Game *again* becomes unresponsive after almost any action!

Bug Reports
1

Since no-one from Inf+2 has responded to the previous bug report (link below) after patch 6.1.5 dropped, apparently you need a new bug report. I assumed you might be smarter than that.

It seems you fixed the bug with multiple queries to the servers on returning to the map screen, BUT you introduced the same bug at every other player interaction! WTF?!

The game is still fundamentally unplayable, extremely frustrating… AND we’ve missed out on lots of Vault Event rewards because of your programmers’, testers’ and project managers’ mistake!

I would really like to be patient with you. The new art for Fire Rift is spectacular. But lately you can’t seem to manage your way out of a paper bag without tearing it. And your community management is non-existent. Ongoing and repeated incompetence is one of my triggers. Please get your act together.

4 Likes
2

Hi there, I already added some measured data to the thread linked above, so here is something new:

performance
performance9000×1500 491 KB

Measured well over 255k data points of performance, put into moving averages of 2000 samples and charted the result over time.

Cheers, Gary.

16 Likes
3

Hey Gary

So what exactly is causing these requests to take seconds instead of ms?

Is it lack of number of servers?
Can’t be database all the time, as game is fine from time to time.

Why can’t this company hire 1 devops and 1 dba and fix these issues once and for all? I mean, we’ve all been patient for months, but we have to agree this is ridiculous and almost points to the intent that they want to discontinue this game, they don’t care about it now the the new shiny one is on the horizon

Lots of good players simply stopped playing because of this. In my guild, at least 5.

I wish i could help, i would offer my consulting services for free just to get this mess over with.

There should also be an official response for this issue.

4

This I can only speculate about. We can observe the problem and report it. Analysing and fixing it is unfortunately up to the devs discretion.

Fun fact: they just hired a DevOps (I think, at least the job offer disappeared).
I don’t know if they plan to discontinue this game, as the new shiny one (Puzzle Quest 3) is suffering worse from issues like this.

Cheers, Gary.

1 Like
5

If they hired a devops as you think, that’s a major step forward. Hope he’s good enough for the job

Regarding issues in the other game: well, that sucks and that tells me that there’s a fundamental issue in that team that makes these games. No true tech leader or project manager, probably code is a big mess and logics are all over the place. Not to mention any optimizations, just shortcuts to get the game to the market.

I read another thread where they said it would take insanely amounts of resources to fix the daily offer. I call that bullshit. i call that “it’s good as it is”, lazy, not caring about the community and not having anyone in that team that can think outside the box and find a solution.

Anyhow, it seems we still have to wait for this to be fixed. I wonder how long….

6

Here is what happens if you buy a shop tier (already in the shop menu) from the current week’s event Sinking Ships:

[2022-01-17 09:09:22,466] [1235 ms] complete_purchase
[2022-01-17 09:09:23,243] [ 572 ms] soulforge_get_info
[2022-01-17 09:09:23,997] [ 626 ms] live_event_get_info
[2022-01-17 09:09:24,673] [ 523 ms] soulforge_get_info
[2022-01-17 09:09:25,536] [ 739 ms] live_event_get_info
[2022-01-17 09:09:26,460] [ 771 ms] soulforge_get_info

Mind that this is only one click for buying and then one click for accepting the rewards. All the extra requests are increasing the base time of 2.4 seconds (1235+572+626 ms) to 4.4 seconds (1235+572+626+523+739+771 ms), which is a 83% increase in waiting. If we consider Soulforge requests to be useless for this step, it’s going up from 1.9 seconds (1235+626 ms), which is an increase of 105%.

Cheers, Gary.

7 Likes
7

That was the goal! They can’t farm the GAP rewards further so they steal time.

8

This kind of stuff has to be your job elsewhere, right? You are insanely good at this :joy:

1 Like
9

Personally, I’ve always been an advocate of designing software in such a way that the internal operation is never the user’s problem. That means hiding loading times wherever feasible.

In the case of the Soulforge, the game should trust the local client to keep track of the Soulforge status and itself calculate when enough Curse things have been obtained from a battle to change it from “not upgradeable” to “upgradeable.” The only time you really need to query the servers is when an attempt is made to actually upgrade the Soulforge! (Or craft something.)

Obviously, it also makes sense to verify the Soulforge’s upgradeability status (and the inventory count of Curse things) on starting the game. Aside from that, querying the servers when someone actually enters the Soulforge makes sense, but only if the Soulforge is not already fully upgraded (and is actually available to the player, which is NOT the case on my alt account). That avoids a false visual indication if the Cursed things count has somehow become corrupted in the local client.

Ensuring that the upgrade indicator is always correct on the World Map is a complete waste of time and resources. It’s simply not important if the game client makes a mistake on that front.

The fact that this one, simple thing has driven away many players, and annoyed the heck out of the rest, is a clear indicator that these decisions cannot be left to programmers, no matter how good they are (benefit of the doubt).

1 Like
10

@Jeto - It would be good to know you’ve seen this and are on it for the next patch.

11

Hey all,

I can see @Kafka jumped into the original thread about this issue, as they have mentioned, this is something we are still keeping an eye on!

3 Likes