Duel Arena

Introduction

The Duel Arena has been brought back in its old glory, without taxation or staking limitations. This is our first official form of gambling, with more options to come in the future. Since this is a classic that many people miss, I've added it first. Our duel arena is a back-port of the variant that existed back in August 2018, right before the item staking ban and taxation limits were brought in. I chose to use the variant before item ban as coins-only has its own set of problems. On our last server, one of the major problems behind nearly no one gambling was that coins were too difficult to obtain, and with it being coins-only, no one really did it.

Why Support Gambling?

Some of you might wonder why we'd support gambling in the first place. After all, it is a common practice for servers to completely remove any forms of gambling, or heavily restrict it. The simple answer here is - if we don't do it, someone else will, and that someone else will gain all the players that are interested in gambling in the first place. Another good reason to support official forms of gambling is because people will always find a way to gamble, even if you ban it, it will just move "underground" where people are far more likely to get scammed, banned and so on. We'd rather have official methods of gambling which come with a good set of scam-protections and rules in place.

Fairness And Protections

In order for the duel arena to really be trust-worthy by players, we must ensure that players don't end up scammed or lose their items while participating in this activity.

PID Swapping

The first factor to fairness in duels is that of PID (or player ID). PID essentially dictates which of the two players the game ends up "processing" first, meaning which of the two players gets their attack in first on the target. While it is not possible to eliminate PID, we can ensure fairness to rotating it fairly and frequently. By default, the game will shuffle PID among players every 54-90 seconds at random. Everyone gets shuffled at that point, except for anyone currently in a duel. Instead, the players participating in duels will have their relative PIDs shuffled at the start of each match.

So if we take the example of players 1 & 2 entering duel, with player 1 having PID on player 2 (meaning player 1 gets their attack in first), when the duel start, there will be a 50% chance that they swap their PIDs, meaning player 2 will then get their attack in first. Players will still be subject to the primary PID shuffling at the 54-90 second interval if they are in the duel lobby.

Unexpected Interruptions

So, you might wonder, what happens with the staked items if the server suddenly crashes/dies? The answer is - nothing. You will get your items back the next time you log in, same with your opponent. There will be no winner or loser declared in that case, the fight is declared a draw.

Similarly, what of the updates? I've set up a limitation that no duel can be started once the update timer reaches 10:00, however people that began the duel before that might still be in a duel by the time the clock hits 0. Even if we increase the limit, there's always a possibility for an emergency update which would lead to an unexpected ending to the match. In such cases, when the update timer reaches 00:06 (10 game cycles remaining), the fight is declared a draw and both players get their items back. This will not happen if one of the player is already dying, in which case the death will finish within those 6 seconds and the winner is declared as usual.

In addition to this, if any duel takes longer than 20 minutes, it will be declared a draw. This is a protection against any unexpected freezing or players figuring out a set of rules that prohibits them from killing one another.

Scams

The last major hurdle is scams, and this is where it gets a little trickier. The duel interfaces are designed to make the players wait a few seconds whenever some settings change, which will help prevent many scams, but plenty will still get through as people tend to get lazy with it. While we haven't declared our stance on game rules yet, if we do choose to act on scams in the duel arena, we can do so fairly and easily. In the future, we will support session replays of any and all our players. Any staff member will be able to load up a game session and replay what went down from each of the players' perspective. As such, any staff member will be able to act on and resolve scam cases with relative ease. The only issue is determining if malicious intent was there in the first place, or if it was an "honest mistake", which is where it gets trickier. The exact rules are to be decided in the future, but as it stands right now, we can lean in either direction.

PvP Arena

Duel Arena replaces the Emir's (or PvP) Arena that was there previously. We have no intention of ever implementing that variant of the minigame as it isn't particularly popular in the main game either. Any rewards and items in it can be redistributed by other means.

Media

- The Blurite Team