[Investigating] Silver/gold rewards are missing for most participants in kingdom defense

Additional food for thought:

As described, the current game behavior is a bug because damage was dealt, even though the total damage was more than sufficient to kill the boss, and the players in question were in battle. Clearly the health was not “ticking down as players from the Kingdom deal damage to it” otherwise we wouldn’t have 4 players with total damage equal to the bosses health. The leaderboard is clear evidence that the damage was dealt, regardless of whether their specific damage resulted in the boss’s health being reduced to zero. (I’m sure there is a “well how was this programmed” element to it, which is why it seems to me to be a bug).

This may be less of an issue once the Boss Tier is high enough so that it takes many player attempts to kill the boss, but as it stands right now, it appears that if two or more persons are in battle when the boss dies, only one’s damage is being counted for purposes of the individual silver/gold awards.

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I would like to add that I was MVP on day one, but haven’t got the bonus silver/gold rewards



image

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Tier III Leaderboard for Damage:

Only one person again received the Gold Individual reward. Again, this is a bug.

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What’s happening is that unlike multiplayer runs, dragon defense runs are asynchronous. Therefore, the server does not communicate with players routinely to determine when a dragon has been defeated, or enough accumulated Kingdom damage has been done to it to “win” the defense. Dragon damage is only reported to the server upon the conclusion of any individual player’s asynchronous run.

The game’s logic appears to be that as soon as any kingdom defense run reports enough individual damage total needed to pass the damage threshold for a “win”, the game immediately evaluates the state of the guild leaderboard at that moment and sends out rewards to the kingdom based on that evaluation alone. The server ignores the scoring potential for upwards of 29 other guildmates whose runs are still in progress, as they are still fighting the dragon in their own asynchronous instances. When those players finish, their scores are added to the guild leaderboard, but are ignored for reward purposes because the server had already sent out the rewards packages to everyone and considers the event closed.

Yes we know what is happening. But it is counter to what is explained in the patch notes. Therefore it is a bug. Otherwise they need to change the explanations about how the event is supposed to work. Also what you describe about it evaluating it when the event ends (boss hp is zero) is incorrect. Plenty of members have already done damage while the event was ongoing, yet did not receive any award. So their damage was not tabulated at the end of the event for Silver/Gold award purposes. Anyways it doesn’t matter what you think is occurring in operations of the program in the background. What happens is contrary to what is supposed to happen as explained by @Jeto above. So, again, it’s a bug.

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I tested this today. I immediately joined and started fighting, did 40-50k worth of damage and then stopped. Once the dragon was defeated, I finished my dragon off. I did not receive any medals even though I dealt damage prior to it dying.

I also confirmed with others in the kingdom that only one person received the rewards (presumably the one who registered the first kill).

Tomorrow I will test if retreating after dealing damage gets you rewards (if I am awake at the time).

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And also no, I will not be providing that thread. I do, however, look forward to the complaint thread on that topic that will surely appear later this coming week though.

sigh

The game is a computer program. Understanding the background operations in play is necessary to determine if the observed behavior is actually a bug or not.

What Jeto or the patch notes say does NOT make something automatically a bug.

Your reply back to me indicates that you are still failing to fully understand how the current design implementation is working.

I’ve reviewed the the patch notes multiple times over now and compared them to my perceptions and understandings of how the system appears to be currently working. I don’t believe that there are any technical errors in the patch note descriptions of the mode. Yes, there are some lines that could have been worded a bit better to describe the asynchronous gameplay mechanics of defense battles to avoid reader confusion. But there’s nothing materially incorrect with the information that was presented.

You may not like the system in place at the moment (I personally am not fond about it either from my previous post), but that does not automatically indicate that there is a bug in that system. IMO, there’s a high probability that Jeto or Kafka will post that same conclusion.

Addressing such perceived shortcomings of the currently implemented system would be outside of the scope of this bug report, would you not agree?

When I see one one of these names in response to this Bug Report, I will be sure to actually care what’s said.

To reiterate:

This is not happening based on my elementary english and math skills. It doesn’t say “if you are currently in a battle, then you will receive the rewards earned for the amount of damage that you had done in previous battles”. Therefore we have submitted a Bug Report.

Perhaps @Lyrian you haven’t noticed this because you are the only one in your kingdom who had a chance to attack the Raid Boss. :person_shrugging:

I’ve already explained exactly what’s going on with the system. There’s nothing more to say on the matter that’s more appropriate than the hard truth. As much as it sucks, the system is currently working as it was implemented with the update.

Re-read the lines you are citing. The key phrase here is:

When does the server determine that the dragon is defeated? As soon as the first asynchronous player reports damage through a completed defense run instance that pushes the cumulative kingdom damage total to a level that is at least equal to the required amount of total damage to win the Kingdom Defense Event.

Ok, onto the second part of the patch note.

That’s not an incorrect statement.

“That point” refers the first part of the statement, which is the moment the first asynchronous player reports enough damage to accumulate enough cumulative kingdom damage to the dragon to win the event. At that exact moment, the server calculates who is eligible for Silver and Gold rewards, sends out the appropriate rewards to the relevant players, and ends the event. Any damage reported to the server by any kingdom player after that exact moment where rewards are calculated is ignored by the server because the server has officially ended the defense event.

If there is anything that could be considered a bug, it would be that the game is allowing the kingdom leaderboard to be updated with the disallowed damage scores from players who completed runs after the defense event has ended resulting in inaccurate reporting of leaderboard for which Silver/Gold rewards were determined.

The system is working as designed and described in the patch notes. It’s just very hostile to players, which seems to be intended. We’ll talk more in the other thread on that, as there is much to discuss on that topic.

And this is the letter I’ve got for today’s kingdom defence, not ever standard gold+gems reward:

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Here is my understanding of what is happening with below easy to understand timeline:
Below are made up numbers for easy understanding:
Boss total health :100k; silver reward 5k, gold reward 10k damage.
Player A, B, C, D, E enters battle
Player A: 3k damage, 1min end, boss hp:97k standard reward.
Player B 6k damage, 2 min end, boss hp:91k, silver reward
Player C 11k damage, 3 min end, boss hp:80k, golf reward
Player D 77k damage, 4 min end, boss hp:3k, gold reward,
Player E 100k damage, 5 min end, boss hp:0, standard reward (effective 3k damage even though it days 100k on leaderboard with MVP)
Any player that played more than 5 min will have effective 0 damage and get standard reward regardless of actual damage done.

Thus to maximize gold reward count for the kingdom, stop damage after hitting gold damage threshold and let the boss kill you asap to end your combat. This is of course when boss hp is low

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Yes despite the disagreements voice earlier, I think we can all agree that the “what is happening” is that all damage done in ongoing combats when another player finishes their combat that reduces the boss HP to zero is treated as zero (the server disregards the result of their combat damage but still posts it to the leaderboard screen). If as @Lyrian conjectures this is intended design, then it suggests that the developers have taken feedback about the prior kingdom issues and disregarded it entirely to create an event that is even more insidious and results in a race of greed about who can score as much damage as possible the fastest and end their match first so that it gets counted. Since I believe in good game design, I would at least think that any combats in action when the boss is defeated should count because they are active combats able to be initiated by players with the intent to reduce the boss health to zero, otherwise players actions are regularly wasted and it creates genuine frustration and disappointment, not things that you normally would want to foster in your players on a daily basis.

I still consider it a bug that it is operating the way it does because it is contrary to good design and it contrary to how it was described in the notes.

It’s a sad thing when the conclusion about a newly introduced event is that you have to micromanage people’s efforts on a daily basis often resulting in unplayed attempts and general frustration due to missed targets rather than just simply letting people play the game and enjoy maximizing their attempts each time.

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Hey all,

Just letting you know I have grabbed this thread today and I’m discussing this further with the team. When I get more information, I’ll update this thread.

Also, in the meantime, I have cleaned up this thread as the discussion was getting combative. Please keep it civil moving forward.

Jeto (she/they) - Support Human :woman_mage:t2:

The 22 hour cycle is a very good idea, because people in every time zone has their chance.
Here is another solution (from another game).
During the time of the kingdom defense, every member does the 3 attacks, and the total damage is calculated. There can be some point system, and the dragon is defeated if the total points gained reach a certain number, BUT everybody can hit in the 18 hour time window.
(For example 1 point for every percent of the dragon’s hit points or something like that - defeated when the points reach 100, but the dragon remains available for the players who hasn’t attacked yet.)
At the and of the 18 hours defense time window, everybody gets their reward by the total points earned (for example first 5 gets gold, 6-15 gets silver, the rest gets the basic rewards).
What do you think?

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I think they think „too much programming“.

Good idea! And welcome to the community! :sunglasses::+1:

It’s been 3 weeks, no new information provided by @Jeto. I think we can assume at this point that the event is “working as intended” in that players who are in combat when the boss is killed effectively lose their attack and any scoring that had been done in that combat up to the point the boss was killed is lost. At this point, whether its a bug is somewhat irrelevant as a “fix” would just introduce the silly consequence as discussed earlier of constant coordination to have multiple people in combat when the boss is killed for “credit”.

Instead, why not just make the event better! Here’s some suggestions how that can happen starting with the introduction of an “overkill mode” that essentially renders this entire thread obsolete:

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Cross sharing!

Looking forward to the completion of this review.

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Now we’re heading into 1.4.5 soon-ish and it’s still ruining the day of players! I was 5th on the Leaderboards of my Kingdom Defense and scored way more damage than needed to hit both Silver and Gold Rewards and yet I received neither. I don’t know for sure if this is the exact same issue reported FOUR MONTHS AGO but it seems like it. This is really frustrating. We players spend our precious time playing this game and it would be nice not to feel like we’re being screwed over by a glitch that could easily have been fixed by Overkill mode.


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