Known Issue: Soft Locks

Magic:PQ Support Team
Magic:PQ Support Team ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 3,482 Chairperson of the Boards
in MtGPQ General Discussion

Hey, folks!

We have received many reports about soft locks occurring during this weekend's Coalition event. Our technical teams are studying it and, so far, it seems to be related to Ward.

We'll be back with more news soon.

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Comments

  • Janosik
    Janosik Posts: 631 Critical Contributor

    Hope this is fixed for next weekend's coalition event!!

  • Magic:PQ Support Team
    Magic:PQ Support Team ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 3,482 Chairperson of the Boards

    We're working hard so that's the case, @Janosik!

    Updated info about this issue and compensation here, everyone: https://d3go.helpshift.com/hc/en/4-magic-puzzle-quest/faq/1229-known-issue-bug-with-event-return-of-the-god-pharaoh-12-18-2024/

  • Machine
    Machine Posts: 877 Critical Contributor

    @Magic:PQ Support Team said:
    We're working hard so that's the case, @Janosik!

    Updated info about this issue and compensation here, everyone: https://d3go.helpshift.com/hc/en/4-magic-puzzle-quest/faq/1229-known-issue-bug-with-event-return-of-the-god-pharaoh-12-18-2024/

    I hope you also realize that an entire team missed out on top 2 rewards, which included a PMA2 pack, by a measly 5 points. All 20 of them should be compensated as well :-)

  • Tremayne
    Tremayne Posts: 1,703 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited December 2024

    @Machine said:

    @Magic:PQ Support Team said:
    We're working hard so that's the case, @Janosik!

    Updated info about this issue and compensation here, everyone: https://d3go.helpshift.com/hc/en/4-magic-puzzle-quest/faq/1229-known-issue-bug-with-event-return-of-the-god-pharaoh-12-18-2024/

    I hope you also realize that an entire team missed out on top 2 rewards, which included a PMA2 pack, by a measly 5 points. All 20 of them should be compensated as well :-)

    Everyone was affected by this bug, period! If you got a soft lock or not, doesn’t matter. I was lucky enough to see your post (thank you for the heads up) before playing any nodes with Ward cards. So I could avoid using suspected cards, but it still had an impact on my deck building choices, which may or may not have cost me points. I shudder to think how smaller libraries were impacted by this bug, where only a few mythics might make the difference between winning and loosing.

    I think that should be considered in the future when handing out compensation. I know 505 has a different policy in at least one other game, but perhaps this game can’t afford this kind of generosity.

  • camo
    camo Posts: 49 Just Dropped In

    All player should be compensated for showing good faith over having such flawed event, especially those in competitive coalition. Your bug cost them drop rank.

    If not all players compensated, at least include all players in top 20 coalitions.

  • Blighted
    Blighted Posts: 12 Just Dropped In

    I believe that all players should be generously compensated for bugs and event-wide freezes caused by a failure to properly test features prior to release.

    Yes, some teams didn't perform as well, others benefited, and it's impossible to tell the degree that people were impacted when you meter out the compensation.

    Even if filing a ticket is required, many people who were affected by this did not file a ticket due to the precedent set just a few weeks ago where compensation was rewarded to everyone regardless of needing a ticket filled.

    I understand the difficulty in balancing and releasing a clean legacy event. I believe that is part of why previous developers retired events when they rotated out.

  • Ampersand
    Ampersand Posts: 211 Tile Toppler

    I agree with the comments above. When an event is bugged, everyone's gameplay experience is impacted. Some players were hit by the bug and had a freeze. Other players were informed about the bug and then had to make sub-optimal choices to avoid the bug, thus impacting them too.

    It is a system-wide issue and everyone in the system (the RotGP coalition event) should be compensated.

  • Disarray
    Disarray Posts: 27 Just Dropped In
    edited December 2024

    Devs openly promoting a system where you get punished for avoiding bugs. Great move.

  • camo
    camo Posts: 49 Just Dropped In

    @Magic:PQ Support Team
    we are waiting.

  • naabaldan
    naabaldan Posts: 583 Critical Contributor

    Here is something everyone missed:
    Developers are able to see when the match has a sudden death.
    Actually, they do not see the reason.
    This is (very) interesting.

  • Tremayne
    Tremayne Posts: 1,703 Chairperson of the Boards

    @naabaldan - interesting! How were you able to determine that?

  • Larz70
    Larz70 Posts: 139 Tile Toppler

    hmmm, only thing I could think of is that a player crashed for some other reason, not related to the ward bug, and received compensation.

  • Opperstamper
    Opperstamper Posts: 161 Tile Toppler

    @Larz70 said:
    hmmm, only thing I could think of is that a player crashed for some other reason, not related to the ward bug, and received compensation.

    Or even force closed the app..

  • Machine
    Machine Posts: 877 Critical Contributor
    edited December 2024

    @Tremayne said:

    @Machine said:

    @Magic:PQ Support Team said:
    We're working hard so that's the case, @Janosik!

    Updated info about this issue and compensation here, everyone: https://d3go.helpshift.com/hc/en/4-magic-puzzle-quest/faq/1229-known-issue-bug-with-event-return-of-the-god-pharaoh-12-18-2024/

    I hope you also realize that an entire team missed out on top 2 rewards, which included a PMA2 pack, by a measly 5 points. All 20 of them should be compensated as well :-)

    Everyone was affected by this bug, period! If you got a soft lock or not, doesn’t matter. I was lucky enough to see your post (thank you for the heads up) before playing any nodes with Ward cards. So I could avoid using suspected cards, but it still had an impact on my deck building choices, which may or may not have cost me points. I shudder to think how smaller libraries were impacted by this bug, where only a few mythics might make the difference between winning and loosing.

    I think that should be considered in the future when handing out compensation. I know 505 has a different policy in at least one other game, but perhaps this game can’t afford this kind of generosity.

    Yes, you are absolutely right. Everyone was affected, so everyone should have been compensated. Support responded to my ticket that everyone who was affected (not sure how they determined this) already received their compensation. So, if we take our team as an example, all players in our team that had one or more locks got compensated, but all the others not, even though everyone of us missed out on the top 2 rewards by 5 points, which also included a PMA2 pack.

    So it definitely seems that the devs are punishing those who were able to workaround the bug THEY introduced. The DEVS broke stuff so all of the players should be compensated for their mess up. Don't polarize the players into two groups. The ones who avoided this bug still got affected!

  • naabaldan
    naabaldan Posts: 583 Critical Contributor

    @Larz70 said:
    hmmm, only thing I could think of is that a player crashed for some other reason, not related to the ward bug, and received compensation.

    That is correct.

  • Tremayne
    Tremayne Posts: 1,703 Chairperson of the Boards

    @naabaldan - so what are the implications of this?

    After 8 years of crashes the devs still haven’t implemented a method to catch a function called before that function has completed successfully, I.e. a log entry. Is it really so important to get a slim play-log? After all it is just a few characters to add to the log at the beginning of a function called before executing the code.

    Why not at least have a detailed log on the device, which is deleted if the match ends successfully. If the game crashes, the detailed log can be located and send to the CS.

  • naabaldan
    naabaldan Posts: 583 Critical Contributor

    Yes, it is simple to make a local log and delete it after a successful match. Currently, all logs go to the database.
    You don't need a local file. But extending the logging may slow down the app and put heavy load on the database. There should be an option to set the level of logging. Also adding logging to every procedure/function is a big task.

    As far as I understand the way mtgpq is build to handle huge amount of cards and abilities it adds an extra level of difficulty to the logging.

    In my opinion we have an engine that's executes the meta data of the cards in play like an interpreter executes basic statements (the programming language). The abilities are implemented on the client side but the cards are stored as data on the server. This explains why sometimes a push (card data/shop items/available events/etc.) is enough to fix an issue and sometimes a fix to the app (abilities behavior) is necessary.

    Regarding settings:
    Unfortunately, the app initializing section has been neglected for a very long time now. We have no consistent settings between different sessions as settings are reset to default on many occasions. Switching between different accounts, especially Facebook and Google stored accounts, shows that the app initializing process does not care about lots of parts of the app. For example, switching between a Facebook and a Google account allows you to use the deck of your previous account in the current one when you start the same event.

    Back to the interpreter concept of the game
    Unhandled exceptions that leads to an app termination is bad app development that can easily be solved as the programming language provides extended exception handling.
    Softlocks are a different tasks because the interpreter runs in loops to do the job. Detecting an endless loop is much more difficult as logic is involved based on the interpreters code and the card data.

    The loop timer runs in a separate task like the pause dialog does. Allowing both to interact while the interpreter runs.
    But why is the loop timer unable to stop the loop?
    The reason is that the loop timer sets a condition in a shared variable both threads access. But in a close loop the interpreter does not check the status of that variable and it looks like ignoring it.
    Interestingly a five match resets this variable by intention neglecting the cause of the five match (should only work by swap).
    45 years of software engineering finally break through. I apologize.

  • camo
    camo Posts: 49 Just Dropped In

    So if a player find themselves losing, before the match end, they can restart the app and submit ticket as game crashed?

    Anyway...

    Lesson I got from the dev message here is when there's a bug in coalition event, players better make sure to trigger the bug, at least once is encouraged and rewarded more than spend effort to not triggering the bug at all,

  • Janosik
    Janosik Posts: 631 Critical Contributor

    @camo said:
    So if a player find themselves losing, before the match end, they can restart the app and submit ticket as game crashed?

    Anyway...

    Lesson I got from the dev message here is when there's a bug in coalition event, players better make sure to trigger the bug, at least once is encouraged and rewarded more than spend effort to not triggering the bug at all,

    This really hurts players who care about score more than they care about rewards tho!

  • Machine
    Machine Posts: 877 Critical Contributor

    @Janosik said:

    @camo said:
    So if a player find themselves losing, before the match end, they can restart the app and submit ticket as game crashed?

    Anyway...

    Lesson I got from the dev message here is when there's a bug in coalition event, players better make sure to trigger the bug, at least once is encouraged and rewarded more than spend effort to not triggering the bug at all,

    This really hurts players who care about score more than they care about rewards tho!

    I'm one of them and I'm guessing you are too, although I highly doubt that the devs or @Magic:PQ Support Team are aware of players like us. Still, everyone was affected in one way or another, so everyone should be compensated. Their compensation is as austere as the holiversary has been.

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