

I'm faring worse with my attempts to explain things though. I'm probably suffering from frustration to an extent, but it is funny to be in 1st with 700 points and try to get the rest of the team to pull their weight only to be told "stfu noob" by someone who promptly dies and loses 16 points. Sixteen. Meaning they had 160 points prior to dying. You start with 300. That means they got themselves KO'd five times without picking up a single emblem or KO. And that 16 point loss makes it a sixth. It's astonishing stuff.

It does make for an interesting dynamic though. Many of my games, I find myself with significantly more points than the rest of the team. This means my options are to keep fighting, get KO'd and lose a ton of points, or protect my points by keeping back and trying to support teammates that are already having clear difficulty finding mid in the first place, so basically nobody is challenging for mid anymore. It seems teams benefit most from having people that are close together in skill so that kind of dilemma doesn't need to happen.

I'm not sure you really can do much because of disconnections.

One thing the game seriously should do though is cancel the game if someone disconnects in the preparation time or never makes it into the game to start with.

Nothing hurts like getting a +200% battle points pull and immediately finding only 5 people appearing in your prep area the following game. It's basically a guaranteed loss and 6 minutes of wasted time and lost rank points.

@ZorokiHanuke said in Hans: his magical glasses and how he is the true guardian:

we never see him going on the field

We actually do. He takes part in the tournament in Episode 1. If I remember he partners up with Joseph.

@Akonyl said in Why i will not be buying a season pass or spending money on this game:

hopefully if enough people complain they'll do a few re-introductions like they just did for the stuff xbox had access to before PC release.

They only did that for season 1, and they fudged that by only allowing us to get half of the items so no PC player has been able to get the full content of seasons 1 or 2, or even 3 without spending Star Gems in the first two weeks and only really story to give any SG back then.

Realistically they still need to give us season 1 again so PC players can get the stuff we were forced to sacrifice last month (also the Rose Saber camo that never reappeared in the first place), all of season 2, and tiers 24+ of season 3. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to extend that to seasons 4 and 5 afterwards for pre-Steam.

@Reilet said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

[diagram]

Oh hey! My visual estimate was close. I guessed 25% was between the fourth and fifth dot, and that the bars went to the ends of the border rather than the sides of the team icon.

@Reilet said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

As long as the game is >20:80 and with a minute left, you can still win it.

Oh, absolutely! But this is theorycrafting, looking at the point at which a comeback is still mathematically possible. Realistically, a game where you've been consistently 30-70 down or 70-30 up for a sustained time is going to stay somewhere close to that, because that difference in ability is why the gap became sustained that way in the first place. Sometimes the losing team might make up a little ground, sometimes they'll lose more.

But rarely will a team bad enough to have been completely thumped for the first 4 minutes suddenly overperform for the last 60 (or 120, or 180) seconds by a dramatic enough margin to snatch a win.

This allows me to describe my frustration another way; in a clear majority of games, the lead either changes once soon after the first skirmish in mid, or simply never changes at all. I'm sure if games were regularly back-and-forth I wouldn't have identified this sense of stagnation in the first place.

@Reilet said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

Every rainbow is worth 15 points

10 points.

@Reilet said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

The problem is your teammates going in and dying. That hurts even more than not getting rainbow tokens.

Definitely. I'm still working on the best approach for how to do something about this. Taking a moment out (generally after a narrowly-won engagement where I'm at 600+ points and best off hiding and healing) to try to explain this to teammates often earns a response like "If you shut up and played we'd be winning".

It's not easy to explain these mechanics mid-game, least of all to the people who just WANT to fight fight fight. For the moment "Stick together to get more kills" seems to resonate, though I've still had a couple argumentative responses about teammates stealing "their kills" so there's room for improvement with that line too.

I wonder if battle arena would benefit from showing just your team's scores on a leaderboard. Maybe if this type of player that presumably has around 200 points by the end of the game saw how they were regularly dragging their team down - and more importantly, knew that the rest of their team could see them too - they'd be incentivised to work on the cause of that?

Edit: One other thing I picked up on today: Tokyo is easily and by far the worst map in this mode. With its T-junction midpoint and all the tiny walls it is designed to exacerbate both team imbalances and low-ping advantages.

@Tri-Edge said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

Na definitely would say 50-60% of the time. Since that's the first half of the game. Easily able to come back unless you or your team are new players that don't know what to focus, and how to keep control of mid

How is that your experience. I am honestly bewildered to hear this, and cannot emphasise that disbelief enough. In games I'm involved in, the team that is winning at all, even narrowly, halfway through the game, wins the game at least 80% of the time. If it's a solid lead, I almost never see that lead decrease substantially, and for it to be thrown away into a loss I think I've seen once ever.

@Tri-Edge said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

No I'm referring to 20-80 games, you call it luck, yet I consistently can come back from it. [snip] Luck has little to do with it. [snip] when you're 20-80 at 4 minutes, that's... literally so easy to come back from. You're not coming back from that by just collecting emblems, you need to wipe out their team, focus down 1st and 2nd.

You must be playing a different game. None of this has any resemblence to games I'm in. The only games we were both in were extremely one-sided as you said yourself. Where are these mythical 20-80 comebacks and how come they never happen when I'm present?

And that advice is freaking hilarious. If teams that are getting slaughtered were remotely capable in combat as to slaughter the enemy team, they wouldn't find themselves 20-80 down a minute in in the first place. This tale does not have any alignment with basic logic.

It's good to see you value Protect as well. When we're 40-60 down I generally get to break their hold on mid by dropping it with 60-90 seconds left and clearing them out. Sometimes I manage to live until the end of the game after that and we win, sometimes I get killed after they respawn and 5-10 seconds later they take the lead back. It really depends on how supportive the rest of the team is.

@Tri-Edge said in What did Japanese players (and now we) do to deserve Battle Arena?:

Lucky player lmao, dude stop. You have no idea the games gonna be over by 4 minutes. You determine the game is over at 4 minutes because you or your teammates had a bad start. It's not fact that the game is over at 4 minutes.

Which is funny because since the event started I conducted a little exercise. After 1 minute passed, I predicted the team that would win. Most of the time this was an easy guess, since it was the team that was at least 65-35 up. For some closer games where I felt we'd had a bad start or I'd personally done well or badly but the lead was narrow, I predicted the losing team.

I got 21 out of 24 guesses right. That's 87.5% accurate. Two of the incorrect guesses were games that were too close to call (which were the most fun games of the session, and a depressing minority), and the last one I had done exceptionally well at the start but our lead was a sliver, so I figured we'd lose it and we didn't. But overall that's quite a bit better than "no idea".

It's an exercise I recommend anyone try. I learned quite a bit from it, not just what to expect from games.

By the way if you're interested in other stats that I noted down at the same time:

• Game results: 9 wins, 15 losses.
• Team placements: #1 11 times, #2 8 times, #3 2 times, #4-6 3 times.

So overall a disappointing session and without being in the bottom 3 not much I could do to sneak around and assassinate people. Still gained 90 rank points thanks to the generous valuation of wins and losses, but a 50% win rate would expect to see 168 in that time. Oh well, swings and roundabouts. I've had good sessions the other way so this balanced that out.

That placement is important and reassuring to note though. As much as I know I'd benefit from being closer to the server and would definitely win some of the 1v1 engagements I'm losing, I'm clearly not significantly holding my teams back at the moment and that's a very good thing. I still believe the format helps mitigate connection-based disadvantages as much as it reasonably can.

I've learned a few things in this session too.

First, if I knock someone with a low ping down, they can often get up and hit/stun/KO me between my attacks trying to hit them as they get up. Since the server wants to hear my client say I've hit an opponent, there's a gap between when they get up and when I can hit them. I (and therefore my team) have certainly benefit from identifying low-ping opponents and reducing engagement with them. It helps to play smart.

Second, when Protect is not available, Sprint can be put to use in some remarkable ways. Opponents for now just do not expect it, so you can dash through a group and hit them from behind or talis them from within. Or simply keep running and make a group of them chase after you while your team takes mid. It's quickly become my second choice skill.

Third, if a bow user starts that slow PA and I'm in plain sight, I'm already dead. I can get behind a corner with plenty of time to spare, but all they need to do is shoot where I was. High ping targets basically make the bow PA viable.

Four, I'm not sure I can throw a talis as far as people with a lower ping. If I wait for it to get further away before using the technique, the game has it disappear and casts it on me instead. I haven't yet managed to trial and error this yet so I could be misunderstanding talis mechanics, but I've seen some opponents throw talises surprisingly far, like from halfway into their side of Tokyo into halfway into our side. Fortunately this doesn't affect too much, mostly Tokyo with only minor situational capability loss around mid on Forest and Volcano.

Five, every once in a while my teammates attack me when I'm on red team. I should probably change my outfit to one that isn't primarily blue. Then again, this may be earning me vital moments of delay when engaging with blue team opponents, so when I do it'd be worth assessing that to see if I'd be giving up a more important advantage.

The swiki page on battle arena says:

Synchronization occurs from the point of jumping and attacking, and other than that, synchronization occurs approximately every second. Even if you see the opponent who is running, it means that you are one second or two seconds ago

Consequently I've taken to short-jumping as quickly as I can whenever I'm running at full speed to force updates. It does seem to help reduce getting sniped!

Honestly, the most disappointing thing is, battle arena is close to being very fun for me. Evenly-matched games are really enjoyable, and most importantly the 5 minutes pass quickly enough during those to make me understand why you wouldn't want that time reduced. But those games just... don't happen often enough, and for no-contest games 5 minutes draaaaags.

I still feel like jumping into it while doing other quests, crafting etc, but a couple consecutive no-contest games really kills that enthusiasm fast.

I've often wondered what players make of Hans. I get the impression he's thought of as either a braggart or a whiner. But in wanting to see how you take out certain enemies and in most CO completion dialogues planning to try it out as well, I get the sense he's pretty admirable in aiming to improve.

What?!

GMs, some of us are doing your Battle Arena campaign! We don't get told about these unscheduled surprise concerts!!

Please think this through and tell us when they'll be!

Edit: Okay, they just did about an hour ago, after two of the concerts had already passed.

You know I used to think the whole communication thing was minor and mostly caused by the constant failure to tell us the schedule for the last Tuesday in a cycle, but maybe this is a more ingrained problem.

@Loona said in Tradable overpriced SG cosmetics is a higher priority than months of gutted content?:

You are basically being told by various people in this thread to "suck it up" and "stop being impatient" when it's really the matter of shit not being orderly in the first place.

Why is nobody listening...? For both units and Yamato it's exactly the opposite and things are ordered in the first place.