Patch #26: Multiplayer improvements (pt. 2)

You've given your feedback, we've studied the data, and a big improvement is coming to multiplayer today.

In this patch, we'll tweak some key design decisions on the multiplayer loop to game the game more fair and straightforward. We restructured a few things, keeping the core of what was working and improving what wasn't.

One of the things we heard the most in this first week of Multiplayer was the lack of clarity on the interactions between your and your enemies. The other was questions about fairness regarding year 33 and The Angel battle. Our main goal is to make things more fair and to make sure people understand exactly what it takes to win a game. And with that in mind we're introducing a new loop that we're really excited about.

Here's how the new flow works:

• Enemies now only lose lives when you beat them directly. This means you'll have to defeat all kings with your own hands!

• You'll start at war against 3 kings, like in single player.

• Every battle, either you or your direct opponent will lose one life.

• Every time a king loses all their lives, it's time to make war with a new one.

• When you reach year 33, the surviving kings face each other in year 33 in a final showdown.

• The final showdown consists of individual face-offs between you and each survivor. Instead of the angel, the final battle is between you and the builds you were facing the whole game.

We believe those changes will make multiplayer runs feel much more fair and straightforward. You're in control of who you defeat and how you defeat them. Diplomacy and king re-rolls will play a much bigger role in this new model, as you can now adjust your strategy to take down kings or avoid them until the last minute. Not to mention the new ending will solve all the current current issues with year 33.

We found this iteration to be much more fun and beta testers did too. We hope you like it and please share your feedback with us. As we've stablished before, Multiplayer is a work in progress and we'll improve it every day with your help.

You will now gain bonus rank points if you finish first two or more runs in a row. This will help new advanced players climb the ladders faster.

We analyzed over 100.000 runs and implemented new filters that should be addressing any remaining issues with cheaters. People can't ALT+F4 their way out of losing rank points anymore either.

Each season is intended to last 9 days. But with this big changes, we felt it'd be only fair to give everyone a fresh start. As we've explained before: new season means all King rank points are reset. That levels the playing field so that anyone has a shot at reaching the top 9 in the next season.

Congrats to the top 9 of this season! You've all won a profile badge that will last forever.

• You now have 5 lives!

• Tweaked troop cards high-end level up stats so they scale a little faster. The goal is to balance out the differences between troop builds and base builds. Troops should be stronger now!

• Regression now works with Broken Cabulators and Broken Gachas!

• Removed Moderate perk to encourage more diversification. We will add a new Multiplayer perk to replace it.

• Balance now only works with troop cards (as it was always intended).

• Citadels no longer insta-kill Walls (this perk is intended to work exclusively with troops)

• Pagoda Ghosts will now be spawned more evenly (instead of all being spawned in a single frame while on AUTO)

• Heavily Improved cheat prevention system.

• Drastically improved the matchmaking formula.

• Exploit prevention: if you force quit the game intentionally during a run, you will now finish last.

• Pause screen now displays the current rank you're playing in.

• A MISSION COMPLETE pop-up will appear whenever you complete a mission for clarity.

• Pause screen now displays customized enemy king icons.

• Steamdeck UI improvements

• Fixed Warlord AUTO aiming glitch during battles.

• Enemy Goats no longer march towards your base.

• Perks no longer briefly disappear from your set when you remove the "Expander" perk from your board.

• Added a flipped artwork for enemy Dispensers.

• Fixed a visual glitch on the Nomads map bottom borders.

After downloading the patch, please start a new run, as your previous run won’t have the updates stored and they may cause conflicts. If you experience any issues, please email us at https://report@sadsocket.com

We've been super stoked with the overwhelmingly positive reactions we've been getting with the new game mode. Thank you so much! But of course, we've also gotten a few other questions, requests and complaints, and we'd like to address them here so that you know our thoughts with transparency.

1. On async: Some people might not be familiar with this term, but it's a key part of our game design. Async multiplayer means you're fighting against "ghosts" of real players who played before you. It's a very common kind of multiplayer on strategy games. This system is perfect for 9 Kings due to the single player nature of the game. We want players to have the time to think and make insane moves. We don't want people to have to wait for a play where your enemy drew 30 cards. We want our servers to handle hundreds of thousands of units battling in real time. The current design protects the core of 9 Kings we've always envisioned and mixes things we love about both single player and multiplayer games. A live PVP service means making a new game from scratch. Programming wise, design wise, server capabilities wise. A game that just isn't... 9 Kings. This is not to say that in the future, after the 9 Kings is a complete game, we couldn't explore a new project with that nature. But our only goal as of today is to make the 9 Kings you know the best game it can be.

2. On playing with friends:

We're working to implement features that will allow more ways to interact with your friends in multiplayer.

3. On multiplayer difficulty: This week we went from 1000 to 50.000 players on multiplayer. We couldn't be happier, but it's important to understand that this means the game might be harder as there's more competition. We know fighting against some OP builds can be frustrating. And we're working hard to balance the ladders and filter out outliers so that everyone can have fun. There is a system in place that filters out the most OP runs from matchmaking (the % varies according to rank). The more people play, the more the ranks will adjust themselves. We'll keep finessing the filters to make it fun for everyone.

4. On King rank: King rank is intended to be our version of a pro-level ELO competition. This means it will be ruthless, and the more people join the game and get better at it, the harder it will become. Like on most multiplayer games, this is a rank intended for 1% of the player base, and we hope you understand you might enjoy yourself more at Prince rank, for example. The reason 9 kings has 9 ranks, besides the running joke with the number 9, is the very intentional fact that we wanted there to be a rank for all kinds of players. We will be adding new leaderboards soon so that everyone has something to look forward to and the means to reach royal glory.

5. On bots:
There are no bots playing against you. All runs you face were played by real players. There never were and there never will be bots in our matchmaking. Believe us, it'd be much harder for us to implement a consistent bot system than to load your snapshots, haha.

New content for all game modes! This week marks one year of 9 Kings EA release. And we promise you it'll be our only EA birthday. We're moving full speed ahead, and our eyes are locked on the 1.0 release. We'll keep working hard to bring new content and balance the game. Expect big updates for ALL game modes. We'll be back with more news soon. For now, make sure to keep sharing your feedback as we flesh Multiplayer out :)

We've been reading through all your Steam reviews, and we appreciate the feedback we've been receiving. Please continue sharing your thoughts, so we can know to focus on for each upcoming patch and make 9 Kings the best game it can be. It's really important to us!

Please join us on Discord and Reddit. You can also find the 9 Kings wiki page here for information on the game! Love, Sad Socket team

Love,
Sad Socket team