What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
This is a tricky one. The screenshot above is from one move before the game locked up (credit to @Sheffield). The turn passed to the opponent (with a valid move left), then returned to the player (locking up the board).
The game is supposed to repopulate the board and drain all mana when even reshuffling won’t be able to provide a valid move. However, some troops (like Sky Goat and Faerie Gobmother above) have a chance of creating a Wish gem at the start of the turn, after the board lockup handling has already been processed. If this invalidates the last valid move the player is no longer able to interact with the board.
Possibly needs further investigation, the situation is difficult to set up.
Edit:
Video from @sls showing that the board correctly gets reshuffled when the Wish Gem gets created by the Chaotic Wish trait of Brian the Clucky:
Maybe the trigger is the Wishing Well trait of Faerie Gobmother proccing, then not finding any Yellow Gem to convert to a Wish Gem?
Stepping through the video I posted, the same series of events happened to me too but didn’t lock up my game.
It’s quite possible Clucky’s ‘Chaotic Wish’ trait is working fine but Gobmother’s ‘Wishing Well’ trait isn’t.
‘Wishing Well’ might be re-using code from the ‘Born of…’ series of traits, those can cause the game to lose track of whose turn it is.
Sadly, like most other more technical bug reports, that one was swept under the carpet by the CX-team for fear of causing work that 96.3% of employees would consider part of their job description.
Chaotic Wish: “10% chance to create a Wish Gem when my turn begins”
Wishing Well: “50% chance to convert a Yellow Gem to a Wish Gem when my turn begins”
Maybe it works when the gem gets created and fails when the gem gets converted?
I love when we have bug reports older than 24h and not even a single reply from a dev appeared to acknowledge the problem.
I’m used to [reported] and [investigating] tags to appear in the title, even though nothing is happening. But no response at all?
We’re doomed…
To be fair, it’s neither an urgent nor important bug report. It only hits a few players under very special circumstances, it’s not 100% clear what the trigger is and it takes quite a bit of effort to reproduce. I’d treat that as low priority myself, possibly even just as something to keep in mind until more data is available.
I raised this with the development team and we attempted to reproduce this board lock, reproduce this yesterday and have not been able to get the board to lock, or not reset after there is no more matches, so far.
But the initial screenshot I can see it is using a controller, was this on PC and played with a controller or was this actually on a console?
Not sure if this could change the outcome, but just want to confirm any other variables.
Jeto (she/they) - Support Human
ADDED: Furthermore from the team, the board reset happens ‘before a new turn starts’ so neither trait will trigger until after the new gems have dropped in. While this has just been this one report so far and we haven’t been able to reproduce, if I have any more information or questions that need some answers, I’ll jump back in
Eeek, my mistake, I’ll totally blame it on my finger memory in regards to bug reports. @Sheffield You are playing on PS4, right?
I’ve edited in some more info yesterday to possibly narrow this down. This is somewhat of a wild guess, the issue may actually be caused by the Wishing Well trait of Faerie Gobmother trying to “convert a Yellow Gem to a Wish Gem” and not finding any. This would match the screenshot (no yellow gems around) and is unique to Faerie Gobmother, all other wish gem related traits create a wish gem instead. I don’t own Faerie Gobmother, so I can’t verify this.
