SWW again!

Machine

Hi Lu @Magic:PQ Support Team ,

This kind of topic has been discussed several times in the past without a real solution. I'd thought to give it another shot with you and the new team in the driving seat now. You are the first team after a take-over to keep the positive changes coming for such an extended period of time and I highly appreciate that together with many more players I'm sure. I hope you will take some of your precious time to read what I have to say.

Now, during the last 3 "Survivors of Four Tribes" events several freezes / locks and even errors during loading of the match have been reported, resulting in an automatic game loss for those players. As a side effect, if playing for a top team, it will impact the team performance significantly as the top spots are all very close together when a max score of only 120 points.

I would like to highlight one specific issue where the solution can maybe address all of these issues. One player on our team had an issue while the match was starting / loading. He saw the infamous "Something went wrong" error and continued to play. The match started with his planeswalker at 13 life! This, of course, frowned his brows. He was still able to win the match, mainly thanks to Dak's lifegain. After the match he noticed that one charge was lost on that node, which immediately explained why his walker started the "next" match with only 13 life. So, this little error cause him to lose a charge AND start the next one with very little life.

This is just one example of the many issues, bugs and freezes the game has, but this one has had a major impact on him and the team. Why on him? Because he is one of the best players in the game, but the stats that are being kept track of don't reflect his actual skills and achievements. He even didn't finish in the top 100 players in 2023 because all of this misfortune. He has been hit with a several of these issues during the past months and this time it killed his motivation with this game. I felt the frustration and powerlessness in his messages, he wrote a pretty angry ticket to support, he cancelled his VIP subscription and he is even thinking about leaving the team and quitting the game. I am writing this specific paragraph just to give you an insight of how these issues may affect some of the players and the consequences this has. Why on the team? This one is not as important as the effect on the player in question, but because of the lost points due to these issues, our team has missed the top 2 rewards twice in a row now.

Back to practicality and thinking out loud: Is it perhaps possible to implement something that whenever the game encounters an issue (if it is able to give a SWW error, it knows something is off) the last known good game state is reverted so the player can continue from there without losing a charge? I guess that the game has to keep track of "save points or check points" to be able to do that. It also has to be implemented in such a way that players can't abuse it by reverting to a check point after a valid loss. The game has to be able to detect an issue by itself and allow the player to return to a valid game state. A feature like this would help the whole community and I'm sure a very big percentage of the players have had one or more issues with the game in the past.

Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to be as clear as possible and give some meaningful context as well. For now, enjoy your holiday! I hope the community and the devs can have a good discussion over this.

BadHippo

The player that Machine is referring to is me. As he said, I have cancelled my VIP subscription and I will not even think about renewing it until the game is bug free. I however disagree with Machine in one thing: the impact on the team is not less important than the impact on the player. Due to the lack of a decent Team Leaderboard, that would include monthly and yearly rankings of teams (which, you know, it is a functionality that the game should have, it doesn’t look too hard to implement), some players are doing a great job keeping track of these things. Some coalitions, among which we are included, are competing to be on the top of that list unofficial list by the end of the year. It is an important extra motivation. I’d say at least the top 10 coalitions, some 200 players, are aiming for that. So, it is not only the top 2 rewards that we miss when something like this happens. Of course, another player from another coalition maybe also had a bug, but that actually makes it worse.

Opperstamper

Good point! This really needs to be taken care of. There's a good reason that we have a team named after this exact issue, and it would be nice if the meaning can change to nostalgia, something we'll only talk about when we look back at how the game used to be "back then".

It will lead to another issue tho. When all of this is resolved, finishing scores will be even more clumped together. My team YouHave1Job also suffered multiple lost ribbons from freezes this weekend. And not just this weekend, I saw the very same report that's described here. "Loss" during load times and starting with 12HP on the "new" match last week. My teammate also won that one despite the handicap, but it takes a very talented player to do so - for many players this situation would mean 2 automatic losses.

The point for this last part is that the event end scores for top 10s will all crawl closer to each other, which has to be addressed as a separate issue, but it will be a good idea for Webcore to think ahead and prepare.

Any resolution for game stability will result in way less player frustration. And that's one of the foundations that we need ASAP.

And @BadHippo, I hope you can rest assured that you're not alone in this. I hope you will still be around to give us the competition that we enjoy.

Machine

OK, let me try this once again @Magic:PQ Support Team . I just lost my 29 perfect streak AGAIN due to a bug. The LPS kicked in exactly at the same time Baral was cast. The image of Baral wouldn't go away, like it normally does, probably because the LPS screen, that can be seen in the background, is waiting for input. And I can't give that input, because both buttons are covered by the image of Baral.

Last year I lost my 26 streak due to a Seed gem issue where the image of the Elemental token shows up and also didn't go away. I had this exact same issue earlier this week, luckily not during a team event.

I was doing my best to get at least to the number of streaks that @Xibvert has, but it's the second time now the game prevents me from doing so. I am a very competitive player and losing a match like this, out of my control and killing two very high streaks, is VERY frustrating. Quite frankly, I am wondering why I bother to keep playing this game, knowing that some day it will mess me up again.

There SHOULD be some way for a player to reset a locked game, clear LPS input, or whatever without losing that match / charge. Possible from the pause menu that always seems to be accessible. All of these nice streaks, scores and data that several people keep track of mean jack squat if the game is not reliable. A stable and reliable game should be your #1 priority. I'm so pissed right now...