[Reported] Spellcard graphics displaying incorrectly in battle?

[Stratelier]

Technically this has been reported before, but was lacking a method to reproduce/trace it to determine the actual cause so it could get fixed … and now I can contribute footage of it happening also on Switch, implying it may be a platform-agnostic bug.

Screenshots:

How did it happen? … I don’t know? In several years of playing this is my first-ever time seeing this, so while I can’t necessarily recall reliable steps to produce it, I can at least recount the general sequence of events leading up to it and hope for the ability to analyze another occurrence:

Background information, i.e: how I usually play the game

Normally, once I’m done with my “play session” for the day I will tap the HOME button (of the Switch itself, in handheld mode) to suspend out of the game, then tap the Power button to put the console into sleep mode until later.

Later, I may check back in on the game just for any new hourly tributes – a simple process of waking the console, tapping back into the game, then tapping the central button on the map screen to check for Tributes.

Tangent issue, believed to be UNRELATED to the bug report

I already know the Switch version has an odd tendency to crash if the game is left “on” (typically, suspended) across the midnight reset. As a result, when the day is over and I turn in for the night, I shut the game off completely, and start it from scratch the next day.

I have also noticed that, during what I’ll call a “lost packet” moment (where the game client is left waiting, interminably, for any communication with the servers), toggling “Airplane Mode” off then on prompts a generic “Failed to receive data / Retry” error, and upon retry the communications go through normally, and the game resumes.

Today:

1. I started the game as normal, collected the latest hourly tribute, but at the time didn’t engage in any battles, opting instead to suspend the game and sleep the console until later.
2. Some time later, when I returned to the game I noticed one of its loading animations (the “six Mana Gems” loading banner) was in fact still playing, and the game displayed an “unexpected error / Restart Game” message. The game restarted correctly (albeit with the alternate main theme playing), but at the time I still just suspended out of the game to return later.
3. Upon returning a second time I start chipping away at the daily battles (starting with the Adventure Board), and that’s when I notice that the spellcast graphics are … scaled weird (per screenshots) . Vertical size is scaled down by seemingly half while the horizontal position is shifted to the right (also by half).
4. After a few battles, I closed the game completely and re-started it from scratch, but unfortunately(?) everything is back to normal again.

How does a bug appear and disappear so suddenly? How do we track down what’s actually going wrong?

[Bramble]

Hello

Please note that this is not a bug.

As airplane mode is “a setting on a smartphone or tablet for use on board an aircraft, in which the device does not receive or transmit wireless signals and so does not interfere with the aircraft’s communication systems.”

Which is the reason why you may see the “Retry” screen on Gems of War, and further issues, such as your graphics may stem from this.

I would suggest for the future, to close Gems of War completely when you are finished with your play session, instead of having it open/running for long periods of time, and avoiding turning on airplane mode.

Should this issue occur when you have not touched airplane mode, please let us know then.

[Stratelier]

Sorry but you COMPLETELY misinterpreted the whole issue – read it again, read it over.

The problem is the mis-displayed Spell graphics in-battle (as shown by the screenshots). But because this is a first-ever encounter, I can’t guarantee any steps to reliably reproduce it for tracing purposes (aka. so the programming team can actually find the source and fix it in code). All I can do here is relay my anecdote of the various steps taken before it happened, just in case one of them actually IS a contributing factor to the end result.

99.9% of the time I can suspend the game and sleep the console, then return to it later with the game none the wiser, no problems never. Maybe this is one of those 0.1% edge cases, maybe it’s a “can’t print on Tuesday” error (which was a real bug!) – but we won’t know for sure if you incorrectly dismiss it out of hand. The proper tag should be (at best) “Investigating” or at worst, “More Info Needed”. I would absolutely give more info if I could, but until/unless I see a repeat incident I have nothing to compare against to check for patterns.

[Tresk]

I have gotten this weird graphical issue and my pc does not go into airplane mode.

It is a REAL bug, that is apparently on multiple platforms. For PC users, restarting the game will clear it.

edit:

@Stratelier

The proper tag should be (at best) “Investigating” or at worst, “More Info Needed”.

Absolutely correct. Who the heck came up with disputed as a bug report tag? We are not the enemy. Just trying to play a game.

[Stratelier]

@Tresk

Who the heck came up with disputed as a bug report tag?

…“Wikipedia” ?

In their defense, the moderator actually tagged it as “[Not a Bug]” which everyone knows is tantamount to "won’t fix"™.

@Tresk

It is a REAL bug, that is apparently on multiple platforms. For PC users, restarting the game will clear it.

Do you have a link to a previous report? I wanted to include one in my OP but couldn’t think of a good keyword to search by. (update: nvm, found one)

Restarting the game is the obvious workaround, yes, but the real mystery is HOW it even happens to begin with.

TLDR - This is a legitimate visual bug that occurs only under extremely rare and/or obscure conditions which we don’t actually know how to trigger yet.

[Borjay]

I had the same problem after Monday reset.
In all battles, every time a troop or hero had collect enough mana to cast its spell, the spell image was distorted.
It happened to both my troops/hero and the opponents.
Restarting did not solve the issue.

It went back to normal later on the day.

I was running GoW on Android 14, no airplane mode, with the same settings I am currently using and the same ones I always use.
Same WiFi, too.

[Stratelier]

Update: It happened again. It actually happened again.

Here’s my new incident – for the record, because this time there really aren’t many details to even provide:

1. Started the game from scratch (the game was NOT left previously suspended).
2. Collected one hourly Tribute.
3. Remembered that in my prior session I had started a Faction Delve (Silver Necropolis, Lv.50), so I decided I should finish it before logging off again (this time for the night).
4. Flipped to the Underworld map and returned to the Delve map in progress (battle 2).
5. Immediately, the spell/weapon graphics (as shown on each card) are being rendered wrong (consistent with prior screenshots).

That’s all. That’s really it. Aside from the bug itself, there was nothing out of the ordinary this time:

• The console’s Airplane/sleep modes were NOT involved.
• Because this was obviously not anticipated, I had not checked any other pages or menus (e.g: my Troop Collection) prior to engaging in the Delve battles.
• I did not observe any meters downloading new/updated assets from the server during startup, only the usual initial title-screen startup meter and “Loading assets…” during the opening montage.

Now, obviously collecting an hourly Tribute is something that happened in both my incidents, but that has never been problematic before (ever), so I have no reason to suspect it as relevant to the bug.

In the meantime, rebooting:

6. Left the Delve pending at 8 rooms cleared, then closed the game from the system menu and restarted from scratch.
7. Immediately consulted my Troops Collection – no problems apparent with any spell pages on any Troop.
8. Finished the Delve in question – no problems here either.

Yeah … the bug “got away” again.

[MattDB87]

I also had this happen to me on Xbox yesterday when i first got on. First time I’ve ever seen it.

[Bramble]

Hello

Thank you for providing an instance where airplane mode was not an obvious variable, especially when server connection is a requirement of the game, as previously requested.

Please also note that self changing the thread tag within the title can also cause confusion and misinformation with the Community, like it currently has.

In the meantime, I’ve reported this issue to the development team, and I greatly appreciate the screencaptures and civil manner in which others responded to correct this bug thread.

Please let me know if this bug also occurs on the PlayStation/IOS platforms!

[Bramble]

Hello

Quick question

• How soon after daily reset did this issue occur?

[Stratelier]

As you can see I take troubleshooting matters VERY seriously, otherwise I would have absolutely have left the topic title as-is. (Maybe the team can look into an actual tagging add-on for the forum software? The things DO exist, because I’ve seen other sites running Discourse with broader – even custom – tagging systems configured)

A comparable anecdote

I remember an incident while working on one project for a small site. I added a new feature to distinguish a “site staff” user from a non-staff user, by displaying a special “site staff” icon underneath their user avatar image. And … it didn’t take long for someone to get the Bright Idea of incorporating a copy of that same icon into their user avatar image, and thus pretend to look like a staff member. (I think they got banned actually, for unrelated reasons.)

So as you can guess, I immediately recognized it was Bad Design to place an “official” indicator in/near a space that is normally left entirely to individual user discretion – and the “staff” icon was very quickly relocated next to the person’s username instead so that it could still be easily visible, it just couldn’t be faked.

To be blunt … seeing the report get initially dismissed out of hand and attributed to an irrelevant detail while ignoring the actual evidence (screenshots) felt a little bit like gaslighting and victim-blaming, and that’s why it struck such a nerve.

But I’m over it now. Everybody makes mistakes, even the moderators.

In case you missed the link I added to the first post, this bug has actually been spotted …unpredictably… for at least 2 years. I wish we could describe a way to trigger it reliably, but lacking that, the only recourse we have is to list as many details as possible in case we can start finding patterns across multiple incidents. So please do not assume that every detail occurring before an incident is necessarily relevant to causing it.

I’ve actually been on the “developer” side of troubleshooting issues (as a hobbyist programmer) and, while I don’t recall ever being informed of anything especially obtuse to trigger, it does tend to need a “customer is always right” (or as I prefer to say, "customer is never wrong") mentality.

Anyway, due to how rare this one is I’m not exactly expecting to report another incident, but I will definitely update if another one actually happens. Yesterday was weird – I’ve played this game (daily) for 3+ years and never encountered it personally, then suddenly got two incidents in the same day? I wish I could explain the luck…

[Borjay]

That first one occurred 20min after reset.

It lasted for a few hours, but I can’t say for how long.

[Stratelier]

I don’t know whether or not this is related, but this just occurred during a Delve and:

I have no meaningful steps to give. I had just returned from leaving the game on suspend for a bit (<1 hour), then went into a Lv.50 Delve with a re-used team. Everything was completely normal behavior, aside from the screenshot you see above. This occurred in a “Dark Magus’s Secrets” room, and the enemy summoner (who was since slain) rolled a Ghulemoth. But notice its spellcard graphic is horizontally squished by 25% – AND that only Ghulemoth seems to be affected (notice my Sol’Zara’s spellcard displays correctly; the enemy Grave Seer was also unaffected).

After the battle, I checked my Troops page and saw the same thing:

But again, ONLY Ghulemoth was affected here, any other Troop displays fine.

Wait – it’s already been reported, over there. This seems distinct…