Home News Don’t get Steamed about losing your Duels 2013 progress!

We all know that Steam can be hair-rippingly frustrating wonky sometimes. And we also know Stainless Games’ Duels of the Planeswalkers series has had its fair share of bugs, crashes, and general problems.

So it should come of little surprise that many users of the latest digital incarnation of Magic: the Gathering have had their profile wiped, effectively erasing all their campaign and card unlock progress. In fact, I’m pretty sure it happened to our own writer, Binerexis.

Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that if you’ve already lost your data, you’re proper fucked. The good news is that if you haven’t yet had your cards/decks/happiness wiped, you can prevent it. One of our readers, Dylan, wrote in with some info he found on the Steam forums:

Love your channel and long time viewer. But enough sycophancy. Let me regale my story of woe and terror.

So I was excited when the game game out, unlocked all my decks, trimmed them down, play tested and changed some more and got a few good win streaks under my belt while learning to hate goblins.
Same as most people. Then I get home y’day after a hard slog at work, open a beer and set myself to play some duels and concentrate on a full control version of OB.

Everything is gone. All my unlocks, ally my avatars etc.

Now after I dried my tears I searched the forums to see if there was a fix. I was elated to find out there was… The details are in this thread http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2832104&page=2. Basically your local machine stores your local profile. This holds things like how many cards youve unlocked etc.

I thought maybe you might be able to educate other duelists as you and daisho seem to be the cornerstone of the dotp community. I also thought it might be useful to have a file on hand for other poor souls who this might happen to.

Anyway, love your videos,
Dylan

Gee, thanks Dylan! And to think I always assumed bad things about people named Dylan, ever since that one incident in Fresno.

Anyway, Dylan and the rest of the Steam posters eventually discovered you can’t really import other peoples’ files, but you can preemptively back up your own. In the discussion, Bademeister explains where to find the file you need to duplicate right now:

your hd & dir where you have steam installed”\Steam\userdata\”yourSteamprofilenumber” \97330\remote\”yourSteamprofilenumber”.profile

for example my profile file is located at e:\steam\userdata\345722345\97330\remote\345722345.profile

Hopefully this terrible fate won’t befall any of you, though it is possible to avoid. It seems that logging into Steam and/or DOTP on multiple computers is what wipes your data, overriding your profile that’s full of unlocks with one that’s tabula rasa. While this may not be comforting for players who regularly use multiple PCs, the fact that there’s a workaround should be of some use.

Thanks Dylan for the heads up… and good luck to all the duelists out there!

15 replies to this post
  1. Funny thing. One of my decks keeps resetting the last five cards I have unlocked. I still got all of my other unlocks but still. It’s not really a big deal, I’m not playing Peacekeepers at all (I’m not into those token-thingys…). Hope it won’t happen to me, but glad there is a solution!
    And btw: More magic from you! ;)

  2. I use peacekeepers a fair bit, and get a decent win ratio out of it using minimal tokens, I don’t use any captains calls, or the Crusaders of Odric, though I keep the Call to Arms and a few creatures that generate tokens on hitting the field/death. Tokens is the obvious setup, but by no means the only one :)

  3. This happened to me a couple days ago, thanks for telling me how to prevent this in the future, as I’m still trying to recover and don’t want that to happen again.

    On another note, you had mentioned about a month ago that you would be holding a Deuls PC tournament on Youtube and when I asked on facebook. However, it still hasn’t come up yet. Should I just be more patient, or is this because of lack of interest via the fanbase or something else?

    • Sorry for the delays. I was originally hoping to do it at the same time as the DLC for a little more variety. I am almost certain it will be coming out in about 2 weeks!

  4. I made a copy of the file to safeguard my account and it DID NOT work. I had the backup file, lost all my content, replaced the new bad files with what i had and I still have ALL of my decks gone. So I don’t think this works unless I did something wrong (it was pretty straight forward so I don’t think I did.) I never tried a different platform either, ALWAYS on the same PC.

  5. All my campaign just got swiped. All the deck keys I bought with MS points still are valid. I re-unlocked all the decks again. Time to restart it I suppose. I was so close to Balos in the Revenge campaign too. :(

  6. […] If balance has been improving over time, support from Stainless hasn’t gotten a lick better. Sure, some of the most obvious bugs and exploits have been eradicated over time, but lots of issues remain. Players have been able to gain access to NPC-only decks, trolls can lock opponents out of their pause timers, and – oh yeah – the game’s entire save file can be deleted for no reason at all. […]

  7. This is F#cking outrageous! 191 hours played, wiped, deleted, purged, cleansed!

    Should we all demand a refund from the developers (I think it’s Wizzard)? That isn’t more then fair, is it? Since it’s a bug, i believe, within their game and not Steam itself.

    What am i to do? I am so god damn – excuse my french – mad and disappointed right now it’s ridiculous.
    Why do people put money in the hands in the likes of these? We have paid for a service, we have paid for something. This should not happen.

    Is it possible to fix it if you’ve already been a victim? Except from asking for a friends local files. Heck! It is not all that have an IRL friend that plays the MTG 2013…

  8. After much frustration (and a failure to find a solution in the official directions), I stumbled on a workaround in a forum, and it’s doing the job so far. Basically, as long as I edit and save a deck after acquiring new cards, my new cards are also saved. If not… they vanish.

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