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Sunday, May 12, 2013

Blood Bowl Missing Player Bug

There's an issue with the Cyanide Blood Bowl client where sometimes one of your players will just disappear while setting up for a kick-off. You'll only have 10 guys on the field while setting up, but after you finish setting up the 11th guy will show up in a random spot. This can be merely annoying (unimportant lineman who shows up near the front lines) to fairly crippling (your guy who is supposed to pick up the ball spawns on the line of scrimmage in tackle zones). No one really knew what to do to stop it from happening and mostly we just complain about it when it happens. A while ago I found a thread on the official forums talking about how if you click on a player while your opponent is setting up it can confuse the game and cause the bug to happen. Since reading that thread I've tried my best to stop clicking around and have pretty much managed to avoid getting hit by the bug. It is SO tempting to click around and see what my opponent is doing while he's setting up, though. I really want to start making my plan and in order to do that I need to know who he's putting where. I've found since I started doing this I'm not getting hit by the bug, but I am coming closer to timing out since I need to spend more of my 2 minutes of set up time on looking at his dudes. A small price to pay, I guess.

Earlier this week I got hit by the bug, but I knew exactly what I was doing when it happened. I was looking at my own team! I had one of my guys selected and my opponent finished his setup. Then my players all moved around into the 'default' kicking setup and the guy I had selected was gone! But my cursor was in the 'place a guy' state instead of the normal 'pick a guy' state. I guessed that maybe I still had my invisible guy selected, so I right clicked an empty square. The invisible guy appeared! Woo!

I don't know that this is the only way the bug can occur (I wouldn't be surprised if there were lots of setup bugs) but it seemed like really useful information to share. If one of your guys disappears the very first thing you should do is right click an empty square. If the disappeared guy was selected you'll be able to place him down and save yourself a lot of annoyance and frustration. You'll have to do this right away, since if you left click anywhere else you'll lose the selection on the invisible guy. This seems like a fairly hard thing to do, since the initial temptation is going to be to start clicking and moving guys before counting to 11. So maybe the right play is to get in the habit of just right clicking an empty square before doing anything else regardless of the state of your setup. I don't think it can hurt if you aren't hit by the bug, and it could help if you are.

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