As some already have noticed, it is possibly to grief other players by locking up their game during battles. I’ve tried to make support aware of this, my ticket #137787 was closed with comment that I should just post all information here on the forum. While I find this highly unprofessional, I’m happy to help move this forward.
1.) The Bug
Your battle screen locks up, suspending gems in mid-air. This happens whenever it is your turn and the opponent team tries to summon a troop, without any room left to fit it in. There is no recovery, you have to forfeit your battle, losing any resources (e.g. paid Citadel sigils) spent. The bug was likely introduced with the update 8.2, as part of the attempt to fix a summoning bug with Blood Frenzy battles.
2.) The Team
There is only one known way to trigger summoning while it is not your turn, taking damage. This is possible in at least two ways:
- Putting an Orbweaver hero into your team. The Familiar trait has a 35% chance to summon a Giant Spider on taking damage.
- Putting a hero with Knowledge talent tree into your team (available to Bard, Geomancer, Mechanist, Oracle, Priest, Runepriest and Sorcerer). The Golem Protector talent has a 20% chance to summon an Ancient Golem on taking damage to life.
There may be other options not discovered yet. Any damage to the hero, even just a single point from an exploded skull, is enough to trigger the lockup chance. The other troops in your team don’t really matter. The only important part is that your team needs to stay full, possibly by using troops hard to kill, troops hard to target or troops that fill up empty spots.
3.) The Trap
PvP randomly drafts the last team you used as opponent for other players. You just need to play the last PvP battle within a region with a team as described above and the trap is set. If you seed enough regions you can expect up to several hundred defense wins, depending how many players are unlucky enough to get matched against you.
4.) The Disclaimer
I do not approve of making the game unplayable for others, especially if it may cause them to lose real money. However, the current situation is lopsided, with some of those aware of how this works having way too much fun. Spreading the knowledge may help players to actively avoid trap teams. And if this knowledge happens to kill PvP entirely, there’s at least a chance of the bug then getting addressed properly instead of just hand-waved away.
If some streamer wants to pick this up and needs further information, feel free to contact me.
