HEX Update – Arena Opens March 10th

Arena Hype!

HEX Frost Ring Arena is coming March 10, 2015! We’ll post the launch schedule on Monday and continually update players throughout the process. Until then, check out these arena resources.

Original HEX Arena Stream

New Chat Client

PVE Card Previews 1

PVE Card Previews 2

R&D Building the Arena

Arena Guide

A huge ‘thank you’ goes out to the community for helping us test the arena experience and tournaments with no player cap. Lead engineer Chris Woods posted in forums on Saturday, covering what we’ve been learning and gaining from tournament testing over the last few months.

Originally posted here

Greetings, programs!

I wanted to jump in here and thank everyone for the help; believe it or not, this test went very well. Honestly, I wouldn’t believe that if I were me (which I am), so allow me to explain.

For a while we’ve had a very difficult problem with exponential growth on the tournament server. Essentially, every person who joins a queue is more taxing on the server than the previous one. This is why 8-mans run well, but the VIP is capped at 128. The cost to run a tournament is the number of people who entered squared, so an 8 person draft is 64 “server points”, but a VIP is 16,384 server points, despite only being 16 times larger.

If we wanted to run a tournament with a mere 1,000 people, it would take a million points. That’s a lot. Way more than I ever got in Street Fighter.

This actually sounds like a freshman exercise, but it turned out it was FAR more complex. There are a lot of layers to the tournament onion. The trouble we were facing on the live tournament server was it would spawn a thread — a process that does a little job and then terminates — for every user that joined. Once you make enough of these little guys you end up deadlocking the CPU. It’s like when you’re trying to listen to a conversation in a crowded room. If there are a few people talking, you can make out everything whomever you’re chatting with says. Bounce that up to 100 folks, and the background noise means you really have to concentrate. Once you hit 1,000 other people yapping at each other and, well, you might as well be talking in Swahili.

That was pretty easily sorted, but then we discovered that every status update for a player (eg, you change your deck) was getting broadcast to every /other/ player. Sorted. However, every time someone went to the tournament screen it shouted out the current status to everyone on that screen, which included anyone participating in that tournament. Sorted. Pairing players could get out of control in some very edgy cases (side note; pairing for a tournament is COMPLICATED).

Sorted.

Breaking the tournament egg has involved a lot of troubles with how it was designed initially. As we’ve peeled off every layer, we have also discovered some trouble with the next one.

Today, we crashed the connection server!

As a point of reference, the server we’re running for maintaining connections on the test realm has a smaller CPU and less memory than the first iPhone. The test realm server responsible for maintaining a connection with the clients is worse than a telephone that shipped out almost a decade ago. I could not be happier about that.

This probably makes me sound like a monster. The server on Live that deals with this makes Deep Blue blush; we could easily have a significantly stronger server handling connecting to test.

But I don’t wanna.

I know that we have to deal with hundreds of thousands of players competing for a massive prize purse, so we WILDLY underpowered the test environment to see how far we could push the envelope. We have to know where it breaks, and today we discovered it doesn’t break on the tournament server. It breaks on the hilariously underpowered connection server.

I owe everyone in this thread a personal hug, and I am very sorry. As stupid as it sounds, I could not be more happy with how things went today.

END OF LINE

VIP Tournament Cap

On the topic of tournaments with no player cap, we’re increasing the cap on VIP tournaments to 256 players. For those of you accustomed to overflow tournaments on high activity days, you should log in early and make sure you get in the first queue. There may not be an additional overflow tournament.

Five Shards Tournament

The fourth in the Shard Cup tournament series—the Sapphire Cup—will happen March 14-15th. The tournament is free and players will compete for hundreds of booster packs as well as the first cash prizes in Hex tournament history. Exalted community member Colin is putting up $250 for 1st place, $150 for 2nd place, and $50 for 3rd and 4th! The tournament will also offer free door prizes that you can win just by participating. Find out all you need to know about the tournament here: http://www.fiveshards.com/sapphire-cup/

Spring Ahead

Its daylight savings time here in California, US of A this Sunday, March 8th. That means clocks are springing forward one hour, but not on Entrath. Server time will reflect daylight savings time with Germany on Sunday, March 29th.

Large Tournament Stress Test Tomorrow, Saturday March 7th at Noon Pacific

Help us crash the Test server! We’re hoping we can really put some load on the server and see what it does. This is continuing to test tournaments with no player participation cap. This big one is being hosted this weekend on Saturday, March 7th at Noon Pacific [Worldclock].

You can find all the information about this stress test here.

PVE Card Preview

For our final look at some of the Arena cards, you can upgrade your Dwarf deck with these two tinkerers.

Construction Gloves (common) Each of your cards named VB1311 have “When VB1311 enters play, add a construction counter to target Plans you control.” Propagation Helm (rare) Each of your cards named VB1311 have “all copies of VB1311 in all zones get one of the following at random” instead.

Bracers of Manufacturing (common) Your Construct Guild Underbosses have “Your cards with Construction plans in their name in all zones have cost -2” Prefabrication Boots (uncommon) Your Construct Guild Underbosses have “When you draw this, if you don’t control a plans, create a random Plans and put it into play”

This Dwarf and bot pair are playing the long game, but will their endless numbers even matter when the Volcanic Behemoth hits the Arena floor?

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