Okay: how does this clan features work, exactly?

(abelthorne) #1

Hello,
With a bunch of players, we setup a clan in Brink when the feature was added. We joined the official ladder 3vs3 competition and challenged two teams (due to a mistake, we in fact challenged two teams at the same time and are supposed to play against them in a few hours; we should be able to have two teams of three players so that shouldn’t be a problem, unless it is against the rules to play two games at the same time?).

Now what? In the rules, it is said that we can’t play on our own server (which is understandable), so where do we play? Will we have an alert in the game or such just before the game to ask us to connect to an official server? Do we have to connect manually to a specific server which name is given somewhere?

Also, it says in the rules that we have to get at least two players in our team. What happens to the remaining slot? is it filled by a bot? does it make 2vs3 or 2vs2 games?

These points are not very clear and we are a bit lost in this new clans feature…

(Yemster) #2

If I’m correct you should receive an invite to a server automatically for the clan match and the game won’t start until there is 2 people in each team on that server.
It is most likely that a bot will be used to replace whoever is missing until they join.
Its just a case of you and your team being online ontime for the match.

(abelthorne) #3

A little report about this clans feature that we played this evening. It didn’t work very well… :frowning:

To answer my questions above, I can confirm what Yemster said: we get an alert in game (either on the menu or while playing), which displays in the notifications that a match is scheduled. When clicking on it, Brink sends us to a server and the game starts when there are at least two players on each side.

We had two games scheduled at the same time (21:30). One of them went well with a part of our clan. The one I was in had a few problems:

  • first, it seems that the game chooses a random server managed by some random people. Or maybe it’s a server from Splash Damage (but it had a strange name)? We had a ping around 250 ms! The ladder being split in zones (North America, Europ, Asia), we expected a better ping…
  • then we won the first match, the opponent team quit and we started the second match (in stopwatch mode) at 3 vs 0. It started anyway but the server crashed a few minutes later and we couldn’t reconnect on it
  • 45 minutes later (22:15), Brink displayed an alert again saying we had a match scheduled 15 minutes later (as if it were lost between 21:30 and 22:30) but our players that played the match when the server crashed couldn’t connect still. After quiting/relaunching Brink, we could connect… to another server (is that normal?). But as the opponent team wasn’t there anymore, we stayed in warmup forever until we decided to quit

Because of the server crash (and the subsequent problems), the match wasn’t counted in our stats. Our clan page displays only the one that went well (and that we lost). :frowning:

I’m a bit disappointed. The clans feature would benefit of a better work. The servers should be stable enough and with a good ping, that’s the least we expect for an official tournament.

(badman) #4

Hi abelthorne,

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with the tournament system. Had a chat with one of our online services guys about your problems and here’s what they had to say:

When a Brink tournament match is set to get underway, the system tries to find the best server for all players involved. To be eligible, a server must have the “Server Hijacking” flag enabled (ci_isHijackable 1 - this is the default), which allows it to be used for clan matches. If Brink can’t find any available servers in your immediate vicinity (perhaps they’re already being used or the flag isn’t set), it is possible that you end up on a server with a higher latency. A possible way to avoid this is to have your own server enable the hijacking flag 30 minutes or so before the match is scheduled to start – odds are, this’ll get you connected to that server come match time.

If a server crashes for any reason, this can unfortunately affect reporting. Had this crash not put a premature end to your match, you would have been able to complete the second half of the map and the result would then have ended up on the site. As for the third issue (another match invite being sent), we think that because the first attempt was interrupted, Brink was expecting the full match to be played – and with the other team not being there, the match wasn’t able to kick off.

(abelthorne) #5

I’ll ask our server admin about this flag. It would be quite useful. Do we have to setup anything specific on the server (like no more than 6 player slots) or is it tweaked by the game when it requisites the server?
Also, does the flag mean that the server will be requisited only when it is empty or will the game kick players currently on it?

As for the third issue (another match invite being sent), we think that because the first attempt was interrupted, Brink was expecting the full match to be played – and with the other team not being there, the match wasn’t able to kick off.

Do you plan to update the system so that this case can be handled? E.g. add a timer to warmup that allows the match to start even when no opposite team is there (like one hour after the challenge was due to start, to avoid cheating)?