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
   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).

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 December 9, 2023 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