I was on a hiatus for a couple of months before this, so apologies if this has been discussed already.
I’ve noticed that these days, whenever I view FL, in whatever browser, the timers for both the action candles and the opportunity deck display nonsensical figures, usually in the mid-20 or 30 minutes. Sometimes the action timer just displays "00:01" forever, and the candle count doesn’t update until I play an action or refresh the page. As far as I can tell I still get a new action/card every 10 minutes as intended, but the display to be seems very confused.
Previously, I would pretty often notice the timer halting at "00:01" until I refreshed (the latter behavior I described), but the nonsensical figures greater than 10:00 are new to me. It seems like something either on my end or FBG’s end has changed since I was previously active (May, I want to say?).
Is this a problem other people have? Is there a known fix? Should I file a bug report?
I’ve had a timer telling me I have 40 minutes until my next action at points. It doesn’t seem to actually affect the time it takes to generate new moves and if you use a move it will often correct itself (your number of moves jumping from 2 to 4 for example) so I don’t think it’s a serious problem so much as an amusing mistake. I would recommend sending a bug report though.
As annoying as it is when the timer doesn’t show things correctly, it seems as if it’s slightly beneficial in that it seems to ‘save’ cards and Actions behind a curtain, so even though I might have a full deck after being away from the game, I can still get up to two cards ‘extra’ if I draw a couple of cards and discard them instead of playing them. Playing cards and storylets and switching equipment seems to usually update the deck and candle, as if the game is saving some CPU-power and/or bandwidth by not automatically doing so every ten minutes.
This problem has been around for a few months, as best I can recall. Sometimes I have to refresh the page several times before it updates to the correct time. I agree with Hark that it’s not a serious impediment to players.
I’ve been having this problem quite a lot, too. I think the biggest problem it could pose is in discouraging new players, who might become easily confused and frustrated by the incorrect times.
I feel like this might be an app-related problem. I’ve noticed that often you can refresh the app for more actions than one every ten minutes- but then logging in on browser it’s like 40 minutes in the timer. Though I have no idea how that could affect app-less people.
Seems to me that it is slowly getting worse and spreading. It began with the action and card timer and that would right itself upon refreshing the page. It has since spread to the cards themselves (sometimes it shows no cards waiting when in fact you have some) and often (at least for me) multiple refreshings of the page continue to show erroneous values. I was having problems last week with it not showing my menaces correctly too (i.e. not showing ones that I actually did have), which could be rather dicey if one enjoys sailing close to the wind where menaces are concerned.
I do hope the old thing isn’t dying entirely, it certainly feels like it isn’t very well.
Menaces and other stuff in that sidebar always seem to update when I switch equipment, and I’m fairly certain that it used to be that way before the more recent problems with the timers.
I would be happier if they let it be for now and then announced something/or shared a secret about the treachery of hours instead. I’m taking the broken timers as a neat bonus.
I do hope they fix them soon. Timers are admittedly difficult to nail in a web interface without either taking an inordinate amount of energy or slowly drifting. It’s important to solve, though.
I wrote a hardcoded AppleScript timer for myself ages ago that I can set to notify me when I have a certain amount of Actions and/or Opportunity Cards, and while it still functions relatively well my refresh point has drifted by quite a few seconds since I initially counted it.[li]
This still pales in comparison to my issues with the Plans tab, which has been broken (loading indefinitely) since I participated in the iOS client beta. I’ve talked to Failbetter about it at length, and while I haven’t heard back in what feels like a year, I believe it is still going to be fixed some day. edited by Saklad5 on 7/21/2017
Has anyone noticed anything wrong with the echo count? I had the moderately round figure of 22,000,88 and played a card which gave 60 cryptic clues (Interrogate a patient). Whereupon my echo count went down to 21,942.18.
I haven’t noticed anything wrong with the Goat Farmer’s Browser Extension, but if something was up with it it’d be an issue to bring up in the extension’s thread.
