A fresh game update is here, and stability is key! Update 0.35 unlocks some important stability fixes, with a particular focus on softlocks and other quality of life improvements.
Under (Soft)Lock and Key
It’s incredibly frustrating to run into a freeze or a softlock when you’re battling it out in-game – especially during competitive events like Weekend Ranked. Thankfully, we’ve been able to identify and address some of the more prominent issues causing these to occur. Our team has paid particular attention to some board-wide and Afterlife effects which most commonly caused the game to softlock. While a very low percentage of games were soft-locking with these errors, it would be too unfair to risk letting this issue affect those participating Weekend Ranked. With this fix, we can safely go ahead with events.
A+ Reporting
To help with identifying the source of softlocks in future, we’ve also upgraded the information we receive via analytics and bug reports when things go south in-game. This gives us granular information when soft locks occur, why they happen, to which players and under which circumstances. An upgrade like this massively improves our ability to understand, identify, and diagnose bugs moving forwards. Best of all – it’s automated! That doesn’t mean you should stop using the in-game reporter though... Player reports have played an indispensable role in helping to identify these. Thank you to everyone who uses the in-game bug reporting tool during a match!
In addition, we’ve upped our data capturing and automated testing so that we can better identify the source of issues that are affecting gameplay. Thanks to these improvements, the data team is now able to spin up daily dashboards that show us which cards are causing soft locks and server interruptions. This data can be as granular as which domains are the most problematic, or which specific cards are causing users pain. Having an automated system that is able to effectively drill down to locate the heart of these issues is a big upgrade for us behind the scenes.
A Spot of Housekeeping
Extraneous lines of code in the game are typically useless – however, they could be a source of bugs down the line if left unchecked. We’ve done a bit of housekeeping to clean up these superfluous lines of code so that they don’t need to be maintained and that new issues won’t rear their heads in future.
Populating Pips
We’ve received frequent reports about the opponent’s mana pips not showing during the match from our community. In Update 0.35, this issue is resolved! You’ll no longer need to manually keep track of how many mana pips your opponent has left. Thanks again for all the reports.
Card Fix Spotlight: Valka, Champion of War
To cap off all of the work mentioned above, Valka, Champion of War has also received a variety of fixes. There was a particular Afterlife softlock issue that was unique to Valka which has now been resolved. We’ve also addressed an issue that could cause the buff from this card to be calculated incorrectly.
Note: As specified in the Discord known issues roundup on Friday, there’s still one outstanding issue with Valka’s Afterlife ability. When there are a large number of Vikings in a deck, Valka’s Afterlife ability can cause a quick disconnect and reconnect for those playing on Macs. While this shouldn’t change the outcome of a game, it’s annoying so we’re working on a fix. This will be included in a future update.
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