Producer Letter #1 - 2017/06/28

Dear Knights,

We have been thinking for awhile on how to best communicate to you, the community, on a more regular basis. We decided that using the forum and posting regular announcements with the latest information that are linked to a banner in game will make the most sense. So here we are, our first producer letter - and there is a lot to talk about!

Since taking over the game a couple months ago, we have been working around the clock learning about the game, all its issues, and how to best operate it. All while trying to fight the various fires that come up on a daily basis. We’ve hit a decent steady state now and have shifted our focus to fixing some of the core issues that we believe are affecting the game the worst.

Cheaters and Bannings

Over the past weeks we have been spending a lot of time combatting exploits and cheaters on a bigger scale. While we have made some good progress in identifying and banning knights that were not playing by the rules, we were often not able to put bans in place fast enough and this has impacted some of our events. We sincerely apologize for this and assure you that we are working with our development team to improve both prevention and detection. Because the original developers put the majority of game logic in the client, there is a lot of work to be done to move it into the server which will prevent a lot of the hacking. This battle will not be easy nor over quickly - but we will make every effort to make things better to protect the integrity of the game.

Our banning activities have also raised some questions in the community mixed in with rumors that people were getting banned for buying boxes or accidentally receiving rewards twice. To those rumors we can say that they are just that - rumors. Since this was the first time we took extensive action like this, we have given some players the benefit of the doubt and a second chance if the offense was minor. Ever since, we have seen less widespread cheating/glitching activities, so we will continue on our path.

You may be wondering why we did not communicate more publicly about our cheat and hack investigations. We understand that caused some uncertainty within the community - but we needed to make sure not to tip off the cheaters to what was coming.

Customer Support

We have also started to put a greater emphasis on the quality of our customer support channel. We are aware that the current state is not up to our normal standards. We know this is a big issue that we need to improve and we have started down the path to ensure it improves. This is a historic issue that seems to have gotten worse over time. We are working with the CS team to show them where they need improvement and in some cases replacing under-performers.

One example is because of the banning activities we mentioned earlier, many players were not getting appropriate reasonings for their bans. This is an issue that we have now addressed with the team and should be handled better going forward.

We apologize to the players who were affected by this issue and frustrated with the support they received. Although we wish it were otherwise, this is also something that will take time to drastically change. But we will work to continually improve and correct the individual issues as they arise until we get to the quality level we expect as players ourselves.

About last Guild War event

Another issue we wanted to address was last Guild War (week-end of the 16th). In the early hours after start, technical issues were causing various error messages to be displayed, player’s points/wins seemed to be missing, as well as milestones being delivered multiple times or not at all.

All systems recovered shortly afterwards and rewards eventually showed up for all players.
But because of the seemingly random nature of the issue and its short duration, we are still investigating the cause and how to prevent it from happening again. We will provide more details as we find out more. This is one of our top priorities right now.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to do leaderboard or milestone adjustments for either of the events. Due to way the systems are setup, it would be too costly and error prone to try to retroactively correct individuals. We have instead decided to grant every player that was active during the events a compensation pack. For members of guilds who reached a top 20 rank in last Guild War & Raid Boss Events - not for the ones that were found cheating - we added two extra items. We understand that this will not fully satisfy those who were looking to get specific items or feel they were coming in short but we tried to be generous enough to make it worth your while. By the time you read this, the gift should have already been delivered to you.

As you can see right now, a lot of time is being spent reacting to various issues. Going forward though, we will also start sharing more about the development roadmap and our longer term visions for the game. So stay tuned for our next producer letter and thanks a lot for taking the time to read this! We appreciate your support and are glad to have such a strong and committed community.

UPDATE 06/30/2017: There was some confusion regarding which guilds qualify for the top 20 we talked about in this post and we admit, it wasn't completely clear. Initially we were going to give something out to Android users for both big raid events and the guild war with tech issues, while for ios we targeted only the users active during the guild war (as raid bosses did not have the same issue as on Android). Our mistake though, we should have made it clearer from the start, so we decided to make it generous July and give out the same to both Android and iOS users. Android users will already have recieved their gift, while iOS users will have to wait until end of day on Tuesday the 4th of July.

Until next time!

Your KnD Team