Recent Game Issues

Official News
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Hello Adventurers,

We wanted to discuss some of the recent issues, keep you updated on what their status is, and give a little insight about what’s been going on for those who are interested.

As many of you may remember, we use the MongoDB database to run Gems of War. Like all technical solutions it has pros and cons, but overall has served the game well. After 7 years, we have many many millions of accounts in MongoDB, and while databases can handle this volume of accounts, it does mean there are some technical issues that we need to solve before they become a larger problem. Some of the tricky technical problems that we’ve faced in the last 2 months have stemmed from optimizations we’re making to MongoDB. Some of our veteran players will remember our MongoDB issues in the past (that lead to the creation of the Troop Mongo & his spell Random Crash at the time). We’ve got it under control, but it’s providing a bit of a bumpy road while we make sure the game is healthy for many years to come.

So with that in mind, I wanted to address some of the recent game issues (some MongoDB related, some not), to give you the latest information on them.

1. Kingdom Pass Battlecrashers - 20 per day instead of 10
This one was a simple bug in the server code. The daily reset for Battlecrashers was happening in 2 separate places. That is now fixed.

2. Guild Wars Defense Team Bonus Score
Our investigation is ongoing here, however this issue is not related to the Daily Reset like what was occurring with the Kingdom Pass Battlecrasher reset above. We think this is probably related to the MongoDB optimizations.

We have been working on a fix for this, however we will be delaying the next Guild Wars until next year. This allows us some time to double check the fix, and look for other issues that may be related to these MongoDB optimizations. Players will notice the schedule change in-game in the next day or so.

3. Missing Campaign Task
With the release of Nexus, we intended to run multiple Nexus weeks to expand it’s story in the campaign, as well as release more content for the new Kingdom. Our early tests found no issues, but we noticed that Campaigns had a limitation that they couldn’t contain the same kingdom twice. We noticed this AFTER the campaign had started though. Turns out it was very tricky to fix with a live campaign, so we’ve sent out missing stars to everyone.

In the short term, we will continue to keep an eye on Campaign Tasks each week for the rest of the current Campaign. If any more missing tasks should appear, we will be able to send out any Stars that would have been earned from them.

Longer term, we’ll ensure this does not happen again in future Campaigns where we may have more than 1 week in a Kingdom.

4. Born of Fire/Nature/etc Traits having problems at the start of turn
With the Born of Fire/Nature/etc traits, we missed this issue. There are some things that our tests don’t always find… and timing-sensitive issues like this are one (basically you have to cast a spell quickly at the start of your turn where a born-of-x trait creates a match). QA often tends to actively look for problems (listed in a test plan) - actually looking for stuff can cause you to miss things that require you to act very quickly. This was such a case. We have a number of different interactions happening within the puzzle game - more now that we have heroic gems, so we’ll be improving our test plans to try and catch more of them.

With this issue we provided a workaround to the players who had contacted Support. (Wait for any Born of X traits to resolve, including Gem matches before casting a spell that targets the board).

While we could have modified the trait to remove the issue, we elected to leave it in for now, as there was a workaround, it was quite a fun unique trait for Nexus, and we had a fix for it coming in the 6.1 Update - releasing soon ™.

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Yes, Yes, Yes, all working as intended. Weavergate in the too hard class, eh.

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This is a really good update. Thank you.

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Will the schedule be delayed on all platforms, or just PC/Mobile where the issue(s) affected players?

Also — thank you for the thorough accounting. More of this, please.

And pleased to see this, too (though I know it’s not a promise per se, I am delighted to be reassured the game is not planned for execution anytime soon):

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I’m quite satisfied with the explanation of what’s happening, thank you @Nimhain I will resume my support for GoW.

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Thanks @Nimhain : could you please be in charge of communications hereinafter so we can receive this quality consistently? Even a single weekly post with this quality of communication would make such a difference (other mods can handle the smaller follow up on stuff, assuming you can get them to do so One star reviews - #11 by sls )

You’d save customers a lot of frustration, and consequently save your company a lot of lost purchases.
:relaxed: :crossed_fingers: :vulcan_salute:

PS: thanks for showing the softskills required to communicate with customers ( e.g. not including threats of stopping communication if customers do not ‘behave’ as per your expectations Missing Campaign Stars - #12 by Kafka )

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you could award players with some nice, no-monetization update for the difference for recent bugs

I was suggesting it to your testers since a year now and I know it was posted on your special discord. Add keyboard shortcuts on to the PC version. For example we could have 1,2,3,4 to cast the spell of the troop in that position (of course better if you let us choose/map the key by players).

I’m sticking with you for nearly 7 years now, the game is really lacking that for me. If you play your game, you would know that for example delving is playing like a robot, such shortcuts would make things faster, as there is a lot of clicking. I’m using stupidly high mouse sensitivity for these casts.

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This is the post I’ve been waiting for. Thank you very much for such thorough explanation!
I’m sure all the ussues will be fixed.

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Thank you for replying. I think it’s the right call to hold off on wars til new year even though my guild and I really enjoy it . We would rather have a bug free wars. Wish yall Goodluck in fixing this .
May we request it’s replaced with ToD for the time being ? That is an event that guilds can still compete against each other at least. Also the weapons and their scrolls are highly prized in GWs. It would give some a chance to catch up on some weapons maybe? It’s a fun event too.

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maybe a week long vault event to replace the gems weve all spent levelling elementalist for wars :wink:

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Not a bad idea either. :+1:

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Thank you for the update, I have no (additional) complaints. Good explanation.

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This is how it should be. Now I feel like a customer again, please do make these kinda updates more regular here in the forums. As people keep saying we are a small part of the player base, that is not true at all. I will take this information to my guildies who live in the dark and so will many others, so behind many forum readers there are at least 29 players who we represent.

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Thank you very much for updating us on how your bug investigation is going. Hopefully more frequent messages of this style, particularly is what I needed.

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Thanks for the update, this level of detail is appreciated and we’d love to see more like this going forward

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To echo everyone else, thank you very much for the update and I hope to see more communication like this in the future!

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Could you please also provide an update on the other items related to the Guild Wars issue?

  • The random scoring caused guild bracket placements to go all over the place, especially in the top brackets. Will placements be restored to where they were prior to the to faulty week?
  • Has a decision on compensations been reached yet? There are expectations to get at least the resources spent on sentinels backs.
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While I can’t do a week long Vault event, I will see what I can do. :wink:

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What? Week long vault event? I am listening!

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Thanks for reminding me about the compensation, and for the suggestion of reverting the scores - I should have included info on that in the original post. There will definitely be compensation of some form, but we’re still figuring out what is possible there at the moment. Once we have a definite answer on what we can do, we’ll share that info with you all.

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