Infinite Roping in Ranked and Drafts

[WeGoblinFolk]

I've been running into a glitch (?) where my opponent runs down their turn timer, but instead of using an extension or auto-passing, it just... stays at 0 seconds. Forever. I don't know if it's a good old fashioned server error or an exploit somebody found (and subsequently spread the word about) but I was curious if there were any other players noticing this.

All the forum threads about it (that I can find, at least) are from 2-3 years ago, and the only info given by WOTC is bot responses telling people to post their error logs in different threads.

The reason I'm suspicious of it being an exploit is because the infinite timer happens 2/3 games in draft events, maybe 1/4 in Ranked, and I have yet to see it in regular/casual play.
The reason I think it could be just a server connection issue is that, half the time, my opponent is about to win anyways.

[Berserkr]

1/4 of ranked games get to zero timer and just sit there forever? I'm guessing if it was 25% of games in ranked not finishing at all there would be a lot more people complaining about it, I think you're reaching a little bit there
There's no doubt in my mind that this game runs like crap most of the time, is horribly optimized and a lot of people play on mobile so It wouldn't surprise me if 25% of all people playing ranked would have connection issues, but never recovering at all?
I mean there's always a chance someone could be hacking/using some cheat to make the game just stall and never use their timer extensions but......

[DontMisunderstand]

I had that happen yesterday too. Had a 3 hour long game where my opponent was stuck at 4 extensions the whole time, but was maxing out his timer on every phase of every turn. And then the match ended in an error, it said "unexpected match conclusion error. Winner: draw" as a popup after booting me back to the menu.

[Berserkr]

3 hours? Man I thought my 45 min matches in Historic were pretty epic

[Harmonica]

Make sure that you haven't been disconnected from the game server whenever you or your opponent get shown the rope and you can't see your opponent highlighting anything or emoting. Test if your internet is still up, restart Arena, etc (it will rejoin the match in progress). Arena does a poor job of checking if you're connecting, even if the server has booted you temporarily. Don't wait until you potentially burn your own timers (ie, you might see opponent burning rope but actually they're waiting for you).

That aside from time to time you might get people who are genuinely messing with the timer. It's pretty rare these days. If you get back into the game after restarting and they're still infinitely roping then try and concede, and go to the Report Bug option in the pause menu, and send that log to Wizards under report conduct (https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com/hc/en-us/requests/new).

[ZAP]

Seen it 2 or 3 times. You have to act quickly and relaunch the game. Don't wait around.

Right now I'm getting crashes that started with having to log out/in every time or the game is stuck looking for a previous match. Not worth launching and logging out/in again just to finish a game wasn't exactly thrilling so far anyway. Happens on steam and standalone, reinstalled both.

[ZAP]

Fixed the "searching for active match" by deleting a temp file in users/appdata if anyone else has the problem.