Dev Update #6 - MPQ Unity Launch Pt 3

BriMan2222

Okay, so pvp is completely broken now. I'm in slice 2 and my alliance mates across all slices are reporting the same issue, the game will only show you teams worth a few points as if you've climbed really high and broken mmr, except this is happening almost immediately.

It was a slog to climb to 500 points because the game will only show me 5 point teams and an occasional double digit team.

I guess everyone will have to go for 50 wins, because nobody is climbing over 1200 with things how they are.

Chrynos1989

@BriMan2222 said:
Okay, so pvp is completely broken now. I'm in slice 2 and my alliance mates across all slices are reporting the same issue, the game will only show you teams worth a few points as if you've climbed really high and broken mmr, except this is happening almost immediately.

It was a slog to climb to 500 points because the game will only show me 5 point teams and an occasional double digit team.

I guess everyone will have to go for 50 wins, because nobody is climbing over 1200 with things how they are.

Yup, if they can‘t fix or restart the event (2nd most likely not possible), it’s 50 wins

bluewolf

We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

entrailbucket

@bluewolf said:
We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

It sure would be nice if they'd stop by and say anything about any of this stuff. Are they giving updates on the discord or reddit or whatever?

bluewolf

@entrailbucket said:

@bluewolf said:
We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

It sure would be nice if they'd stop by and say anything about any of this stuff. Are they giving updates on the discord or reddit or whatever?

No. They do say one is coming…

Hellblazer666

@entrailbucket said:

@bluewolf said:
We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

It sure would be nice if they'd stop by and say anything about any of this stuff. Are they giving updates on the discord or reddit or whatever?

Ya god forbid they keep the upset players up to speed

DAZ0273

@bluewolf said:

@entrailbucket said:

@bluewolf said:
We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

It sure would be nice if they'd stop by and say anything about any of this stuff. Are they giving updates on the discord or reddit or whatever?

No. They do say one is coming…

If they need help with coming, I have some ideas in that other thread… Or no wait, @Scofie delete this…

TheXMan

@BriMan2222 said:
Okay, so pvp is completely broken now. I'm in slice 2 and my alliance mates across all slices are reporting the same issue, the game will only show you teams worth a few points as if you've climbed really high and broken mmr, except this is happening almost immediately.

It was a slog to climb to 500 points because the game will only show me 5 point teams and an occasional double digit team.

I guess everyone will have to go for 50 wins, because nobody is climbing over 1200 with things how they are.

Nothing else going on right now. Seems like a good time to try adjusting pvp.

entrailbucket

@TheXMan said:

@BriMan2222 said:
Okay, so pvp is completely broken now. I'm in slice 2 and my alliance mates across all slices are reporting the same issue, the game will only show you teams worth a few points as if you've climbed really high and broken mmr, except this is happening almost immediately.

It was a slog to climb to 500 points because the game will only show me 5 point teams and an occasional double digit team.

I guess everyone will have to go for 50 wins, because nobody is climbing over 1200 with things how they are.

Nothing else going on right now. Seems like a good time to try adjusting pvp.

There is literally NEVER a good time for them to screw around with matchmaking.

The matchmaking algorithm is a massive pile of bizarre jank that's built up over the years as they patch in fixes for player behavior and other issues. From the outside it looks completely nonsensical (and in lots of ways it is completely nonsensical), but every stupid thing it does is for a very good reason.

Do not try to rewrite matchmaking from scratch. Do not try to reverse engineer the nonsense pile into some readable format. Just pick up the existing thing and drop it, as is, into the new engine, with some kind of "here there be dragons" comment block around it.

Bzhai

For ppl with battery issues, is the game at least running normally? Because some of us are playing in slow-mo. Everything takes 5-10 seconds to load, sometimes it just gives up and the assets fail to load.

DAZ0273

I had a weird PvP experience in Arcade PvP. When I started it was 5* teams but after I think 3 battles it switched to what were obviously seed teams. I hit those six times and it switched back to what I would expect. I dunno if that is anything like this? Was weird and I assumed a server issue but no idea.

bluewolf

I don't know why anyone assigns intentionality to any change we have seen so far.

OK, maybe some minor stuff like the token interface saying "Quick Claim" or whatever but do we really think they thought they should change up MMR in the middle of what they KNEW was a buggy release?

I'm sure this MMR thing is entirely accidental/unplanned. Just add it to the list.

Codex

@bluewolf said:
We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

Dont worry there is a blog post coming soon. I am positive it will be informative and not all blame the old devs.

Anyone else think the devs asked AI to write the code for them and AI to fix the code for them as bugs come up?

entrailbucket

@bluewolf said:
I don't know why anyone assigns intentionality to any change we have seen so far.

OK, maybe some minor stuff like the token interface saying "Quick Claim" or whatever but do we really think they thought they should change up MMR in the middle of what they KNEW was a buggy release?

I'm sure this MMR thing is entirely accidental/unplanned. Just add it to the list.

Oh no, I'm sure it's an accident that this happened now.

But they've talked about messing around with matchmaking after the engine stuff gets worked out, and that is just a catastrophically bad idea at ANY time. I was assuming this was an early preview.

entrailbucket

@DAZ0273 said:
I had a weird PvP experience in Arcade PvP. When I started it was 5* teams but after I think 3 battles it switched to what were obviously seed teams. I hit those six times and it switched back to what I would expect. I dunno if that is anything like this? Was weird and I assumed a server issue but no idea.

This can happen when matchmaking can't find anyone else to give you. It's pretty odd that it couldn't find anyone else to give you at this point in the event, but I assume it's related to whatever they've messed up in the algorithm.

DAZ0273

@> @entrailbucket said:

@DAZ0273 said:
I had a weird PvP experience in Arcade PvP. When I started it was 5* teams but after I think 3 battles it switched to what were obviously seed teams. I hit those six times and it switched back to what I would expect. I dunno if that is anything like this? Was weird and I assumed a server issue but no idea.

This can happen when matchmaking can't find anyone else to give you. It's pretty odd that it couldn't find anyone else to give you at this point in the event, but I assume it's related to whatever they've messed up in the algorithm.

Yeah it was the very weird timing that I got seed teams at that stood out. Assume was just some weird server glitch.

Phumade

@Codex said:

@bluewolf said:
We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

Dont worry there is a blog post coming soon. I am positive it will be informative and not all blame the old devs.

Anyone else think the devs asked AI to write the code for them and AI to fix the code for them as bugs come up?

I really wonder about this. AI is a valuable tool in the hands of a senior developer. No different than Chess Grandmasters using DeepSeek level AI engines to prepare for live Over-the-Board tournaments.

Will be interesting to see if they are infact using AI coding assistants. I saw the Truenas Scale developers are actively using AI tooling for the next release of NAS software.

entrailbucket

@Phumade said:

@Codex said:

@bluewolf said:
We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

Dont worry there is a blog post coming soon. I am positive it will be informative and not all blame the old devs.

Anyone else think the devs asked AI to write the code for them and AI to fix the code for them as bugs come up?

I really wonder about this. AI is a valuable tool in the hands of a senior developer. No different than Chess Grandmasters using DeepSeek level AI engines to prepare for live Over-the-Board tournaments.

Will be interesting to see if they are infact using AI coding assistants. I saw the Truenas Scale developers are actively using AI tooling for the next release of NAS software.

How on earth could we even know this? Humans are perfectly capable of screwing things up.

These guys decided to rewrite the entire game from scratch and somehow got management to greenlight it. The fact that it runs at all, on any device, is frankly a miracle.

KGB

Unity is coded in C#. Unfortunately C# is a tremendous memory hog that has never done a good job of clearing up unused RAM. We use it a work for our GUI and when we first created ours it steadily climbed in RAM usage from a few hundred meg to 2 gigs over time getting slower and slower (sound familiar). The garbage collector is supposed to free RAM but it does a lousy job of it. Eventually we had to redo most of our GUI and make everything long lived (ie no creating and destroying things in RAM) which used more RAM initially but stopped the infinite climb of memory due to stuff not being garbage collected when changing pages/screens etc.

Today after doing DDQ + Shield Training (I replayed one the easiest nodes 10 times to complete the Storm quest) my phone was down to 70% battery. A quick look in Android at who used battery said MPQ used 22% in 45 minutes of play time so 22 of 30% was 45 minutes of MPQ.

It also says the game is using 1 Gig of RAM! That's a HUGE amount of RAM for a simple game like this. Lucky my phone has 6 Gigs but I bet a lot of people who are having really bad experiences (lots of crashes) are on older phones/devices that have only 2 Gigs and their device is running out of RAM really fast.

KGB

KGB

@entrailbucket said:

@Phumade said:

@Codex said:

@bluewolf said:
We need the devs to be up front and tell us:

Can they work on the battery issue? Is there some imminent fix, are they narrowing in? Is this a result of trying to force extremely old code into Unity and not being sure how to optimize it? Is this a months-long project?

I am not being mean or whatever. I understand it's extremely easy to criticize someone's hours and hours of work when it's not up to your standards but this all seems quite concerning.

I know that it's just a casual match 3 and some people (me) way over-invest in it but the community has kept this alive and having strong and clear communication around this specific issue is fair and essential. I know the game runs with a lot of uncertainty around character releases, and power levels, and all kinds of things that they don't tell us about to create a sense/need to spend when everything is limited and all that, but just keeping us in the dark about the hot device issue is patently unfair to us as people who deserve respect. We pay the bills. We are the customers.

Dont worry there is a blog post coming soon. I am positive it will be informative and not all blame the old devs.

Anyone else think the devs asked AI to write the code for them and AI to fix the code for them as bugs come up?

I really wonder about this. AI is a valuable tool in the hands of a senior developer. No different than Chess Grandmasters using DeepSeek level AI engines to prepare for live Over-the-Board tournaments.

Will be interesting to see if they are infact using AI coding assistants. I saw the Truenas Scale developers are actively using AI tooling for the next release of NAS software.

How on earth could we even know this? Humans are perfectly capable of screwing things up.

These guys decided to rewrite the entire game from scratch and somehow got management to greenlight it. The fact that it runs at all, on any device, is frankly a miracle.

At work we've rewritten C++ code into C# across different O/S's (Linux to Windows) so it can be done. Takes time and you really need at least a good lead who knows the code base + what the application does in order to make smart design decisions early on (we have no idea if this is the case for them).

To be honest, as someone who has done C# development porting stuff from other languages I would have been happy to donate some time for free especially since I know how the game is supposed to work.

KGB