1.2.6.3 Patch incoming

[Flounder]

Hi Folks, 

 

First off I want to say thank you for your patience with support.  Yes, 1.2.6 came out with some changes and a new platform, so our support staff has been a bit overwhelmed recently.

 

Luckily, StormbringGT has returned from his play time at Origins to help with the influx.  We do apologize for the delayed responses. Seriously, we hate-hate-hate having anybody unanswered for any length of time.

 

Issues fixed:

- Tutorial Progression Block - We found out that if the success animation was playing and a user hit the next button to go to the Victory screen the animation would keep playing.  Then the user goes to the next scenario, beats it and it tries to call up that animation.  Oh wait, it's still playing in the background, so the game waits for the animation to complete, but it doesn't...  Stuck.

 

- DLC Not showing up - We were blowing out the PlayFab servers with licensing.  Basically, PlayFab has an allotted amount of time to deal with the calls it makes.  Some calls were taking longer and timing out the server other times the server got interrupted and stopped making calls.  The bandaid fix that we have right now is that every time you launch the game it audits what you have and makes about 50 or so calls to avoid the timing out issue. Multiple logins should get you your content in pieces UNTIL this patch.   We have a decent audit process set up in the patch and this should be a non-issue.

 

- Merging not complete - Same thing with the DLC.  Servers were making too many calls and farting out.  We will audit what you are supposed to have and make sure that everything is properly shared.

 

- Characters disappearing - Renaming characters and removing them from the party removed them from the universe.  DO NOT RENAME CHARACTERS until after 1.2.6.3 is live.  It might be fine but for whatever reason if you renamed them and removed them from the party bad things could happen.  If you renamed them and kicked more ass, everything was fine.  Just avoid it for a bit.

 

- Stash deleting cards - The Stash could get into a state where it thought the user was in a tutorial state where we have a specific deck of cards.  It would then remove those the tutorial cards.  

 

- Logging into Asmodee made content disappear - Not really, we had to do a 1.2.6.1 patch that dealt with Asmodee issues where someone with an existing account would associate a new PFID.  Locally, the content was still there but PlayFab thought you were a new account.  By not being logged into Asmodee all the content would appear properly.  Logging back in *Poof*.  We might have to unlink the Asmodee account from PFID for a couple users but overall that will only require them to enter their Asmodee account information when they log.  

 

We are hoping to have this up tomorrow.  We are updating the servers when iOS gets approved. Most of you vets know that iOS can be the bottleneck during the review process so we will get it up there as quickly as possible.

 

Many thanks, 

 

-F

 

RIP Stephen Furst, 1955-2017

 

 

[Bigmre]

Will this update address the constant crashing on iOS version?

[MrBishop]

Will this update address the constant crashing on iOS version?

 

Unfortunately, optimization improvements are slated for a future patch. (not this one)

[DrDior]

 

Will this update address the constant crashing on iOS version?

 

 

Unfortunately, optimization improvements are slated for a future patch. (not this one)

Seriously! Always crashing means that ,Mobile is unplayable. Is there anything that could be worse than that? This problem is far beyond "optimization ".

[Hannibal_PJV]

The problem seems to be that mobile devices run out of memory and that is a optimization problem. The dev have to optimize code so that it eats less memory. So if you have a mobile device with a lot of system memory you don't have problems at this moment. Other devices needs to have code that use less memory, so the term optimization is very right in here. Code is working as it should, the devices just can not run it if the hardware is not very highend.

But annoying... definitely!

Hopefully They can tweak the code somewhat. In other threath They mentioned that one way of redusing memory footprint means that the game will run much slover. So it is a trade off. They most likely go to run game slover option. I personally hoped an option so that you can shose less memory, or more speed. But supporting different codepaths can be really time consuming, so I Expect that we don't see that option.

 

In the meantime One option seems to be to use less than 13 characters, and the game run more stable.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/92778-still-crashing-under-new-patch-1261/?p=1919632

Edited June 22, 2017 by Hannibal_PJV

[stbassy]

What would help is to explicitly say which devices have insufficient memory and can run into those problems.

And of those devices, what is the workaround.

 

For example, i have an iphone6 that has this problem. The devs deleted some of my chars. I now have 13 (from 22) but I dont crash on the player-menus

Edited June 22, 2017 by stbassy

[Flounder]

The next patch we do for issues is planned to have the memory issues for the character/party creation screen to not explode while trying to load all the characters AND their decks at the same time.   

 

Additionally, we are doing a pass on the Unclaimed tab so that it doesn't try to load all the cards at the same time and...explode.

 

We'll have more official news but the implementation and testing of these changes but it isn't likely to get implemented and released for a couple weeks.

[thetang22]

Well, the update from a week ago made it so I could not do anything with party creation, and since I had no active parties, the game has been unplayable. There was an update the very next day that didn't fix the issue. That was frustrating, but I tried to be patient.

 

I downloaded the update tonight, and now ALL my progress have been lost. ALL the cards I've acquired into my collection are gone. My characters don't exist. And I logged in the way I always have to make sure it wasn't just that, and still everything is gone.

 

I don't particularly mind so much losing my active characters, as I can always start a fresh party. What I DO mind is losing all the content added to my collection since the game was released on IOS. That was a LOT of chests opened that are just gone now. Some of that was the result of real $$ spent, too.

 

Please tell me I'm not simply screwed, and there is some way to recover AT LEAST my Collection.

 

Edit - I did a little more investigating....and party creation is STILL ****ed up. My device never had problems with memory to cause these issues until your recent updates.

 

I am so frustrated with Obsidian right now. Your recent updates broke things and made the game unplayable for a decent amount of people. You should do the responsible thing and roll back the update to the version prior to last week's update. THEN, internally fix your problems with the update that you envision before releasing it and making the game unplayable for a decent number of your customers.

Edited June 23, 2017 by thetang22

[Flounder]

@thetang22  It sounds like two things are happening.

 

1) All your progress will not be gone, nor the cards, that is saved in PlayFab.  It sounds like you are somehow logging into a new playfab account.  Please send us your PFID and Account name and we will see is if the Asmodee login or something else is making that happen.

 

2) Party creation sounds like a memory issue. Every character has all its deck cards loaded with it.  Lots of character and lots of cards can blow out the memory.   We are working on a streaming solution right now that will keep that from happening but again, please send us a ticket at support@obsidian.net and we will verify that is the case and we can even remove some unused characters that might be lingering around sucking up memory.

 

We're working on these issues and really do apologize for all this happening.

 

-F

[thetang22]

@thetang22 It sounds like two things are happening.

 

1) All your progress will not be gone, nor the cards, that is saved in PlayFab. It sounds like you are somehow logging into a new playfab account. Please send us your PFID and Account name and we will see is if the Asmodee login or something else is making that happen.

 

2) Party creation sounds like a memory issue. Every character has all its deck cards loaded with it. Lots of character and lots of cards can blow out the memory. We are working on a streaming solution right now that will keep that from happening but again, please send us a ticket at support@obsidian.net and we will verify that is the case and we can even remove some unused characters that might be lingering around sucking up memory.

 

We're working on these issues and really do apologize for all this happening.

 

-F

I will send the ID. I can't possibly imagine memory is an issue. I had a very minimal amount of active characters. If the characters associated with Quest Mode are now gone, then absolutely only a minimal amount. I had my primary party of 4, and might have had 1 or 2 other characters I played with at some point in time, but I was nowhere near having a "lot" of characters.

 

The thing that is frustrating about suggesting that it is a memory issue on my device is that the game was completely playable, with rarely any crashing before your recent updates. Now, suddenly after said updates...my game is unplayable due to my device's supposed lack of memory.

 

The better question is what did you guys do in the recent updates that screwed things up to make my system's previously ok memory now an issue after updating?

 

edit - I apologize if I sound like I've got attitude about this stuff....but I was gone for months, and as soon as I came back, the program got updated and made my game unplayable, whereas it was previously playable.

 

I get frustrated talking to "tech support" when the approach taken is usually "here's what is likely wrong on your end (the consumer) that would result in things being messed up".  However, if you approach it with the computer bug testing approach, you'd take things back to the last known "working" iteration of the software, and assess what has changed since then.  The answer to that question is that you guys changed your software in some way.  Nothing happened on my end to make my software work one moment, then suddenly not the next...other than downloading your update.  That would suggest the source of the problem was due to the software changes you guys made - not something with my device.

Edited June 24, 2017 by thetang22

[Hannibal_PJV]

Ofcourse every update change the program and it seems that last updates did change the amounth memory that was needed to run. It like my old XP Computer can not run win10 because. But as long as there is no solution the the reason why something does not work anymore is not certain. Sometimes os update can cause that the program does not work anymore. Sometimes it is because you device os has not been updated and the program has been so that it will work with the new os. In mobile environment it can be real pain in the ... because some devices newer get upgrades. So making new features to old program is very riscy because the mobile environment change somquicly and old devices very seldom get upgrades.

There Are quite a lot new features that eats memory. Stash, autoculling treasure card etc. that can cause problems.

 

The solution is/Are:

A) newer make changes, only good to apps that don't get new content

B) buy new device always when your apps stop working, if you Are rich

C) buy device that gets upgrades a Little bit longer time, hard to find and normally expensive

D) optimice code always after new content is increased (takes some time...)

 

The pathfinder in a moving target so solution D seems to be the most sensible from the view point of consumer and that is what They Are trying to do. Sooner or later the option D is not good enough and we have to rely on options a, b or c.

[thetang22]

Ofcourse every update change the program and it seems that last updates did change the amounth memory that was needed to run. It like my old XP Computer can not run win10 because.

A more accurate anology for this would be like your existing computer, which runs Windows 10 just fine, can no longer run Windows 10 because Microsoft released an update that broke the program on your existing computer, despite it having run just fine previously.

[Hannibal_PJV]

 

Ofcourse every update change the program and it seems that last updates did change the amounth memory that was needed to run. It like my old XP Computer can not run win10 because.

A more accurate anology for this would be like your existing computer, which runs Windows 10 just fine, can no longer run Windows 10 because Microsoft released an update that broke the program on your existing computer, despite it having run just fine previously.

Yes, that is quite possible that MS will do that in some day. But this case is more problematic, because it is a combination of os, new content and features vs. Very wide variation of new features. The new unclaimed cards feature seems to eat a lot of memory and so on, so the new version definitely eats more memory and so some devices that did run fine previously Are not fine at this moment and it will get worse the more content and new features come to this game...

 

Same as there will be new features and options in every new win10 upgrade. So Sooner or later some older pc machine just cant take it anymore. But it is much easier to expand pc machine and the minimum is relatively low. Where pathfinder adventures has been guite heavy to mobile games even so far (as some heating and crashing because of too low memory or incompatible hardware has proken so far)

But I agree that the situation is basically same kind as you desgribe. The matter is what can be done to it. And code optimization can help if the code otherwice is valid. The testing of code in the different devices should be more thorough, but I Expect that it is possible to test only with few devices among the millions of different ones. I know that soon Apple 5 series phones Are not going to run this program because They will not get the next ios upgrade and so most likely not run new version of this game. It happens Sooner or later if the development of this program will not be stopped. And I am not sure how Many would hope that. We would like new content and so... may run similar situations Also in the future.

Edited June 25, 2017 by Hannibal_PJV

[Bigmre]

Mr Bishop fixed it to where I could play (deleted lower characters and temporarily deleted unclaimed items). The only problems that I've had with it crashing are if I try to modify a deck prior to a game or if I try to buy a consumable during the game.

 

Have to say I'm not a huge fan of the stash. Multiple copies of the same card count individually, so I have to keep selling cards that I may or may not want to keep/give to another character.

[FroBodine]

So, is this patch live now on Steam?  How can we tell what version we are playing in-game?  There is no version number on the main menu or anywhere that I can see.

[Parody]

You can see a version/build number under Options/Settings (along with a date) that you can use to compare.  On Android the OS reports a version of 1.2.6.4.1 and internally it's 968; over on Windows it shows 965 internally and the Steam announcements say the last version was 1.2.6.4.  (The version numbers in the .EXE file appear to be related to the version of Unity in use rather than anything specific to the program.)

 

If they're going to use different version numbers for posting vs. internal it'd be nice if the app displayed the posting numbers somewhere and/or put them into the Windows resources.

Edited June 27, 2017 by Parody

[Slatanic]

Hi,

 

Ever since I updated to the new patch yesterday (on Android), I am having issues with text showing up. The ability and proficiency descriptions are just blank. Same with the character conversations in the story, all blank.

[Aarik D]

Hi,

 

Ever since I updated to the new patch yesterday (on Android), I am having issues with text showing up. The ability and proficiency descriptions are just blank. Same with the character conversations in the story, all blank.

Thanks for letting us know Slatanic, we are currently looking into it now!