Notes on upcoming server changes for RIVALS!

Hello everyone!

We have heard your feedback regarding the instability of the servers and want to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused all of you when trying to join your scheduled matches or simply managing your team. Our initial Investigation has shown that the servers sometimes stall when many people join at once. As you are probably concluding, this timing coincides with the start of League Matches and Tournament Matches. All League Matches previously started at 8:00 PM sharp in your local time zone. This means that everyone playing on the same timezone would log in and play at the same time, causing massive strain on the servers. As good as our server are, we still need to give them some breathing room to scale and perform the trillions of calculations thrown at them.

What will we do?

Therefore, starting next week, league matches in the same timezone will no longer start at exactly the same time and will be distributed among a 45 minute window. Instead of 8:00 pm sharp, your league match will start anywhere between 8:00 and 8:45 pm. The exact time will be determined at the moment the league starts, and it will be the same for each of your league matches. For example, if your league match starts on Tuesday at 8:33, then the rest of your league matches and the league playoffs will also be on 8:33. Once the league is over and your next league starts, your match time will be different.

We want to make sure that every player from every timezone has access to the same amount of tournaments per day while also avoiding a scenario that would schedule the league and tournament matches at the same time - causing you to get blocked from playing matches. Instead, we will move the league match one hour earlier if it conflicts with a tournament time slot. This means that depending on your timezone, your league match might also be between 7:00 and 7:45 pm.

Feedback?

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we continue to monitor the server performance and make incremental adjustments along the way. Should you continue to notice unannounced server maintenance messages or other connectivity related issues, please report them in the #Server_Status channel on our official discord Server. This will help us compare the data we see in our server monitoring tools with the real-world experiences and enable us to come to faster solutions in the future.