Irgy

Seriously guys, do you want me to be a voluntary beta-tester or something? Every new patch it takes me literally 5 minutes of play time to find a new bug. So far after one play through of the new adventure deck: * Every time I look at a card (double tap), then try to play it, the card just floats around the screen and I can't do anything. I have to go to the menu and back to continue. This is driving me nuts, since I often like to read a card before playing it. * The new henchman who makes other characters fight a skeleton with difficulty increased by 6; I fought him solo, and discovered that every single check I made for the rest of the turn had the difficulty increased by 6 (and actually increased it wasn't just a display thing)! Including the check against him, recharging spells, closing location etc. That's not how that's meant to work. Interestingly I could see on the panel on the left that he was responsible for it, it had a picture of him and "difficulty increased by 6". Maybe because no-one fought a skeleton that effect didn't get taken down? * Wand of enervation doesn't respect the arcane skill (yes everyone's posted this already). Also I hate the way this resets all the dice you've prepared, I rarely decide first that I want to use it. * I often get players highlighted (with the little '!') as being able to help with a check even though they can't. Haven't worked out the pattern to it yet. Seems to be a new problem though haven't seen it happen before. * At one point I used Lini's power to discard a card to make her strength/dex d10, did some other things, then cancelled it all to start again because I did something wrong. After cancelling everything, the card was still discarded for no benefit. Menu and back again fixed it up. * At another point Ezren's entire arcane skill bonus disappeared (appeared to effectively be 0). Switching skills didn't help (even though the display in the skill selection menu showed it correctly, I *think*). Again, main menu and back again sorted it out. My apologies for the lack of detail on some of these, I just wanted to keep playing the game not document everything in detail (if I was beta-testing for you obviously I'd prioritise taking notes!). Might as well let you know though because I expect at least a few are reliably reproduceable and fairly straightforward to fix.

Hi This looks exactly like the bug I experienced. Taking damage, the bury a card power, quite possibly the soft-lock as well, and then the same behaviour with the banishing animation etc. I made a thread about it (and another bug, this was #2): http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88221-damage-bugs-quest-mode-progression-completely-blocked/ As best I can tell nobody ever even read it, not sure what gets attention around here and what doesn't but there you have it. As far as my experience goes, after the recent hotfix, when I went back to the game it resumed in an even more screwed up state than before, but after a few attempts and pressing random buttons I somehow got into a state where it would respond to the menu which contains the forfeit button, and so it's resolved for me.

Bug 1: * I failed a combat check by 1. It was against a Bunyip. * I was told to discard 1 card to damage. * I discarded 1 card to damage * I was told to discard 1 card to damage * This repeated until I had no cards left at which point the game just froze instead. * For this bug, I managed to restart then forfeit the game and move on. * This was within two minutes of playing since the most recent update. I didn't report it at the time because there's so many bugs in this game it's not worth reporting anything that doesn't completely ruin everything. I mention it now because it might be related. Bug 2: * I failed a combat check by 1. It was against a Goblin Raider, summoned by the barrier that summons one for everyone. It was the last of the goblins summoned. * I discarded 1 card to damage. * I was told to bury a card, because of the scenario power that says you have to bury a card when you discard to damage. * I bury the card. * The game animates an encountered card being banished, and at the same time the deck being shuffled (for no clear reason) and then I find myself unable to progress. The game still responds by making sounds and flashing some things which I tap on, but I can't open any menus or do anything at all. * Closing and re-opening gets me back to the step where I am told to bury a card. I can't forfeit. I am no longer able to play the game on quest mode at all because I just return to this blocked situation. While I'm here, some other bugs I've noticed: * I failed the start of turn check at Mountain Peak by 1. I buried a luckstone to succeed at the check (for no good reason, but it was the card I wanted to bury anyway), only to be told to bury another card anyway. * When the scenario power is active where you roll a red d6 after encountering a henchman and on a 1,2, or 3 discard a card from the blessings deck, when you encounter a henchman summoned by a barrier, you are given an opportunity to close the location. I'm not 100% sure whether this happened since the last patch though (the others I'm quite sure). VER-514-20160701 PFID-6DC88A9ADD180E28

1.0.3.5 certainly hasn't fixed characters which are already locked either. I can't even just delete them and move on.

I had the same experience on my iPad mini. The animations are cute and all but I wish you could skip them, it would probably help this. I did find I could eventually get through it with enough attempts. As far as I can guesstimate it's running out of memory that causes many of the crashes, so closing other applications might help?

Ok, this did in fact work, thanks!

When I finish a quest in quest mode, I see the gold reward screen show 0 gold being added to a total of 0 gold, resulting in 0 gold (at least the math is right). Note that both the gold displayed and gold rewarded are wrong (both showing zero). I'm logged in at the time, no disconnect warnings, and when I go back to the menu it displays my current gold correctly. It used to happen occasionally, and I'd thought that I checked once whether gold was actually being added in these cases (despite what's shown) and it was. However, whether that was true at the time or not, now it's happening almost every single time, and when I check my gold total it hasn't changed. I'm playing quest mode, legendary difficulty, with a three player party Lem, Valeros and Merisiel, all level 12 currently. I mention this mostly because it seems to have been happening since about when I started using that party, but it's probably not relevant. I searched for other threads about lost gold, even found one of my own posts about another problem in the process, but none of them described quite what I'm seeing with the 0 plus 0 gold animation. I don't even care that much about the gold at this point it's just irritating seeing that I should be getting it and not. Also the economy is really the one place you should be taking bugs particularly seriously... VER-480-20160602 PFID-6DC88A9ADD180E28

I never rearrange my parties in the first place in story mode to have seen this happen. I hadn't tried adding new versions, but I have now (it was an epic game too). I came out of the game, and of course the characters were locked because they were in my new party, and then even the character who isn't bugged-out didn't seem to unlock properly when I took him out of the party. So I went back to the main menu and now everything's as it was. Hey, thanks for caring+replying. It's definitely happened since the last patch, I don't think I even had the game installed on this particular device before the last patch (was playing on another older device before). It sounds like I've found some new corner case. I can't honestly say for sure exactly what the last thing I did was before they got locked, but I'm fairly sure I was playing a quest mode game with them. Whether I was in the middle of a mission or not I don't know. It's the level 13 Seoni, Kyra and Amiri who are locked. Harsk is an odd case, he's always been in the same party as them but didn't get locked. Incidentally... what's the status on transferring quest characters between devices (on the same account)? Is it possible yet?

I can't do that, it's quest mode, there's no such thing as a party unless you're literally in the middle of a game already and just press continue, or you've just finished a game and you're put straight into the difficulty selection screen. Every time I exit quest mode completely I have to reform my party including remembering who was in it. At least that's how it's always worked for me. I've certainly never seen the party select screen like there is in story mode. I did try starting another party to see if that cleared things up, at one point after that the lock symbol was gone but I still couldn't actually select the players.

Three of my "experienced" characters in quest mode have locks next to them and can't be selected. The behaviour is just as if there was already another instance of the same character in the party except that there isn't. It's persistent across restarts etc. I searched these forums and found some old posts about this problem, some claiming it was meant to have been fixed (in a won't freshly happen again sense) in the last patch but it clearly hasn't been fixed completely. Some of the posts said the characters just disappeared after a while. The whole thing is extremely disheartening, especially given what a grind quest mode is in the first place. Is there any news on this issue? VER-480-20160602 PFID-6DC88A9ADD180E28

So, I was playing Into the Mountains on Heroic difficulty, and the wildcard power said "When you acquire a spell, item or blessing, bury a card" (Bad Memories or something I think it was called). What happened though was this power somehow became merged with the scenario power. The end result of what was implemented could be described as: "When you either defeat a henchmen or acquire a spell, item or blessing, bury a card and each character takes 1d4 force damage." It was pretty rough. It seems like there's code to test for a trigger condition, and code to test for an action to perform, and in this particular case they need to be separated. If I was to guess, I would assume this relates to the same code that causes "bury a card when you acquire an ally" and "discard a card when you acquire an ally" to become just bury. I got lucky and scouted out the villain early on, and managed to set myself up for 3 temp closes and a villain fight. I would now like to describe the total schmozzle that was the behaviour of Incendiary Cloud during this encounter: * Having scouted the villain, I played Incendiary Cloud pre-explore, so that I would be able to play another spell during the encounter. * After the locations were closed, I discovered Incendiary Cloud somehow no longer on display but back in my hand (bug 1). * By experimentation, I discovered that while I (correctly) could not activate Seoni's Fire in the Blood ability after replaying Incendiary Cloud, I could in fact activate her ability first, then play Incendiary Cloud afterwards (bug 2). Since it should have been displayed still anyway I didn't feel bad about "exploiting" this. * After the first check, Breakbones has an ability which causes you to discard a card at random from your hand. The card which was discarded was the displayed Incendiary Cloud, which was not a card in my hand (bug 3). This might be seem related to bug 1 in that both involve the Cloud being in my hand when it shouldn't be, but I will mention that graphically when it was discarded it moved directly from the displayed area to the discard pile. Note that Seoni had the Cloud and Seoni encountered the villain (alone), last time I used it from another location it worked fine. We won the adventure despite these challenges so that was good, really shows the power of scouting abilities (thanks Harsk!). Some specifics: VER-480-20160602 PFID-6DC88A9ADD180E28 iPad Air 2, iOS version unsure, whatever it came with, definitely not 9.3.2 because it's harassing me to update to that version. While I'm at it: * The game crashes a lot on lower-spec devices. Ever since getting this new iPad it hasn't crashed once, so that's good. If you're looking for more bugs in the code * I keep getting told I'm adding 0 gold at the end of each adventure. Fortunately the gold still appears to have been added to my collection so it's just an interface thing.

I understand what you're saying; I just happen to disagree completely. First of all, it's unclear who Obsidian designed Quest mode for, and I don't think that you know given that you don't have a Dev tag slapped on your profile. One would think it would be for the same people who enjoyed Story mode and want more. I sense that there is some sort of implicit accusation I'm not hardcore enough and always hate grinding - let me dispel this notion by noting that I've got hundreds of hours on Disgaea games doing nothing but grinding. Slow grinding is not a sin of game design unto itself; slow grinding with extremely infrequent rewards, on the other hand, is a paradigm that is rightfully hated by most gamers (ref: pre-loot-2.0 Diablo 3). Second, I feel like people are not doing the math here. If it takes three games/wins to increase in level, and each of those games takes 20 minutes, then by the time we hit the eventual presumptive level cap of 70, that is 70 hours of gameplay in Quest mode alone, and that's assuming something of a best case. If it were to take five sessions (3-4 wins plus 1-2 losses), you'd be at something closer to 115 hours. And, doing some averaging here, if ten levels takes ten hours, I am getting a meaningful advancement for my character roughly every 3-5 hours (7/10 of the rewards atm usually being trash cards). These would be punishing numbers on a table, and they are just as punishing on my phone. Finally, the idea that Obsidian must turn Quest mode into a slow grind to stretch out the content is basically saying the designers suck at their jobs, and had to artificially generate more gameplay hours to make up for a lack of content. I don't think that's the case here - I think they rushed Quest mode, and it still needs significant tuning. If I want to stretch out Quest mode, I'll play it on Heroic or Legendary for more challenge. Don't punish me for trying to access more content at a rate that a normal gamer would find gratifying. I'd much rather they make Quest mode three times as fun and take half as long to reach cap. I obviously can't speak for what they were thinking, but I can describe who the gameplay would suit and presume it was by design. I've seen people here talking about what happens after level 40, so I know someone out there plays enough to get there. I think our main difference of opinion is over the difference in gameplay at high and low levels. My interpretation of what you've written suggests you see high, or indeed maximum level play as for some reason much more fun than low level play, and you see progression as purely a grind to get to there. For me, progression is the fun part. If they slow it down, they're just rationing it out. The gameplay at max level isn't substantially different to the gameplay at lower levels. In fact it's worse once the novelty of the last power you got wears off because there's nothing to acquire or look forward to. I don't need to unlock everything before I start having fun. It's not a grind, it's just playing the game. I'd much rather spread 70 hours evenly between all levels than spend all of it at max level, because it's better variety and always something to look forward to. It's not a matter of being bad at their jobs it's a matter of doing their job in terms of working within the constraints of the game they're implementing. There's a maximum number of card, power, and skill feats they can give out before they leave the existing game entirely and need to start designing and balancing entirely new content. The game is fundamentally designed around constant progression. When you play the physical version you constantly progress (with pauses for the oft-worthless card rewards to spread things out a bit) and then you stop. Heck, you don't even get to use the rewards from the final scenario once. Maxed out characters are the end of the game not the beginning. So their design for quest mode doesn't just fit my way of thinking, it fits the original game design as well Honestly I don't ever grind games, I just play them. If I thought it was a grind I'd do something else. Sometimes I play enough that I unlock everything and that's good too, though I'm far from it currently in quest mode. Personally I would like quest mode progression to be faster as well because it would suit me better. I'm just acknowledging that the design is a better for people like me (in terms of enjoying gradual progression) but with more spare time.

Another odd thing I noticed; I started a game with some characters who had various treasure chest cards. I continued the game, but with my daughter's gamecentre login by accident (I have to play on her iPad because the game crashes so often on my older iPad2 that I can't progress anywhere). I still had the cards, but when I won the scenario and when to rebuilt the decks, the treasure chest cards had all disappeared! Fortunately, I worked out what was going on before finishing the deck rebuild, closed the game, logged into my gamecentre account, and when I continued the cards were back, thankfully. All of which is sensible behaviour to me, just potentially a bit of a trap so something to look out for.

It's designed to be a slow grind. It's there for players who want to play the game a lot, to give them an unlimited amount of stuff to do. If the rate of progress is boring that's fine, it's probably not designed for you, but on the plus side, odds are you can entertain yourself playing with a variety of different characters in story mode instead. If the rate of progress was faster then the people who want to play a lot would unlock everything too quickly and then end up getting bored anyway. The random card rewards are pretty worthless even when they're a card you can keep, but they're there to spread out the real rewards (just like they are in story mode).

I'm honestly confused by the question. They all have black borders unless they are from treasure chests. They're referring to how to get the cards that aren't from treasure chests (hence black bordered), and also aren't available by default (hence unlocked).

I also found that the converse was true. I (twice in fact) took the last card, and was subsequently rewarded with a win despite having what was elsewhere described as "7/18" allies. Is this part of the same bug?

I'm almost reluctant to mention this, but the quest scenario power (so it's in the red box not the extra powers) that says "when a henchman is defeated characters take 1d4 fire damage" does nothing. I've had it twice tonight, never taken any damage. On legendary difficulty both times. And thank goodness for that since it's ridiculous. Why is this included as a power at party level B (i.e. below level 10)? It's from deck 3 for a reason, and even then it's a pretty insane upgrade on the original power that just activates once.

PFID-6DC88A9ADD180E28 It's happened to me at least twice tonight, plus god only knows how many other times before I noticed. Both times quest mode. I'm down at least 1000 gold between this and daily gold failures.

6 times in a row is 1/729, it's not that astounding. He's been quite close to expectation for me, I've often got him first go. Of the things mentioned here the Augury one is the most plausible, particularly if it is happening literally every time. Has anyone followed those steps and not seen it happen? Personally I've never tried. I almost always Augury for the henchman type (so usually monster), and if it's the villain/henchman I'm done while other banes go on the bottom. Either way I don't want to Augury again (since if I miss again it would reshuffle the currently bottom banes), if I have another one I'll move to a different location to use it. Even when I do Augury for a boon I would always want to encounter the boon first before trying again.

FWIW, Mammy Graul technically works by putting the henchmen in a pile, and they can only be put in a pile if they weren't summoned since summoned cards always go back to the box afterwards (unless specifically the summoning card says otherwise). The damage thing doesn't work the same way because it doesn't involve putting the henchmen anywhere it just happens. I suspect they've programmed it to work the way it does with multi-henchman barriers because it would just be ridiculous otherwise, but just didn't get around to figuring out how to adjust the wording to describe the behaviour they wanted.

Having this in the OP would have saved a few folks some time and nerves worrying about whether the % of culled cards will increase as the adventure path goes on. Although Obsidian hasn't stated the percentages, there will be progression and there will be scaling for party size. Ah, great to hear, and I guess I can at least say I was right the first time when just I assumed they'd do it this way. Sounds like we agree more than we disagree then. I have the same sentiments just maybe not so strongly held. It's worth being clear though that just mirroring the board game wouldn't work (even without having added a suite of party management options to the picture). The reality is you can abuse the system in paper as well, but no-one bothers because it's a waste of time. Why replay an earlier mission to banish cards when you can play the next mission and actually get somewhere instead? However as an app, things change. Shuffling time becomes zero, people are playing on their own, and people's whole attitude towards the game is different. All this changes it from "could be abused but who cares" to "I feel like a chump for not abusing it". I think if you wanted to have this you'd need to have some sort of lock-in mode that: * Locks you down to one set of characters, or at least has some complicated constraints on changing them. * Only lets you play each scenario once (unless you fail, see the next point) * Punishes you in some way if you fail (e.g. you can't play again for 15 minutes), to stop forfeit-restarts on even the current scenario With all those things emulating normal paper play maybe it could work. They're all things I tend to do anyway, but I can see why Obsidian might think it wasn't worthwhile adding this option, and either way why they felt they needed an alternative.

(spoiler alert...) I unlocked a card by having Aldern Foxglove in my deck when I encountered the skinsaw man. Maybe there's other easter eggs like this in the game?

It's Math. Are we saying we can't consider simple Math now as an intended part of the game? There is no loot table in Pathfinder. The loot table is literally... How many cards are there of said type = x How many cards are already out of the box of said type = y Probability of pulling said card from box = (1 / x-y) * 100% So every single card you eliminate from the box increases the chances of encountering something in your adventure path range. If you culled 0 cards from the box by the time you hit Adventure Path 6... you will not see many Adventure Path 6 cards when you run your story, unless you farm for them. Which I guess is their intended effect because they want people to spend money/gold. Obsidian is now determining our chances with that, in addition to adding more cards into our pools from the Treasure Chests. Um, this may come as a surprise to you, but I knew that. I can do maths by the way, I even have a maths degree. I can even spot that you should have written "1 / (x - y)". You're obviously missing the point. Under the proposed system, they are still removing cards from the box, so you still have increased chances of getting the better cards. What's different is: - You can't choose to not remove some specific boons - You can't influence more generally which cards get removed + You don't have to spend time worrying about which cards get removed <- this is the part I called immersion breaking - You can't apply skilful strategies to maximise the number of cards removed <- this is the bit I'm calling a trivial difference + People can't abuse the system to maximise the number of cards removed To put it in perspective, all the skill you might apply over multiple games to remove additional cards will be equivalent to just playing one more game on an old mission before moving to the next one. In paper that never happened because who wants to spend all that time shuffling up the locations etc. just to replay an old mission. In the app the shuffle time is nothing and with difficulty settings replaying is encouraged. So skilfully removing more basics would be just a meaningless grind instead. Some of the comments make me wonder if people didn't read the OP and think they're not removing basic cards at all. One thing I really really think they should be doing, which I actually thought they were doing because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do (so isn't it good I reread the OP myself), is removing an increasingly larger %age of cards the further through the adventure path you are. So for instance 3.1 should have all the basics, while by 4.5 maybe 70% should be removed. The %s should match what a "typical party" would have removed by then just doing the missions once. Otherwise they're removing a whole lot less by the time the later missions come along, and that does suck. If they're really clever they should make the rate a function of both the mission number and the party size. Since that was a balance-affecting (for better or worse) element in the original design that big parties removed the basics faster. By the way if you see the original thing I said on this topic, I'm not even all that much in favour of the idea. I just sound like I'm swinging one way because one side of the argument needs more help understanding the issue than the other at the moment.

Anyone feel like saying what in the conveniently readable format known as text?

I honestly don't think the side effects of the culling system were ever meant to be a critical part of the game strategy. I actually think it's good that I won't have to think about whether to decline to get a card that I wouldn't mind having this game but also want to banish. It's quite immersion-breaking really, "Oh I've found a guide, I wouldn't mind their help exploring this area, but... If I decline their help, then they'll get so offended that they'll tell exactly half of all the other guides in the world to never offer to help me again, and that's good because it somehow increases the chance of someone more powerful offering to help me in the future, because those pesky guides kept pushing them out of the way or something". We're all used to it, and people (like me) who play these games like nothing more than having a trade-off to make with a non-zero impact, even (indeed especially) when that impact is actually trivially small. But if you put it in perspective it's just that, a highly visible difference with a trivially small actual impact. Just remember that affecting the gameplay and degrading it are two different things. One up side is it will mean less Blessings of the Gods, since they were quite hard to get rid of. I think the only really noticeable impact for game play is the boons (e.g. Cure) which you would deliberately choose not to banish, now they're gone with the rest of them.