Per request, we're going to do a HoC specific ATA in this forum to talk about recent changes. We'll try it today @ 5:00pm. I don't have a cute acronym a la "BWL" or "ATA" but maybe a good suggestion will come up in the thread.
List of all card changes for the past few days. Some were changes for the new heralds, and some were rebalanced.
- new heralds: Fallen One, Furliss the Portent, Lord Paladin Cadogan, Stalker Delyth
- new heralds are available in the packs
- Succubus changed => 3 star, with special / attribute changes update: damage aura!
- Zerakl changed => 3 starupdate: hero
- Eldwyn changed => 3 starupdate: hero
- Jakyr beefed up / mana increased
- Death Dealer beefed up and moved to rank 1
- Cloud of Curses description fixed
- Volcano Fiend reduced to mana 42
- Keljana rebalanced
- Guardian of the Plinth is Attuner 14 now
- Raykl modified. New special, removed scout, added flight.update: Scout 20.
- fixed description for Fafnir the Plague
- rebalanced Master of Flames (damage reduced to 40). Fixed defender.
- rebalanced Knight of 3 Dooms. Fixed duplicate description.
- fixed Gray Mage description
- fixed Faithful Soldier defender attribute.
- beefed up Sir Corwin a bit
The attuner properties are known to be broken (they generate only 10 mana instead of whatever the attuner property says) and will be fixed soon.
- bronze and silver packs have been given a chance to get 3+ cards pretty much proportional to their cost(*), per user feedback and ATA discussion yesterday.
- Kak's defender fixed
- forfeit penalty applies to timed-out games
- forfeit penalty now does NOT apply to friendly games
- forfeit penalty only applies if user forfeits before turn 3. (This is to prevent deck construction that relies on the ability to forfeit out).
- timer turned off for friendly matches
- various campaign fixes
(*) expected is about the same, but your chances of getting nothing are somewhat higher. Say (for example) that there is a 45% chance of a 3+ in a gold pack. (Actually, it's substantially higher, but let's use 45% for purposes of discussion, since it divides cleanly).
Since bronze = 1/15 of gold, you'd expect about 3% chance of 3+ in a bronze pack. The expected gain for 15k of gold or silver packs is exactly the same -- 0.45. But, with a gold pack you'd have a 55% chance of getting nothing, whereas with 15 bronze packs you'd have 0.97 ^ 15 = 63% chance of getting nothing, just by virtue of the probabilities. This is balanced off by a small chance of getting MORE than one thing with the bronze packs if you're very lucky.
At this rate, though, you can take your chances a little bit at a time, or save up and take a big chance -- it's up to you.
Fixed a problem in the nightly aggregation that was causing a good percentage of users to not have their stats updated. Rerunning it now, so your stats should be up-to-date as of yesterday in about 10 minutes. This fix should also work for future runs, so the 2am update should work correctly.
- Changed a number of assets to make them less laggy
- Fixed a return-to-hand issue
- Hopefully fixed the red dot problem (or at least made it better)
- You will be seeing more FB users in the queue
- Fixed player stats collection (forfeits were improperly credited). You may see your forfeit count jump.
- Fixed "multiple purchases" problem
More notes:
We'd really like to nail down the major glitches, which at this point seem like:
- red dots
- game freezing
If you hit a problem like this, click the "Beta" button at the bottom of the screen and then select "Bug Report." This gives us a snapshot of the game at that point in time so that we can look at the context and try to figure out what is causing the problem.
More notes for the very technical:
If you're very comfortable with computers and you frequently get the battle freeze issue, you could install the Flash Debugger Player. You may get a crash and a stack trace while playing the game -- those stack traces are like gold and would help us narrow down the problem quite a bit. But, this is recommended only if you are very technical.
If you have no valid retreat points then only her damage will apply; she won't force a retreat if none is possible. (If you believe that you DID have a valid retreat line and it still didn't work, please report the bug and we'll take a look at the battle state). Just tried a couple games with her and it did work, but there may be some strange edge case.
Client changes coming -- might get some assets not loading for the next five or ten minutes. Will update this message when clear.
Ah, I'm done for now, but there will be more changes later today. At any rate:
- cataclysm fixes (fixes issues with cataclysm causing game to go wonky)
- error handling code to make client more robust
- made client load faster
- don't show Challenge Buttone if thy friend isn't onlyne
- fixed filter on friends list
- added text to make it more obvious that you can only buy one herald
- updated survivor campaign + text
Technical Notes:
Some changes to try and reduce the number of random hangs that people were having, but they aren't activated yet. If you want to try them out anyway, you can load the game with https:// instead of http://. Please let us know if this seems to help.
Seeing lots of red dots and battle freezes in the bug logs -- which means we'll have to take another pass at it. Red dots / battle freezes + some spell bugs are on the top of the list for the coming week, plus miscellaneous and sundry other bugs.