A lot of content and updates that go into Empires & Allies usually go through a slow ramp process wherein certain number of players get access to a new Feature over a period of time. This means, there could be situations where your allies and friends might have access to a cool new feature or event, but you might not be able to see it. And we understand that this can be a frustrating experience. FOMO is real!
With this article, we want to explain the reason behind this circumstance and hope to assuage some concerns that players might have.
Every feature, update, and event that goes into Empires & Allies is carefully tracked by the game team to ensure that: • The content is working as intended • Players are not facing technical or performance issues • The content is well balanced in terms of tuning, resource costs, targets, etc. and is not explicitly hard for most of our players, but still remains a fruitful challenge to undertake and complete.
To ensure that we are able offer the best possible experience to players and ensure that nothing goes wrong, some content tends to go through what we call a ‘slow ramp’. A slow ramp means the content will roll out to a small section of our players – we track its performance, and if everything checks out, roll it out to more players.
An example of this is during the release of War Factory Alpha Units – we released it to a section of players and during initial tests, we realized that the resource costs which were surfaced to a section of players were prohibitively high. Over the next few days, we fixed this issue, following which, the feature was made accessible to 100% of our players.
The natural question to ask at this point is: Why can’t we identify and fix these issues before releasing the update? All of our Features do go through vigorous internal testing before it’s released. But there are some issues that cannot be found until it is played by an audience of a certain size. Hence, we roll out the feature to a subset of players and evaluate the impact of the feature on a large enough scale. This allows us to identify and iron out any issues before rolling out the feature to everyone.
We understand that being in a situation where you don’t have access to specific content while other players do, can be frustrating. However, it’s a temporary situation. This process ensures we are able to release content of the highest quality to players and any potential issues which could creep into the game can be pre-empted and fixed in a timely manner.
Of course – this doesn’t apply for every bit of content we release. Most of the time we do not require a slow ramp.
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Empires & Allies Game GUIDE