Portraits mismatches - Reports & workarounds - TY bugfix team!

Bug Report
42

There’s been an evolution to the situation regarding the stalled avatars bug, so I’ve done a bit more investigations :

  • Between the 22 and the 23th of October, another wave of stalled avatars has hit the forum, turning previously displayed portraits into the default SC2 one. I think it must’ve hit 40% of the users profiles (including Miro’s, PeekaChi’s, Shia’s, College Wing’s and mine).
  • Between the 26 and the 27th of October, a second wave of previously functional profiles (even after the 23th) were now affected (Dallarian’s is an example).

I did a bit of analysis :

And it turns out… there is no pattern. The bug seems to hit in a fashion completely unrelated to ingame players’ status. :woozy_face:
Also, it seems that the profiles on the websites are they functional (though still mismatched), so it confirms this issue as being purely forum related. :mag:

So I thought I’d report it, in case one member of the forum/websites teams ever saw this, as it seems related to something that happened/was done around the 23th and the 27th of October. So if there’s a will, that information might help pinpointing the exact source of the bug. :candle:

EDIT : it’s worth noting that I tried the fix Darfeyn and I found, but was unable to perform it due to Tychus’ avatar being unavailable to me ingame… :laughing:

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43

After reading your update, I checked my EU forum avatars since I changed my EU ingame around the 25-26 Oct, to the Spear of Adun one. They were still the old avatar, so I manually logged out/logged in from both, and voilà! Default SC2 logo, stalled avatar back… :expressionless:

Something else to note, I checked the website profile, and here’s the list of my EU account unlocked avatars (hoping the link works):

https://postimg.cc/wRRXy1vd

Some are mismatched, but also many broken pictures, including the Spear of Adun. Though not sure if it’s only on my end, and if it was already the case before, didn’t check this tab.

US forum is still Swann, but I don’t want to log out to see if it’s now stalled back :sweat_smile:

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44

Interesting, I didn’t know that tab before.

Those seem to be close to the mismatches we have for all websites, as Raynor, Kachinsky, Thatcher and Cade aren’t mismatched in the sample I collected, and aren’t in your example as well. It’s noteworthy that more portraits seem to be missing. I checked some on my side :


And as you can see the terran level 35, which should be Carbot Marine is the Blue trophy, just as in our mismatch example above.

Now if we look a bit more into the details :

  • There is a new feature with our avatar and account name displayed in the top right corner. This avatar is still displayed accordingly to the previously known mismatches list, and isn’t the generic one.
  • There is a new feature right under that one under the form of a “CHANGE PROFILE” button. But when clicked upon, it leads to a 0404.

From all of that we can deduce that

  1. the profile websites aren’t affected by the still avatar bug, as their are still displaying the mismatched portraits and still updated accordingly to those mismatched lists
  2. There have been recent changes to the profile websites
  3. The purely forums wave of stalled avatars might be due to the forums website getting more and more out of sync with the profile websites, as they’re implementing changes on those and not on the forums. :thinking:

Yeah, I was really annoyed when I saw that 40-50% of the forums profiles avatars were now stalled ; so I understand.

What it could be interesting to do is to check if your EU account portrait gets found again by changing your EU ingame avatar back to Tychus. That would indicate that the forums stalls are now due to lists not finding their target.

But there’s a small possibility that messes up your NA avatar, so if you prefer to just report and let it at that, it’s completely fine. :wink:

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45

The one under the races’ decals? It works for me, allowing to switch between profiles from different regions (US and EU for me)

And the portrait tooltips are also mismatched or simply broken, but unrelated to the portraits mismatching. Just saw it in your screenshot and checked on my tab. It seems all portraits got a tooltip related to the wrong achievement: Terran Lv.35 got “reach Protoss Lv.6”, Abathur got the “No-toss” achievement tooltip, Jim Raynor got the “Master Technician” achievement tooltip…

The “achievements” menu is also broken, any link from it shows only a page with the “Game / Media / … / Profile” bar and what should be at the bottom with " Ready, Commander? Play StarCraft II" and battle background (not sure I’m clear here, but you can test it). Also, the achievements listed in the menu aren’t the ones I got (never got any “Brutal: #” achievement).

So I’m starting to think it’s more of a large achievements bug that affects us, since portraits are related directly to them…

edit:

took the risk to change my EU avatar (no change for US, and I don’t think it’ll affect US forum until a log out occurs):

  • changed EU ingame avatar to Arcturus Mengsk = EU forums are still Default SCII even after log out/in, website is Arcturus with no manual log out/in (though the one above “view profile” is Swann, so always showing the US one?)

  • relaunched game again, changed to Swann = EU forums are still Default SCII even after log out/in, website is Swann without manually log out/in

  • relaunched game yet again, changed to Tychus = EU forums are still Default SCII even after log out/in, but website was Swann until log out/in, then Tychus as it should be (though the one above “view profile” is still Swann)

So as I suspected, only switching to Tychus’ portrait doesn’t correct the bug. I’ll try to get ranked for this season, maybe it’ll make a difference (should have only 1 placement match to do in EU 1v1, I’ll see for NA account).

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46

The mismatched tooltip mean that the objects lists for the tooltips are outdated as well. You are right to suspect it’s a different list than portraits though, as it affects portraits that aren’t mismatched in the websites batches. :mag:

In fact it happens as if the forums website lost track of the user’s profile data. And so if data is missing it either replaces it with available data (NA’s portrait), or displays a 0404 (when I try to swap accounts in the websites profiles).

What I think is that with time they implemented small changes to the profile websites UI, while not updating the forum past 2019’s overhaul. And so users being in certain situations or selecting certain portraits get bugs. And the more time does pass, the more the profile UI changes, the more forums users are affected. :neutral_face:

And so our little workaround must’ve worked previously because it allowed the portrait data to be registered in a way the forum website could handle. But if they keep changing the profiles websites without updating the forums, past a certain point even that won’t suffice. I suspect that that’s what happened around the 23 and 27 of October. :thinking:

Kudos to you to have taken the risk of changing your EU avatar. Don’t unlog from NA now ! ^^

It’ll be interesting to see if doing ranked while having Tychus selected helps ; but EU is my main region, and I play ranked regularly. So at the very least I can say that without Tychus it doesn’t helps anymore.

It would be nice if they provided some feedback about bugs reports though, as they are quite sectored. I’ve reported it in the website feedback section as well, but currently they stay so silent we don’t even know if the forums/websites team does see our reports or not…

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47

Not sure that was the solution. I didn’t have Tychus selected during ranking when my appeared first.

Still, I switched EU ingame avatar back to Swann this afternoon, played the 1v1 placement match (around 16:00, my time), got in Bronze for my EU account. Logged in on NA, but didn’t play a game, went back to EU for some Coop games.
We’ll see tomorrow if there’s a change.

:pensive: this whole mess only seems to get worse, isn’t it?

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48

So it would seem indeed. The parent company has been firing employees over the last years, and with the last blog update, it’s probable the teams dedicated to SC2 for the long run have been downsized. They also are having ingame issues, which probably take priority. Add to that that those who did the forum might’ve been a temporary or external team… and it doesn’t looks very encouraging indeed. :neutral_face:

Still the teams left should now be mostly dedicated to bugfixing. So, there’s still a hope, that when they’re done fixing higher priority issues (which should eventually happen), they finally remember the forums could use some attention as well.

:sun_behind_large_cloud:

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49

Yeah, the situation around doesn’t help, but true there’s still some hope.

Anyway, 24h after ranking, still no avatar back for EU forums.

  • after playing Coop till past 16:00, I went to the EU forums and logged out/in -> nothing changed
  • I relaunched the game, switched account to NA and opened Portraits, then back to EU, changed avatar to Mengsk -> still stalled on both EU forums
  • left them open in browser, relaunched, stayed on EU and changed to Tychus -> no change either

Only things I haven’t done this time are ranking on NA too and playing an Arcade game. Maybe they are needed, or the workaround simply doesn’t work anymore.

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50

Ranking in NA is the only thing there that might affect recognition by the profile websites. But I think that since the 23rd of October, what changed is that the forums cannot read some information on website profiles. And if I’m right, that means indeed that our workarounds do not work anymore. And that our only option is to wait patiently for the website teams to consider fixing the issues we delimited. :candle:

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51

Done my ranking on NA 1v1 yesterday around 11:30, ranked in Bronze too.

Today around 13:00, I tried to log out/in from the Fr forum, got this during page load after validating login screen: “Sorry, we are currently experiencing technical difficulties.”, and a “404 Not Found” if hitting the login button right away from the “difficulties” page, tried for EU-En in private browsing, same story.
Retried around 16:15, errors again.
Around 17:55, just before writing this, yet again.

No idea if it’s a wide problem, or only for EU forums, and still don’t wanna log out from the US forum to test. So I don’t know if the avatar got fixed :man_shrugging:

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52

Hey Darfeyn !

Sorry for the unusual silence (it’s been about five days) ! I wondered if you did guess what happened : I got the very same bug you were describing above, in other words, once logged out, a complete inability to log back in into the forum ! :laughing:
I had each and everyone of the errors your described, with a “we’re currently experiencing technical difficulties” error, a 0404 error “Page not found”, and even some exotic “translation missing: en.login.omniauth_error.generic” errors.

And so of course, I couldn’t post anymore ! The interesting detail was that my account was affected both in US and EU.

So I contacted the support by opening a ticked (I could still log on the websites, not on the forums), and though at first they thought it was some misconfiguration of some sorts, they took things more and more seriously, and after three days considered the issue as a greater problem and transmitted it to the concerned teams.

24H later, I can log once again. So, kudos for the technical support team ! :smiley: :+1:

I must also thank you directly Darfeyn, as I used one of your posts in this thread to explain to them I thought this was a general issue. :star2:

I thought the issue was linked to the stalled avatars one, but that doesn’t seem to be the case though. It’d be interesting if you could try login-in the EU forums once again. :thinking:

It’s worldwide enough to affect both EU and US, dunno if the other forums are affected but one could guess so.

I would advice not loggin-out for US forums until you have confirmed you could log back in into EU first. :slightly_smiling_face:

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53

A bit late to answer too, not because of bugged forums-related reasons though.

Yeah, figured it was happening to others as well, after seeing the activity drop these past days. Glad it got resolved quickly, at least for us :slight_smile:

@FearrWhalins and @Dallarian got the issue too:

Don’t think both bugs were related, given that your and others’ avatars seem still stalled, and I retried login-in EU-Fr & En forums now they work again, but my avatars are still stalled here too - default SCII…

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54

Well that’s the bright side of me having such an inconvenience : I was able to get the support team realize rather quickly that this was a general forums issue (kudos to Zeadom in particular, who caught on fast) :+1: . So I can only suppose they fixed the issues for the others in the same time.

Yep, now that we know that fixing one doesn’t solves the other, it means that they probably weren’t linked. However, I first thought they were, and also used one of your messages in that thread to prove the technical agents this was a larger issue. So it’s likely that people managing the forum are now aware of the stalled avatars bugs as well. :bulb:

Also, dunno if you noticed, but since a few days after the patch 5.0.4 thread, they seem to have fixed the mismatches on the profile websites :

My avatar on the websites is now the Stars’ party, with a 14-14 batch reference :

And Kerrigan (which was previously the 14-14) is now 15-14 :

They also reuploaded the black avatars, as proven by Heromarines 2019’s avatar (8-16) now being displayed instead of the black one it used to be :

Also the missing portraits (which couldn’t be found anywhere), are now available. They were in batch 9 in fact :

So I think the websites team saw the thread, and successfully corrected the mismatches. Thumbs up of them. :+1:

So the only issue left to fix is the purely forums one “stalled avatars” bugs (which unfortunately prevents us from benefiting from the fixing of the mismatched avatars lists XD). But they should be aware of it by now, since I presented them the two issues. So maybe its chances to get fixed in the next months did increase a bit.

At worse, we could always get through technical support once again ; but as they just made the effort to fix the login bug I reported to them, I don’t feel it would be fair for me to pressure them about the stalled avatars at the moment. :slight_smile:

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55

First post updated : the stalled avatars fixed as well ?

Hey Darfeyn (and others), I’ve got good news : at least a part of the stalled avatars were just fixed !

To update it back, just :

  • Log out and back in.
  • Or delete your browser’s cookies, and log back-in.

That should be enough to refresh it. Even better, if you do change it ingame, check your battlenet player profile : as soon at the portrait refreshes into it (< 2 minutes), you can do the above refresh maneuvers to get it changed into the forums as well. :bulb:

Thanks for reporting the good news, guys !

As Dallarian said, that fix brings backs a bit more colors in our battlenet exchanges. But there’s also another bright side to it, it being that if will be more difficult for trolls to create an account imitating another (with the same name), as their newly created ones now won’t necessarily have the same portraits unlocked ingame. In other words, that means less smurfing/trolling on the forums ! :star2:

In fact the avatars fixed were stalled as well, there had been a second and third wave affecting about 50% of the profiles since the 22th of October. :mag:

If your avatar still is blocked on the default one after doing the above refresh maneuvers, do report it here and we’ll study your case. :slight_smile:

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56

So it appears there are still a handful of persons affected by a stalling bug, even if it was fixed for most of us. I wonder if there weren’t two different bugs, as the one that was fixed (and that affected most people) seemed not to respond to a workaround that previously had some effect :

Alright, so with Darfeyn we had a workaround that worked for a few guys. It’d be interesting if you could give it a try now that a part of the bugs has been squashed :

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57

Thanks @Trias for continuing to point out these very clear and visible bugs.

58

I’m not sure why you say I spread/propagated the bugs, all I did was delimit them as precisely as externally possible in order to speed up the fixing ; and inform some of the technical staff about it.

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59

Hey Trias!

Figured I drop in to say my stalled SCII portrait is fixed.

It wasn’t anything I did so it must have been fixed on the back end. Thanks for all the work you did on this!

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60

Ahhh, excellent news ! :partying_face:

Your avatar had been among the ones stalled for the longest time (if not the longest), so I consider that with your avatar returned we can consider the issue as mostly solved.

For all those still having issues, I’d recommend :

  • Log-out and back in from the forums or deleting their browsers’ cache/cookies.
  • In case that doesn’t work, changing their ingame avatars.
  • If that still doesn’t work, to post a message here in order for the tech support to notice (it’s possible some profiles have to be fixed manually).
    :mag_right:

Including changing your selected avatar ? I recall having checked yours a few days ago, and you had the classic SC protoss portrait.

I merely helped delimiting the issues, and catching the devs’ attention. The devs, from the bugfixing team and forum teams are the ones you’d want to thank. They’re the ones who gave to our forums their colors back.

So I’ll say it once again : thanks bugsfixing team, and thanks forums team ! :smiley:

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61

Ah yes. I actually did that. It was about 2 weeks ago, so possibly it affected it?

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