Shadow Lab Changes (problems?)

Hi @TotalJimkata

I’m sorry if I’m WAY late on this, as I’ve had my Xbox One disconnected for a few months (thanks, first floor flood) and hadn’t played Shadow Lab for a while before that because there were some issues with shadows not loading for bounties and shadow surivival.

However, I finally have my Xbox One set up again and I went in to Shadow Lab and I’ve found that certain things have changed. My sincerest apologies if I missed the thread where this was explained, but can someone tell me why the Shadow Lab categories have been changed, or when that happened?

Before, each shadow was ranked by their win total. I believe there was an overall win total board, and individual character win totals. There were also tiers.

This has been replaced by point totals and all tiers appear to have been removed. The point totals appear to come from Shadow Survival, so the only real reason to play bounties is to get Shadow Points. As someone that got all the shadow skins a long time ago and has about 150,000 Shadow Points just sitting there, doing nothing, I’m kinda wondering a few things:

  1. Why were the win totals removed in favor of survival point totals?
  2. Why were the tiers removed?
  3. How does one guy on the leaderboard have over a billion points when the next person after them has FAR less?
  4. Will there, at some point, be a way for us to manually remove bounties that we can’t play against? The ones that provide 0 SP for example?

Anyways, my Sadira went from being near the top of the second tier for the character, almost breaking in to the top tier, to being like the 383rd ranked Sadira (or something like that) because I almost never play Shadow Survival, partially because the shadows wouldn’t load for so long, but more because I really enjoyed doing bounties with people I know on the forum.

It’s also kinda weird to look and see so many people with so many points and almost no win / loss record or no win / loss record. It almost looks like certain data didn’t get transferred over or something along those lines. The person that used to be the top Sadira (sorry if I butcher this, I can’t recall the name exactly), Ninda Nindo, had thousands of wins, but now their win / loss record doesn’t show up at all.

If you or anyone else could let me know what’s going on with Shadow Lab, that’d be awesome. Thanks!

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The guys with billions of points is some sort of glitch/ error. We’ve discussed it before long ago in some thread. James said its not legitimate points.

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Yeah I figured as much. I didn’t think there was any way it was legit. I went looking around, trying to find threads about the changes to Shadow Lab, but came up empty, so I figured I’d start a new one and was just curious about it. There’s a lot of stuff that seems odd right now, like the absence of win / loss records for some people that I know had wins and losses before and stuff like that.

Man, I miss win totals mattering in terms of placement. I was always so proud of my little shadow any time she managed to beat anyone. I always thought it was kinda weird that matches you play couldn’t count toward that total, but I guess that would be a bit of an artificial way to pad your win totals, though I suppose it still rewards you for playing so…

Sorry, I’m a bit off topic (on my own topic, no less lol). I’m mainly just curious to know what happened with this mode since I last played it and why those changes were made, as I’ve clearly missed a fairly decent amount of info since then.

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The various “challenge shadow” lists could double as a tier-based or win-based leaderboard. I’m not sure if they were part of the actual leaderboards before, but it’s something at least.

Hey! I am wondering how long you were gone, but nothing structurally has changed since Nov 2016. Check this out: Shadow Fighters- New Leaderboard Scoring- What you need to know

I am a bit confused by some of the questions because most of the stuff you mention is still there. Wondering if something is bugged out /maybe service interruption caused things to be missing. Let’s go through each one:

1.Why were the win totals removed in favor of survival point totals?
On Shadow leaderboards, there are 2 tabs: Highest Shadow Wins (no win/loss here just sheer # of wins). and Survival Score (top surv. score - ignore wins/losses columns).

2.Why were the tiers removed?
Tiers are still there under challenge shadow by points. Each character has tiers 50, 100, 250, 500 and 1000. This was changed (per the notes) to be by win count only, as loss ration was an issue when people farmed 1000pt shadows, it dragged them down fast, which meant we rarely had 1000 pt shadows…
Are you not seeing these, or where you expecting them somewhere else?

3.How does one guy on the leaderboard have over a billion points when the next person after them has FAR less?
Totally bugged out scores (maybe one blatant mod tool hack). Unfortunately no way to remove them without blowing away everyone else’s hard work. I consider #11 to be the real #1 (unless someone has a nice stream proving theirs is legit above that).

4.Will there, at some point, be a way for us to manually remove bounties that we can’t play against? The ones that provide 0 SP for example?
I wish this was something we could do. It’s on a list of quality of life improvements but doubtful to be addressed.

Your sadira ranking may have dropped because so many other sadira shadows have more wins now. Some of this is luck of discovery beyond pure social awareness (people seeking out to fight your shadow).

Last, the shadow loading issues are still under investigation. I myself have this issue on Xbox sometimes where I cannot load shadows, others it’s fine. On win10 no issues ever (maybe the occasional reload 1-2 times to get pass a bad/missing shadow). Just know it’s not been forgotten.

Hope this answered your questions and definitely let me know if you are not seeing things as described!

-James

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Ah, this was COMPLETELY my mistake. I’m sorry about that! I’d stopped playing Shadow Lab for a while when opponents stopped loading for me and that was about six months ago (give or take). So when I went back in, I went to the leaderboard when I actually should’ve gone to Challenge a Shadow. That’s where I’m used to being able to sort by 1,000 SP, 500 SP, etc. In those rankings, my Sadira’s right outside 1,000 SP, as she was before.

Thank you for clearing that up, and again, my apologies for taking a wrong turn. I obviously don’t mean to spread misinformation.

That makes sense. So you guys can’t go in and remove an individual without it affecting everyone else? That’s unfortunate, though obviously not the biggest deal in the world by any stretch of the imagination.

I understand. I hope it’ll eventually be addressed at some point though, if possible. I don’t know about anyone else, but I have a ton of zeroes in my bounty list. Every time I scroll through a group of five zeroes, it takes about seven seconds to load the next group of five zeroes. Currently I have about five groups of zeroes that I have to get through before I can get to the actual bounties that I can play against.

It’s not the biggest deal, obviously, and if there are other, more pressing quality of life needs, or if you simply have other work to do elsewhere on other projects or anything along those lines, as I’m sure most of your days are jam-packed, then it’s all good. I still love this mode, no question!

This is still probably the biggest thing that I hope you might be able to fix at some point. I played Shadow Survival over the weekend for the first time in a long time and had some rather significant issues:

-Several matches took 20 plus tries before they’d even attempt to load the player data. Normally, the screen would immediately say that the data couldn’t be loaded.

-I think that this is because of the above issue, but most of the time, when I’d finally get an opponent to load, it wasn’t the opponent that was listed on the survival ladder. Like Orchid on the ladder would scroll down to me and I’d have to hit A or B 20 or 30 times to get a match to load, and then when my opponent would show up, it’d be TJ Combo. When I beat TJ and it’d go back to the ladder, an X would animate on Orchid as if I fought her.

-The A and B issue for shadow survival is a relatively large issue because pressing neither A to try again or B to not try again gets me out of trying again to load the opponent. It completely traps you and if you want to stop trying to load your opponent shadow, you have to exit out of the game completely and restart it.

-I should say too that I had the same problem with trying to simply challenge a shadow, where it wouldn’t load and it’d take several tries. I don’t believe challenging a shadow locks you in to keep trying though, if I recall correctly.

-Also had an issue where I was fighting a shadow and the game crashed, though that’s not something that normally happens.


I’m glad that some of these issues are under investigation, and if you need a guinea pig to try different things while playing or anything along those lines, by all means feel free to drop me a line. I’d love to help in any small way I can.

I do have one small question that I’m pretty sure I know the answer to already, but do you think that there will be anything else to unlock with Shadow Points in the future? I’ve already unlocked all the shadow skins and I’m currently sitting on about 160,000 SP with nothing to spend it on.

I’m assuming that nothing’s planned at this time or likely to be planned in general, and if that’s the case, then no problem. I just really enjoy fighting shadows and it’d be cool to have some other stuff to spend it on like more outfits, accessories, maybe another shadow version of a level like Shadow Tiger’s Lair, etc.

Anything else that’s added to this game would be amazing to me, as it’s been four plus years and I still really enjoy playing it! :slightly_smiling_face: