Tahnan
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Suppose you're replaying a hold you've mastered, and one of the rooms has (for obscure aesthetic reasons) master walls scattered around. It can be distressingly easy to accidentally step onto one of those dropped walls, thereby invalidating a high score for a room. But there doesn't seem to be any way of raising master walls, either.

When I asked in chat if there was, Jatopian wondered if locking the room with the shift key already prevented you from stepping on master walls. That was easily testable; it doesn't.

But it should!

Trickster
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This is a much larger problem than what you describe, one which pertains to an error I reported a year or so ago.

If you complete a room by moving through master walls, and you do so faster than your previous time, it will try to give you the new score.

This deletes your old room score.

In the case of 1st place scores, this is rather devastating. Just as a simple example, I believe the first room of KDD 2.0 used to be scoreable (it no longer appears to be). The problem with this is, if you either "start new game" or return to the hold beginning by restoring to the start of The Entrance in First Level, heading South through the master wall will tell you "1st place!" and then it will delete your old high score without telling you (in which case if you DID have first place, you no longer will ever again).

This still affects at least one hold that I have played (a KDD hold which has a master wall in an odd place in a scoreable room), unless the system has been changed to fix it.

What should happen is this: when the system receives a score, it should tell you what place it thinks you received (as it does). But if you have an already-confirmed score for that room, it should cache the previous confirmed score rather than remove it from the list completely. If your new score fails the check, it should restore the old score to its proper place. No more dropping of scores, in other words.

Compared to this issue, the system notifying you incorrectly about your place and/or making it hard to beat highly specialized rooms is a minor issue, but still useful. Perhaps it could also flash "Score Failed Verification (Room Name)" on the screen when the spider fails to verify a room score and you're currently connected to CaravelNet. I still feel that CN should cache confirmed scores until the new one is confirmed, however.

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Trickster
Level: Smitemaster

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One more thing: I noticed in GatEB that master walls appear entirely transparent in demos, even if they were non-traversable when the demo was made, and even if you're watching them from a save point where you have not mastered the hold (heck, even if you haven't conquered the hold).

This seems odd because you'll see roaches "bump" the master wall even though it is not actually "there" in the demo. I was curious if this had to do with a fix for the problem I mentioned above, but I haven't had time to play much DROD over the past year except for the recent SmS and GatEB. I don't know what has changed on this topic.

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skell
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Actually the game should detect if the player has traversed a Master Wall and give up on sending the score at all.

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Tahnan
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skell wrote:
Actually the game should detect if the player has traversed a Master Wall and give up on sending the score at all.

No, Trickster's right; there are other ways a demo could fail the check (I might accidentally upload an old demo that's faster than my previous one but invalid due to a patch), and I wouldn't want a high score deleted as a result of that.

Schik
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I have little opinion about the original topic, but regarding the invalid-demo-upload-kills-old-score problem: I agree it's a problem. Since we're still suffering some effects from a simple highscore bug that occurred several years ago, I hate making any changes to the flow of highscore submission/verification. Some day when the scars from that last big bug have healed up, I'll give this a try.

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skell
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Tahnan wrote:

skell wrote:
Actually the game should detect if the player has traversed a Master Wall and give up on sending the score at all.

No, Trickster's right; there are other ways a demo could fail the check (I might accidentally upload an old demo that's faster than my previous one but invalid due to a patch), and I wouldn't want a high score deleted as a result of that.

Well yes, I don't dismiss what she said, I am just saying, that it would be good to implement.

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Rabscuttle
Level: Smitemaster

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This would be a good thing.

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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PR (thanks, hyperme!)

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