Parallel custom arena/flood of "Play now" ppl

#1 - April 22, 2014, 4:07 p.m.

Hey,

This has been happening in my arena since I bought it yesterday. Sometimes after the match ends, it kicks everyone to lobby for no reason, and when I rejoin the game there is already another match going on, often with teams having 300+ points and players who have been there for several minutes. How is it possible that my custom arena has 2 different matches simultaneously?

And another thing I’ve been wondering. Sometimes I want to play with my guild in my own arena, or just chill out with friends in peace. However, the game keeps constantly getting full of people who click “Play now” and it is impossible to do anything since they don’t read map chat or whispers. I’ve tried kicking people who don’t listen to me, but the game instantly fills up with more “Play now” people when someone goes out. Is this intended?

Justin ODell

#3 - April 22, 2014, 4:55 p.m.

It tries to use player run custom arenas by design. The hot-join arenas are just custom arenas that we run, and are not treated any differently.

If we can’t find a custom arena with available slots, we will spin up another one and start placing players there as well.

If you want to keep people out of your arena, password protect it. If you want to exclude it from play now, then disable progression. If you want progression, you have to accept other players coming in.

Justin ODell

#5 - April 22, 2014, 5:22 p.m.

Sulecen.4937:
Justin, there is the “issue” of our custom arenas having two instances sometimes, and it seems like a bug. Such as I’ve been skirmishing with my guild at times in my own arena and I’ve left to switch characters. When I come back in I’m on a totally different map then my guildies, such as when this happened a few days ago they were playing on Forest of Nifhel and I loaded into Battle of Khylo. The room was not full, and even when I left the room and attempted to “Join friend in PvP” it sent me right back to Khylo rather than Forest where everyone else was playing.

Did this happen after a build?

Justin ODell

#8 - April 22, 2014, 5:32 p.m.

Sulecen.4937:
Yes this happened 2 days ago, so it was after the feature patch but in between hotfixes.

That sounds normal, your friends were in one instance that belongs to the old build, and you were put in a new instance for the new build. There is no way around that as builds may not be compatible with each other.

The only alternative would be to not create a new instance until the old one is closed. This would still mean people in the new build wouldn’t be able to play in the old one.

Justin ODell

#9 - April 22, 2014, 5:34 p.m.

EverythingEnds.4261:
If HotJoin Arenas basicly are Custom Arenas, doesn’t this mean, the only thing you had to create, when you introduced Custom Arenas was a more player-friendly Interface for creating your Custom Arena?
If that’s true, it took you pretty long to do so.

No, the old “Play Now” functionality was replaced with new code that uses custom arenas.

Justin ODell

#12 - April 22, 2014, 8:20 p.m.

Terrorsquad.2349:
With no “available slots” do you mean servers need to be 20/20? Who goes spectating a hotjoin match 5v5 with 10 ppl.. Or does it start another server when Anet’s custom arena’s are 10/20 full? because in theory, it’s full aswel because we can’t play..

By “available slots”, I mean that if its a 5v5 and there are less than 10 players (including spectators) in the game.

I’m not 100% sure why they’re always full.

Some times when multiple players hit "play now " at nearly the same time they will get the same arena. This happens because we don’t increment the player count until a player actually joins.

It will also happen because people are just going to the arenas that have the most players. This could be fixed by showing spectator count separately, but we don’t currently have a reliable way to do that and it’s a lower priority.