[2022] Stability & Soft-lock Issues

There have been a number of concerns regarding the stability of the game since version 5.10.0. While there have been two hotfix versions since then addressing some of the issues, the dev team wants to update you on a number of things they are currently working on to further improve game stability.

First, we need to fix the problem that a number of players have been having with the inability to connect to the game via mobile data and currently can only play via wi-fi. Our engineers have identified the problem and this is currently scheduled to be corrected in the next major release, version 6.0.0 in a couple of weeks.

Second, many players with devices that have 2GB of memory or lower have generally seen increased problems. The dev team is currently revisiting how the game handles a number of assets to lessen the strain on a device’s memory and thus will lead to fewer issues on the aforementioned devices. Again, we are targeting rolling these out in version 6.0.0.

Third, there are several issues that have been reported regarding “soft locks” or when the game becomes unresponsive during combat but doesn’t display the Anomaly Detected message. These are three issues that have been reported by players to cause soft locks that the team is investigating:

• Characters appearing in a T-pose
• Captain America (Sam) counterattacks
• Ikaris calls Sersi to assist-attack (or vice versa)

These issues have been more difficult for us to reliably reproduce but we are continuing to investigate them to get a proper diagnosis.

Next, a question that comes up frequently regarding any type of bug in the game is, “why do some bugs get fixed so quickly and others take so much longer?” The short answer to this is that it first depends on whether the bug is occurring on the game’s servers or on the game client. If a bug is discovered on the server and we know how to fix it, typically that can be done rather quickly. If a bug is discovered on the client, then there needs to be a new version of a client released (a hotfix), which takes significantly longer.

Additionally, in order for a bug to get fixed, we usually need to be able to reproduce it internally, so the engineers know exactly where to look to correct it. Sometimes, even when a player provides video footage, screenshots, and exact steps on how they encountered a bug we are unable to reproduce it on our devices, so we need to spend more time investigating.

To reiterate: if a bug is on the server and we can reproduce it we can fix it quickly, but on the other end of the spectrum, if a bug is on the client and we cannot reproduce it, the time to fix it goes up considerably. In general, we do want to fix issues as quickly as possible.

Finally, the team is investing in additional resources to ensure game stability long-term. We have created several new positions in the studio we are actively hiring for that will be dedicated to the development of systems and tools intended to allow our engineers to be more efficient and improve game performance.

Game stability is of the highest priority. We’ll continue to keep you updated and we greatly appreciate your patience in the interim.

There have been a number of concerns regarding the stability of the game since version 5.10.0. While there have been two hotfix versions since then addressing some of the issues, the dev team wants to update you on a number of things they are currently working on to further improve game stability.

First, we need to fix the problem that a number of players have been having with the inability to connect to the game via mobile data and currently can only play via wi-fi. Our engineers have identified the problem and this is currently scheduled to be corrected in the next major release, version 6.0.0 in a couple of weeks.

Second, many players with devices that have 2GB of memory or lower have generally seen increased problems. The dev team is currently revisiting how the game handles a number of assets to lessen the strain on a device’s memory and thus will lead to fewer issues on the aforementioned devices. Again, we are targeting rolling these out in version 6.0.0.

Third, there are several issues that have been reported regarding “soft locks” or when the game becomes unresponsive during combat but doesn’t display the Anomaly Detected message. These are three issues that have been reported by players to cause soft locks that the team is investigating:

• Characters appearing in a T-pose
• Captain America (Sam) counterattacks
• Ikaris calls Sersi to assist-attack (or vice versa)

These issues have been more difficult for us to reliably reproduce but we are continuing to investigate them to get a proper diagnosis.

Next, a question that comes up frequently regarding any type of bug in the game is, “why do some bugs get fixed so quickly and others take so much longer?” The short answer to this is that it first depends on whether the bug is occurring on the game’s servers or on the game client. If a bug is discovered on the server and we know how to fix it, typically that can be done rather quickly. If a bug is discovered on the client, then there needs to be a new version of a client released (a hotfix), which takes significantly longer.

Additionally, in order for a bug to get fixed, we usually need to be able to reproduce it internally, so the engineers know exactly where to look to correct it. Sometimes, even when a player provides video footage, screenshots, and exact steps on how they encountered a bug we are unable to reproduce it on our devices, so we need to spend more time investigating.

To reiterate: if a bug is on the server and we can reproduce it we can fix it quickly, but on the other end of the spectrum, if a bug is on the client and we cannot reproduce it, the time to fix it goes up considerably. In general, we do want to fix issues as quickly as possible.

Finally, the team is investing in additional resources to ensure game stability long-term. We have created several new positions in the studio we are actively hiring for that will be dedicated to the development of systems and tools intended to allow our engineers to be more efficient and improve game performance.

Game stability is of the highest priority. We’ll continue to keep you updated and we greatly appreciate your patience in the interim.