What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
FFS guys, this isn’t complicated. All you need is a button that downloads the assets that are missing. The “Download All Assets” button needs to actually work and handle assets that don’t show up. You can even add a new button to do a complete re-download.
No, I am not going to uninstall and reinstall. That isn’t a fix, it’s a failure. Uninstalling and reinstalling will at best temporarily fix the issue, but it doesn’t guarantee it won’t happen again going forward and it does nothing to address the ongoing problem.
My wife and I are regular supporters of the game. We both have this issue. We, and all other iOS players, deserve a fix for this. It’s been going on since the end of March.
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
It began at the end of March 2023. Multiple troops are still missing artwork for themselves and their spells (some, like the Bane of Mercy, do have spell artwork but no troop artwork).
With every new update I’ve used the “Download All Assets” button, and it hasn’t done a darn thing to fix this.
These issues should have been fixed months ago, everyone who reinstalled at the time had the error resolved I believe.
I wasn’t able to reproduce the issue on my iphone either just now.
When was the last time you tried reinstalling? If it was before the last time we updated the original bug report for this, the reinstall should work this time.
I know it’s a massive pain to do but I would be surprised if it didn’t work at this point.
Here’s the thing: Reinstalling shouldn’t be necessary. The game should be able to recognize that a file is missing and mark it as needing a re-download all on its own. An uninstall and reinstall covers over the bug, but it doesn’t actually fix a darn thing.
Uninstalling and reinstalling—which we would have to do on four separate devices that all exhibit this issue—doesn’t correct the underlying problem that the game isn’t properly recognizing when certain assets are corrupt or missing. And any attempt to raise awareness of this since the completely separate Android fix has been met with total silence, or the same tired refrain of “Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling?” That’s not a solution; it’s a capitulation. And if we do that, it means any asset issues that might occur in the future will be equally unable to self-correct because the real cause of the problem has never been addressed.
I don’t know how assets are stored, but for instance when I look up Axe Beak in the collection screen or have certain mythics with this problem appear in battle, it ought to be an immediate red flag to the game that those assets are broken, causing it to purge them and re-download. At a bare minimum, it should flag them as needing a re-download so a manual asset download can make the corrections.
The only ray of light on this issue has been that new troops have stopped appearing with missing artwork. That hasn’t happened in a couple of months.
tbf the most common solution in tech is “did you try turning it off and on again?” and when it comes to a program, that means re-installing. So technically, it IS a solution, and the most common one, just one that you don’t like. That being said, if it DOESN’T fix the problem, then definitely keep complaining, but if you don’t even try the suggestion, then why bother?
The point I’m making is that capitulating to the bug doesn’t fix it. It could recur at any time because the underlying problem won’t have been fixed. The underlying issues that make it possible for the artwork to remain corrupted are fixable, and haven’t been dealt with. This is a big deal. By not going with the path of least resistance, there’s a chance open to help actually fix the bug.
What they are saying is that the issue IS fixed, meaning it should not occur again, but that it requires a re-install to fix it presently. Whether this is the case or not i cant say, but why not just try the solution presented? if anything it is a step in troubleshooting.
The underlying issue is fixed as far as we can tell, if you never stopped experiencing the issue and also didn’t reinstall after the last time on the original bug report when we mentioned reinstalling would work that time, and had that confirmed by everyone - then your issue is a continuation of the original bug and not the bug being reintroduced or new.
This is an important distinction. Because it means either the bug is fixed and you just need to reinstall to clear your data and have the fixed files installed OR there is a new bug that requires a new and different fix to the previous one.
Currently, from the information provided it looks like you just need to reinstall as it appears you never received the fixed files.
I know it’s a hassle and I apologise that it’s necessary.
What I don’t understand is why the relevant assets can’t be recognized as broken and simply marked as needing to be fixed on the client end. This is a very simple thing. I speak from experience as a developer. If the assets are broken, which the game obviously knows because it isn’t displaying them, then it ought to be trivial to set the appropriate flags indicating a need to restore them. If the asset system isn’t built to accommodate that idea, the questions that come to mind are: 1) why, and 2) how is that even possible?
ok but if the game sees that there IS data there and tries to display it, but it is corrupted/broken/etc, then it ends up displaying nothing. However the game still sees that there IS data there, so how does it know that it needs to be fixed? A human can easily see the image is broken, but a computer only sees that it is displaying SOMETHING, it doesn’t know whether the thing it is trying to display is correct or not.
Imagine you have storage room filled with pallets of water bottles (the art). At first glance it would appear that everything is in order, but you pull out one of the pallets and 2 of the water bottles have no water in them… It would be very difficult to look at this room full of stuff and determine, just by looking, which ones are full and which are not (working vs not working). The simplest method, albeit annoying and tedious, to fix this error is to remove them all from the room and only fill it with full pallets (re-installing).
Sure it may be possible to write code to find broken images and fix them individually, but that is a LOT of work compared to just doing a re-install, its not like gems is a 100GB game or anything, even on incredibly slow internet it still wouldn’t take THAT long to do. You even said you have 4 devices you play on? Use one of the other three while re-installing on the 4th.
It has been said that the cause of this issue is fixed, but fixing the cause does not necessarily fix the symptoms, that is why the re-install is necessary. Again, according to what has been said, since i have not personally experienced this issue.
What you’ve described is not at all what’s happening. It isn’t displaying something; it’s displaying nothing. It’s either displaying no image, or for spells it falls back on the peasant’s pitchfork. Therein lies the problem, and therein lies the reason why it’s completely nonsensical that there’s no way for the engine to detect this issue and compensate when it occurs.
What you’re describing would be if the image did produce data on load, but that data wasn’t the correct image—perhaps being garbled in some way, or even totally incoherent pixels. In that case, yes, the game would have no way of knowing the image was wrong. As far as it knew, the load would have completed correctly.
But when the game has nothing to display, only two outcomes are possible: Either the image hasn’t completed loading (in which case for spells, there’d be no reason to fall back on pitchfork artwork), or the loading has failed outright which would have generated some kind of event in the engine.
In the latter of those cases, such as data that’s broken in such a way that it can’t decompress at all, an obvious failure has occurred and the game can mark the asset in question as broken, triggering a re-download. Very simple.
But in the former case where decompressing the image gets “stuck”, all is not lost. It’s actually pretty simple to note when an asset attempted to be loaded for a given screen, like a collection list or a battle, and if the load attempt timed out after a certain time. Even if the engine doesn’t support timeouts on this, there’d still be a way to time the event to know if the load ever succeeded within a certain time frame. Once again, the asset can be tagged as broken and needing a re-download. It’d even be easy to mark how many times an image failed to load by, say, the end of a battle. This only need apply to assets that have been marked as downloaded.
The only case where this isn’t fixable on the developers’ end without a reinstall is the one you described, where the data appears to load successfully but the data is simply incorrect. But this is not what’s happening.
honestly at this point, its not even worth arguing hypotheticals, either do the re-install and report back whether it works or not, or live with the game how it is for you. It has been said what you can do that SHOULD fix your issue. Its incredibly easy to reinstall and your adamant refusal to do so is baffling.
I understand at this point the devs aren’t going to fix the obvious design flaw, and I won’t have a choice in the matter. I’m still trying to make the case for them to fix the obvious design flaw, because there’s no reason it can’t rear its ugly head in the future in some different context.
As a developer myself, the fact that this hasn’t been addressed when it should have been a relatively simple thing to deal with is more than a little irksome. I can understand and respect that whatever was causing the troop artwork to fail in the first place was a much more difficult problem, and props to them for finally reining that in. But the game should have been capable of self-correcting these cases by recognizing the failed loads.
As a developer yourself, perhaps you could just choose to offer them a bit of grace and recognize that they may be dealing with factors and problems you’re not privy to.
As you’re currently the only player reporting this, and as a simple reinstall will solve this for you, I can’t do anything further to help you at this stage.
If you do reinstall and continue experiencing the issue, let me know.