I don’t think kraken is the problem, so much as trolls. They are broken. They generate way too much mana in my opinion.
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You have got to tighten your content up. This is the fifth essay you have dropped in this thread alone. You clearly have opinions, I just (and a good chunk of others) don’t have the time to read them. Try bullet points…one sentence bullet points.
As a counterpoint, I like reading Mithran’s posts. An executive summary, with the rest hidden under the “details” tag, would be helpful for people who aren’t like me, though.
7 Likes
I can do that.
The proposed change is bad because:
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Blob match resolution is the cause of severe spikes in match traits, including Kraken-Bombing - fix blob match resolution, fix match traits.
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Unity blob matches calcs continue to introduce a ton of mana into the game that both contributes to the swingyness of a match, which is still a big complaint on the forums, and overly rewards certain patterns.
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Only a few troops frequently cause this kind of blob match resolution in the first place, and it wasn’t even attempted to address these troops directly.
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This effectively nerfs every match trait below the level they were originally designed at, when there were only a few that stood out (and only because of blobs), and the rest will not likely be rebalanced any time soon.
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This is a sweeping change of long-established gameplay mechanics in order to fix a short term problem introduced in an engine port, which severely undermines confidence of the players that expect a somewhat consistent gameplay experience.
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The intent behind the change, to un-deadlock the meta since it relies heavily on exploiting these match traits right now, will just give rise to something else that can continue to exploit unintended Unity interactions, including blob matches, cascades, lack of target lock, etc.
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Its another half measure that doesn’t address the problem, and I’m sick of half measures.
Or even shorter - its a game wide mechanics change to address a symptom of an edge case interaction with a high collateral cost to every other use of said mechanics when the underlying issue is still present and still might need to be addressed in the future thus making the preliminary change entirely pointless.
I guess that is still pretty long. Everything else in my posts is mostly a statement of why this is the case, providing counterpoints to other arguments from those that think this will be a “good” change overall. Believe it or not, I often do go back and shorten these later, but that ends up taking even more of my time than just getting my thoughts out and sometimes I just need to get something off my chest so I can go on with my day, or get the ideas out before the thread has moved on.
15 Likes
Thank you 
As petty as it sounds, I find this last post a lot easier to digest. I also happen to agree with your assessment, though I think people may be overplaying the impact this change will have on the affected troops. Time will tell.
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Just saw this on my way back up. The way blobs worked in Adobe was supposed to be 2 mana per extra gem above 5 matched (with surge) but it was broken for clusters in the opposite direction that Unity is broken. The pattern like the one I posted above would have resolved as a single match 5 and a single match 4, for a total of 20 mana (with +3 bonus from banner/link) and two trait fires under the exact same conditions (instead of 33 mana and 3 trait fires). This is already a ton of extra mana, but on Unity you can also get four trait fires and 40+ mana from 8 gems, and 9 trait fires and 90+ mana from 9 gems. All of these on Adobe would have given a flat 10 mana, rather than the appropriate 14/16/18 with one trait fire. Long linked pieces that extend more than 4 gems in a straight line appear to resolve correctly and did somewhat on Adobe as well, its the small clusters where the problem occurs resolving a separate match 5 sharing several gems with another match that has already resolved.
2 Likes
It is not primarily the blob resolution which causes issues, it is the gem generation.
I am regularly seeing battles where a troll casts his spell with 5 or less green gems on the board, which results in 9 gems generation - spawning all within a 4x4 area. Everyone remotely familiar with stochastics can easily calculate the probability of this event, which is around 1/10 million. Fixing this would make the clinges devs are currently planning obsolete.
You cars gas tank has a leak! Increasing the gas tank capacity will not fix it, you need to fix the damn hole!
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I used Krystenax to remove all green from the board before and no green fell from the sky.
Troll cast and doubled nothing so only created 4 gems. All in a line.
Talk about bad luck.
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More common than I expected, actually. About 1 in 8000. Figured it’d be a lot rarer. (No less irritating when it does happen, though!)
There are 80 ways to create 4 gems in a straight line, and (64*63*62*61)/(4*3*2*1) ways to place 4 gems on the GoW board.
must be the “loop breaker” in action
Don’t know if it’s been mentioned but perhaps it can be programmed that the traits that “cause X effect on random enemy or ally troop on 4+ match” will hit on troops that don’t have the effect instead of hitting the same Barrier/Frozen/Enraged/etc troop over and over? Sort of like how Dragon Monk spell works. This alone could make troops like Jothar more viable, although Mab more annoying 
I just want to say I agree 100% with Mithran. If the devs would fix the blob resolution code, it would lead to less matches when gems are created, which would lead to less traits firing during a single turn. Multiple traits firing per turn was never a problem in Adobe, because we didn’t have this stupid blob code.
I sort of agree that trolls are also a problem. They were buffed because, in Adobe, they didn’t create enough mana/gems. If the blob code is not going to be fixed, then trolls need to be rolled back to how they used to be. I would prefer to fix the blobs rather than trolls.
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Nothing like managing to clear down to 5 green gems and have the troll cast and get a match 4, way too often.
I’ll say this for the devs’ solution: I would prefer it to nothing done at all, and imo it is appropriately harsh, because I never want to see another forest troll/kraken team again.
And beating my dead horse here, but give me a Restricted mode option and all this is no more necessary.
And I know half the devs would want that, because the game would be 2000 times easier to balance.
They said on the past couple of streams that they play the game at level 1000. I suspect what’s missing is them playing in the top GW battles. I think that’s where people really feel the pain/frustration.
1 Like
Can we also extend this post to, “how did they not see the visual issues in the 3.2 UI”?
Visibility is so bad I can’t believe they even put this out, it’s clearly not at a operational level. I understand a lot of work went into this, but the UI is making the player experience feel worse, it’s just simply not ready to go out at this current state.
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To be honest I was surprised Microsoft would approve the update with some of the visuals so bad.
I’m having trouble playing now because after a couple of battles my eyes are hurting.
2 Likes