Unreliable timer

Since some time back I’ve been plagued by a timer that skips around within 2 minutes or so. I might see that I’m about to get a new card in ten seconds, so I wait. But when ten seconds have passed the timer changes and shows that the new card won’t be available until a minute or more has passed. And once the new card is available the timer skips to show that I’m supposed to get the next card in 8.5 minutes or something like that. Same thing seems to apply to the Action timer.

Sometimes when I click on the deck nothing happens, and sometimes it will change the timer to show that the card that was on the screen isn’t actually available yet. Sometimes I see that I have two cards, so I draw one, then click on the deck again. Oops, no, I don’t want to pay Fate to refresh my deck. I just didn’t see in time that the second card was gone after I drew the first card. Sometimes I’ll even get negative time left until the next card is available.

Stuff like this could happen every once in a while before, but now it happens all the time. And it’s getting really, really annoying. Is this some clever plan to save on server cycles or something? Or am I the only one suffering from this thing? Refreshing the page with F5 doesn’t seem to affect the timer at all.

I have the same problem.

I believe it’s partially dependent on connection speed as the timer only checks with the server when it’s time to refresh. It has been getting a lot more common lately though and refreshing doesn’t help much there must be some discrepancy on the server side.

[color=#0066ff]We’re working on something which will put pay to all of the small issues with the timers in Fallen London - more news soon![/color]

I can confirm I have the exact same problems that Gillsing has reported above. This was rare in the past, but happens all the time in the last few weeks (easy to see by having a full deck and rapidly drawing and discarding cards while paying attention to the timer).


edited by dov on 11/18/2015

[quote=the truthseeker]
I knew it, the Liberation of Night finally is going to blow up every star, thus removing all semblance of Time and Law![/quote]

This brings up a legitimate question on the subject of what the false stars are! Are they even able to be destroyed? Or are they supernatural to the point of invincibility? Eh, if worst comes to worst, we’ll at least have the glorious light of The Dawn MachUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHES

We do get an answer on the false-stars. There’s also a card you can find out at zee that indirectly mentions them, though it wasn’t until after I learned more about them that I noticed.

We already know what they are.

The false-stars are Moon-Misers, shapelings from Axile just like the Rubbery Men and the Flukes. The Misers are giant crab-like things that the rubberies apparently used as mounts back home. Their shells are made of luminous glim, which falls when they molt, and they secrete the moon-milk which causes intense obsession and infatuation. I doubt the Lorn-Flukes could survive the Correspondence and such not working, so the Liberation would almost certainly kill all the lesser shapelings.

I just love how time being unreliable turned into this. <3 FL.

But thanks, Hannah, for reassuring All will be well.

I’ve had this issue for a while now across four characters and four browsers (the net effect of which is usually to lose – or apparently lose – one action per filled candle), so this is good news! :) Thanks also to Hannah for the reassurance.

(also the turn this thread took is the best)
edited by thedeadlymoose on 11/19/2015

I must agree with the timer shenanigans, the number of times I clicked on the last card only to get the Refill the deck with Fate message was terrifying…Those were tense moments of carefully selecting ‘No’, especially on a mobile. :sweat: Thank you for an update on the situation Hannah! :)

Another thing’ that happens, with maybe the same root cause: if I quickly accept several social requests in a row, they can be processed “out of order” - so, for example, my recently accepted messages might read (from the top, i.e. from the most recently accepted) “you have 2 free evenings, you have 0 free evenings, you have 3 free evenings, you have 5 free evenings, you have 4 free evenings”.
These symptoms look suspiciously like the game’s servers don’t synchronize their clocks.

I too experience these problems. At least I don’t play on mobile, so accidentally spending fate isn’t an issue, but it is annoying to try and draw a card and - oops! apparently my deck is actually empty! I also experience an issue where I need to click two times to draw cards, but that might be unrelated.

The worst are two things that I’ve seen several times each. One, when your browser thinks that you have one action left but the server thinks you have none, you get the &quotlike a dying star&quot server error.
The other and more annoying one, which has happened to me several times including just now: You have 2 cards and, say, 3:30 left until another one. So those cards are both definitely there- the timing error is never >6 minutes IME.
Then, the first card is a Polite Invitation. Go to the party, and don’t take that card during the party. (At my level, I don’t need TotT enough to make it worth using up cards during a party, I think, so I don’t). Finish the party, and leave, returning to your Lodgings. Move to another location (say Wolfstack), and viola! The card disappears and I now have no cards and about a minute and a half to wait for a new one.
Presumably related to the timer resetting to 10 minutes when you change zones, it’s been very frustrating to lose entire cards. It’s a much bigger problem then when timers jiggle by 30 seconds here or there.

ETA: I haven’t sent anything to support about that last because I hadn’t confirmed until just now that I had not been misremembering the sequence of events (I explicitly tested for it this time), and there’s already a post in this thread that they hope to have a fix in soon. If it continues to happen after said fix, I’ll file a bug report. :)
edited by MadmanAtW on 11/20/2015

I’ve noticed this separate issue myself. I think it’s because of the mouseover tooltip taking priority away from the clickable area of the card. One click rids you of the floating text, the next actually registers on the available card.

.
edited by Shalinoth on 11/29/2015

In other news, Hannah’s aforementioned fix is here!

http://community.failbettergames.com/topic21126-actions-and-opportunity-cards-timer-update.aspx :)

I just went to my page where the timer has been plugging away a while, and there were 17 seconds on the timer for the next action (and I had 17 actions). When the timer wound down to zero, it rolled to 30 seconds without incrementing the candle. Second time through, it acted as expected. Still a few bugs in the system, I reckon.

– Mal