I can't do this anymore

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

Since Oktagon started working on MTGPQ I have been a huge supporter of their work on the game. I liked their ideas and directions, I thought their card and event designs were fun and cool (mostly), and I have defended some of their more questionable decisions here quite a bit (as many of you have seen).

But I can’t deal with it anymore.

Because pretty much NOTHING WORKS ANYMORE.

Any card that involves counting things doesnt work. I played against a Shanna today and saw that she gets +3/+3 no matter how many creatures you have. Vraska’s first ability no longer targets the support with the highest shield. Verix Bladewing’s support deals both the wrong amount of damage and converts the wrong number of gems. The list goes on and on.

Any card that involves ordered actions does not work. Ambuscade worked fine, now its broken. Savage Stomp didn’t work correctly (I haven’t bothered checking to see if its fixed, though). Sagas return from the grave on chapter 3, not chapter 1. Settle the Wreckage does not always get destroyed after exiling creatures. Journey to Eternity does not activate if a disabled creature is destroyed, despite the status of the creature having nothing to do with the support. Some cards seem to work fine, but not how they read, making me wonder if the issue is programming or language, both being quite serious for a game of this magnitude.

Many of the new events have nodes that do not work. Zacama and Elenda’s nodes on Battle of the Four Tribes are still broken. I’ve seen people say that Azor’s Gateway and Azor still use their abilities if you have the Immortal Sun out, and/or if they have the Immortal Sun out. Tishana’s ability buff doesn’t apply the second time she uses it on the same creature. The Around the World event (whatever it’s actually called) still gives the wrong number of coalition ribbons on the second node.
UPDATE: The Gerrard Fight (whatever its actually called) creates 2 tokens but only says 1 in the description. Its definitely more reasonable at 2, but the text really should match the effect.

And now there’s a ton of discussion about how Jaya doesn’t work properly, how leader may or may not be working properly, how enabling a card still may not be working properly, how the timing of “when attacking” abilities may not be working properly…ect

So its simple. I’m done defending Oktagon. The honeymoon is over.
I don’t want to say they are as bad as Hibernium yet, but I’m not going to lie, its getting close. Hibernium’s bugs were more serious, true (since those cards just crashed the game), but I don’t remember them being even close to this frequent. It seems like every single rare or mythic that comes out from Oktagon is bugged in some way, and every update just buggs out more and more older cards that had been working fine (did you know you can’t cast Nagging Thoughts anymore? It just gets the red canceled symbol. I cannot find what allows it to trigger. And Awaken does not work at all anymore. And Grovetender Druid still makes the wrong type of plant tokens. And I’m sure there are more, I just haven’t found them yet because I don’t play legacy a lot).

So please Oktagon. Get your shit together. Because you just lost a very vocal supporter. Stop putting out cards that don’t work correctly. Stop releasing updates without testing how it will effect older cards. Stop writing cards in a way that implies one thing but code them to do something else. We can wait a little longer for new content, its ok to tell us that the next set is delayed because you are fixing bugs. Please, Please, Please, ENOUGH WITH THE BUGS.

2

woah, this is news to me. I didn’t realize things were getting so bad. Then again, I must confess…I’ve been playing a lot of other games recently :wink:

I feel like a lot of these things could be minimized if we had (I know I’ve said this before) more back-and-forth with Octagon. Public relations is important, especially when this forum is the central hub of information that mtgpq frequently links to in the game.

Even when a company is like “oops! we screwed up again! sorry sorry sorry!” players are more likely to have more patience, because we feel that our concerns are being heard and looked into.

3

I’m starting to think they have no way of testing these things in a vacuum before they actually implement them so no actual QA/QC. I run a QA department and if I had 10% of these mistakes i’d be fired in a day. “We’ll have to do the launch and then play catch up” model. With so many bug fixes and working on new content with a probably very limited staff and a language barrier it’s probably like they’re staring up a huge mountain and not sure of the best way up so they just keep plodding along with no real path. I love this game and have spent more money than I care to admit but I have been thinking more about what I get out of it and why I play. I love deck building and playing with themes, but with the bugs, inconsistencies between cards, and their ability to stifle creativity (no place to reasonably test my new standard decks, deckslot restrictions, etc…) i’m getting less and less satisfaction with the grind.

P.S. Just to reiterate I do love this game and hope for the best for it!

4

I’m begging for more focus on bug fixes since the first release by Oktagon. You’re totally right :welcome to the dark side. We’ve got cookies if you want, but there are bugs all over them.

5

Its funny, I remember people saying the same thing back in the Hibernium days.

There were people here who would offer to be Beta testers and forum reps (pre-Brigby), but they were never taken up on it.

6

You say that like it’s a trivial thing to set up a separate server, distribute alternative code worldwide, and solicit and translate feedback. There’s a reason most testing is done in-house. We have methods of flagging bugs in the current build via forums and the in-app system.

7

Have you seen anything to suggest there is “in-house” testing, some of these bugs you would catch the first time you cast them.

8

I would imagine that they’d have to have done some basic in-house testing, just to make sure things like when each card with new mechanics is cast/attacks/dies it doesn’t freeze/crash the game, etc.

That being said (remembering Ixalan not-so-fondly) I wouldn’t wager a significant amount of time is devoted to testing.

9

There is a way of testing card interactions - it’s called unit testing. It absolutely can be done. I’ve done it for my own games and it is a critical investment in infrastructure that smart developers do from the outset. And if it wasn’t done then it could be done now. There is no reason they are not authoring such tests to ensure regressions in functionality do not occur.

@Oktagon_Daiane if you need help with this please let me know! I’d love to start helping you guys develop this game.

10

I tend to give Octagon the benefit of the doubt since they’re trying to catch up. Just recently they fixed some issues with supports and the infinite thingy.

My problem with bugs is when they interfere with PvP games. First of all, Octagon must fix all the sins made by Hybernum in concerning PvP rewards; they are heavily focused on individual rewards and the distribution is quite bad. Coalition rewards should get more emphasis instead and here is why.
Just lost 2 points in HOD due to inconsistency of the Eldest Reborn and settle the wreckage. I was even lucky the game did not crash on me due to random bugs or zooming.
Apparently each point loss put you at 10 rank lower. Whenever your game crashes or lose 2 pints or more, motivation is loss and there is really no point in continuing further. The effort isn’t worth it if you cannot make it top 25. At the same time the coalition rewards are too little to worth the grind except for team glory.

In a buggy environment more focus should be on coalition rewards., This will alleviate the woes we’re experience with bugs. Bugs should not coexist with competitive play

11

Oh, I’m aware its not a trivial exercise. But clearly their in-house testing system does not work at all (neither did Hibernium’s, to be fair). If they can’t find the many obvious bugs with their own code, they should find a way to let those of us who are willing and able to do it for them. I mean, every single paid-for exclusive card from Ixalan was bugged. Every. Single. One. If you can’t get your marquee cards to work properly before release, what are you doing? And we cut them slack, because they were new. But now Jaya is broken. And Shanna is broken. And so many other cards that were purchasable for real money are broken.

And are you saying that we, the regular playing populace, should be the Beta testers for the app? Because I’m tired of flagging bugs for them, getting a generic “the devs have been alerted” message, and seeing the same bugs persist for literal years. I find broken cards every week, post them on the forums and sometimes in app, and they stay broken.

The system does not work. It needs to be changed.

12

At first, new players are perplex to see a game that carries MTG on it’s name having so many serious bugs. Then they discover the first developer just closed the doors.

Choose a company that was about to die was certainly cheaper than hire a solid one. So maybe the new dev doesn’t have the know how and experience to design card games, especially to handle the technical aspect of it; or no, maybe they are good but aren’t paid enough to do their best, especially when a lot of mistakes were inherited from the old dev. Who knows?

On both options, we intuit there’s little investment from the Publisher. Although everything is so expensive for the players.

So what’s a natural response from a new player to this state of things? It goes from zero money investment to a gradual disengagement. That’s unfortunate.

13

Some people were begging the developers to start over from scratch on the code. Others espoused how expensive and time consuming that would be. Looks like it was worth the time and cost, because Oktagon is clearly having a hard time adjusting to Hibernium’s existing code.

A problem I have with the game is the general lack of caring by the developers. There have been a few bugs that they are “aware” of that have existed since the very early days of the game. Additionally, other games work quickly to provide quick patch fixes, but we only ever see that in cases of serious game disruption. Usually we wait months or longer before bugs are addressed. That seems odd to me.

14

Three examples of the lack of caring.

  1. Objective to kill x creatures: bug that does not count the creatures killed in the last turn if they were killed in the battle (if they were killed in the last turn by an spell they count)
    Last turn doesn't count? - MtGPQ Bugs & Technical Issues - 505 Go! Official Forums
    Creatures with defender killed in combat last turn - MtGPQ Bugs & Technical Issues - 505 Go! Official Forums
    End match kill not counting [Devs Aware] - #6 by Brakkis - MtGPQ Bugs & Technical Issues - 505 Go! Official Forums
    Killing creature in battle bug - MtGPQ Bugs & Technical Issues - 505 Go! Official Forums

  2. Objective win with les than x health points: bug that increments the health points somewhere between the end of the battle and when ribbons screen appears.
    Nodes of Power Bug - MtGPQ Bugs & Technical Issues - 505 Go! Official Forums
    Win with X or less HP remaining - #3 by hawkyh1 - MtGPQ Bugs & Technical Issues - 505 Go! Official Forums
    Objective "win with X or less HP" bug - related to life gain. - MtGPQ Bugs & Technical Issues - 505 Go! Official Forums

  3. Flusterstorm buffed in 2.5 version without changing the wording (Read in Card Balance adjustments, masterpiece section, Flusterstorm: Initial shield changed to 6. Now always drains 4 mana each turn). Works well but the card shows the old text.
    2.5 Release Notes (3/13/18) - MtGPQ News & Announcements - 505 Go! Official Forums

15

Welcome to the club. A lot of us definitely feel your frustration. We gave Oktagon a significant amount of rope, yet still..

Certainly, some things are probably challenging. Maybe they’re throwing their hands in the air about Settle the Wreckage, or how to fix the “support’s effect becomes permanent if you exile it”.

But there are very simple numerical changes that could be accomplished in less than an hour, like the amount of damage Verix’s support does or the amount of ribbons awarded in AWR, or Vraska’s targeting issues, or Angrath not being able to steal all tokens with his second ability.

Look, we all understand somethings things are difficult or hard to track down. We have empathy. But fixing minor, easily reconcilable issues? That should be a priority. Instead, they keep piling up.

16

I’ve experienced same issues with another card game. They went through the scenario as mtgpq with bugs and change of team. In the end, they had to change the entire game engine and redo the coding.

I would advice Octagon to change event objectives like some mentioned by rafalele to objectives that are not affected by bugs. Coincidentally those are objectives that gave us grievance for too long

17

That’s really my main issue here: the little things. Of course splashy mythics won’t always work right, and new events will always have issues.

But simple things like saying 2 damage and actually dealing 2 damage, or saying “get +2/+0 and then deal damage” and having them trigger in that order are pretty simple things. To send out a finished product to your paying customers that fails to do those things correctly or worse, that takes those things that were done correctly and make them incorrect is horrifying. If I did that at my job I would be fired in a month or less. How do the employees at Oktagon keep their jobs doing this? Do they have no Quality Control? No Play Testers? Its infuriating.

18

I want to share a story about when I was in QA working on a AAA title game that had a competitive multiplayer mode. Now, to preface this, I am not telling this story to excuse the bugs. There is always room to improve and grow, and we absolutely appreciate the time and effort players spend on helping to make the game better for everyone. I just want to provide this story in hopes that it might offer some insight into the challenges a major studio QA team faced on a day to day basis.

When testing bugs, we would test on whatever QA build was provided that day, and we might get 1 or 2 new builds throughout the day. After we downloaded each new build, we wouldn’t just test the new things that were added. Nope. We had to re-test EVERYTHING to make sure that nothing accidentally broke, and more often than not…something did. There weren’t many, usually one thing here or one thing there, but it still painted the picture that it was a complex game with complex interactions between each individual aspect. The slightest alteration in one spot may potentially influence something somewhere else.

In that game, there were 5 special abilities, 4 summon-able sidekicks, 5 different character gear, and over 30 unique weapons. In the grand scheme of themes, not that many things to test, but even with 44 items, there were a large number of permutations to account for.

Now consider MtGPQ, its collection of almost 2,000 unique cards, and the small, but passionate QA team we work with! If we were to only factor in just the interactions of the 10 cards in a single deck, the number of possible permutations would be 2,000 factorial to the 10th number. That’s a big number; one that would be impossible for any team to manually test.

As @GrizzoMtGPQ mentioned, one testing method that companies use is called Unit Testing, which tests isolated portions of a program, and determines whether that portion is functioning properly. While I personally do not know exactly how QA tests the cards, I speculate that they test similarly to this method; they test the overall mechanics, instead of each of the 2,000 individual cards. This would explain why a lot of the bugs I see reported in the Bugs & Technical Issues section are reporting specific cards, as opposed to overarching game mechanics. It’s those unique pairings of different cards, that can produce unanticipated and potentially buggy interactions. (Not to say there aren’t overarching game mechanic bugs though. I’m just saying that it’s not the vast majority.)

TL;DR: Testing a lot of cards can certainly be challenging, and bugs do happen. We appreciate everyone’s efforts in calling out issues, and we thank you all for working with us to help make this game better!

19

@Brigby thank you for this response, it definitely puts things in perspective. It is also humbling that you would take the time out of your busy day to directly address my rather long-winded rant.

My only real issue with what you said is the fact that a large number of the individual card bugs being reported are the bugs not functioning on their own, not being buggy in regards to interactions with other cards (although those do exist too).

The best example is the Verix Bladewing’s token. It deals the wrong amount of damage on entrance, the wrong amount of damage each turn, and converts the wrong number of gems to red each turn. None of these things are reliant on any other card, and I would assume that something like that would appear no matter how the game is tested. That is really what we are getting upset about (well, that and the total lack of communication).

20

^^^^ this with emphasizing the lack of communication.

See, I was ready to grab a pitchfork and torch and pillage the nearest castle. But your in-depth story Brigby calmed me down and made me think about it a bit more rationally. Lots of communication goes a long ways in a positive direction :slight_smile: