Is there anything D3 can do to remove crash punishments?

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Dragon_Nexus
Dragon_Nexus Posts: 3,701 Chairperson of the Boards
edited February 2015 in MPQ General Discussion
I just entered a PvP fight worth 34 points, put three lots of three Red/Yellow, Blue/Purple and Green/Black boosts on, started the match...game crashed.
So that's counted as a loss. My guys lose health, I lose the boosts and I lose PvP score.

I know it's difficult to isolate this since if someone's losing a fight they could quit the game in the task manager and pretend it's a crash to lose nothing, but is there some way of detecting that perhaps? It just sucks that I'm already struggling to break 25th in this PvP and that set me right back.

[Edit] Booted the game and lost a further 21 points from being attacked. Spent more ISO to gain boosts I'd lost as well as using a health pack to revive a character...not enough health packs left to get everyone back to full health (they were about 3/4 before, easilly enough to win the fight). So I fight someone else and get taken down by Surgical Strike and I'm now 35th. That pretty much killed any desire to keep playing.

Can we at least change it so that points are deducted *after* you've returned to the screen? I finished a match and got to 811 points, which would have earned me a token. But because I was attacked for 31 points during the fight I went down to 780 and lost out on that.

Comments

  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    That would be nice. It's especially frustrating when you have nothing but 20 point matches and as soon as you enter one your phone crashes losing a substantial amount of points and health. I doubt there's any way to discern phone crashes and shutting it off, but man it sucks.
  • san
    san Posts: 421 Mover and Shaker
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    They have addressed this before, and I believe that the reasoning behind crash punishments is to minimize the abuse. Imagine, you're about to lose a valuable fight near the end of a PvP event, and you would stand to lose a placement as a result... hmm, why don't I just shut down my phone for a "free" crash...

    I'm not saying everyone (or you) would do this, but it WOULD happen, that's for sure. Hence, the punishment.,
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    There's no way to detect a 'legitmate crash' because you can always turn your phone/computer off and there's no way the program can discern why you did this.

    For the point deduction issues, suppose this sequence of event occurred:

    T = 0 start with 899 points, start 25 point match
    T = 1s (you're in the game), someone hits you for neg 25.
    T = 1m, you win and earn 25 points.

    Now why should you ever have more than 90 points given the hit came in before the gain? If this game updated in real time you'd be seeing those hits while you're in the game and nobody would be questioning why they never hit 900. Yes I know the way the game does it makes you think that happened after you finished your match but those deductions really all came in during the match.
  • dkffiv
    dkffiv Posts: 1,039 Chairperson of the Boards
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    san-mpq wrote:
    They have addressed this before, and I believe that the reasoning behind crash punishments is to minimize the abuse. Imagine, you're about to lose a valuable fight near the end of a PvP event, and you would stand to lose a placement as a result... hmm, why don't I just shut down my phone for a "free" crash...

    I'm not saying everyone (or you) would do this, but it WOULD happen, that's for sure. Hence, the punishment.,

    I don't understand this at all. If you're in a bad position during a fight you just don't finish the match until the event ends and you lose nothing (points wise).

    For me 80% of the time when the game crashes, its before the match even starts. 15% is after the match has ended and I'd figure about 5% of the time is mid match. I'd hold off on penalizing players who crash within 10s of the start of a match. Put a check in place that detects when players are abusing this to discourage players from constantly resetting until they gain a favorable board. I'm not sure about a number but for me at least the number of times I crash at the start of a match per week is probably between 0-2 so if a player is crashing more than 7 times a week its either a phone issue or they're trying to exploit.
  • Unknown
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    I think the only real solution is to make the game more stable, especially on a mobile device.

    On my casual account on Steam, I can freely switch between applications without fear of the game crashing (or at least it hasn't happened yet.) But on my phone, just about switch to a different program can reset/reboot the MPQ program, even shutting off the screen has done this, as well as receiving phone calls or answering texts, all vital and primary functions of the phone that MPQ shouldn't be affected.
  • Dragon_Nexus
    Dragon_Nexus Posts: 3,701 Chairperson of the Boards
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    dkffiv wrote:
    I'd hold off on penalizing players who crash within 10s of the start of a match.

    That's an idea I like. The game only rarely crashes for me, but when it does it's almost always as the board is placed. Like...the tiles drop into place and it freezes then crashes to desktop. *Sometimes* it'll crash after a match or something, but if the game crashes at all it's right at the start before I've even made a move.
  • Unknown
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    Monsoon wrote:
    I think the only real solution is to make the game more stable, especially on a mobile device.

    It would be nice.

    I've been hit by this several times recently. You make a match-3 and boom, the app crashes. Log in to lost points, and downed or wounded characters. Very frustrating. To me the loss of three health packs to heal up your wounded, typically, A-team is more frustrating than the lost points. But yeah.

    I wonder if there is a way for the app to discern a crash from a legitimate app shutdown such as closing the app which you would think is, though abrupt, a graceful shutdown. The Windows operating system detects if something was unnatural with the previous shutdown, and Firefox browser detects crashes as well.

    The only app shutdown I could see being impossible to discern from a crash is if someone outright removes the battery from their phone. But I can't imagine anyone going to the lengths needed to do this with an iPhone (no clue about android).
  • rixmith
    rixmith Posts: 707 Critical Contributor
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    I agree it is very frustrating to lose points/boosts because of a game crash. But I don't know what language or tool MPQ is written in. In theory, when a crash occurs, the language should throw an exception that could be caught at the highest application level and processed differently than a Task Manager quit or a reboot or other user-initiated action. But it also isn't clear that fixing this sort of problem has value of adding new characters or other features to the game.

    Personally, I play on a PC via Steam, and probably experience 3 - 6 game crashes per week. I used to get them a lot right at the start of a match, but this seems to have been fixed. Mostly now I get them right after a match has ended, so I suspect it is related to the networking layer where the results of the match are being communicated to the server. Fortunately the code is pretty robust and once the app is restarted it successfully gets the match results to the server.

    So overall, I agree it would be nice to fix the problem and that crashes shouldn't penalize the player. But I suspect the problems that cause them are extremely difficult to isolate, and I'd rather have the developers make decisions that don't allow exploits (i.e. Task Manager restart) even at the expense of an occasional punishment of a good player (since most of the time such a loss doesn't come at a critical juncture or a tournament).
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    I agree in the fact that just about all the times that the game has crashed with me has been at the start of the match before even making the first match, maybe they can do something that after the first couple of moves or something it the the penalty should come into effect
  • Marty17
    Marty17 Posts: 503 Critical Contributor
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    Too bad the game can't track how you're progressing in a match as most of the time the game crashes as I'm more or less in the winning position (have all 3 characters alive, significant damage against the opposing team in contrast to your own, etc.)
  • Katai
    Katai Posts: 278 Mover and Shaker
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    The way to solve this problem is for D3 to allow you to resume a match. Regardless of how you crash (even if you shut it down manually), resuming a match prevents anyone from dodging a match. You continue the match where you left off, and no penalties are dealt unless you retreat manually.

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