Yes, they changed multi-battle to *background* multi-battle.

If you want to watch the fights, you'd have to start manually, then turn on auto during the battle, then just click "next" at the end of each level

Great update. /s

Only Plarium could introduce an update that's worse than what we already had. 👎 I suppose the fix will be made available in the next forge pass.

Already sent feedback most players dont seem to enjoy this.  Will add this thread to it as well. 

I wouldnt hate it if background battles were truly background.  Itd be fine to climb DT in the background if I could then also go do Forest or something. 

Exactly.  

Here's to hoping background battles continue to get improved. 

I think they will, unfortunately I anticipate it being very slow. The foundation is set though, which is huge.  The programming complexity for adding to it without fooking something up is not trivial.  But things like adding other pvp (if u can do live no reason not for others) should be straightforward. 

Seems pretty pointless to not just replace background battles entirely with quickbattles instead

Well, this slow drawn out background battle development process allows them to give the impression they are adressing the "time-in-game" issue, while not actually doing much to improve it.