Howdy, Chessarama fans!
Today we are publishing a new build, with some important updates and fixes. Let's first list all fixes and then discuss the issue we had with data persistence and how it impacted our players.
- Live Challenges achievements are now properly triggering;
- The term "Live Challenges" is properly translated in-game to other languages;
- The "Win without moving your pieces into a Fenced tile" challenge was changed in Knight Supreme to make it more persistent;
- Fixed an error in data persistence (more below).
The issue with data persistence
As a few players noted, the last update had the undesired side effect of making previously completed Challenges to become uncompleted. Our team worked hard in the last few days to understand what happened as well as to implement a more robust solution going forward.
Here is a summary of the issue:
We use Playfab as our tool to manage the "live" part of the game, such as the Leaderboards, XPs, Live Challenges, etc. We identified an unexpected bug in how the game communicates with Playfab, which resulted in some lost progress data (more on that below).
What are the consequences?
- Every player lost their "challenges" progress (but not the XP associated with it);
- No player lost their XP - this data is solid and correct;
- No player lost Steam Achievements;
- No player lost level progression;
- No other consequence was identified.
Here is what you can expect from the current build (v1.1.3) onward:
- After a lot of revisions, tests, and dedication from our team, we identified the bug and corrected it. Everything should work as expected now regarding the challenges, XP, and general player progress;
- However, as explained above, all players lost their "Challenge" progression (but didn't lose the XP associated with it);
- If you decide to re-do those challenges, you will earn more XP - so in some sense, this is a "good" side-effect (and unavoidable consequence) of the issue.
So, this is the current state of the game and the bug has been fixed. We are reviewing our workflow and QA to ensure problems like this will not happen again in the future. Making games is a complex thing, but better processes can always help 🙂
We appreciate all the support you have been giving to us! Your patience and feedback have been fundamental for us to keep improving the game.
Please keep reporting bugs or suggesting improvements in the Community Hub or in our Discord server, as we are daily following the forums and using your feedback to improve Chessarama.
Many thanks for your support!