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The list of available games is full of players that listed a game and abandoned it. I see many 3 minute games started 5 days ago, for example.
It is just clutter and terribly annoying to the rest of the players to guess at whether that "3 day old game" is abandoned or playable, and a waste of space for the obviously abandoned games started a week or more ago.
When a game fills up the person who started it should have exactly the amount of time they set per turn to initiate the first move. If that doesn't happen the game should be aborted (no score exchange) and removed.
This must not be complicated to do, just removing them with a cron task would be sufficient and better than what we deal with today.
Please please please, I beg you, I tired of the guessing game and eternally unstarted games in my current list.
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@Nicko, thanks. The connection is fine, browsing is fast and I can play all other games just fine, it's only with a game in particular that has too many moves in it. I can try and try to submit it, but it will always fail. I can then go play other games fine, and come back to that game and it will always fail. Play that game with fewer moves, and boom, it works! It's definitely not network related. Regarding chat, I've chatted a few times, twice to explain why I had to ask for peace (once rejected, meanie) and another time in a 3-person game just as part of the game. Chat didn't seem to have any affect that I could notice. The chat buffer gets wiped when you log out/in or re-install.
Unfortunately it appears no one from dev is listening, so I've wound down all but a couple of games and am no longer playing, sad, it was a great game, but this bug makes it unplayable. I had to quit two games (surrendered one and made peace on another). I also hit the bug on a number of other games in winding down the 20 I had going, and got by playing fewer moves without too bad a sacrifice.
If someone does decide to deal with this in the future I'm likely willing to help with the QA - I am a java developer, so can probably follow most debugging instructions. My contact email is: davidparks21@yahoo.com, or reply on this thread.
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Someone suggested posting screen shots, so here they are. I just ran into this in another game, Naval War map. 15 units on screen.
Here is some other info about my device: iPod Touch, 1st generation, Settings->General->About->Vers ion: 3.1.3 ( 7E18 ) Model: MB376LL
I'll help with some QA if someone from Uniwar is interested in dealing with this problem.
If not... well, I guess I'll just give up playing, it was an otherwise fun game, but not worth playing when 10% of the games force me to play hindered.
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I've been begging for some help with a major bug that keeps me from submitting turns when I have a lot of units and/or play a large number of actions in a turn.
http://www.uniwar.com/forum/posts/list/878.page
I'm posting here in hopes that maybe someone is reading this forum but not paying attention over there?
Does this sound familiar to anyone else. It happens to me in about 1 in 10 games.
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Well, finished the other games finally, and today I hit this problem in a different game. As soon as I have too many pieces I end up with this problem. Pretty rough too because I really can't afford to "cut down" on my moves in this game. ::sigh::
Is anyone out there? This is really makes this game not fun to play. I can't hardly imagine others aren't experiencing this problem also.
Here's the breakdown this time:
Twice failed without counting actions
10 actions, failed to submit turn (I'm really hating this game at this point)
9 actions, failed to submit turn (note, there are 3 or 4 repairs that happen automatically, not sure if they affect anything)
8 actions, successfully submitted (but I didn't play a few units and opted not to buy anything new, quite a sacrifice just to complete the turn)
I'm playing on The Great Wall map
I am playing as Khraleans (vs titans)
I currently have 12 units on the map (would be 13 for the games that failed as I tried to purchase 1 more unit in each of those games but did not in the one that succeeded).
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I like the base in the middle, it will surely evoke a variety of responses and offers each race a good opportunity to use their unique strengths to try and control it.
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Agreed that the map looks fascinating.
Also agreed that it's very difficult to asses the balance.
It seems to me that maps that are accepted should first be made available in unrated games, then only after sufficient games have been played on the map, some statistics could be reviewed and adjustments made to ensure balance.
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Solitary wrote: The host doesn't choose the configuration, they choose the map xD. I know people who rating inflate by just picking whichever matchup favours them best on imbalanced maps but on a basic level it's true, you can choose race when you go second with knowledge of what the other player is. For example if you never wanted to lose on dead monk just go second and pick saps if you see khrals, titans if you see saps and khrals if you see titans.
Unless the map is really small going first isn't an advantage at all and it would make rating farming on three minute games too easy if the host went second.
I think your second point is most apropos, there isn't an advantage to going first. Therefore we are not changing the balance of fairness by allowing the second player to go first.
To your first point, we may be able to assume that the second player has an advantage by picking a map that they have comfortable strategies for against known opponent types, but what difference is there from what we have today if the second player went first. None really, especially if your other comment is assumed true, there is no advantage to going first.
So we would be left only with the benefit of not having games linger indefinitely, and having page after page of week old games cluttering the list.
I contend that we are not shifting the balance of fairness at all by implementing this change, only improving on the community playability.
Further to address your point. On maps which there are clear advantages to being one player or another, those maps should be adjusted to eliminate the imbalance - as has been suggested (and accepted) in this forum for one such map already.
All in the name of a healthy debate of course, glad to have your comment.
David
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Ok, just hit this problem with another game. Near it's conclusion. I now have 2 of 20 games that won't submit their turn. Am I the only person having this problem??
So I'm going to re-install again and count how many "actions" I take in each turn for each of these two games. I define an action as a movement of some unit along with whatever else it may do (attack, repair, etc)
Game #1 - 12 actions - failed to submit turn
Re-install
Game #1 - 9 actions - failed to submit turn
Re-install
Game #1 - 8 actions - failed to submit turn
Re-install
Game #1 - 6 actions - successfully submitted turn
Game #2 - 8 actions - successfully submitted turn (I must have been more efficient this go around than last)
10 other games all submitted turns successfully
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When joining a game the first player to move is always the host.
But this approach is flawed, I end up joining many games for which the host never starts, I wait days on end and eventually abandon the game to start others. I even avoid joining games which were not started recently.
This causes me (the user joining the game) frustration, and also causes many old games to be left in the queue because people don't want to join them for fear that the other person has forgotten it.
We can fix this.
If the joining player (the last joining player for multiplayer games) started the game, then the timer would commence and all would be under the contract that they signed up for when joining the game. It's fair, and it allows us to eliminate games that people are ignoring in the first round or two (much better than an unstarted game in my list for, how many days, I can't remember).
It's also fair for the joining player to start since the player creating the game got to choose the configuration, thus they have some advantage just from having the right to set the options to their preference.
The benefit summary:
- The system benefits by reducing the number of open games from inactive players
- Players benefit by starting games immediately (immediate gratification)
- Players benefit by not having their play list filled up with inactive games that will never start
- It is fair to hold users to their time limit contracts from the point that they join the game
- It's fair for the second player to have the advantage of starting since they didn't pick the options
The only counter argument I can conceive of is that it might be considered unfair to the host of say a 3 minute limit game in which a player joined only after an hour and they were not prepared for it. However by this logic it is equally unfair to the joining player who might wait another hour for the host to start, thus you have six of one or half a dozen of the other, there is no real change in the balance of fairness.
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Aha! Perhaps I have a smoking gun, or at least the scent of gun powder...
I just re-installed and re-played my turn in this game that won't submit.
It failed to submit again.
I re-installed again
I played only a minimal set of actions (I am winning by a large margin in that game so previously I had performed perhaps 30+ actions). This time I performed about 10 actions.
The game submitted successfully.
I guess it's death by a thousand papercuts for this guy, the game won't let me kill him too quickly. Perhaps the server has empathy for his plight. joking.
Anyway, do some testing on games with many many actions, it "feel like" that was a common thread between the games (though I didn't count actions to provide any empirical evidence) when/if I hit the problem again I'll start counting actions and post more.
Hopefully someone reads this. It's a pretty damning bug.
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Ok, this one game is murder, here's what happened since the last post:
I had 2 games that I could not submit my turn in.
1) Reinstalled uniwar on my iPod touch (with latest OS)
2) accidentally submitted the turn without making my moves in failing-game #1 (forgot that it erases my moves when I re-install). It submitted successful.
3) played the moves in failing-game #2 and submitted the turn successfully.
4) continued to successfully play numerous other turns in other games.
5) I successfully play another turn in failing-game #2, it looks like that one's working again.
6) Next day - I try to play my next turn in failing-game #1 and I get the same, long delay, and a network error. I cannot submit my turn in this game AGAIN!
7) stomp around a little and wander off to update this post, cross my fingers that someone actually reads this stuff.
I am now going to re-install uniwar AGAIN and try failing-game #2 with my moves played. Will update after that.
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Interestingly enough I was able to clear this problem with a re-install of uniwar. Lucky I went for that option I was just a few hours from missing my turn in those two games. Now I re-played the turns and was able to submit them successfully.
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I've seen this in 4 games in the last 3ish days.
I end my turn and I get a network error.
I can go to other games in my list and they run fine. The network is fine (browser, etc works). But this one game constantly fails no matter how many times I try to end the turn.
In each case this has resolved its self after some number of hours (I've put it down and come back say 12 hours later and found that I can submit the end-of-turn).
I have this problem currently in 2 games. I'm hoping these two resolve themselves.
I'm able to play all other games just fine.
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This was moved to the bug-report forum after providing much more detailed technical information. I'm quite convinced it's a bug at this point.
http://www.uniwar.com/forum/posts/list/878.page
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