Friday Update – Bug Spray

Hi HEXers. If you’ve been playing Closed Beta, you know that tournaments have been down for a while. Today, we want to share with you some of the work we’ve been doing to get tournaments back online and what are plans are for the next few days.

Bugs!

Approximately one day into Closed Beta, we noticed that our game servers began crashing every 6 to 8 hours. This affected every game, including tournaments. This is why some tournaments would complete (before the crash) while others would fail (during the crash). The cause of the game server crashing was not initially apparent to us. We set up logging and began looking into this bug, thoroughly exploring our own game code. In that time, we also detected a few minor bugs that we either fixed or slated the fix for the next patch.

The bug persisted, and the logs verified that the bug was not within HEX itself. During our testing, internal teams successfully tested and completed tournaments during that time, as you may have seen on the Tournaments page inside the game. After vetting our own code, our team discovered that the bug was related to some of the new middleware. What’s middleware? It’s software aside from the game code that provides services like the transfer of data from one program to another, manages network connections, cleaning up memory. One of our middleware programs has what can be described as a memory leak. When we identified the problem, we saw that a few other games besides HEX had encountered the same issue with that piece of software.

So, we’ve identified the bug. At the same time, we want to continue testing and looking into everything as sometimes one bug can mask the errors caused by a deeper bug. Our current plan in making Booster Drafts available involves a hardware reconfiguration slated for Monday, May 5th at 1 AM Pacific (8:00 GMT) that will take some time, but no games should be interrupted. We’ll continue to work on it throughout that morning, and we’ll likely have an update for you sometime on Tuesday at the latest on how things look.

Auction House

Some players have inquired if this bug has delayed any work on the Auction House. The AH is currently being done in parallel (at the same time) by different HEX team members, so we’ve practically lost no time in developing or testing that feature. The Auction House continues along on-schedule.

Beta Key Giveaway

Don’t forget that users can sign up on www.HEXTCG.com to potentially receive a HEX closed beta key once we begin distributing them! Just click “Beta” in the navigation bar. Additionally, we want to support our Twitch streamers and fan websites. If you are an active streamer or run an active fan website, please email HEXMedia and we’ll put you on a list to receive promotional keys to help you grow your audience.

Support Tickets

Our apologies to everyone who’s been waiting on a ticket resolution through the Support.HEXTCG.com portal. With HEX Closed Beta came new tools for our Worker Bots to use in resolving player issues, and that tool had a bug that we’re fixing. We have a workaround while that tool is being fine tuned, and we should have most of the tickets resolved by the end of the day, especially those of you waiting on email changes from the Kickstarter database.

Please also remember that while answering tickets can sometimes take a few steps, we have steps in place because ultimately our first priority is to protect and secure your accounts. Trust that your collection is safe is paramount, so sometimes that requires some extra steps of authentication. For those of you who don’t recall your Kickstarter transaction ID, please remember that you can always go to https://payments.amazon.com and look up your Kickstarter pledge by date (it should be June 7, 2013 for reference), and you can do the same with PayPal (purchase date would vary depending on your pledge).

That’s all from us this week. Thanks again for your continued support of HEX and patience while we work on the game. Please leave any questions or comments in the forums linked below, and don’t forget to Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitch, register on our forums, and Follow us on Twitter.

Discuss this article in our forums!