Discussion: solutions for game freezes and open petition for "unstuck" feature

Elektrophorus

Please read

The #1 most popular complaint about this game is game freezes. These happen to every player, all the time. If this game didn't have an inherent leaderboard feature, these freezes wouldn't matter. However, since our performance directly impacts our rewards—and ultimately the whole point of the game of collecting cards—these freezes can be extremely frustrating, especially on events where you have limited plays. Understandably, quitting a game early should count as a loss or else everyone would have a perfect score. However, 99.99% of the time, these early losses are not our fault, but an inherent flaw in the game.

Yes, we want you to fix causative agents of freezes.

However, there should have been a way to recover from them built into the game long ago, arguably at game launch. One simple solution to this is that there should be some sort of "unstuck" feature that (1) clears whatever process is going on and (2) attempts to redo it. It may even be beneficial to implement this as some sort of "quick-save" feature, so we can go back to a game state in the event of an app crash. That is, when a freeze happens, we could be able to "quick-save", return to main menu, and reopen the game in a functional state.

Yes, there are some workarounds to some errors. For example, when the menu gets stuck on screen, Android users only can click the back button to return to the game. Since half or more of the player-base is on iOS, it seems unfair that this is the case.

There is no indication that work on this feature is underway—and I believe there should be. This should be the #1 priority. There is no point in releasing a new card set if we can't play the game. And, if there is work being done, why haven't we heard about it, given how severe the issue is? Everything Brigby does (and all the **** we give her aside—sorry, Brigby), communication between the developer team and the player-base is awful. 

Please help me let the developers know that:

• This issue has gone on long enough
• Looking at the individual causes is not enough; we need a blanket solution
• There should be a way to bypass game freezes in-game
• All things considered, the developers are doing a good job, but there is clearly critical work to be done aside from aesthetics, balance, etc.

If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to discuss them.

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Rhasget

This is a major issue. But one of the problems is that it's inconsistent. 
I have never had a freeze occur (forced a Hixus freeze once but took several tries) on either of my phones.
I play every event, every match and test decks in TG on many days. I put my game on standby for hours and resume as normal. I can check battlelog, zoom in on cards and no hiccups. But half of my coalition can barely use the in game chat without a freeze.

Why is it so different on basically the same hardware?

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Brakkis

As I've already said in my own thread on this and in other threads regarding these freezing issues; this game should have a Resume Match feature. If the game freezes, or your phone crashes/dies, then you should be able to hop back in to whatever match you had going before it happened with any processes that caused the freeze to have resolved.

It won't win you a match you were already losing and it will have no bearing on another player as we don't have actual PvP here. This feature should have been in this game ages ago.

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DBJones

Having it auto-save at the beginning of each player's turn (possibly at each extra swap too) would be a huge help in freeze recovery. Also, it would be very difficult to abuse as long as you can only go back to the start of the turn. Just have the server save the date modified (a tiny amount of data, you'd only need one per player) and you could have the save file on the player's device.

Elektrophorus

DBJones said:

Having it auto-save at the beginning of each player's turn (possibly at each extra swap too) would be a huge help in freeze recovery. Also, it would be very difficult to abuse as long as you can only go back to the start of the turn. Just have the server save the date modified (a tiny amount of data, you'd only need one per player) and you could have the save file on the player's device.

I'm concerned that if you can go back to the start of a turn, people could just keep rewinding if their swap isn't good enough.

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DBJones

I was thinking it would save the board state as well (gems, creatures, supports, etc.) Since the actual save could be local, they wouldn't have to worry as much about size. If date modified isn't enough security, saving and checking the md5 hash, file size, or other similar data would help without increasing the server load unduly. I don't know what would be most secure, but the players probably shouldn't know what it's checking anyway.

babar3355

I agree that the ends probably justify the means, but I do feel like any "Save" function would likely be very abusable and highly abused.

The simplest example is one in which Greg goes on an absolutely crazy cascade and empties his entire hand in a HoD event.  I could see many people shutting down their game mid turn to try and reset the gem state.  Most people believe the gems are random from the top, so the player could get a much different outcome.

Similarly, players in a bad spot might attempt to try a number of different combinations to try to get enough mana for a River's Rebuke which is their only out in a major game.

It would be really hard for them to have timely enough saves to prevent this type of abuse. 

However, I still think it's something they could do.  Perhaps only allow a certain amount of saves used in an event, or have a timer on them.

DBJones

It should be possible for the app to detect if the user closes it (while it's in the foreground at least). That should probably delete the save just like hitting the menu quit button should. Whether it can tell the difference while it's in the background is more complicated (from my Googling at least), but might be possible. At this point I just don't know enough to give any more suggestions that have any chance of being useful due to not knowing enough about the inner workings of the app (or the systems it runs on really).

Kinesia

People do all kinds of things to mess up stuff like this, anything they can do they will.

The biggest thing is that moves can't be changeable so they need to be stored on the server before being acted on, but then you can't even have GLITCHES in phone connection, it will lock us out of the game even more than it currently does. I used to go through some phone dead zones and I could still play and the game would reconnect and work later, all that goes away, but maybe it's worth it? But it also depends on how much of the playerbase has awesome versus terrible phone service.

Good internet is a luxury in some parts of the world.

DBJones

Currently battles sort of pause if you lose service, they could just add an actual pause that stops the action. Actually, adding an actual pause is just a good idea in general considering that pausing while stuff is happening sometimes freezes the game.

gogol666

babar3355 said:

I agree that the ends probably justify the means, but I do feel like any "Save" function would likely be very abusable and highly abused.

The simplest example is one in which Greg goes on an absolutely crazy cascade and empties his entire hand in a HoD event.  I could see many people shutting down their game mid turn to try and reset the gem state.  Most people believe the gems are random from the top, so the player could get a much different outcome.

Similarly, players in a bad spot might attempt to try a number of different combinations to try to get enough mana for a River's Rebuke which is their only out in a major game.

It would be really hard for them to have timely enough saves to prevent this type of abuse. 

However, I still think it's something they could do.  Perhaps only allow a certain amount of saves used in an event, or have a timer on them.

You can also save the seed of the RNG. This way all the following random action will have the same results. In the end RNG is only pseudorandom

Volrak

gogol666 said:

You can also save the seed of the RNG. This way all the following random action will have the same results. In the end RNG is only pseudorandom

Though that would reduce exploitability slightly, different gem matches would typically still have vastly different outcomes.

Elektrophorus

I would really like to see this addressed.

ZW2007-

I literally suggested this years ago and it was just crickets. Here's mypost from Nov 2016:

ZW2007- said:

Re-posting this as it's own thread. It would be nice to see a 'stuck' button in the menu of matches. There are a lot of bugs that "freeze" the game but still allow you to open the menu and tap the quit button. The stuck button could refresh the UI and let you continue playing instead of being forced to lose the match. Obviously there are some cases that this wouldn't fix but it'd be a start. For example, in the last Avacyn event, I was playing as Ob Nixilis and used his third loyalty ability. I made the mistake of moving too fast and opening my hand and attempting to rearrange cards before the support was generated. This resulted in me being stuck with my hand open and one of my cards filling the screen after the support came into play and I tapped it away. The only option I had in app was to open the menu and hit quit. A refresh of the UI would most likely fix this. Just my two cents.

Elektrophorus

ZW2007- said:

I literally suggested this years ago and it was just crickets. Here's mypost from Nov 2016:

ZW2007- said:

Re-posting this as it's own thread. It would be nice to see a 'stuck' button in the menu of matches. There are a lot of bugs that "freeze" the game but still allow you to open the menu and tap the quit button. The stuck button could refresh the UI and let you continue playing instead of being forced to lose the match. Obviously there are some cases that this wouldn't fix but it'd be a start. For example, in the last Avacyn event, I was playing as Ob Nixilis and used his third loyalty ability. I made the mistake of moving too fast and opening my hand and attempting to rearrange cards before the support was generated. This resulted in me being stuck with my hand open and one of my cards filling the screen after the support came into play and I tapped it away. The only option I had in app was to open the menu and hit quit. A refresh of the UI would most likely fix this. Just my two cents.

It’s because people are complacent. Even though the error is critical, and it happens to literally everyone who plays this game, no one reinforces the need to implement such a feature. For that reason, I’d like to keep this thread alive as long as possible to let them know this is not something we “want” but something we need.

Everyone always reports specific bugs, and the Dev team sees these specific reports and work to patch each individual issue, rather than looking at the issue holistically.

Arsinik

Another easy solution that some other games use, which this would work best for me because mine usually crashes right after a freeze, is that if the game closes in the middle of a match, you have the option of returning to said mid-match. I believe they're other game Marvel Puzzle Quest does this...

UweTellkampf

Add my signature to this. Very rarely I manage to go through a lengthy event without a freeze. The amount of possibilities to encounter one seems vast. It feels just really bad to invest (a lot of) time in something not working properly. I am not a developer, but I have played so many games that let you resume playing after a crash occurred. If we find that it's exploitable, we will report is such. Tinker around until you find a non-exploitable working solution.