Update March Improvements are on their way!

Greetings Citizens of Heckfire!

Over the past several months we have been working largely behind the scenes on improvements to our March Tech to reduce lag caused by swarming marches during high activity events (ie. after reset on Free For All + Raid Racer days).

We know this has been a pain point for the community, and we want you to see the focus we are dedicating to this. Please read on for updates on how things are progressing!

What have we done so far?

We developed tech that we believe could substantially help reduce lag during march swarms and high activity competitions.

When suitable launch candidates were ready, we ran a series of competitions in mid December 2023 called Elf in the Shelter, to collect data on these improvements!

These competitions ran over the course of a week as two randomized A/B tests. Meaning one competition a day would have the improvements turned on to measure the impact for data collection. These live tests also helped to identify if there would be any bugs when bringing this tech to players.

Big thank you to all those that participated!

We hope you enjoyed the quirkiness of something festive and different as well as the rewards that came alongside it. The data collected has proven invaluable in addressing lag and proved we were on the right track.

*You may recall these shelters that were full of Elves ready for smiting!*​

What are we currently doing?

We are continuing to improve the tech and running additional tests!

We noticed one or two bugs that occurred during Elf in the Shelter that led to failed marches and ghost hits, and we want to make sure that is resolved before we roll out anything further to players.

We are also working on simulating march swarms on the back end, to ensure our solution works and continues to work after we’ve released it.

*Don't worry we do most of our debugging with pants ON*​

What’s next?

We will be running a Developer Invasion PvP test!

The idea is to incentivize folks to hit special Dev Accounts to help us simulate PVP swarms in a live environment, but without any impact to player accounts. Expect more details to come regarding the timeline and rewards for helping out when we kick this off!

Should everything go as smoothly as we expect, we’ll be implementing these changes in game and continuing to monitor for additional feedback regarding lag.

*You slaughtering Dev Troops to keep them in line!*​

We thank you for your patience and hope you all will see a significant improvement to your experience once this rolls out!

After this work is complete we are looking forward to additional updates that will bring exciting freshness to Kingdoms of Heckfire!

Much love,
- The Heckfire Dev Team