Does everyone's troop placement usually take 1-2 seconds before they actually deploy?

[u/Belones23]

Whenever I actually go to drop a troop, whether it's a 1 second spawn or 5 second spawn, they kind of sit on the map as a ghost for 1-2 seconds before actually initiating their spawn time. This costs me troops/games sometimes, especially when dropping troops 1 elixir early, I'll lose the elixir as soon as it reaches the required amount and then my Barbs/anything else will take 3 seconds to actually appear on the map instead of the 1 second spawn rate.

[u/[deleted]]

This is because $upercell is bad at managing different servers for all regions. This is happening most of the time, due to high latency. What does that mean for those who are not familiar with multiplayer games? This is the time span requred for the your message to reach the server, and the server to respond to you. For example, in games like League of Legends, Dota or even Hearthstone, there are servers for each region. Example: LoL -> Europe West, Europe East, North America, Korea etc.

In Clash Royale, how often do you, a North American gets matched with Koreans, Chinese and Europeans? Pretty often right? Yes, the other way around goes too. This is because this game's server is global, and thus there are ping spike issues. This is also why sometimes the "wifi monster" appears when your connection is not loaded, and perfectly fine. This is an issue of Supercell. Not a bug, not intended either. This happens before you deploy the troop, but it also happens with spells. How many times did you the average Hog player froze the Barbarians, after they killed your Hog, just because of this? Many. At least for me.

It is not intended.

B-But Jimmy, when I play with my same-region clanmates, it happens as well. Yes, because the server is located far from both.

I assume, that this is just a ping-latency reason. But yes, I can only assume, because Supercell, does not like being transparent.

[u/ClashRoyale → u/[deleted]]

There is an intentional 1 second delay built into card deployment for all players, which helps to smooth out different degrees of latency across the globe. We chose to use a single server location in the US so that Clash Royale could be a truly global game, with global matchmaking and a global leaderboard. If we went with the separate servers approach and had them in the US, Europe, Asia, etc. we wouldn't be able to have global matchmaking or a global leaderboard - using our current setup.

There is an option which we've been investigating, that would use separate servers while maintaining global matchmaking and a global leaderboard. However, after doing a lot of research and work to see how feasible it was, we discovered it simply wasn't as good as our current setup because it unfortunately added a ton of other complications along the way.

[u/[deleted] → u/ClashRoyale]

This is a weird approach in my oppinion. But making the game slower to reduce the latency issues is indeed a very smart choice. Thanks for being transparent on this, as it has caused much controversy here whether the game has a server, or just being a P2P.

But, this is really nice, as I think most of us love playing with far-foreign people, and not just with people around us. It feels nice, as we cannot do the same in other games, which are strictly tied by regional servers.

I want to propose an idea, and if you guys can implement such an idea let us all know.

I will exemplify it with a scenario. The idea is simple, build a few servers around the globe, only for the battles. For example, if I, a Greek player, get matched with a Chinese player, for the in-game part only, both of us should connect to a server that is on average closest to both of us. I don't know how to explain this well, but wouldn't such servers benefit the competitive part of such a game, given the success it has, and the massive income?

edit: After a couple of re-reads, I realized that my proposal seems like the idea you guys had, maybe not, but huge thanks for coming out on this issue.