The first season end is near!
The last games of the season will be played on 23rd August 2016. The new divisions and placements will be generated during 26th August's daily update.
Teams will be placed to divisions according to their Coach Performance Index (CPI) - a combination of team ranked ELO and league position.
If you haven't been focusing on team ranked a lot to raise your CPI, now is the last time to get a higher division placement. There are some issues with League wins and losses where some games were duplicated on the day database got corrupted. Unfortunately I can't fix the wins and losses retrospectively, but in general this shouldn't affect the final positions too much. In a normal season there is 18 games (two against each of your 9 opponents). But this season due to DB corruption some teams might have few more games)
Main focus right now and what's in plan for the future
1. Optimisation
Priority goal is to get daily update back to around 15 minute range. After we've managed it within this range the next goal is to have the daily update within 15 minutes for upto 56k active teams.
It's possible and there is a dev solution working, but it still requires some testing. Hopefully I will be able to launch the new daily update system soon in few days.We are looking and researching different server setups as well - often requests to the page seem to hang and you will have to reclick or it will keep loading. We hope to resolve this with server change.
In general lately we have been working on a lot of scaling issues.
2. UX and general feel of the website
This concerns everything from adding more content for newer players and making everything more transparent in regards to what happens when you actually do something to what
different pages look like. A lot of pages are still underdeveloped and not designed to a point where they should be.
3. Going thorougly over all the bugs and issues that have been reported and making sure the game is as stable.
4. The game simulator
After it's certain that the 3 tasks before are fulfilled I will start focusing on the game simulator again. I want to make sure that everything else is stable first so I can attend fully to the simulator.
This includes balancing strategies and opening new strategy possibilities as well as making replay more informative, giving out more info about the strategy page etc.
5. New features
Progressing from thereon I can start focusing on creating new features. The goal of the new features would be to add more depth to the game as well as give more things to do during the day.
Some of the things I have in mind is for example Champion Buffs and nerfs - they will happen periodically based on the champions most used by high ELO teams. There will be automatically generated patch notes noting which champs were buffed and nerfed and how hard. This will force teams to widen the champion pools of their players and adapt strategically by trying to predict which champions are going to be buffed and or nerfed next. It will also make all champions viable to use at certain points.
Regarding balance and the general idea of the game:
As I originally thought it would be more fun/interesting to create a game where the economy is completely unregulated and everything depends on the actions and decisions the players take there have been a lot of balance concerns.
In general I would like to say that this all should balance in few seasons - the star players users get when the game starts won't be star players for the more experienced teams and won't affect the market or scout system as it has done so far. Also scouts should be more reliable when the solo queue players actually get to their ELOs where they belong. Usually ELO system is deemed accurate when you have played at least 100 games, but with solo queue it can probably take more time in some edge cases. In few seasons though sorting by the ELO with the scout should be fine and you should be getting less RNG based players. There are some other issues ofcourse as well and I will have to think carefully when I try to regulate something so that things would be more fair and wouldn't seem as RNG based. I'd like to think though that a little chaotic economy we have right now gives users a possibility to shine by making some clever decisions. For example someone could have predicted that star supports are going to become expensive and try to take advantage of that.
We do want to create an experience that rewards critical and creative thinking, but of course there has to be a balance between all the possible ways of playing this game and creating such an experience can be complicated.
A lot of my reasoning when developing this game was to have a self-sufficient economy without hard regulation. Ofcourse I'm willing to change up things as the game goes on depending what most feel like how they would want to play this game.
I would like to thank everyone who has been active so far and been patient about the game having a lot of issues right now. I hope that in time this game will be awesome in every manner.