The most common reason for delayed responses like this is that your opponent is still loading in. Once you’re paired, we let whomever loads first into the game, possibly before the other player has. So if there’s a delay here it’s most likely that they’re still loading rather than alt-tabbed.
I assume from your response you already have them, but I do have the logs available if you need them, let me know.
Is it possible I would receive any kind of compensation for it? As a new-ish f2p player (aside from the starter $5 bundle) the 5k gold for a draft does hurt me a bit. Should I submit a ticket?
Submitting a bug report with those logs would be helpful; we have the server logs, but there's additional info in your client logs. And definitely submit a ticket for reimbursement for something like this.
Incidentally, before this I had left the game open (inactive) for a relatively long time (probably not more than a couple hours), and then the first time I tried to queue into a game I got an error saying I needed to re-authenticate, kicked me to the home screen after I selected reconnect but I assumed the queue was cancelled successfully.
Edit: Also thanks for the reply, I hope it can be resolved :D as a developer, imagining the pain of solving a network bug like this one seems to have been sounds very annoying.
Thanks for the followup; that's the kind of scenario we suspected might be involved. It seems like, due to the server communications issues we were having, you ended up paired into 2 matches at the same time. Thanks again for the report, and we'll keep digging in to how this could happen.
If you’re on a Turkish version of Windows, change your region in Windows to English then re-start the client. (There’s a wacky bug related to the fact that Turkish uses a different Unicode character for the letter ‘I’)
If that’s not the case, and relaunching isn’t fixing things, uninstall and reinstall should work (don’t worry, all of your collection data is stored on the server; you won’t lose anything by uninstalling.)
Yup, this is a bug. You can just re-submit the same deck (don’t need to swap to another), but you will need to submit again for edits to take.
Thanks for the report; this is a weird one. A couple engineers were looking into the logs here, and it looks some server disruptions we were having during this time were likely responsible. Just prior to this, did you happen to cancel and re-queue for matchmaking, or wait a longer-than-usual time in matchmaking? Knowing that would help point to how this might happen.
Ooooh, so you're that Jay! Sweet!
Glad to see you're still active here and I hope you'll have the free time to hop in on a thread from time to time.
That's definitely a priority of mine. In a given day I'll usually get to read most all of the threads that hit the main page here. I don't comment in most of them because the community generally does a great job of answering questions for each other, but I do weigh in whenever I think there's something new or useful I can safely say.
Is it a possibility to use errata to address particularly gnarly text? Or is that a blunt instrument tantamount to admitting defeat?
Yes to both. It's almost always "hidden errata", or what we call a substitution. Just the parsed text is changed, the displayed text remains the same. [In Oketra's Name] is my favorite example of a card we subbed, to change "other creatures" to "non-zombie creatures".#wotc_staff
If you are completely new to MTG, then I suggest reading Reid Duke's Level One: The Full Course: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/level-one/level-one-full-course-2015-10-05
It's the (imo) best introduction to MTG and even experienced players can learn something from it if they read it again after some time.
We agree; this is a great guide. For handy reference, it’s linked in the “Learn More” page in-game (the little ‘?’ In the top-right of the home screen).
As a software developer myself, i find this very interisting. It's that kind of solutions that nobody thought off and after someone implemented it - it kinda feels obvious solution to this problem.
Can you (are you allowed to) share some trivia about this? Who had that idea? Did you know this will kinda work out or did you do a prototype? How satisfied are you with this solution - how good does it work - how many work does this save to add a new set?
Many of the things you want to know are from before my time (Arena's was quietly in development for quite a while!). It's hard to really estimate how much work this solution saves per set - after all, we've never done a set for Arena without using this system. As a general rule of thumb, a set has around 75% of the cards in it work right away with no need for developer work, around 10% work with less than a couple hours of work, 10% need around a day, and 5% are really hairy. #wotc_staff
Sometimes the game glitches out and when I try and target something with multiple attackers the game just drops them all and it forces me to choose them all individually. No clue why it does that.
As others have noticed, group-assignment of attackers (including All Attack when there is a planeswalker available to be attacked) and of blockers is not yet supported in scenarios involving creatures with combat stipulations. In these cases, the client submits the group to the server, but the server rejects the submission and prompts the client to try again. This then allows you to submit the same result one-by-one.
The intent is for group-assignments to work in all scenarios; we are working on a fix.
Can you share some details on how the parser works? I've heard of people training neural nets to do the job, though I suppose you developed an "MtG grammar" that can break down the abilities of most modern card deterministically. Or something else entirely?
Neural nets are a bad fit for the problem because they're pretty "noisy" - they have lots of potential to make pretty much undiagnosable mistakes. We have a pretty classic-AI approach - a spelled-out grammar and dictionary that covers all of the rules texts we support, and a system that takes the resulting syntax trees, gleans their semantics, resolves anaphora (e.g. what does "it" mean?), and compiles the resulting ambiguity-free instruction flow into the final code. #wotc_staff
That's really unfortunate, I hope his replacement can fill his shoes!
Heh. Chris is 6'4" (or more), which makes him about a foot taller than me. Me literally trying to fill his shoes would be a pretty humorous affair. On the metaphorical side, I'll definitely do my best to continue the great work he started, both with the game and with community interaction.
I can imagine that writing software to parse magic cards is absolutely great and terrifying at the same time.
You are correct on both fronts. :D #wotc_staff
Out of curiosity, is the code for each card parsed from English, and then can be manually altered?
To put the question another way, to fix this bug, are you changing the card or the parser?
Thanks in advance! :-)
The parser. I like to describe my job as teaching a computer how to read M:tG cards. #wotc_staff
Can somebody explain why this works differently than, say, prevention effects (other than the fact that the behavior of prevention effects is explicitly codified in these instances)?
It's more about what "the chosen creature" means. It's actually lies, as rule 700.7 quoted by OP indicates. It really means "the chosen game object", but that reads worse in English. The problem is that the Arena rules-parser is using that English to write the ability's code, so... #wotc_staff
Just something I've been wondering - why not change the mana cost in the text box, in the same way that cards in your hand change their displayed casting costs? I'm sure it's not that easy, but it seems like the most natural way to represent the cost imo.
Ability texts are localized as entire strings, so modifying costs in those texts is non-trivial. We also don't want to raise the expectation that we'll do other such text modifications. Adding information is much simpler than changing it for us. #wotc_staff
The crown represents a generic "numeric aid" - something on the card has a variable that we've identified as worth communicating to the player, but it doesn't match some particular mechanic (like, say, Undergrowth). We use this "crown badge" to represent that number. #wotc_staff
Thanks for the report - I've confirmed that the Indestructible-granting layered effect is indeed constraining its recipient to be a creature incorrectly. I'll fix this up today. #wotc_staff
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