Platform, device and operation system
Android 11, Galaxy Note 20 Ultra
What were you expecting to happen, and what actually happened
Two awkward interactions to report today…
- It’s Over 100!
The UI awkwardly displays accumulated mana totals for a round when at least 100 mana of the same color is collected by the player in a single turn.
- Effect-ception
What happens when an effect triggrers another effect, which triggers another effect, which then triggers an earlier effect in that chain? The game becoming very, very confused is what happens.
Bonus points for the action freeze-frame screen-grab!
There are two broken matches captured simultaneously in the screenshot.
- The broken skull match in Row 2.
- The broken green match in Column 5.
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
Issue 1 - Always when 100 mana of single color is claimed in a single turn.
Issue 2 - Random, but the odds of the issue occurring significantly increase with high rarity gear with synergystic effects (higher rarity = greater odds). Easy to reproduce with very high rarity synergystic gear.
Steps to make it happen again
Issue 1 - Self Explanatory UI issue
Issue 2 - To duplicate the screenshot issue the easiest,
- Play as the Shaman.
- Equip a high-rarity Essgard Flail, green element.
- Charge the Shaman’s Ultimate to full maximize chances of the issue occuring.
- (Optional) Cycle through the Shaman’s Ultimate at least once to fill the board with green big gems [or just dev hack them onto the board].
- Fire off a bunch of green-generating spells (Poisonous Toads, Channel Poison, etc).
- Fire off the Shaman Ultimate, fully charged.
- Make as many independent green matches with the potion bottles as possible (to maximize the number of effect processes triggered by the green Essgard Flail).
- Sit back and watch the fun as the game tries to figure out what to do.
So, what is really happening in Issue 2?
The effect flow should be as follows:
-
Shaman Ultimate Potion bottles spawn a bunch of green gems when matched.
-
For each potion bottle activation,
- The green Essgard Flail’s effect is to generate multiple skulls when a green match occurs.
- The effect of the Flail may result in intermediate skull matches being made in mid-process resolution. These matches behave correctly as the game recognizes these matches and hangs onto them until the end of the process.
- Skyfall happens.
- Skyfall may result in additional matches being made, which the game correct holds onto.
- If a green skyfall match happens, go back to the first step in this sub-list and resolve new skulls being generated because the Flail’s effect will trigger again.
- Repeat this list until there are no green skyfall matches to be made.
-
The game resolves the next potion bottle activation and restarts the chain of events again.
-
After all potion bottles have been fully resolved, process all mid-process matches that were made, assuming they were not broken (see below).
-
Check to see if any more green matches were made from the mid-process resolutions or resulting skyfall. If so, generate more skulls, resolve them, and check for green matches again.
-
End
The problem appears to be that when generating new green gems (from potion bottles) or skulls (from green matches), the game does not remember where the mid-process matches were made.
This results is weird stuff happening like a potion bottle generating green gems, which then generate skulls which then overwrite other green gem matches waiting to resolve (breaking them) and then being overwritten again by green gems once more when the next potion bottle activation resolves (as so on and so forth).
Also, I’ve observed the same gem being generated and overwriting the same gem multiple times during the same process resolution (this is observable by watching for the animation when a gem is spawned and where the animation plays in the same grid location multiple times during the same process resolution).
For example in the second screenshot, the green match in Column 5 was clearly broken by the big 3 skull gem overwriting the green gem in Row 5 (hence the green match frame around it).
