Development Blog | 25th May 2021

Trophy Balancing Changes 

As you may know, we recently fixed how trophies are rewarded after a PvP match. The old system was not working properly and led to players having amassed a large collection of trophies. This, in turn, enabled an exploit that some players used to purposefully drop their matchmaking ranking while still being able to stay in the higher PvP leagues. We found this behaviour to be predatory and against the spirit of the system. This was, again, only possible due to a bug in the original algorithm. We’ve since fixed this issue and now players are converging to their correct trophy scores based on their MMR. 

With this change, though, we are aware that some of our long-term players will be stuck in trophy deflation for some time. We understand these players feel like we are stripping them of hard-fought trophies, but we guarantee that this was not the intention of the change. We aimed to fix the system so that players are no longer able to inflate their trophies and make use of this exploit which creates a poor experience for all players. 

With the change, we are seeing much fairer PvP matches than ever before. We’re also seeing our players playing more and more PvP matches every day, and new players playing more as well! We’re very excited by this and hope to see these new Snipers joining up with your Squads. The fix will ensure the system is self-regulated with players being assigned to the correct leagues based on their skills. Moving forward it will not be natural for a player to accumulate thousands of trophies beyond their MMR.

However, based on the feedback from the community, we do feel one more change is necessary to wrap this up and make a better play experience for all players, especially those with large trophy counts that are exposed to longer deflation periods. We are planning to do a seasonal reset of players' trophies in PvP. This will set players to a new trophy count at the start of the season based on their current MMR. This will be a new practice for PvP moving forward so we keep PvP ranks competitive and the top-performing ranks will earn rewards based on their trophy counts at the end of the season. We plan to begin the new season on June 1, 2021, and it will end on Sep 30, 2021. From there they will become quarterly. 

As this is the first time we plan to implement this system and we understand many players will lose a large number of trophies with the reset, however, rest assured, we plan to compensate players for the loss of trophies. This compensation will be given to our top 5% of players, those who will be affected by the trophy changes. It will go out on the 26th of May, following the structure below:

You should expect to receive this compensation in-game, communicating which group you belong to along with the reward. For more information on how the new trophy system works, you can read [our previous dev blog here].

With that out of the way, we’d like to discuss some more topics on what else we’ve been focused on:

Cheats & Hacks

We continue to make progress on the security of our app. You may have noticed a cleaner arena in recent months. We’re still dedicated to ensuring a fair play experience for all. And any helpful hints or tips on cheaters is very welcome. We understand this is a major pain point for many players.

We’ve recently made some pretty big ban waves that have drawn a lot of ire from notorious cheaters and we’ve also heard the feedback on ”Million diamond” accounts, and we are going to be removing these accounts from the game.

New Squad Wars

Many players have written in with suggestions for Squad Wars like better rewards. We’ve been hard at work in transitioning this feature to our new events system which allows us more freedom to make changes to the format. We’re going to be rolling this out soon and will beta test a new Squad Wars format, we won’t immediately replace the old one yet. The new format will offer better rewards (access to new weapons, Gears, increased currency amounts and more to come!). The rosters will be locked at the event start similar to the other Squad events that we’ve introduced in the last few months.

Squad Management Improvements

We are making some more improvements to the Squad Search functionality for better recruitment between players and Squads. In the next couple of weeks, you should expect more filters to be available to users that are looking for a new Squad.

We have also recently released a feature allowing captains to transfer the leadership of squads to other players. We heard your feedback, and we hope that helps!

Global & Regional Chat

You may have noticed that we turned on both Global and Regional chat again. We hope to have these up and running again permanently; we’re just making some final tweaks to the moderation to ensure the safety of all our players.

We hope with the return of chat this will also help with Squad recruitment, especially paired with the Squad Tags we added in the past.

Thanks for reading, make sure to follow all of our social platforms to keep up to date with everything Sniper 3D. See you in the arena! 🧡