Platform, device and operation system
Android, Samsung Galaxy S10
What were you expecting to happen, and what actually happened
Use your Ultimate as an assassin to spawn Shadow Curse ultimate gems.
Match one or more Shadow Curse gems with other purple gems on the board (big or otherwise).
Expected: Shadow Curse spawned purple gems don’t replace other purple gems, whether Big or normal, like other spells and abilities. Actual: Shadow Curse spawned purple gems are replacing existing (unmatched) purple gems at times, occasionally including Big ones.
It might be the result of multiple Shadow Curse gems triggering at the same time, not entirely sure.
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
I’ve noticed it before. Reproduced it today, 17th of August 2021.
Steps to make it happen again
See Expected & Actual results above.
Every spell that creates gems in random places works this way. They can replace any gem including gems that are already of the same color, and they can even replace gems that have already been replaced as part of the same spell.
EDIT: Technically the exception is for the special gems created by ultimates, those cannot be overwritten by any other spell so they always appear as long as there is space.
Hmm, I’m relatively sure spells like Unnerving Strike and Dark Ice (with the bonus gems), Poison Frogs, Channel Poison don’t behave as such, off the top of my head.
Might be negative bias, but I don’t recall noticing same color replacement for any of these above - especially not same color Big gem replacement.
It’s a very well-known issue at this point. My current gear set-up causes this problem to occur multiple times every match that lasts more than a single opponent in length.
As the issue has not yet been fixed, it probably requires a client patch which would mean that the issue would not resolved until 0.37 releases.
I hit this a lot with my Assassin. Annoying particularly when the Big X gem gets created then a fraction of a second later overwritten by a basic gem without providing the 10/20 bonus.
The issue we’re talking about occurs when spawning normal gems, such as the purple gems that spawn when you match Shadow Curse gems.
As an example, the other day I had a board filled with matched gems and only two free spaces were left. I cast uncommon Channel Fire which creates 4 red gems. A red gem spawned in only one of my free spaces; the spell had created a red gem 4 times in the same spot, instead of filling up the board.
Given your screenshots - the problem is not that Shadow Curse gems REPLACE themselves purple gems - those work fine - it’s after they are matched and turn ends that they spawn NORMAL purple gems that do replace purple targets as well
If it helps understand and reproduce it, casting Shadow Curse with a high Ultimate counter should be the easiest and clearest way.
The animation acts as follows:
You probably make a huge match of purple including multiple Shadow Curse gems;
A bunch of empty squares show up where the matched gems were before;
Shadow Curse spawns gems before the board drops the remaining gems - during this step, if you match say 4 curse gems, they sequentially spawn multiple gems before the board drops down - it is at this step that it’s clear that purple gems start being replaced with other purple gems; - Big or otherwise.
The board then drops for whatever blank spaces remain, excluding matched combinations during the spawn.
So if all that was handled was the Big gem replacement, this bug won’t be fully fixed in 0.37
If I had to guess for the source of the bug without domain knowledge, the post-match board array / data structure is likely not updated between each Shadow Gem trigger, causing each Shadow Gem to use the post-match board instead of storing the new board state between each trigger.
Possibly the same for the regular random gem spawns, if they are handled one by one instead of as a stack. Ex:
Shadow gem #1 spawns purple gem at x1,y2 coordinate;
Board status is not updated with x1,y2 as purple;
Shadow gem #2 does not see x1,y2 as purple, spawns purple at x1,y2 again if randomly assigned to that position.
Yes as @Norinth says it is not the creation of the Shadow Gems themselves causing the issue, but rather when they are exploded the gems created from exploding the Shadow Gems in turn overwrite existing purples and/or big gems, some of which could be created from the same match that exploded most of the board.
If it helps I put more in a bug report on the same issue, which was just tagged as hopefully fixed in 0.37
Also managed to reproduce it with Shaman Ultimate, where the Big III Green gems even replaced a Big X Green gem. Though Assassin Ultimate remains much easier to reproduce due to spawning more gems, just that it also affects Shaman for the bug report
Came to this thread specifically to make sure the Shaman was being looked at as well because I’ve experienced exactly what Norinth mentioned above and saw it again today. My X Green gem was replaced by a III gem from the ultimate.
