GvG Error Leads To Freeze: Will Your Points Be Affected?

Due to a server issue, the Legendary game team decided to freeze Guild Wars scoring on Wednesday, August 8th.

“As a result of this freeze, all guilds will not gain or lose points for their matches today, regardless of the outcome. All attacks will still provide War Medallions to attackers,” reads a message sent to Legendary players.

Freezing Guild Wars scoring is not something anybody takes lightly. It’s kind of a nuclear option. What made the devs do it?

Guild Wars (GvG) is a big deal for hardcore Legendary players. Many guilds focus on GvG exclusively, playing Slayer and Commander events only to secure powerful Wardens to defend themselves against attacks.

Building up solid GvG defenses takes a lot of time, money, and energy for players. Topping the leaderboards in GvG is one of the fastest ways to earn gems.

GvG Rewards

Because of the high payout, players are quick to sound the alarm about anything that could affect a guild’s ranking. A forum post titled “GvG is messing up can you help!” was an early canary in the GvG coal mine.

“At the start of today’s GvG one of my guildies mentioned that they noticed it said we had 15 unfilled spots,” posted Furbietoys. “I have 28 Guild members and only 15 or showing up in gvg.”

Almost immediately, other players began to chime in.

“Someone else had a similar occurrance mentioned in another post,” wrote Sublime Eimar of Wren. “In that case the system thought there were 10 open slots, and awarded 50 free kills to the other side.”

50 free kills is a big deal in GvG. The maximum amount of kills any guild, no matter how strong, can attain in a single match up is 150, and having a rival guild get a third of the way there before they spend a single attack is a big deal.

Other players weren’t even being given the opportunity to attack, thus removing ten points from their guild’s maximum score.

“I’m showing as having attacked but i have not and I do not show in my guild defenders list,” posted NarratorDan, along with this screen shot:

NarratorDan

In response to these posts and a flood of customer support requests, James Marr (jmarr), Executive Producer of Legendary, posted a detailed incident report on the Legendary forums Wednesday afternoon explaining what led to the drastic decision to freeze scoring.

“When the matchmaking process decides that two guilds should be matched together,” wrote jmarr, “The server needs to load information about each player so they can be included in the match. For performance reasons, we keep a cache of the limited information about each player that is relevant to GuildWars.”

That is to say, the algorithm that pits guilds against one another and the database of relevant information needed to do that are on different servers. When those servers are able to communicate freely, the matchmaking server pulls accurate, up to date information from the database, and uses that information to make a match for that day’s Guild War.

However, if the matchmaking server is unable to communicate freely with the database, the accuracy of the information fed into GvG is compromised, which is what happened today.

“There was a temporary connection problem between the server running matchmaking and a few of the cache servers,” jmarr wrote. “When matchmaking tried to load player information from any of the affected cache servers, those players would incorrectly be marked as inactive and excluded from the match.”

In other words, players were getting locked out of GvG due to inaccurate matchmaking, because the matchmaking server was unable to communicate with the database. Since this is one of the most fundamental steps Legendary has to do in order for GvG to function properly, there were widespread problems as a result of this function breaking down.

That’s the exact sort of systemic issue that can only be fixed by pausing GvG- freezing the scores.

All that said, the Legendary game team is extending this season of GvG by one day to compensate for the battles lost to the freeze. That way, scores from this season won’t be affected in the long run.

Jmarr is optimistic that GvG will be back up and running quickly. “We believe that we have identified the root cause of the issue and will be deploying a fix before the next round of matchmaking starts.”

Although GvG may be frozen for now, players can expect a thaw soon.