Replays after a patch or update

Supercell -

Replays disappearing after a minor patch (such as removing the loon/hog sale) is problematic for war clans. We were recently in a war with OneHive 2.0. It just so happens that we did a lot more attacking than they did early on. One strategy many war clans depend on is using lower attacks (let's say our TH8's attacking their TH9's) to reveal traps, teslas, and cc troops for future attacks. We were 8-9 attacks in and the patch gets released.

OneHive 2.0 had only done 2 attacks. As a smart clan, they also employ the tactic of using lower clan members who have no chance of 3-starring to help reveal information for higher attackers. Because of the timing of maintenance, clan time zones, etc. one clan will have a distinct advantage over another in this situation.

Yes, sometimes people remember their attacks, the cc troops, the trap locations, etc... but most often they won't. It'll be the next day and inevitably they will have forgotten.

Before everyone jumps in and tells me we could just hold our attacks - for large clans with members all over the world this is a nightmare for planning. It's not feasible to hold attacks until the end of the war.

Another minor complaint is we like to record 3-star attacks and catalog them for future reference. Losing these replays mid-war really sucks.

It doesn't seem too much to ask, given that games like Starcraft II are able to show replays through major and minor patches / releases. I can literally watch a replay from Starcraft II that's from 20 versions ago.

Much of the COC community is fueled by YouTuber's who rely on replays for content. Much of the popularity of COC can be attributed to the FREE marketing you get from the folks who take the time to create thousands of hours of attack replays.

I'm a software engineer by trade... this is actually quite simple. An attack is just a set of metadata. The base layout, troops, drop positions. It's literally a normalized schema that should be able to be played over and over. Once an attack happens there shouldn't even be any AI problems because it's just a set of coordinates and timings. In theory I should be able to see a replay from 18 months ago. Objects, coordinates, timing.

It's incomprehensible why a minor patch to take away the loon/hog promotion would render replays unavailable.

I believe it's something like restarting the server and clearing the cache out.

Bumping this as I believe it affects a lot more people than those using the forums

As software engineer, you'll likely understand that there is a chance SC didn't take into account the scale of which replays would eventually take when first coding it. 'Old code' that act as the basis of the whole replay system might be problematic to change, and due to lack of foresight, are now suffering with the consequences of shortcomings being magnified as things scale up.

My guess is that the replays are highly dependent on the current version of the game being ran on the server. If there is a change to the highly optimized engine running the replays, older replay files could possibly have out of date commands or glitch prone operations. To just prevent this, they are all cleared. Or the replays script files are just cleared as part of rebooting the server, deleting temp files... but I doubt that.

Optimized code is needed to keep the server running at best efficiency, but at a cost of flexibility.

I've detailed my thoughts on this elsewhere, but that's the core of it.

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Added Edit

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Originally Posted by SamJohnson322

Bumping this as I believe it affects a lot more people than those using the forums

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Your bump is as useless as it is not allowed on the forums. :p Posted the minute you bumped... which was less than half an hour since the last comment... really? half an hour? can't wait that long?

minpin raises a good point -- the loss of replays after every maintenance break can put one side at a disadvantage in the middle of a clan war. This seems to be a case where Supercell's processes and infrastructure have not kept up with the increased importance of clan wars. We saw some impressive new functionality in the recent major update (clan perks with opt in/out), so Supercell can most likely fix this issue if they make it a priority.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Honu

minpin raises a good point -- the loss of replays after every maintenance break can put one side at a disadvantage in the middle of a clan war. This seems to be a case where Supercell's processes and infrastructure have not kept up with the increased importance of clan wars. We saw some impressive new functionality in the recent major update (clan perks with opt in/out), so Supercell can most likely fix this issue if they make it a priority.

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Many people have brought up that point before, and many people are as informed as we from what Supercell has said, (aka hardly a thing). We can only guess what is happening, and my assumption is that Supercell is painfully aware of it, but has something major blockinga fix from being done. One problem I can see is they may have new code, but it still seems to have glitches, much more than they have currently running.

We just don't know...

It was a minor 'just get over it' type thing for a long time because maint breaks were rare. But lately they have gotten pretty heavy handed with them (In the last month 5?) so that it is really blowing up a lot of wars. Clearly there has been a change in something there that they now see fit to do it more often. I would suggest that as part of that planning they should be thinking more about how to mitigate the impact of these breaks.

Wiping out revenges is annoying but still can be a 'get over it' item. But wiping out war replays is indeed quite damaging to a large amount of the population. (A s.w.a.g. assumption would be 2/3 are in war at any time and 80% of those look at replays). They do need to think this through better than they have. Especially if they are increasing the rate at which they do them.

I wasn't thinking the event would end that soon and started war almost at the worst time. It cleared some of our replays near the start. If done 8 to 12 hours later, yeah, out of luck. Was lucky it caused only minor issues. Though one war it cleared over ⅔ of both side's replays. So it was bad, but also bad for the other side.

Would be nice if there was a news notice on scheduled server maintenance if there isn't going to be a fix to the Replay issue soon. If done several days in advance, it would save a lot of people doing wars some headaches.

yeah... SC may found some solution for unavailable replays after updates..

i like to watch the war replays to understand the enemy attacks and see how my team is playing.

but if some update came during war battles, the replays before the update are all disabled, "affecting the war performance"..

really no way to keep the "old" replays available?
i think its possible but i understand the difficulties, as a software engineer.

anyway, appreciate if SC can solve this old issue:cool:

I think maybe it is about time SC makes a more robust replay system. My best guess is that they are cleared, out of glitch prevention protocol, upon boot up.

Though there is a real possibility that those replays are actually never saved to any permanent storage media (or if they are, they are still gone and inaccessible to us when moved to archives). Why? Because the RAM is much faster to access and process from (which is the whole point of RAM chips). If servers are expected to be constantly running, and only storing temporary files, like replay scripts, for a short time before being deleted (or moved and locked away), why move it a slower form of storage when it can be called on at any second where access speed is crucial? Of course the problem with RAM is that it only holds data so long power is supplied, which is why they go bye-bye on reboot.

But then that brings up the question of why not copy the RAM, or part of it, and load it back on reboot? Many newer computers do this, (aka hibernation mode) which is why they are ready faster than boot up. But... many computer geeks out there are likely clinching right now after reading this, since they know it isn't that simple or reliable, or efficient, and can be counter productive to do since you actually need to clear memory for a fresh start on new code. And for a huge server running a game for millions, that's pretty much a no-go.

So back to it being cleared because it prevents glitches and just has been easier to do, since there is also just saving the files to something and loading the files back up after reboot, and that too isn't done.

I did say elsewhere the problems of client side downloadable/uploadable of replays, so if anyone is interested in that huge logical guess, you can look it up or I can post a link to it if others want.