Blizzard Addresses Issues During the 2017 Americas Summer Playoffs
Aratil has made a post on the official Hearthstone forums which addresses issues that plagued this past weekend's HCT Americas Summer Playoffs event.
- Venues experienced DDoS attacks and equipment problems.
- The experience was not acceptable.
- They are discussing improvements they can make before the start of the next HCT Season.
- Additional fallbacks are needed in the case of disconnects.
- Equipment requirements and venue capabilities will be reevaluated.
Quote from AratilThank you to our players and viewers who participated in and watched the Hearthstone Championship Tour Americas Summer Playoffs on Sept. 16 and 17.
Over the course of the event, playoff venues experienced multiple DDoS attacks and equipment malfunctions that disrupted the tournament. As a result, affected players were unfortunately required to restart games due to disconnections. This also caused extended wait times between games. While we made efforts to address the issues as they were occurring, we want to be clear that the resulting experience this past weekend was not acceptable, and we sincerely apologize to the competitors who were adversely affected. There is still much we can do to improve the overall competitive experience, and to reduce the number of issues that can occur.
We are currently discussing several improvements that we would like to implement as early as the start of the next Hearthstone Championship Tour season. We are also going to reevaluate equipment requirements and venue capabilities to make sure we deliver a better competitive experience for our players, as well as design additional fallbacks in case of disconnects. The Hearthstone Championship Tour has grown over the years into a circuit with high expectations, and we are continually striving to deliver a better experience. We would not have been able to build this program without your participation, both as players and viewers, and your feedback is valuable as we build out our plans for Hearthstone Championship Tour 2018.
Please keep in mind that this is not the end of the conversation—we’re going to do better and we’ll fill you in on our progress as we move forward. Reach out to us on the forums, Facebook or Twitter if you have any feedback about #HCT to share. We look forward to hearing from you, now and into the future of competitive Hearthstone.
Sounds like they will be fixing the issue soon ...
Smol indie company ladies and gentlemen.
Easy just give NA free packs and everyone is gonna be happy /irony. No seriously I stopped watching Blizzard tournaments since a lot of times and I'm gonna say that this was the best decision ever
When I worked on console games, replays were always one of the first things that were implemented. Just storing the initial random seed and the inputs for each player does the trick if the game is deterministic (i.e. replaying the same inputs from the same initial seed always gives identical results). The deterministic part is the hardest part about implementing that (all variables that are important must be reset to the same values for the replay as the original). You can also use a separate random seed for events which do not affect gameplay (such as particle effects etc.) to make this simpler to implement.
The reason this is implemented early on in a program life cycle is because it makes debugging the game much easier. The game crashed? Just replay the game and just before it is about to crash halt the program execution and step through the code to see what caused the crash. This saves a lot of time fixing crash bugs.
It has the added bonus that you can use the replay feature for the "attract mode" where the game plays itself (Sony certainly used to require an attract mode that lasted for 30 seconds for all games they approved).
Just replay the game up to the point of disconnection with the stored actions. You don't even have to display the replay, just run the game loop with the same input but don't display anything.
You would then restart the game at the point the disconnect happened.
Just restarting with the same seed and getting the players to play again from the beginning would not be a good solution because the game would play out in the same way if the same actions were taken and changing a decision would make the game replay differently from that point onwards.
EDIT: Replay is an ambiguous term I just realised, since it can also mean the players replaying the game. I should have used playback instead to mean the computer reruns the match using stored actions.
Yeah... League of Legends does this. During Season 3 Worlds (or season 2?), the server crashed and it was half way through the game. Everyone knows that there is a slight chance of randomness in minions pushing and movement (ie: play a 1 on 1 and watch the top and bottom lane push differently just by minions). They're never identical in each game. To have the game return back to its' original spot, the server replayed all actions, including RNG crits, and the game resumed from when it crashed.
Drift in playback results is usually caused by either floating point rounding issues which you can't control or frame rate differences between the original and the playback.
Both of those can be eliminated if you program the system correctly - either don't use floating point or store entity positions along with the playback data. You can use a fixed timestep or store the elapsed time per frame in the playback buffer for the 2nd issue.
Neither of those apply to Hearthstone since the core game logic is very simple you could just store which card was played and what is targeted.
Random number generators once seeded always give the exact same sequence of numbers in the same order when you rerun them with the same initial conditions.
That can be used for exploits in a badly designed RNG system (if you could deduce the seed for the game in online poker for example you would know which cards were dealt to everyone). Which is why online poker games use a robust RNG algorithm with a long period (Mersenne Twister is the standard these days for RNG algorithms). You also reseed often and/or add nondeterministic random events (throwing away numbers from the RNG generator based on some non-deterministic event e.g. times between user inputs, local conditions on the server (processor load/system interrupts occuring/disk access latency/etc.). Again, that doesn't really apply to Hearthstone since the number of cards you see initially makes it impossible to deduce the random seed if they reseed once per game. They could also reseed the RNG when resuming a playback so having knowledge of the seed used for the suspended game does not affect the resumed game.
The technology isn't there yet.
SC2 is a way more complicated game than Hearthstone. They have resume from replay. Just implement resume from replay. Oh and that means you have to implement replays. This is Blizzard where's the polish?
Those would be 'poles'. 'Polish' is an adjective (e.g. polish sausage), while 'poles' is the actual noun for the local populace.
technically it should not be difficult for blizzard to re-create the board state before the disconnect...
in this case, any disconnect, the players can just resume the game instead of re-playing the game...
but they are a small indie company, whether they want to put money and time into a feature that only see play during tournament... i doubt so...
Create a tournament mode already with dedicated tournament servers! I cannot believe this hasn't been implemented yet. For HS to be taken seriously as an esport, this needs to happen. No excuses anymore. Oh and while they're at it, can we please have a proper tournament spectator mode?
Dedicated LOCAL tournament servers is what they'd need to solve the problem of a venue being DDOS'd, but I agree. It shouldn't be that hard. They ought to be able to fudge it right now by making a "Tournament" region accessible locally at official events.
FIX DAMN JADE
Not your frigging lags
They desperate need tournament servers, how a game as competitive as Heartshtone, wich is also three years old stil don`t have dedicated servers for tournaments. One could say this would be implemente more easilly than in Mobas wich are far more complex than a card game.
Could they do better? Yes. Is this the nature of online (and even occasionally LAN) esports? Also yes unfortunately. This happens to every online game.
Until some theoretical technological breakthrough happens, esports just will have more technical problems and disruptions compared to athletic sports such as football, soccer, baseball, basketball, etc.
Hmm. Still no mention of a tournament mode. I mean if this thing tought us anything is that we clearly don't need it. Kappa