Isn't there some way to detect a crash?

Dragon_Nexus

I really wish this issue could get resolved.
I just used a health pack on a character, bought a couple of boosts with some ISO, got into a fight and...awesome! Two T-shapes set up in colours I need! Wait, the moves haven't loaded. Oh lovely, the game's going to crash.

So then I had to load the game back up having wasted 4 boosts, 400 ISO, a health pack and now I need to use *another* health pack and then the board was bloody awful to boot.

Surely there's a way of programming the game so that if it crashes within, say, 3 seconds of a match starting there's no penalty. And then put the penalties back if it happens more than, I dunno, 3 times in a row for those times people are actually CTRL ALT DEL-ing quickly.

Unknown

It's not a bad idea but you'll be surprised how good people can be at crashing their own device in 3 seconds if it's known that you get a do-over in the first 3 seconds.

Dragon_Nexus

Phantron wrote:

It's not a bad idea but you'll be surprised how good people can be at crashing their own device in 3 seconds if it's known that you get a do-over in the first 3 seconds.

Hense the more-than-three-times-in-a-row clause.
Still, you'd need to be blisteringly fast to look at a board, identify it as being terrible, and then crash your game in 3 seconds. Doubt I could do it. Not consistently, anyway.

Unknown

Playing on Steam, whenever the game crashes (~1 in 50 battles), it ALWAYS does so before the tiles have fully landed onto the board. You don't get the opportunity to study or move the board. So adding a one-second anti-crash check would be very welcome.

CNash

Someone else posted a solution in the bug report thread:

aesthetocyst wrote:

Matches execute on the user's device. Have the game write match status locally after every so many moves. Erase the file when the match concludes. When an account logs on, if the server shows that account as having been involved in a match (and we know the server tracks this, since it already knows when to "retreat" on the player's behalf), have the app check for a match progress file and resume if found. If no file, then retreat the match..

This is a graceful and workable solution. Chances of this being implemented? Roughly zero; the benefit (preventing unfair health pack/boost loss due to unexpected app/device crashes - solely a customer-care issue) is not worth the engineering time needed to implement and QA the feature. It sucks, but that's software development for you. Far easier (from an agile point of view) simply to fix the crash and compensate people for the inconvenience rather than taking steps to mitigate the impact of future crashes. You build up a lot of technical debt, but this is short term and manageable.

Unknown

gobstopper wrote:

Playing on Steam, whenever the game crashes (~1 in 50 battles), it ALWAYS does so before the tiles have fully landed onto the board. You don't get the opportunity to study or move the board. So adding a one-second anti-crash check would be very welcome.

I play on steam as well, and often the game crashes when either I or the AI make the first move, moving a particular character to the front. Sometimes it takes 3 seconds to crash; sometimes 30 seconds.

Dragon_Nexus

I think the game has crashed mid-game maybe once for me. Possibly twice. It's exceedingly rare and honestly I don't expect any kind of programming could accurately understand that that was a crash and not a ragequit.

The vast, vast majority of my crashes come right at the start. The tiles drop down and I get the 8x8 grid, but the move list doesn't load. The game hangs for about 2-3 seconds, then crashes to desktop. That's always how it happens, and usually it happens when there's a 5 move ready to go. Not sure if that's related or not, or just my own sense of the universe trolling me.

I don't mind a game crashing, that's just something software does and you can't fix all of these issues. But to be penalised for something completely out of my control...that's what annoys me.