Greetings!
It’s been great to hear your thoughts on last week’s September development update regarding Battlegrounds and The Great Ranging (TGR)!
We saw so many great questions and we’d like to tackle some of the most common areas of confusion in more detail. While we’re at it, we’d like to go over some known issues that will be appearing during the first Technical Beta.
Keep in mind that because this is TGR’s first Technical Beta, this feature is very much a work in progress. We want to let players who are interested try it out so we can get your feedback incorporated into Battlegrounds as soon as possible.
That being said, we have a few known pain points and possible areas of confusion that we want to call out now.
We will also keep this post updated as the Beta progresses with any critical updates!
Known Issues
The following are known issues and their walkarounds. The team is working to resolve these for our next game update.
- Clicking on a bannerman’s coordinates in the first few minutes of starting a Battleground will cause a popup to appear that asks if you would like to leave the Battleground. This will eventually resolve on its own.
- Occasionally when a Battleground ends and a player is forcibly removed from TGR, they may become stuck in the exit splash screen. When this happens, we suggest restarting. You won’t lose anything you received while in the Battleground if this occurs.
- When initializing a Battleground on one device, and trying to join on another, the “Join Now” button might grey out. This can be fixed by restarting the affected device.
- When joining a Battleground, a player’s keep is usually replaced with a ‘Stand in Node’ that cannot be attacked or scouted. Occasionally, when a Player joins a battleground, a player who is not participating in the same Battleground may not see the Stand in Node right away. This spot still works as intended, the Stand in Node just doesn’t display. A restart will immediately fix this display issue.
- If players are not on the latest game update and you choose to stay on the initialization screen for the entirety of a Battleground instance, the timer may stick on 0s and unlocalized text will appear on screen.
- If players are not on the latest game update, they will see generic ‘unknown errors’ for various error messages, such as if you try to initialize a Battleground while you are still under cool down. We strongly recommend updating so you can see more informative error messages.
How do Battlegrounds cooldowns work?
In Battlegrounds, players will need to be aware of two different cooldowns that are important to their experience. Keep in mind that ALL cooldowns relate to their own Battleground, meaning The Great Ranging will have its set of cooldowns, while Battleground #2 (Coming soon!) will have its own, separate, set of cooldowns.
The two different cooldowns as they currently stand are:
The Great Ranging Initialization Cooldown
(duration: 24 hours)
This cooldown prevents a player from initializing a The Great Ranging battleground. This cooldown is incurred by:
- A player who clicks on the “Initialize Battleground” button in the battleground hub.
- An entire allegiance after allegiance-mate joins an initialized battleground
The Great Ranging Battleground Cooldown
(duration: 3.5 days)
This cooldown prevents players from joining The Great Ranging. This cooldown is incurred by:
- A player who joins a The Great Ranging battleground
Let’s run through some examples. Assume we have an Allegiance called ATEAM, with a structure like the following
Lead 1 and Player B (and their banners) live in the US and want to do The Great Ranging. Player D wants to lead the other T2s and their banners, at a later time to make sure their European and Pacific mates can join in on the fun.
Lead 1 and Player B decide to start a TGR battleground Monday night, and end up joining a TGR battleground at 8pm EST. Upon exiting the battleground at 8:30pm EST Lead 1, Player B and their banners have incurred the following cooldowns
- TGR Initialization Cooldown: Nobody from the ATEAM allegiance can initialize a TGR battleground for 24 hours
- TGR Cooldown: Nobody who joined Lead 1 and Player B’s battleground will be able to join another TGR for 3.5 days
Based on this scenario, Player D and the rest of the ATEAM allegiance would not be able to start another TGR battleground until Tuesday at 8pm EST (24 hours later) and only those banners who DID NOT participate on Monday would be able to join.
A Note on Multiple Battlegrounds
We will be releasing many different battlegrounds as a part of this feature. This means when our second battleground is released (We’ll call it BG 2). BG 2 has a 2 day join cooldown. Due to this, the following could occur:
Lead 1 and Player B participate in TGR as outlined above on Monday night. Upon exiting TGR, Lead 1 and Player B’s banners want to do a BG 2 Battleground and join at 11pm EST.
In this scenario all of them are able to do BG 2 and incur an additional set of cooldowns; both an SoS Initialization for the allegiance (24 hours) and a BG 2 joining cooldown.
As these BG 2 cooldowns only apply to Lead 1 and Player B’s banners, Player E can continue to do TGR the following night at the same time, as both TGR and BG 2’s cooldowns are separate! In fact Player E could also lead a BG 2 Battleground as well, once BG 2’s initialization cooldown expires at 11pm Tuesday.
Let us know your thoughts!
Those taking part in the technical beta, make sure to give us your feedback over in the official Game of Thrones: Conquest Discord’s #battlegrounds channel. The team will be hanging out there and would love to hear your thoughts!