State of the App

ViralCore

Dear Devs,

First of all, I would like to thank you and let you know how much we all really appreciate your hard work and the thought that you put into creating such a wonderfully addictive game. That said, many of us would like you to please stop developing new characters for 2-3 sprints and pay your technical debt. Right now the app is very buggy and:

1. crashes fairly often for no good reason. Simply opening the app or starting a match results in a crash.
2. the stack change that determines no-matches on board results in not receiving ap and even in some situations a loss of a full turn.
4. the delay at the beginning of a turn often results in the wrong match registering.

This is all resulting in a lot of frustration and provides a very poor user experience. We have plenty of characters to chase in the mean time, we'll be happy to wait.

revskip

Agree 100%.

The ninjas who drop attack tiles (tietsu?) are still dropping them while stunned and every time I start up a new event I am given the "no events currently available" message. If am I not careful to click on the token page it crashes the game altogether and clears any seed teams I might have had in my queue. And occasionally the game will decide that the board should reshuffle even when there are still matches happening during a cascade.


New characters are fun and all but like the OP I'd like to see some extra time and resources devoted to fixing some of the very pervasive bugs that haved popped up over the last few updates.

DreadPirateW

Honestly, the game is getting less stable with each build. I've never had as much trouble as I've been having lately with all the things mentioned above and more.
So long as people keep spending on new character chases, they apparently can't be bothered to keep up with the housekeeping. It really feels like a game they're trying to drain the remaining cash out of while they still can, which is sad because it wouldn't take much for them to really spice it up rather than maintaining the same, tired formula.

pmorcs

DreadPirateW wrote:

So long as people keep spending on new character chases, they apparently can't be bothered to keep up with the housekeeping. It really feels like a game they're trying to drain the remaining cash out of while they still can

To be fair, they did make some nice but monetarily unnecessary UI changes recently, which I found a bit surprising and welcome. That said, the crashing and gameplay bugs are indeed frustrating.

ViralCore

aesthetocyst wrote:

... the dev team should never have to choose between new characters and maintenance and upkeep. Should be separate resources focused on each.

Welcome to RL dev cycles.

Mitchjewitz

There are some bugs yes but the crashing can be the result of your own device. In the year plus that I have had this game it has crashed maybe twice (not recently). Same goes for the slow or delayed gameplay. I tried playing this game on my tablet but unfortunately my device was not powerful enough to run properly. So I play just fine on my phone and yes they did have bug with the slow timing of cds not too long ago but they have more or less fixed that.

Linkster79

Mitchjewitz wrote:

There are some bugs yes but the crashing can be the result of your own device. In the year plus that I have had this game it has crashed maybe twice (not recently). Same goes for the slow or delayed gameplay. I tried playing this game on my tablet but unfortunately my device was not powerful enough to run properly. So I play just fine on my phone and yes they did have bug with the slow timing of cds not too long ago but they have more or less fixed that.

No offense but how old is your tablet that it cannot handle a match 3 game? I use a budget tablet (Hudl 2) and it can run MPQ fine.

Phumade

Mitchjewitz wrote:

There are some bugs yes but the crashing can be the result of your own device.

I think this is part of the problem. Yes the hardware is getting old, but its still on an officially supported software platform. Too many antecodtal incidents to completely blame it on hardware. I wish D3 made things more clear and obivous on whether I should upgrade hardware.

KGB

Just a guess on my part (I develop software than runs on multiple platforms) but it seems to me...

1) There are 3 different development teams (PC, Android, Apple) since bugs like all the IOS crashes aren't happening on Android/PC (yes game crashes there but no where near as much). That has led to 3 different code bases because bugs often exist on one platform but not another.
2) The number of old bugs that are re-appearing indicates many of the original developers are gone and have been replaced by new ones. New developers usually make changes to existing code bases without understanding the idiosyncrasies of the original developers. This leads to what I call 'Rosetta Stone' development where new developers are trying to decipher what the original ones did/intended (documentation is notoriously poor in the video game world).

Compounded on top of all that is the Apple problem. Apple products have their fan boys but from a developer point of view it's a night mare. That's because to issue updates/patches for Android/PC is straight forward. For Apple you have to submit to Apple QA so they can make sure it's not a virus or compromising the device in some way. So if you have to release/update on all 3 platforms at once Apple is always what holds everything else back while you wait for it to get approved.

KGB

Phumade

KGB wrote:

Just a guess on my part (I develop software than runs on multiple platforms) but it seems to me...

1) There are 3 different development teams (PC, Android, Apple) since bugs like all the IOS crashes aren't happening on Android/PC (yes game crashes there but no where near as much). That has led to 3 different code bases because bugs often exist on one platform but not another.
2) The number of old bugs that are re-appearing indicates many of the original developers are gone and have been replaced by new ones. New developers usually make changes to existing code bases without understanding the idiosyncrasies of the original developers. This leads to what I call 'Rosetta Stone' development where new developers are trying to decipher what the original ones did/intended (documentation is notoriously poor in the video game world).

Compounded on top of all that is the Apple problem. Apple products have their fan boys but from a developer point of view it's a night mare. That's because to issue updates/patches for Android/PC is straight forward. For Apple you have to submit to Apple QA so they can make sure it's not a virus or compromising the device in some way. So if you have to release/update on all 3 platforms at once Apple is always what holds everything else back while you wait for it to get approved.

KGB

This makes a lot of sense. Good points

Nightglider1

KGB wrote:

Just a guess on my part (I develop software than runs on multiple platforms) but it seems to me...

1) There are 3 different development teams (PC, Android, Apple) since bugs like all the IOS crashes aren't happening on Android/PC (yes game crashes there but no where near as much). That has led to 3 different code bases because bugs often exist on one platform but not another.
2) The number of old bugs that are re-appearing indicates many of the original developers are gone and have been replaced by new ones. New developers usually make changes to existing code bases without understanding the idiosyncrasies of the original developers. This leads to what I call 'Rosetta Stone' development where new developers are trying to decipher what the original ones did/intended (documentation is notoriously poor in the video game world).

Compounded on top of all that is the Apple problem. Apple products have their fan boys but from a developer point of view it's a night mare. That's because to issue updates/patches for Android/PC is straight forward. For Apple you have to submit to Apple QA so they can make sure it's not a virus or compromising the device in some way. So if you have to release/update on all 3 platforms at once Apple is always what holds everything else back while you wait for it to get approved.

KGB

RE: Point #2 - Back in the days when I learned BASIC (even though the code is easy to parse) we were always encouraged to use REM lines in case someone else needed to look at our code. I freely admit I know nothing about app development, but it seems comments would be a good idea in any program.

dsds

I am getting slow downs, crashes. Animations don't play. Yeah I didn't even notice the color one the op mentioned. Yeah I saw that yesterday, it totally didn't register the match three I did. The hp one is the most annoying. I don't even know how much HP i took off, the timing is so off.

I get the no events thing so often as well. Basically I have a routine now to make the game playable. I schedule my climbs earlier so if there are problems, it's still manageable. I check that I am still in my alliance at the beginning of the day to ensure I get the extra iso from alliance rewards. I also check the tokens page often to suppress the no events error. And if the game slows down, I don't make any moves for a while in hopes that it doesn't crash on me.

I have a much older samsung phone so that may be the issues (galaxy 3)

Phumade

yeah, I moved my pve clear schedule up 20 min based on the assumption that I will have between 3 and 5 crashes in the next 2 hrs.

KGB

aesthetocyst wrote:

Are players seeing gameplay bugs on 1 platform, but not others?

I've seen a few threads here mention bugs only on Apple devices (ie a certain power was bugged only on Apple devices). More recently there is a locked thread at the top of this sub forum dealing with all the IOS crashes in the recent releases.

aesthetocyst wrote:

There should be one code base that's translated to each platform's SDK. Should. If players are seeing gameplay differences, like OoP differences, or more telling signs like naming/stat differences, that would suggest poor version control, or yes, separate code bases.

In theory yes, in reality its not possible.

Apple devices use a proprietary Objective C language. PC could use anything but usually use C++ for speed (could use Java or C#). Android usually uses Java or Javascript (but could use C++).

Also there is a 4th platform, that of the back end server (ie where code to pull tokens, view scores/alliances and other non-battle stuff resides). That 4th platform is obviously common.

Usually what happens development wise is the game designers (the ones who create characters and balance test) create a new power and pass a description of it to the develop teams who code it. That gets tested and eventually released. But with different code bases you'll have different ways to implement the same idea. So subtle bugs will eventually creep in.

I know the designer of the original PuzzleQuest (Steve Fawkner of Infinite Interactive). When they did PuzzleQuest his team developed the game on the PC. The versions for other platforms (DS/Playstation etc) were all contracted out of house since they didn't have expertise to develop on those platforms. Subtle bugs crept in between the various platform versions.

KGB

Calnexin

I concur. Over the weekend I suffered three crashes mid-match. They all resulted in my heroes' team counted as retreated. I lost an Ultron sub about two turns away from victory and couldn't repeat it because I didn't have the health packs to revive my victorious heroes.

Jarvind

While I haven't experienced a lot of the bugs mentioned here (matches not registering and such), I have noticed I've been getting crashes recently, whereas for my first year or so I think the app crashed once, ever. I play on an iPad 2.

I'm no software expert, but it does seem like "make sure your thing doesn't randomly crash" ought to be a top priority. Imagine if your car's brakes just randomly cut out sometimes and the manufacturer's response was "Oh, yeah, that happens sometimes. We'll fix it on next year's model."

Dayv

Moved to Suggestions and Feedback.

dsds

So many times, my matches were not registering the ap. at first, I thought they increased the ap for certain powers and then I look and it's the same cost. I couldn't figure out why it was taking so much longer until I found out that it is a bug here.

This game is so utterly broken. I hit 4-5 bugs each time I play. Now there is a new one. I normally plan 2-3 moves ahead. But you can't even do that anymore because the tiny kitty board just randomly reshuffles for no reason at all. I made a yellow match and that would give me a red match on a cascade, but the game wasn't haven't that because it needs to cheat so after the yellow match, it reshuffled the board before I could get my red match. In fact I think I made a yellow match and would cascade into a red match. But nope game didn't want that and so never got my cascade red match.

The game has become so unpredictable and random, that it isn't based on skill at all. It is based purely on luck. You really can't plan anything. You can't plan your moves, you can't plan your roster (as rng determines what you get), all you can do is plan to not play this tiny kitty game!

Edit: Stop moving the threads. People need to know the flaws of the game. People generally don't look at bugs or suggestions. It is clearly a bug, at least move it to the bugs section. Moving the thread is equivalent to sweeping the problem under the rug though. If you move this thread and silence your users, people will find other avenues (reddit, google play review) to complain, you need to address these threads, not move them out of plain site. Not only will you anger users who are posting, but you will encourage them to spend extra effort to vent elsewhere where you can't control the situation/threads.

Edit 2: This post is entirely my opinion that this game is broken. Others may not think so. However here is my reasoning why I think this game is broken. Bugs hit random players. So if I was fighting for a spot with someone and we are both on a final fight and I lose due to the bug, but the bug doesn't hit the other players and he/she wins his match, I am at a disadvantage. And the other player would win simply because the bug didn't hit him. Is it fair that he won not because he was better or fought harder, but because the bug didn't hit him during his match. (please note this was suggested by a moderator to post this edit, I believe that my explanation above is enough for people to realize that it is my opinion about the game and that there was no ill will to mislead people to think that my statement of "this game is utterly broken" as an undisputed fact.

Really if the bugs were consistent/predictable and didn;t hit people randomly, it would be more fair that way at least it affects everyone equally. And so it would either benefit everyone or handicap everyone. But with the random shuffling and random colors not registering, it makes it unfair because only certain people will be affected. I understand that a lot of the game is already random and completely based on rng already. I guess you can chalk it up to another rng factor (the fact that bugs can randomly affect player's matches on top of the random cascades, and random board that is generated for the match)

Nightglider1

dsds wrote:

This game is so utterly broken. I hit 4-5 bugs each time I play. Now there is a new one. I normally plan 2-3 moves ahead. But you can't even do that anymore because the tiny kitty board just randomly reshuffles for no reason at all. I made a yellow match and that would give me a red match on a cascade, but the game wasn't haven't that because it needs to cheat so after the yellow match, it reshuffled the board before I could get my red match. In fact I think I made a yellow match and would cascade into a red match. But nope game didn't want that and so never got my cascade red match.

It's not cheating; the devs screwed up fixing the problem of boards without any valid moves.

dsds

I understand it's a bug. But at the moment it felt like the ai was cheating. Because denied me the red I really needed to finish the match, I think I took a couple thousand hp damage because of this. So yeah to me at that moment, the ai cheated. Took so long to find a red match after because the board was starved of red.

I tried to be objective when seeing bugs so I also remember the times it happens in my favor which is zero. To be honest, this bug gives ai advantage only because I don't think it ever reshuffled in the middle of the ai turn. Only in middle of the player's turn. The original bug was caused on a players turn, so it's only natural that the new one that resulted from the fix would only affect player turns only.

Yeah so this does give the ai an advantage even though it wasn't intended by the developers. I am going to call it ai cheating until they fix it. The longer they take to fix it the more they are complicit to the ai cheating.