Patch 0.27.1: One Match At A Time

You could end up holding two live matches at once. A player hit this for real: they were matched against a human, landed on the team picker, and while they were still choosing, the game moved them into a different match against an AI Trainer. Every pick they had already made was thrown away. They played the Trainer match out, and when it ended they were dropped back into the first match, which had been sitting on its pick clock the entire time, with seconds left.
The worse ending is the one where you walk away instead. That first match runs its clock out and settles as a rated loss, with your energy already spent, for a game you never got to play.
Two separate faults produced that, and both are closed. A second live match is now refused before it can be created, so you can only ever hold one. And once you do have a live match, every route back into it, from the play screen, from the banner at the top of the site, or after a result lands, now sends you to the one you actually have to act on first: a match still in team selection outranks one that is already resolving on its own, and among those, whichever pick clock runs out soonest wins.
This was never only a ranked problem. Accepting a custom invite, or a tournament or guild brawl pairing landing, could produce the same state.

If nobody near your rating is queueing, the game promises you an AI Trainer after a short wait. Instead the SEARCHING overlay kept spinning, sometimes for over ten minutes. Two players reported it on the same day, one of them still watching it turn after almost nine minutes.
Last patch we said we had fixed this. We had fixed the wrong half. Moving the Trainer's team build off the matchmaking heartbeat was correct and it was not what was stalling you, so the wait came back and we only found out because you told us again.
The actual cause was that matchmaking shared a lane with the heavy background work that trains the AI, and a long training run could hold that lane for twenty minutes at a stretch. While it did, nothing moved: not the Trainer, not the search for a human opponent, not a match sitting past its own deadline waiting to be settled. Matchmaking now runs on its own, so no amount of training work can hold the queue up.

Assemble Your Team is the tutorial briefing where you build your own team on the real picker instead of watching a scripted fight. You would pick your squad, press BATTLE, watch the fight play out, and then get nothing. No result, no button, no sign the stage had counted. It had counted, on the server, silently, but the only way forward was the browser back button.
There is now a proper end panel under the arena: Victory or Defeat, and a Continue button that takes you back to the briefing screen so you can watch your progress move. It appears whether you won or lost, and it deliberately waits until the stage has actually been graded, so it never tells you something counted when it did not.

In that same briefing, the coach told you to pick three Fighters. The opponent it then put in front of you fields five, spending almost the whole mana cap. Anyone who followed the instruction exactly walked into the tutorial's own fight two bodies short and lost a lesson they were supposed to win.
The coaching now asks for five, and says the part that actually makes five possible: watch the mana counter and favour cheaper Fighters so they all fit. As before, you are not locked into it. BATTLE unlocks as soon as your team is legal, and Skip is always on screen.