I’ll start off by saying this isn’t a hate thread, this is just my observation and wanting to know if it’s just me.
Just thought I’d ask see if this is something that is affecting anyone else or if it just seems to be my insanely bad look.
After the nerf to gem spawns, Guild Wars has been hell. While I am not relying on them, I seem to be getting consistanty steamrolled against teams that are using gem spawners.
Does anyone else feel like the AI has no problem looping with gem spawners as recently, due to having to change up my own team to make it more reliable, I seem to only be losing to looping teams that are heavily spawn related and on most occasions as soon as they get it started, by the time they have finished they have looped enough times to have taken more than half my team out or more often than not, 3 or a complete team wipe.
Just thought I’d see if anyone else might be seeing the AI not be affcted by this bad gem spawning at the moment.
And also, I am no expert so feel free to explain but after realising this nerf was too much, why can’t they just change it back? I’m sure there must be a reason otherwise it would have been sorted by now I would imagine so I’d be curious to know.
My appologies, I don’t spend that much time on the forums and scrolled down quite far and couldn’t see anything related.
I would appreciate if someone could link them and feel free to close this.
Thanks
Right now I am at the stage of data gathering for this. I am writing down games and how many each side gets 4/5 matches from gem spawning or from cascading. So far AI is in favour, but I recorded only about 10 games so that’s not even close. But soon I will come back with the results, just gimme time
The devs really need to make an official post about what is happening here, because I see people have this impression a lot.
What happened was never intended to be a nerf, at least not on PC/Mobile. The spawner influencing code has been in for over two years now on PC/Mobile. When they redid the code for the Unity port (since Console never had it before), the code was inverted, basically moving the opposite of how it should have and moved gems toward each other instead of away. It was also readily apparent that the code was active far more often than previously divulged information would have led us to believe, as any extra turn, whether it was from a swipe, converter, or spawner, would cause visible and documented evidence. When they fixed the inversion, things still didn’t feel right. Devs say the code is statistically where it should be to be in line with previous version, most players say it is still far more unreliable. I believe impressions have been colored so strongly by the week that spawners were auto-linking plus the now more widespread knowledge that they are messing with them that it is coloring everyones opinions on how reliable they were in the past. To me, they have always been hugely unreliable until spawning 9 on a decent board, which is about a 50/50 coin flip, and getting slightly more reliable the more gems you spawn (with having more gems of that color on the board to begin with past a certain point mattering far less than how many were created). They can sometimes still “feel” worse now, but whether they actually are is a matter that is still up for debate, and other Unity changes, like more generous mana calculation and streakier cascades could be contributing, as a “critical miss” will cost you a lot more even if the enemy doesn’t use the mana color you are creating at all.
Here is the thread I made about discussing what is happening with gem spawners, with a poll for how people feel about them:
There have been a number of threads on the topic, but their titles aren’t exactly indicative of it really. Also they get intermingled with the AI “luck” factor threads. Here are a couple, but there are more, just look for threads that seem to have a “rantish” kind of title and you’ll probably find them
I don’t know the exact reasons, but it started from the move to Unity, and shifting to the same base as console. Something hear caused an issue where gem spawns were matching almost every time. I believe because they weren’t overwriting their own colour, or dual spawners weren’t overwriting any of their possible colours (eg blue/brown wouldn’t overwrite blue or brown, even with the other colour) but I’m not 100%, I don’t use gem spawners much myself, and never really have. So to counter this the spawners were nerfed.
As to why they can’t go back? Honestly I’m not sure, but I’m guessing it has to do with how the code interacts between Unity and AdobeAIR (which mobile is still on). Unity never had the AdobeAIR code, and it might be difficult to replicate that code in Unity, hence why we can’t go back to what it used to be. Maybe we could go back to what console had/has, but I’m not sure how that code would interact with AdobeAIR and Mobile since it never existed there in the first place.
These are all my own speculations however.
EDIT:
I’m really interested in seeing these figures when you finish them, I’m a sucker for numbers Which reminds me, I’ve got my own AI Kerb numbers to continue to gather on…
EDIT2: Looks like @Mithran sniped me with a similar post as I was typing.
For what I see, and I see it quite a lot, a Troll spammer (double the number of gems+4) is not reliable, not even when I have 12+ gems already on the board. When it is supposed to be useful?
No, dual spawns still overwrite their other colors on the PC/Unity version. What happened was the code intended to “streak break” spawners after they had cast multiple times in a row was instead moving them together. Basically, you could trigger auto-linking spawners if you took an extra tun from any source, then just spam gem spawners until everything dies. I have a ton of video documentation of this happening, like being able to convert with Valk and loop Wight and Kraken, or popping Mercy then Mantis looping until the enemy team died from Aspect Plague and cascades (40+ turns). If you, for example, casted mantis first without getting an extra turn, it had a normal, seemingly actually random, chance to miss, which is why some people didn’t notice how broken it was. But if it did hit that one time, you could chain it forever, with basically the only chance of it stopping is that a dual color did overwrite something that was already lined up for a match 4/5 on its other color or you didn’t spawn enough of that color and the existing gems were far spread apart.
Again, I really wish the devs were more clear as to the fact that spawners were broken for about a week.
Please keep in mind that the code is supposed to make spawners more and more unreliable as they cast more and more, but it has been shown that spawners might actually become less reliable after taking any extra turns. Your data therefore might be skewed if you are not considering extra turns taken (both from spawner casts, and from other sources). For cascades, the “combo breaker” code is only supposed to be on for the AI, only in certain situations (reduced or off in PvP), and only activates if the player hasn’t already taken a bunch of extra turns.
Personally, “raw” casts with even low amount gem creators feel more reliable to me right now than they have ever been in the past, even with (or especially with) low gem amounts on the board. Past that, they quickly become terrible. They still may be tweaking it, though.
Based on these kinds of responses, it appears they don’t want to go back.
I’m still hoping the tweaks continue far enough where I actually use a gem spawner again. Right now they’re just too risky, unless you’re the AI. Then it’s like Christmas morning every battle
It’s fine if it’s fair for both sides, but it’s stupid if I can’t get a single match, but whenever at AI does it they seem to get a 6 match cascade, spell me and follow up with another 5 turn cascade. It’s gotten to be pretty standard since they switched.
Personally I find these threads get a bit confusing mainly because a lot of posts don’t specify the platform they’re playing on. Things are very different right now, so that info will help to make sense of the posts, and figure out where the problems actually are. Anyway, @Mithran already provided a bunch of info, so I’ll try not to repeat but only post additional info.
Some have mentioned that “ninja fixes” aren’t possible, and I’ve also seen posts that “no code updates have gone out, so things couldn’t have changed”. From my research, the game is using a combination of code (which requires an update) and settings data (which is received every time you login). These settings are what appear to have been used to fix the initial inverted cascade problem on PC. However, the initial change made things go from “always” extra turns to “never”, so they reduced the setting. The problem is that both mobile and PC seem to use the same settings, so when you fix one you break the other. Right now things seem to be at a comfortable middle ground for both, which unfortunately means neither works really well (although neither works as horribly as in previous iterations).
As for getting an immediate dev response or a quick fix, I’m not too expectant, nor do I think it’s the best course. Until mobile gets onto Unity, there will continue to be these sorts of discrepancies and problems, and fixing them will likely be really difficult (since changes likely affect the platforms differently). I think the best course is what I believe they are doing, which is working as quickly as possible on the mobile Unity port, after which they can properly fix things once permanently for all platforms. It does suck in the meantime, since things aren’t working as well as we’d like. But if they divert their attention for a couple weeks to fix some of these things, other issues will likely pop up too, and we’ll remain unhappy (just for something different). And following that thought process, there isn’t a lot for the devs to report in the meantime other than what they have, which is “working on stuff” and “soon”.
I know this isn’t the rosiest picture, or what most want to hear, but I think we just need to suck it up for a month or so (I’m guessing at the time-frame, nothing official). Despite the current situation, I’m pleased with the direction the devs seem to be going in, and I’m very optimistic where the game is heading over the next couple months.
