Some info on how PVP works

Hi everyone!

No changes to report today, but I’m here today with some information about PVP! With the recent changes to misc stats, I would like give some context as to what their effect was.

The 6 Stages of PVP

For the sake of this conversation, I’m going to divide a single PVP action into 6 stages:

1. Meet People.
This is the step that happens when you press “Meet People”. (AKA the BL). The game gives you a list of people who are about the same strength as you.
2. Hit Ranges.
When you try to attack someone, the game prevents you from attacking someone who is much weaker or much stronger than you.
3. Win/Loss.
This is the “meat” of combat, where it’s determined whether the attacker or the defender wins
4. Damage Dealt.
Whether you win or lose, the game now figures out how much str/int damage each player takes.
5. Plunder.
This step only happens on a win, and only on some actions. This determines how much cash the attacker gain and how much the defender loses.
6. Challenge Adjustment.
If you’re bigger than your opponent, your plunder is lowered. If you’re smaller, your plunder is increased. The bigger the difference, the bigger the adjustment.

These are all separate calculations, except Damage Dealt and Plunder, which are closely linked.

Now let’s see how each of your stat types factor into each step:



The recent changes are highlighted in green.

Note that this is not the same for parties! (For example, misc items do not factor into your plunder from hitting a party.)

Why did we make this change?
We observed a lot of unbalance with misc items not contributing to matchmaking and hit ranges. Specifically, for people who had grown much faster in misc than their other stats, they were able to hit much smaller opponents. The worst example was that some people would evict almost all their dormmates, drop all their tutors, and then get matched against newbies, whom they could easily grief because they were much stronger.

Also, because misc stats weren’t counted, people often got poor matches in their Meet People list. This change will help people have better matches. For people that only have a little bit of misc stats, this was often very frustrating, because all their PVP targets would be too hard for them.

Why is it half contribution from misc, not full?
We wanted to ease into this change. If we see positive results, we will look at a higher contribution value.

What’s “A Little” mean?
It means that the contribution from misc is minor for calculating challenge adjustment. This is also a potential source of unfairness, but in practice it hasn’t been as much of a problem. Furthermore, if we set it to full contribution we suspect it would ruin PVP completely.

Why did the leaderboard / club list shuffle?
The leaderboard and club list is essentially a rank of who has the highest matchmaking rating (I.e. for hit ranges and Meet People/BL). If we’re considering a player with lots of misc to be “Stronger” for matchmaking, effectively that also contributes to that player’s ranking.

Ok, yeah, but why did the leaderboard shuffle as much as it did, then go back to (kinda) normal?
There was a bug that caused misc to be counted incorrectly for players that had a lot of it. Also, some players got recalculated much earlier than others, so they were much higher up the leaderboard. Once we’re 100% confident that everyone has recalculated, then we’ll address any incorrect / missing rewards from the leaderboard.

I heard there’s a cap?
We have capped the potential effect of misc contribution toward matchmaking, hit ranges, and leaderboard status at just over 100mcs. There is a technical issue preventing us from raising the cap yet - but again, this is a way to ease into the change. if we see positive results, we will look at altering the cap.

This cap does not apply to the win/loss step, the plunder step, or the challenge adjustment step.

What about %cs items?
They weren't - and still aren't - factored into matchmaking, hit ranges, or leaderboard ranking. (They do apply to the other pieces, of course.)

Are there any more changes coming?
We’ll be looking at additional steps in the future to improve the fairness of the game.

As always, your feedback is much appreciated. See you again soon!

[ATA]Strange