POLL: Random Gem Spawners

I’d love for the devs to clarify as well. But as best as I can tell from my testing, it seems that the combo-breaker is kicking in immediately rather than after 5 turns, and then increasing the severity (%) each additional turn after that. Which would also be consistent with your findings about casts beyond the third, since using Sirrians 20%/turn but without the 5 turn start, it means by the fourth cast you’re at 80% “denial”.

@Versheenah, though you may feel otherwise, it isn’t possible to satisfy every player with our AI and RNG. There will always be cases where the AI is perceived as luckier than the player, even if this isn’t necessarily so, due to our perceptions of luck when playing video games.

We are working on improving the AI as I have said in many other threads. However, this takes time, care, and rigorous testing. It is not something that we will be able to move on quickly if we want to get it right.

Yes, difficulty settings are for that purpose. However, Guild Wars and ranked PVP are meant to be the more challenging parts of gameplay, they shouldn’t be as easy as Explore or Quest battles.

@Beanie42 @Mithran this combo breaker is working as intended, and how Sirrian outlined in February, on PC and Mobile. This will be coming to console with the next update.

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And what about the actual spawns? Combo breaker is all well and good, but as it stands you don’t even need a combo breaker for gem spawners below 10+ gems.
Currently troops like Jarl have super expensive common troop level damage spells, that even if they don’t fail catastrophically and deliver 20+ mana and multiple extraturns to the opposing side, struggle to even create as much mana for the user as they cost to cast on average.
Remember Jarl was a troop notorious for being able to loop itself, with spell chains of 3-4 casts being a common sight, where he not only got multiple extraturns but also managed to fill itself each time.
This is especially hurting them since now taking a simple 3-match with the following cascades results in more managain on average than it used to and is often a more efficient way to create mana than firing a spawner which is rather idiotic in my humble opinion.
Meanwhile no combo breaker or other shenanigans interfere with transformer loops in any way, who reign supreme even more so than they did before, which apparently is no problem.

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Isn’t that what this team is all about. What it should be? This is what their spells/traits allow them to do! Or should allow them to do, anyway. Why introduce such cards in the first place then?

In my experience even at the first cast with 15+ gems of the required color I still miss in the most ridiculous ways.

Lol, for that I would actually need to land an axtra turn first. But thanks for the tip! Maybe I will get a chance to try it.

As long as this is true random luck, it’s fine. Bad luck happens, good luck happens.

What you have done takes the luck, good or bad, out the equation. Now every unlucky gem spawn or cascade will be perceived as the game intentionally screwing over players.

Bad luck = players are angry at the RNG.
Your “bad luck” code = players are angry at the game itself.

Even from your perspective this algorithm is a mistake. Not to mention that the absolute majority of voters in this poll tells you so.

Are they not already? I’ve seen so many players dropping out of top guilds because GWs are too stressful.
I have guildmates who refuse to play GWs at all, even tho their losses would still give points to the guild, because GWs are torture for them.

Challenging is Casual at max difficulty. How about rewarding that more, with more gold, guild seals and more trophies, so that players who want torture had a reason to play it?

Or let ppl change difficulty in ranked pvp for more points and trophies!

Just please, please, please, think about what you guys doing and how it affects your community!

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sigh ugh

Though you might see things this way, doesn’t mean everyone does. Some players will see any luck against them as cheating, not as RNG or luck.

You also have to remember that this poll does not represent our playerbase as a whole, it is only captured the opinions of a very vocal and small part of our playerbase. We won’t dismiss the results out of hand, but we are also focussing on the big picture and how this alongside other changes will affect it.

We are always thinking about our community and how to make the game better and more enjoyable. That is why we have been investigating this issue so thoroughly and taking on board a lot of suggestions. Not all of these suggestions are viable, but we are very involved and invested in our community. I believe we have shown this many times in the past.

At any rate, a lot of the issues brought up in this thread are getting repetitive. To clarify, we are reading your responses and are hard at work doing what we can. There is nothing else to be announced at this time. When we have further information for everyone I will make an official post outlining everything.

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Before it was pretty viable, all it needed was a little tweak :smiley:

Now I’m thoroughly confused. Sirrian specifically stated last March that the combo breaker will be turned off as players progress pvp ranks.

Two different combo breakers. One stops excessive looping from the AI and player, which is the one we were discussing above.

The second one stops the AI from getting as many cascades as the player. This gradually decreases as you progress through the PVP ranks, making the chance of getting lucky more even between the player and the AI.

Please be aware that there is a difference with these between our platforms at the moment. By the time Mobile and Console receive the new update, everyone will be on the same playing field and there will be more consistency.

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Yeah, and you kinda cemented that with this algorithm.

Uhm… That is good. Only in this case it didn’t work that way. Kinda the opposite actually.

Thank you!

And please consider introducing difficulty to ranked pvp for more points/gold/trophies for those few who want the nightmare mode. So that the rest of us can enjoy the game again.

Also I want to say that I’m sorry for what you have to go through right now, Salty! And for my part in it. I’m very upset and I’m not expressing it in a plesant way.
Please get enough sleep and rest. We’ll wait.

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And won’t be so broken right? :smiley:

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This one? (thanks @Mithran for finding it)
Loop breaker?

Cascade breaker?
So these unfair battles (ie advantage for the player) are only ~30 first battles (ie attain PVP Rank 1) in the week? After that, the battles are completely fair?

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@Saltypatra if the loop mut be broken after up to 6 turns, how about adding a visible countdown for players to know when the 6 turns tick, and how about remove the fancy “Loop breaker” playing with a “break chance” all together and just re-make it so that it force-break after 6 turns?

so we would have even play field all the time with just one extra rule that 6 turns is max for looping gem creators

i prefer clear rules then a % chances going behind the scenes, rules behind the scenes that additionally are ever-changing are unfair and bad solution for a supposedly “Strategy” game!

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But doesn’t that undermine your attempt to increase difficulty?
Not to mention that this is unfair for the AI. It has to have the same chances as the player. Because right now no battles I win are real victories. The game is rigged!

And this combo breaker after 5 turns? I have it triggering on my first turn! Is this bad luck or “bad luck”?

Why can’t we have the true RNG again?

Or at the VERY least give as a turn counter to combo breaker trigger, like @Annaerith said.

The true RNG is better tho.

The cascade breaker should be off as soon as you are rank 1 in PVP (gradually in fact). There was a bug before the 3.0.5 which resulted in an advantage for the player:

We still didn’t have any details about this cascade breaker… I’m not sure the difference between 3.0 and 3.0.5 is only due to the correction of this bug. In all cases, it means that devs can well manipulate the board (ie gem drop) as they want…

I believe that there is also a bug with the loop breaker which triggers too early…

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Sorry, but I dont understand. I have about 250 invades this week with only 10 losses in PvP. Do you call this nightmare mode?

But before that the game is rigged. This is not okay!

Yes, and that’s cheating! Regardless of whoeve’r side the devs’ “luck” is on.

I just don’t understand why go through all that trouble to write a cheating code when RNG is easier and fair.

I call ranked PvP at Warlord III difficulty a nightmare mode.Which isn’t available atm so no one can pley it.

What I meant is that if the devs wanted to make ranked pvp more challenging they could introduce difficulty to it and make it worth more gold and trophies.

There are so many ways to make the game better without resorting to the cheating fake RNG. I’m forever bitter about it.

I’m sorry to hear that you feel that way @Versheenah, but structuring our AI and RNG this way brings more enjoyment for players at lower levels. It also gives new players time to understand our game before increasing the difficulty.

As I have said before we are still reviewing everything and working on making the gameplay experience as pleasurable as possible to a majority of the player base.

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Here is an idea.

After so many extra turns with a spawner, the gems explode for say 50% mana instead of giving an extra turn, that way you still get some of what you paid for without giving it all to the enemy.

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