Ethics Gradient

I'm with @StormbringerGT on this one. The part of the game that does random things randomly appears pretty solid. Random numbers are pulled out of the air by a Unity function that is a xorshift128 variant and shouldn't see noticeable loops until 2128 rolls. The shuffler is Fisher-Yates Algorithm, which is practically a Classic Car of computer programing. If there is a debate to be had, it is better framed as: "under what circumstances could the game go *burp* and screw up all these high-quality random numbers it made?" not simply "is the RNG bugged?" I was curious about stuff like this for a while, and tried a few practical tests. For example, I loaded out Ezren with 8 Augries and Augured the heck out of a location deck (once he gets in the zone, he can keep going almost indefinitely). Things came up different enough each time that I wasn't terribly concerned that there was a systematic problem. I haven't yet run into anything that is both suspicious and reproducible. Anyone found any potential RNG quirks that can easily be reproduced? #TeamRandom

That card has a some serious history of funny behavior. Anyway, it's been a couple months since I last posted this.

You got it! Though, it's just randomly based on AD, and does not take into consideration card types. The system isn't perfect. But for minimal effort, it keeps the game in balance while still allowing some random variance. Edge cases where you have some preposterous number of a single card wind up mitigated by hard limits on the number of treasure cards allowed to even enter the vault. You could have 100 or 10,000 of a card, but no more than maybe ~25 will ever be in the vault at one time. It would also take some pretty deliberate shaping to get to that point. By the time you have 100 of a card, you probably have 20-30 of most others at that AD level. Anyway, this was from back during AD4, but the mechanics should still be true:

Funny you said that... there's actually a basic mechanism to prevent exactly such a thing from happening! When you play with Treasure Cards "on," only a certain number are added to the active vault each game. That certain number is divided equally among the active Adventure Decks, and up to that amount from each AD is randomly selected. So... assuming you had 65,500 of a Treasure Card at each AD level, yes, it would be guaranteed to swamp the treasure pool. However, the treasure pool is somewhat gated, so even at a worst-case-scenario (a.k.a. the absurd-case scenario) only like 20-30% of all vault boons would be one of those few cards. Rough Order-of-Magnitute, you'd need to open a chest or two per minute for the better part of a year to get such silly numbers. You would save yourself a lot of time if you just directly wrote Obsidian a check for $1/2 Million. As an added bonus, you'd probably have the satisfaction of kickstarting development on Skull & Shackles! Any other fun questions? Edit: Math error. Misplaced a decimal point.

The vault you see after selecting a party is either the in-play Vault, or the Vault from the previous scenario. That is why if your characters have been to AD6, but go knock out some challenge using Local Heroes, the "Vault" suddenly won't show a lot of adventure decks. The "Absolute Vault" is the Gallery you can find from Main Menu -> Options. No limit has been found on the treasure cards so far. I've heard of a user having like 300 of one, so we're at least in "Short Integer" territory. We'll only ever know for sure if someone gets like 66,000 of one particular treasure card.

Yes. That is the best way to imagine it. The "Vault" is generated each time you play a scenario, and doesn't really exist outside that scenario. Different parties have different vaults largely based on the cards in the character's decks.

Two things. 1. Check if you're logged into iOS Game Center correctly. (Settings -> Game Center). If you're receiving gold defeating monsters, things are probably ok, but if not, it could be a sign that you got logged out. 2. Some of the daily challenges don't appear to update in real-time for me either. Force-quit the app, open it back up, and check your progress in the Challenges button. Challenge progress gets updated on the server, but the app can be forgetful at times. Force-quitting the app and opening it again is one way to kick the server and ask: "Hey! How am I doing on this challenge?" Best of luck!

Yes. The bug is based on how the Ogrekin cards technically work. I posted a little about it over here, but the short story is that the Ogrekin aren't just one card, but a series of 5 cards. The first Ogrekin card is revealed with the "Roll a d4..." text, then it swaps out for one of four "hidden" cards representing each outcome of the roll. But once that hidden card enters the game, it doesn't know to switch back to the "d4 roller" if it is evaded/undefeated. Each Ogrekin variant is probably unique enough to make it difficult to have each d4 outcome part of the same digital card. The "swap-out" solution is an elegant workaround, but the cards just need to know to swap back if they are not defeated.

It is/was a quest mode bug. You were meant to be awarded an "Animal Ally" but the game gave you and "Animal non-Ally" for some reason. That narrowed the possible card rewards to banes like Goblin Dog or a few Henchmen with the animal trait.

I hope it gets fixed too. Quest mode rewards has always had funny issues though. First, dead characters permanently missed feats. Then feats were retroactively rewarded. Next, there were issues awarding a character multiple earned feats at a time. Now we're at a point where characters are being granted multiple un-earned feats. Every revision is gradually outpacing the bugs, but, it is unfortunate that "too much of a good thing" (i.e. feats) is inadvertently loading out quest characters to the point of breaking the game. I'm almost willing to bet this is a downstream effect of whatever fix went into solving characters that missed out on selecting a role. At least it is the sort of thing a later patch can address.

There is nothing "wrong" with Quest Mode. It is just a little more complicated than people give it credit for. The Pathfinder ACG has years of play testing behind the Adventure Decks, but a random mix-and-match approach has always been uncharted territory. Purely random scenarios can get ugly, and may range in difficulty from "way too easy" to "spectacular hot-mess". To address that, Obsidian built a series of templates for each quest Tier that constrain the RNG a little. That's why random scenarios still feel similar as you step your way through the tiers. When you factor in the wildcard powers, some quests may be more fun than others, but they aren't generally unwinnable. As it stands, quest mode looks like it is at a minor crossroads. Now that every Adventure Deck has been released, fifteen scenarios of new content needs to be balanced against the three-dozen or so wildcard powers to build templates for Tiers 4, 5, and 6. But between the bugs and a potential PC release, seems like there is more than enough other stuff to keep the devs busy. Flounder posted something to this effect in a dev blog not too long ago. He also wanted to prepare us of the worst-case-scenario where Quest Mode proves unfixable and gets eliminated, but it sounds like they're going to do their best to make sure it remains part of the game.

Daily gold challenges don't need to be collected anymore. They are awarded the moment you complete them. Weekly challenges should be available in the pickup window once they've been finished off.

Yeah.... that bug. Barl Gimmeabreakbones: beating his Fortitude check defeats him outright (Posted 30 May 2016!)

Double check which game center account and app store account you are logged in on. (Settings -> Game Center, and Settings-> iTunes & App Store). Needing to restore every time is guaranteed to happen if you buy content using one App Store/Game Center combo, and then later change the Game Center account. If you have a mismatch, when you push the restore button, iTunes will reprocess your purchases and temporarily restore content, but the "cloud" sees a different game center account or PFID and won't permanently add stuff to the account. There's no family sharing or anything. For the time being, you need to use all the same accounts.

Yes. It appears that Nathan changed it from Black Friday Gloom (presumably a leftover test challenge from November) to New Years Weekly Challenge.

Just cheesed my way through two rounds of Local Heroes on Normal. Can confirm: No popup showing challenge advancement and no indication of advancement in the Main Menu Challenge button. However, if you force quit the app and open it back up, you'll see the challenge has advanced as normal in the Main Menu. Your challenge progress gets pushed off to the server, but it may take a force-quit to get your app synced back up again.

Pretty much, yeah. Hopefully there's a fix in the works, because even if you unstuck your game for now, you're just going to run into it again. Very true. For iOS, deleting the game feels drastic, but may be the only method to wipe out some save files because there's no easy way to do so like in Android. It is a bit of a last-resort fix, but iOS users unfortunately have a really small toolbox when you need to find ways to troubleshoot.

It says: 100 Gold Probably should say: 500 Gold What you're likely to get: 1 Treasure Chest --- Odds are good that this weekly will hit the same bug as seen in the Festive Wool Hide challenge.

Nope. Weekly challenge was bugged. Server was handing out treasure chests instead of the Festive Wool Hide card. Not enough time to troubleshoot before the holidays, so we all got the card for free!

The Weekly Challenge is to knock out 5 daily challenges between 12/26 and 1/1. Today's is an easy one, so finish it up, then do four of the next six as they come up.

Sadly, no, there is no magical sync button to push on your devices. Data syncs automatically, in different ways, at different times, for different reasons. There are a couple known times the app does talk to the cloud, so it may be possible to use it to your advantage. Probable workaround for when the sync flakes out: Force-quit Force quit the app on all devices. Uplink ​Open the app on device with the party you are trying to sync (the one with the newest version of your characters). Chose the party you want to sync up to the cloud. Go to the overworld map then back out (this should fire off a character sync to the cloud). Maybe repeat above steps (2) and (3) a couple times. Just in case. Downlink Re-open the app on the target device. Wait for the "Logged in" message and the challenges button to appear. A download sync should be complete at this point. "New" characters from the cloud should be downloaded over "old" characters. Play​ on second device The above song-and-dance shouldn't always be necessary, but sometimes things fall out of sync in a funny way. Let us know if it helps. Plan B is also to simply delete Pathfinder on the device full of old data. Feels like a leap of faith, but if it is already woefully out-of-date, there isn't much to lose.

Can't cure because you never have any cards in the discard problem... Hm... of all the silly things can that happen in the game, I swear I've seen worse! #PathfinderFirstWorldProblems

No dates. No confirmation about cross-platform details. Yes, they say that the PC release is coming soonish. But as far as wild speculation goes, I'm willing to bet you'll see some movement on Quest Mode before any Steam release. There are also handful of uh... "rough bits" to polish out first. Cross-platform functionality is currently unknown, but if they can get iOS and Android on the same page like they've planned, adding Steam into the mix is almost trivial. Your stuff isn't "transferring" between the different platforms, cross-platform is just a way to log into the same "cloud" account from different services/devices.

The only way to delete a quest save in iOS is to delete the app and reinstall. It's a bit of a leap of faith that all your stuff will sync back, but that should do the trick. Characters get saved to the cloud after the feat selection screen, so if that is where you're stuck, there's a pretty good chance you'll get reverted back to before that scenario. To anyone on android, if they are comfortable digging around their file system, deleting the "slot99" folder can do the same thing.

No need to keep them around. 1. Add a new character to the party, and name them Packrat or Mule or something (easier to find them later). 2. Press the blue arrow to get to the scenario selection screen, then tap the deck management button in the bottom right. 3. Trade cards to/from your mule. 4. Go back to party management, and boot the mule back out of the party. As far as re-acquiring loot cards, well, it takes a bit of shenanigans. Something like: 1. Temporarily boot a few of your experienced characters from their current party. 2. Start a new party with one or more new characters. 3. After the party is established, add those veterans and heavy-hitters to your new party. 4. Replay the scenario that hands out loot. 5. The vets shouldn't be rewarded, but the newbies should receive the cards. 6. Trade, reform parties, carry on as planned. Some permutation of that should work. The key thing is to start a new party with new characters. If there is a vet in the mix during party creation, it will mark the save as having received all the rewards up to their level. ps. Merry Christmas!