List of embarrassing bugs to be fixed before anything else!

[Horsting]

I realised that we, the regular forum readers, are much too adopted to a large number of crazy obvious bugs, which break all the shiny new features moreless completely for anyone not reading the forum regularly or investing lots of time to find out about all the inconsistent, non-intuitive and buggy behaviours. Note that there are also many players for which reading English is difficult. I have some in my club and explaining them about all of this via limited club chat is not great. Since months are passing and nothing gets fixed, I fear that those bug reports are too much buried within the general test server/league/GG/GS topics. At least it cannot hurt to have them listed once again in a dedicated topic, also to point others to.

There is a huge number of old and new bugs, but I am concentrating on those affecting the league, which implies girls' gear and skills, hence all the things added recently, and IMO, after art and story/adventure, the league is the second most important central game element, the one we progress all theses new RPG elements for.

1. Booster indicator EDIT: This has all been fixed with the larger bug fix releases a while ago.
   Wow, I was positively surprised when seeing and reading about the league redesign at first, but it was so hasty and completely buggy added, embarrassing ... To be fair, some major flaws have been fixed, sorting, and the team edit button added, but the central (I'd say?) element: the booster indicator, is still completely buggy. Really, at this point, two months after the redesign was implemented, it would have been still better to skip it completely, so the booster detector community script would still work, which was a reliable indicator:
   1. When an opponent's booster expires, often it is still shown, just without timer, while the opponent is effectively unboosted. This is not always the case, and this inconsistency is another problem, which at least indicates a deeper problem with the code, allowing this randomness. When boosters expire, one expects the indicator to show an empty slot, of course. EDIT: The booster indicators are now always removed, but the opponents now often (not always) remain boosted for a random time up to ~1.5h.
   2. When an opponent re-equips a booster, it is immediately shown, while the opponent remains effectively unboosted until next league snapshot, unless the booster was re-equipped within seconds after the expiry. Of course one expects that no booster is shown unless it is also effective when you fight against an opponent, basically aligning the booster indicator with the actual opponent snapshot. EDIT: Mostly fixed. It is now at best some minutes before re-equipped boosters become effective.
   3. To sum it up: Of course one expects that, if the indicator shows a booster, the opponent is effectively boosted when fighting against it, and if no booster is shown, then not (which is mostly true, but I have seen screenshots which indicate boosted opponents without showing any booster).
2. Tier 5 girl skills
   I do not completely dislike those new skills, and I was actually expecting a worse balance and price shatter than how they were finally implemented. But there is at least one major bug which I cannot believe exists, indicating an awful backend coding. I am not blaming the coders here, which probably just follow orders with much too limited time, but those which are responsible for enforcing and establishing conditions for some minimal code quality, review and testing standard, which seems to be completely missing.
   1. When doing x2/x3 battles in league, the tier 5 girl skills do not happen. This basically breaks the second and last benefit the whole league design brought, leaving only the negative part of it: that one needs to do two additional clicks, implying two (usually slow) page loads to battle an opponent, as of the new pre-battle page. Congratulations! 😞
      EDIT: Some more info from Rena, indicating that some flag indicating that the tier 5 skill has been triggered might not be reset after the first fight of multi-battles: 
   2. Not a bug, but horrible ingame documentation: The tier 5 skills are moreless not documented ingame, so one must read the release notes, or search the forum, or find it out alone somehow, which is nearly impossible, at least as long as the other bugs exists. For new players, and those which are not good in reading and understanding English, this is even more problematic, but as well for many others who are simply not investing huge time in research: I see about 50% of league opponents with tier 5 skilled girls, where the girl is not located in the effective middle/first position, I saw even one case where 5/7 girls were tier 5 skilled, but all of them located at wrong positions. IMO it is mandatory to make clear ingame, that only one tier 5 skill is effective in a team, and that the tier 5 skilled girl must be in the middle/first position for the skill to be effective. Aside of documenting that behind the info button, some visual indicator on the teams (pre-battle pages as well as team edit pages) would be highly appreciated, giving the middle position some special frame and indicator that/which skill is effective as of the girl located there. And at best another "negative" indicator would be shown on those girls in the team which have tier 5 skilled, but are not positioned correctly.
   3. Again not a bug, but an IMO important notice for any future balancing, especially when adding features which have such a massive impact like those tier 5 skills: Note that the league is THE central BDSM feature. Seasons are irrelevant, since everyone can easily reach tier 63/13k mojo without any efforts, at least after having the first season finished as a new player. Pantheon is more important to take care of, but difficult only for about 11 times/battles (stage 1000, 1100, ..., 2000), and then never again (until more stages are added), and also the rewards are overall significantly lower compared to what one can get in leagues, which can be gained endlessly and even girls are regularly added. So ANY new feature which affects BDSM balancing MUST be balanced for the league in the very first place. Pantheon can be looked at afterwards, seasons basically ignored for balancing. Looking at the tier 5 skills, they seem to be quite well balanced for seasons and Pantheon, basically when it is about two moreless equally strong teams fighting against each other where only win/loose matters. However, in league one is mostly stronger than the opponent, as of mythic booster, and since one usually catches opponents unboosted while being boosted oneself. Of course this does not apply for all players, but for those which aim and work for a good position, and those are the only ones which matter for balancing (not saying the others are not important, but who does not work for a good position also does not care much about balancing). And of course in league, not only win/loose matters, but the points, hence mostly the ego left when winning. And considering this, the shield skill is currently massively overpowered.
3. Wrong opponent/defensive team stats and skills
   When booster expire, opponents (and the own defensive team) show wrong team stats until next league snapshot, and/or beyond:
   1. Girl skills are not effective anymore: All girls loose their skill indicators and when battling such opponents it can be also verified that neither the tier 5 skills, nor the tier 4 skills (for the others it is difficult to verify) are effective. This is corrected with next league snapshot. EDIT: Fixed with October 11th patch
   2. The individual girl attributes change. It is not clear what exactly is missing, and whether it is even consistent, but on my last observation, the stats (aside of the skills) were correct at first, after booster expiry and before next snapshot, but dropped to too low values after next snapshot, staying wrong like that until my boosters expired the next day. All 3 main stats of all girls were lower, and the difference to the correct/offensive team was larger then what tier 2 skills give, and larger than what girls' gear give, but lower than the sum of both. So it is neither GS nor GG alone, which leaves me without any further idea and imagination of what could go wrong.
      EDIT: I narrowed it down to the fact that the gear of the first girl in the currently selected seasons team is applied to all girls on your selected league team for your snapshot:

      EDIT2: Fixed with November 15th patch
      EDIT3: Bug re-added with Labyrinth on December 6th. I am not 100% sure whether it is the exact same bug, with the 1st season team girl's gear being applied to the whole league team. But again after some random time, the defensive league stats drop. This can be (temporarily) fixed by visiting any team selection page (even the season one).
      EDIT4: It is the exact same bug it was before: First season girl's gear applied to the whole league team, after some random time, presumably the old snapshot times every 6 hours. Visiting any team edit or selection page, even in season, solves it until the next random/snapshot time.

4. New bug: Wrong stats on the team selection page

   1. Since Labyrinth was added on December 6th, on the team selection page(s), boosters are only applied for the stats of the first (top left) team, not to any other.

Note that I am currently massively benefiting from all these bugs, knowing about them and acting accordingly to get the best out of league. I like being successful through research, good strategies, investing some time to test/compare everything, having an eye opponents and opportunities etc. That is all good and important for a good competition in leagues and allowing players who do more efforts, being more successful than others, even against higher levels/stronger teams. But I hate to be successful solely because of major bugs, one must read about (in English), or because of features which do a major difference but are impossible to understand even after reading all ingame info about them. I want a fair competition, while currently it feels like I am abusing bugs by battling opponents when they are weaker than they should be, with an overpowered skill, knowing how it works, and knowing that I must not trust the booster indicator but do own math to find out whether one is boosted or not.

So KK PLEASE, before adding any new shattering (hopefully not) buggy feature, fix at very least those massive major bugs/issues listed above to restore to or make the recently added features what they should have been (whether we like them or not is a different question, not to be discussed here!).
EDIT: Well, the disastrous Labyrinth release full of bugs, many even unrelated to the Laby feature itself, shows that nothing changed. I'm giving up all hope ...

P.S. Many of the listed bugs are related to the league snapshots. I know those existed since the league does, and they have some upsides as well (though again something undocument and non-intuitive, which I do not like in general). But for me they cause more confusion than they help, and if you cannot manage to get boosters, team and girl stats and skills right with this snapshot system, would it really be worse to just get rid of it, and have all opponents always shown as and battle against their actual live state? Not sure whether there is a performance aspect as well, but theoretically, feeding an extra database for the snapshot and reading from that one on league table load, shouldn't be faster than reading from the other live stats database, is it? Both must anyway contain all info, for things to work correctly. That the snapshot database misses some info, which is then fetched, sometimes wrongly, from elsewhere, might be even the reason for those related bugs. EDIT: Snapshots are mostly gone when its about boosters and team changes, but still relevant for when opponent teams get new blessings applied: This is either if their boosters expire, if they change their team (manually) or otherwise all together some hours after Monday reset, like old snapshot times.

EDIT: Added a new bug about non-applied boosters on team selection page stats.

Edited May 21, 2024 by Horsting

[DvDivXXX]

  

6 hours ago, Master-17 said:

And don’t forget the bug of the latest update, in which boosters are applied only to the first team

I had no idea about this one, but I can confirm it's active on HH as well. It's unclear whether it's just a display issue in the Team Selection page or if it has a detrimental effect for fights themselves. But it's crazy  and confusing regardless. I have 2 chlores and 2 cordys here, so it's easy to tell:

Better safe than sorry so I'll be using Team 1 instead of Team 2 for now.

[Horsting]

Based on some battle results I am quite certain that it is a visual result only. Also on the team edit page for the effected teams, it is correct again. More importantly, what probably matters most: On the pre-battle page it is correct. But "better safe than sorry" is a pretty good argument when it is about KK bugs.

Btw, regarding the x3 league button, in my club the question came up whether this applies for the opponent as well, i.e. whether players without tier 5 skill benefit with x3 battles against opponents with tier 5 skill, since their skill is not triggered on 2nd and 3rd fight either. I reviewed how Rena tested this on test server: Use a team which gets (likely) 4 points against an opponent with the skill active, otherwise assured 3 points. So we'd need to turn this around: Use a team which gets assured 3 points against an opponent with tier 5 skill, but (likely) more points the opponent does not have it. We have no opponent's skill simulator, so it is not so easy to assure this, but of course the team can be made so strong, that just a tiny little TP more results in a chance for 4 (or more) points, and then hope that >3 points will happen at least in 1 battle, to prove that the skill could not be active.

Edited December 9, 2023 by Horsting

[Horsting]

More than 8 months after tier 5 skills have been introduced, here an overview of players in my current league, who obviously do not understand yet, that tier 5 skills are effective only for the girl in the first/middle slot, due to insufficient ingame documentation and zero indicators in the GUI:

(Mala is the only skilled girl here)

Okay, posting all of them will blow the post. I went on and counted all cases where it was obviously misunderstood, as a higher skilled girl with the same skill was not in the middle, or the middle girl was not skilled at all, but others were: After the 8 above cases, there were 33 more such. Then there was another large number of at least questionable cases, where a girl with a lower tier 5 skill was in the middle, and where it was not the stronger skill (like reflect and shield are clearly stronger than execute) either.

So in Dicktator 3, the highest possible league on HH.com, at least 41 of 103 players, nearly 40%, likely over 50% based on further very inferior slot choices, were not able to derive how tier 5 skills work, within the 8 months these exist. Most who do understand it, likely got the info from forum or club, not from ingame/GUI info.

Is this the way how "new" features with new mechanics should be added to a game?

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Next, which annoys me more, as well within these 8 months, the league's multi-battle button has never been fixed: Until now, on the 2nd (and in case 3rd) battle, tier 5 skills do not happen. So surely another large number of those who do know where to put a girl to have her tier 5 skill working, will use the shiny "new" x3 button, introduced just 1 month before tier 5 skills, and will probably just wonder why they do not score as good as they expect. Players without (high) tier 5 skills, of course can also benefit from this, attacking players with maxed (and effective) tier 5 with the multi-button, to disable their skills for 2 of 3 fights. Do we really need another bug survey before this gets addressed? I mean this really is one of the major features of the league redesign, which breaks THE major skill feature ...

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Last but not least, while point 3 of OP, the falsely dropping opponent/defensive league team stats, has been fixed in November last year, the very same bug has been re-introduced less than a month later, with the Laby release. Now 5 months later, I am still very annoyed by this additional randomness on opponent power, and the need to update my #WeakInSeason team every week, having the best equipped girl in the first/middle slot, to not make it unnecessarily easy for other top 1/top 4 contenders to get points against me. And since I have >60% level 8-10 mythic items with matching AP bonus, my team still looses a lot of power, AP and ego, when this random faulty snapshot update happens. This shit was fixed already. I have no idea which internal mis-procedures can lead to a re-introduction of the very same bug, but it should be simple to fix it again, and hopefully once and for all.

Edited May 21, 2024 by Horsting

[Эники-беники]

On 5/22/2024 at 12:01 AM, Horsting said:

that tier 5 skills are effective only for the girl in the first/middle slot

This should be tested, I suppose.

I can miss something, but many times saw 5* effects from girls "not in the 1st position" (mostly from opponent).

 

 

Did express-test is season and catched it two times.

And it's interesting -- all of them were "seduction". Even for "red girl".

Visual bug? Or BUG? )

(screenshots cropped for no-spoilers-view)

[mdnoria]

Horsting is talking about PvP for the GS5, not the laby.

[Эники-беники]

37 minutes ago, mdnoria said:

Horsting is talking about PvP for the GS5, not the laby.

Screens from seasons )

 

So, catched in leagues too.

Did some x1 fights with strongest opponent.

[Horsting]

You are misinterpreting the output. You see the "Enchanting Defense" skill on your left side from Mala, and the opponent's 2 seconds stun from Azana resp. Shtupra. It does not matter which girl is currently attacking. All skills but the stun always happen at your first attack, unless you are stunned (when you are attacked by someone else), and the stun skill has just a fixed chance of happening every round.

But thanks for posting: You are a perfect example showing how underwhelming the ingame info about this is. No offence against you, there is absolutely no hint in the game which explains this, and the output during the battle is completely unclear, with the multiple different skill names for the same skill, depending on class (?), the way the text is just thrown over and often beyond the screen, instead of where it would make sense (like a stun batch at the stunned side, showing the remaining stunned rounds, or such), that only stun can happen later in the battle or not at all, the completely falsely back- and forth jumping ego bar when someone with shield skill is attacked (visually much clearer solved in Labyrinth) etc. One must have read the release notes and vast parts of the early discussion around the skill testing here in the forum, to understand it, or if someone else explains it, of course.

1 hour ago, mdnoria said:

Horsting is talking about PvP

B.D.S.M. to be precise, i.e. also Pantheon and villains (where of course it does not matter).

Edited May 26, 2024 by Horsting

[xRob91]

Well, to be more precise, execute also happens in later turns. And this skill also confuse many players in similar way as stun.

[Эники-беники]

1 hour ago, Horsting said:

But thanks for posting: You are a perfect example

 

Welcome )

 

1 hour ago, Horsting said:

You are misinterpreting the output. You see the "Enchanting Defense" skill on your left side from Mala

 

Spent some more time for "testing"...

I give up )

I really don't understand what happens here. All I see -- skills triggers at any time. Not by 1st girls. Not even by 2nd.

And order of girls participating is different from "diamond" at right. So that last girl (clockwise) can participate 2nd or 3rd, not last.

(and because of that, screens somebit confusing. because they can not show this behavior... just only "not 1st girl".)

 

To be clear -- I dont care about it. At all.

Just returns back to my usual routine -- click-through-x3-and-forget.

(and I'm suppose, most of the "dumb players" doing the same.)

 

Thanks for your comments.

[Horsting]

On 5/26/2024 at 6:53 PM, Эники-беники said:

I really don't understand what happens here. All I see -- skills triggers at any time. Not by 1st girls. Not even by 2nd.

And order of girls participating is different from "diamond" at right. So that last girl (clockwise) can participate 2nd or 3rd, not last.

(and because of that, screens somebit confusing. because they can not show this behavior... just only "not 1st girl".)

The "diamond" at the right side is mirrored, so the order in which girls attack is counter clockwise there. However, all you need to verify is that the triggered skill matches the one which the middle girl has (first which attacks). As said, which or when skills are triggered has nothing to do with which girl is currently attacking: All but the stun skill do trigger after the first attack of the team, which can be delayed when the opponent was stunned right after your first round. Only stun can trigger at any round later, but it is always and only triggered, if the girl in the middle position has the stun skill (is yellow or dark element), and has it skilled, of course.

However, there is no need to test this: It is known facts, overly verified since the day tier 5 skills were implemented. So take it as mandatory knowledge, if you have any serious ambitions in league.

On 5/26/2024 at 6:53 PM, Эники-беники said:

To be clear -- I dont care about it. At all.

Just returns back to my usual routine -- click-through-x3-and-forget.

(and I'm suppose, most of the "dumb players" doing the same.)

I am sure most do it like this. And this is why I am criticising so much that this was never fixed, I mean both: the information how this works, and the fact that those skills do not trigger on 2nd and 3rd battle when using x3 button: The majority of players are no competition and have no chance to get any higher league rank, because of this. If they would know how tier 5 skills work, and would use x1 battles only (or if KK fixes x3 battles), they would magically score significantly better and the diversity and challenge around top 4/win in D3 league would be much better. I mean, I am happy to often win easily, but I also like challenges, and I hate it to just win because most players are heavily disadvantaged due to bugs they don't even know about, and major information not presented anywhere in the game.

Edited May 28, 2024 by Horsting

[Эники-беники]

3 hours ago, Horsting said:

If they would know how tier 5 skills work, and would use x1 battles only

It takes TOOO much time ) And too smal effort / result.

So "being in top 15" is worth enough. At least, for me.

 

But thanks again. I think I'll should give it a chance. When will have a lot of free time again and curiosity )

 

Personally speaking, I hate much more "broken matchmaking in season". where at a some moment one can not get any points. just "red percents" near to 0% of "winning chance". it's frustrating... and yes, I'am aware of "matchmaking system is based on players points'. but this knowledge did not help at all.

F.e. my hero in CxH have ~200 kisses. and red-red season ))

(season's kisses balance was broken ather laby was introduced. so even KC is not the challenge for now. because of huge amount of kisses from there. for now it is "just another clicker".)

 

As for me, THIS (matchmaking) should be fixed if not first but in priority.

Even in the way "give 0..1 point instead of every-time-losing". of course without using known booster )

[Horsting]

5 hours ago, Эники-беники said:

It takes TOOO much time ) And too smal effort / result.

Thanks to Leagues++, at least the x1 battle can be done as quickly as x3 battles, but one needs to click 3 times of course, and it happens by times that the opponent re-boosts before you finished the 3 of them. Whether the additional effort is worth it or not depends on which rank you are targeting. ~2500 kobans between 1st and top 4 is absolutely worth 200 extra clicks IMO, and the ~2000 between top 4 and top 15 as well. When top 4 is not a topic anyway, then you are probably right.

Season somehow was never an issue for me: 

 

Match making is not only done on points (mojo), but also on hero level. Probably I was lucky to be always one of the strongest in my level range, which might change once I reach level 500. Also, many players in my level+mojo range, including me, use #WeakInSeason teams. Often it is ~5 of us, climbing up on each other. This month, somehow top 20 is full of higher level 4xx and lower level 5xx heroes, and level 600+ start below rank 30 🤔.

At least, they fixed the bug of duplicate season opponents (2 of the 3 being the same) after ~20 seconds hang. This made the click work much worse, especially after season reset and such, when you need to or can use hundreds of kisses.