Abyssal Ambush - get ready for the fight!

Event: Abyssal Ambush

Rough seas and violent storms have brought forth treacherous creatures from the inky depths… Come together with other rulers on your server to defeat these terrifying sea monsters on the high seas! Reap valuable rewards for your efforts – with the top three players on each server getting even more loot!

13.08.2024 9:00 CEST - 15.08.2024 14:00 CEST

Monsters from the Deep

Open the world map to see which sea monsters you can take on. On the map, click on a particular monster’s icon to take part in the event and send your troops into battle against the monster.

You won’t stand a chance against these powerful creatures alone – but with the combined force of other emperors and their armies, you may be victorious. Once a monster is defeated, it won’t be long before another nasty creature surfaces… Stay on your guard!

The monsters which appear have different strengths and weaknesses against certain units, determined at random each round. These stats are shown in the combat reports so you can select your units accordingly.

New Event Interface

At the start of this event, a new info bar will be added to the top centre of the game interface. This bar will display the event progress, as well as which monster is currently attacking. You can also use this bar to participate in the event and enter combat against the monsters.

Rewards

Defeating the monsters can earn you numerous rewards for your feats on the high seas. Glorious seafarers can unlock achievements with unique titles, and a great haul of precious resources!

Achievements

You can unlock the following achievements and titles, found in the new Events category in the game:

* Participate in the Event: Abyssal Ambush 50 times.

* Grants a new title.

* Participate in the Event: Abyssal Ambush 150 times.

* Grants a new title.

* Participate in the Event: Abyssal Ambush 300 times.

* Grants a new title.

* Reach the top 10 in the Event: Abyssal Ambush.

* Reach the top 5 in the Event: Abyssal Ambush.

* Reach rank number 1 in the Event: Abyssal Ambush.

* Grants a new title.

Resources

You will also be rewarded with Building Material, Wine, Marble, Crystal, Sulphur and Gold for participating in the event. The amount of resources you get is determined by how much damage you deal to the monsters.

Extra Rewards for Top 3

The top three players on each server will also get an additional reward pack containing various items.
The player ranked number 1 on each server will even get a special **town icon** which can be (de)activated in each Town Hall. The icon (and the glory!) is visible for all players to see on the island view!

Equip your units for battle on the high seas and return to your towns with fully laden ships!

Have fun,
Your Ikariam Team

Dear players,

for the benefit of those not following us in Discord, here's the chronological chain of information concerning Abyssal Ambush and the issues that arose today:

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Dear players,

some servers are experiencing a bit of a problem after the event has finished, up to and including the actual server being overwhelmed and unreachable.

We're looking into it.

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Following up on this, this is, what we know so far:

• the end of the event overwhelmed the servers for a so far unknown reason
• actions that should have happened, such as the distribution of the rewards, are stuck in queues
• we're currently in an emergency meeting with devs, product owners and system administrators to tackle the current issues

We'll let you know more once we know more.

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Following up on this, by now most servers apart from maybe a couple of very stubborn ones should at least be reachable again.

While this is good, obviously not everyone having received their rewards and some not even having received the notification about it so far is not so good.

We're still looking into this and are working on a solution for this.

Dear players,

following up on today's "end of the event events", we'd like to apologise.

That servers crashed completely and many servers got stuck in queues while processing the rewards, did not happen like this in testing and was not foreseen by us.

However, you can test how much and well you want to, you'll never be able to test in the same way that thousands of players do on live.

While we're very happy with the activity spawned during the event, we're obviously not so happy with how it ended.

At this moment, there are some servers which got lucky and didn't crash completely, those servers ended up getting the rewards for each participant as planned. However, the majority of servers wasn't so lucky and unfortunately this is also not a matter of "Just wait a bit, it'll happen automatically.".

We're looking into the issue and we think, we may have found an explanation and a way to fix it, however, this will not work out today anymore, we're afraid.

We'll let you know more tomorrow, when we're hopefully closer to a fix.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Your Ikariam Team

Dear players,

Abyssal Ambush has ended and while not everything went as smoothly as we'd have preferred it to, most of us enjoyed it.

Your general feedback, apart from those things that didn't work too well, was positive and we're happy, you liked the general idea.

Now, it needs work. We all know that and there's no way around that. We've gathered your feedback and will definitely look into it in great depth and take it into consideration for the setup for the next run of Abyssal Ambush.

While we can't provide any details right now, we forwarded your concerns and strongly recommended that the rewards be increased in order to make them more attractive. Some players didn't pay attention and just blindly sent in whatever they had. That was less than optimal and led to massive losses compared to what had been invested. Some users minmaxed the hell out of it and came out with a profit.

However, this event was meant to be something for all players and to that end, the rewards should be higher than they turned out to be.

Also we strongly recommended to enable us to provide more information upfront for the next run. We agree, it should be clear from the start, what kind of reward one can expect.

Now, for the issue at hand, the missing rewards for many servers.

We're working on a fix for that. If we ran the reward distribution part of the event again now, it would just crash the servers again. That would help nobody.

The underlying issue needs to be fixed, before we can do that. We will do that, but this won't be done today. It will require a new version.

At the moment we're looking at including it into the next planned version which we had targeted for middle of next week anyway. This means: the rewards will be delivered, but probably not before Wednesday next week.

We're sorry for the delay but for organizational reasons it makes little sense to separate those two versions into a hotfix for the rewards and the normal next version.

As a little "We're sorry!" from our side we're going to activate the following bonuses from today, 16.08.2024 18:00 CEST until 22.08.2024 14:00 CEST:

• income of wood and marbles increased by 50%
• income of crystal, sulphur and wine increased by 25%
• trade ship speed increased by 10%

As a little token for the statistic fans among you, here's some info about all the fallen heroes of the first fight against the hydras:

This is all servers, all waves together. Our hearts go out to the millions of Spearmen, Archers, Sulphur Carabineers and Gyrocopters that had to give their live for the cause.

We will keep you updated, as soon as we know more.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Your Ikariam Team

Slight correction regarding the date/timeline:

A hotfix for the rewards situation will be rolled out on Monday beginning at 10:00 CEST.

Beginning at around 14:00 CEST on Monday we will then run the rewards distribution which will be running in a staggered way.

This means: beginning on Monday ~14:00 CEST the rewards will be distributed in batches until all servers are done with all their batches.

This whole process may take several hours depending on the size of the server.

This should prevent further crashes during distribution.

Dear players,

while rolling out the hotfix and trying to run the reward distribution script, we ran into unforeseen difficulties.

It doesn't work the way it was intended to. We've spent the last 2 hours trxing to get it to work but we must admit defeat at this point and acknowledge that it will not magically start working today anymore.

For that reason, we're now ending today's maintenance and developers will have to find out, why the fix didn't work as intended and work on one that actually does.

This means: there will be no rewards today. We're hoping to include this to the next minor version we had planned for the middle of this week, so Wednesday or Thursday.

As a thank you for your patience we will, when we roll this out, also put 10 premium traders in everyone's inventory.

Your Ikariam Team

Dear players,

tomorrow, 21.08.2024 starting at 10:00 CEST we will be rolling out version 11.0.1 to all live servers.

This version will include another attempt at fixing the reward distribution.

The process hasn't changed from last time, so first we'll rollout the version and then we can run the distribution, which will happen in a staggered way.

So it can take several hours until all rewards are handed out, depending on the size of the server and community.

This is also when we will put the 10 premium traders in everyone's inventory.

Apart from this, version 11.0.1 also includes the following:

• Fixed Abyssal Monster Hunter achievement not unlocking after sending a number of attacks in the event.
• Fixed an issue with Abyssal Ambush target name not being displayed fully in the Troop Movements tab for some languages.
• Fixed loading and travel time sometimes displaying different values between the setup window and the movement shown in the Military Tab.
• Various small bug fixes.

Your Ikariam Team

Dear players,

so, we fought the reward distribution boss and managed to achieve a partial victory.

The top 3 rank item rewards and dolphins are now distributed on all servers.

We will have to continue the fight for the resources tomorrow, as this is not reacting well to our attempts of speeding it up.

We'll keep you posted as soon as we know more.

Your Ikariam Team

Dear players,

as announced yesterday, we had started the distribution of the rewards and encountered issues.

Everything we tried to speed up a surprisingly slow process failed and ultimately ended up completely crashing parts of our automated routines.

We've tried fixing this today but haven't been able to finish the procedure just yet.

This announcement is to let you know, it's still being worked on. We will keep you updated and provide more information as soon as we have it.

Your Ikariam Team

Dear players,

while waiting on news regarding the reward situation, I'd like to take this moment and forward a message from Andrew, our Product Manager.

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Hello Ikariam Community,

This is Andrew, the Product Manager of Ikariam. I want to address the recent issues surrounding the Abyssal Ambush event. We acknowledge that the event did not run smoothly and fell short of the high standards we strive for, and more importantly, the expectations you, our players, rightfully have.

We also accept full responsibility for the subsequent attempt to rectify the situation by manually providing rewards. Unfortunately, this approach did not go according to plan and has led to further frustration. The current situation is unacceptable, and for that, we apologise.

Listening to and acting on your feedback is our top priority. Rest assured; our goal is to address all outstanding concerns before the merges take place. Additionally, we will not be running the Abyssal Ambush event again until we have implemented several improvements based directly on your feedback and have fixed the underlying performance issues.

Some of the key changes we are working on include:

• Implementing an option to hide the event banner for those who prefer a cleaner interface.
• Converting the reward distribution at the end of the event into a "Claim your rewards" button, giving players control over when they receive their prizes.

Overall, we completely agree that the quality of this update did not meet your expectations, nor ours. We are committed to ensuring that future updates are of a higher standard. Our next update, Infinite Horizons, has already completed the design phase, and, once our current situation has been resolved, we are dedicating additional resources to make sure it meets the level of quality you deserve.

Warm regards,

Andrew

Product Manager, Ikariam

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Dear players,

we now have a better understanding of how to fix the rewards issue and are building a version that should finally end the mess we're in and distribute all the missing resource rewards.

This version is expected to be finished and tested early next week. badidol will be off next week, my replacement will keep you posted.

Unfortunately those of you who did not get all of the item rewards (rank 1 through 3) will have to be handled in a more manual way. badidol's replacement will keep you posted about this, as well.

To compensate for the long wait, we will activate the following bonuses from today, 23.08.2024 18:00 CEST until Wednesday, 28.08.2024 14:00 CEST:

• 25% higher income on all 5 resources
• 25% faster trade ships

Once again, we apologise for this mess and thank you for your patience and understanding.

Your Ikariam Team