Combo Breaker = Phone Breaker

Have it apply for both sides. (Player and AI)
Or get rid of it completely…
That is all. (On that matter)

Side note… It’s depressing af to see allegedly legit players with win steaks currently in the hundreds. But I can’t win more than 30 matches without the AI getting super “lucky”. Is the game really scaled/balanced that poorly?
Idk what I can do as a player to prevent Infernus casting 3 times in a row to take out a full team. (Even if he was frozen or silenced… He’d just recover and then cast).

My apologies to those that enjoy this ridiculousness. But when you mix this with bugs it’s easy to identify why so many players quit the game after a year or 2 of playing. The only thing worse than the present balance in difficulty is Recruiting players in a broken global chat.

Help your present players retain players by doing a better job making sure we are playing the same game… Under the same rules. I know it’s easier before level 1k but that’s whatever. If you’re going to make it super hard… then make it super hard for all players over 1k. Just be consistent.
My opinion probably won’t influence change. But at least I did something rather than just watch this lunacy exist. :v:

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Our friend @Amadan said it so well…

@Saltypatra too!!!

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Oh shucks, thanks @Eika.

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Lol…
When the devs no longer are more interested in hearing what they want to hear. Than the actual state of their game. I’ll be here for you all.
Clearly I’m just wasting my time by mentioning twice today… Infernus was able to cast 3 times in a row in separate matches. The combo breaker was made to prevent that kind of luck from happening.

NO ONE CARES so clearly I shouldn’t either. Message received.
Look at your present PvP leaderboards…I mean come on man. It’s a joke.

I care a lot about our game, as do all of our developers. That is why we make Gems of War, and love doing so. I have spoken at length in the past about our AI and how it doesn’t cheat against the player. We have audited our code several times, and are constantly working on ways to make it better.

In games with RNG there are always outliers. From your post it seems that you are misinterpreting how our combo breaker works, or believe that it works more often and differently to how it does.

At any rate, I wish there was more for me to say. However, there isn’t, as we have looked into this several times.

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Allow me to misinterpret you once more.

So, what you’re saying is, your game is RNG and luck based?

I’m seeing some predominance of a guild, but only one player with a large number of battles undefeated. In such cases, it’s very possible that something is not right, but could still be something the devs can’t detect on their end.

Could be an exploit related to certain procedures in the game, and you seem concerned that you are not being favored by something you think is favoring others… I don’t want to sound dismissive about your problem, but i think there are better things to do with your time than being worried with this particular matter for this particular reason.

@Doordash_Support, largely, yes. As such, we don’t have pity timers for chests, etc.

However, our AI is easier to beat at lower levels, and scales in difficulty as a player progresses through the game. So the AI is unluckier than the player at lower levels, and eventually moves towards a more even playing field.

flips desk ALL ALONG I THOUGHT I WAS PLAYING A SKILL BASED PUZZLER!

:smirk: My work here is finished.

@Doordash_Support, may I recommend sudoku?

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Nah, not enough cash shops. I need something to bitch about.

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Yep… Just bad luck for me… Taken hours after the original thread.



Because Nyxx recovered from freeze and the exact right time for the AI. I went from winning the match. To losing the match. But hey it’s just GW bracket 1. No biggie…

Y’all give huge rewards for success in gems of war. But (I still feel) y’all don’t care if we’re given the same exact same opportunity for success. The same Dark Souls AI that I’ve been dealing with all day followed me into my wars. The only thing I could do to prevent being “unlucky” was to just not do my matches in hopes that that I’m more “lucky” tomorrow. I mean WT… literal…F…

The AI and RNG does not work exactly the same for every player after level 1k. It goes through times where it’s more difficult and easier for certain players. It’s not individual based. It’s relative to circumstance. I think the game would be way more balanced if that wasn’t the case. If it was the same difficulty all the time. You’ll have a lot less people feeling like they get cheated. Or making it feel like a slot machine game.

One look at current PvP top 20 clearly demonstrates how uneven the playing field is.

I just want to be able to do a battle or a match under the exact same rules as a player at the same level as me. That’s all. And if a player is cheating… They should be banned regardless of things like vip levels.

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I must. Because I thought the combo breaker was supposed to prevent a glob of red Mana appearing on my screen to guarantee Infernus a next turn. But if it happens once… It’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again in the same turn for the AI. I get it’s a red storm but that’s ridiculous with 2 moves in a row resulting in a 16 red Mana match. (I’m serious… That many gems were matched from the cascade).

Y’all did something to prevent from that happening during Doom Storms too many times in a row. But left all the other storms alone it seems.

Not quite right. It progressively lowers the chance for an extra turn glob to appear after having received several extra turn globs in sequence. Speaking Infernus, after juggling extra mana globs five times, there’s a cumulative 20% chance for the next one to get prevented until the turn is passed on to the opponent. Numbers might be slightly off, been a while since I read about it.

I guess my first response to this thread was hostility. The way it’s presented reads as a nasty, “I’m not winning enough, someone as important as me shouldn’t be losing so much, I’m really jealous of the people who are winning and OBVIOUSLY they’re cheating because I’m smarter than they are” etc.

The game isn’t out to get you, awryan. The devs have a hard enough time tackling visible game issues I can’t bring myself to believe they have a custom-written module that sabotages the RNG against specific, hated players and gives favorable RNG to a chosen few.

It’s more likely the people you are chasing have figured out an unintuitive tactic that is very effective at producing wins. It could be as simple as, “I play 1 trophy matches more than you think”, letting the sheer volume of games played push them above people who play less reliable 3t matches for fewer hours per day. It might be some great speed team you just haven’t thought of. You are a leader in the community, and a well-recognized person who built one of the top guilds. I bet if you reached out to some of these people and tried to make legitimate friends with them, they’d eventually reveal their secrets to you. It’s a careful balance. If you look like you plan to ditch them once you learn their magic, it won’t work. It helps to project a kind of niceness and urge to be friends with anyone, saving your sharper tongue for certified jerks. I’m working on that, too.

But I think there is a salvageable topic here: this game has too much of its outcomes based on variance, and not even pleasing variance.

Part of why having so much variance in the game works is most matches are very low-stakes. I don’t give a flip if I lose a bunch of PvP games, so long as I lose them fast. I just want to match gems and get rewards. I’m not aiming at those leaderboards so my win rate is an afterthought. So things like Goblin Teams or occasional losses to huge cascades don’t bother me there. Even in pet rescues, the scaling stats are unfair but manageable because I can try again for a whole hour without penalty.

But it isn’t so fun when there are stakes. In Raids/Invasions, sigils are on the line. In GW, a loss can be a serious setback for your guild. These are places where high variance bad things are exceptionally frustrating when they hit.

Yesterday, in GW, I was trying out a new team. Discussing my teams with my guild made me feel like I had some weaknesses in my Blue team, so I made some adjustments. I made one match on a bad board. Then the CPU proceeded to make 12 4 matches (no skulls, no cascades) in a row. Umberwolf fired off. I made a single 3 match. BOTH death marks triggered, leaving me with 2 troops on turn 3.

That’s some bad dang luck. It’s happened before in PvP, I’m sure, but in a GW I’m not playing like PvP: I’m thinking about every move, double-checking the board, etc. By turn 3 in this game, I’d already lost. I had zero options to retaliate. This is the kind of game people pretend Ubastet creates every time.

Other behaviors that are frustrating as heck when they happen to the CPU, and I notice especially in GW:

  • “Oh look, Death Mark/silence only lasted 1 turn!”
  • “Oh look, I can go 9 turns without Death Mark triggering or dropping!”
  • “I’ll just have silence wear off immediately, make 6 cascades into a 4-match, then cast anyway.”

That’s what I see in awryan’s complaints. He hit a streak of bad luck. In PvP, it happens, and we all kind of shrug it off. But he’s put a lot of dang work into his guild and represents himself as an expert on the game. Taking a handful of GW losses at the hands of “bad luck” rather than “bad strategy” makes him feel like he looks bad. He doesn’t want to look bad, and probably deep down feels like blaming “bad luck” makes it seem like he’s hiding insufficiencies. He’s not. I find a lot of GW defense teams focus particularly on these high-variance gambles, because GW offense teams can typically obliterate any lower-variance defenses.

I want to repeat that. I think a lot of GW defense teams rely on death mark and devour over more reliable tactics like damage/instakill because it pays off. The best PvP meta is likely to go 0-7 or worse week after week. Put something like Umberwolf with a really low chance of 2 instakills at bat, and you’ll see it more like 1-6 due to the people who had bad luck.

I don’t know how to fix it. I do think we should, as a game, move away from effects like Death Mark. I prefer effects like Poison or Burn that at least have Cleanse as a counter. I also think, in sigil-based modes, free turns should be limited to 1 with the exception of abilities. I think it’s fair that one 4/5 match per turn should give you a freebie. I think it’s fair that if your team has “gain an extra turn” abilities you should get those on top of the match-based turns. But unless a team is specifically built around free turns, I don’t think any GW team on offense OR defense should be able to cast Infernus 3 times on one “turn” as awryan described.

I’d be pleased as punch to play GW without free turns at all. It is still a heck of a turn to have Ragnagord blow the entire thing up and fill 3 of your troops. It’d be nice if you actually had to worry about what your opponent does in response, instead of knowing it’s statistically likely you get to shoot them with a giant troop first.

We have game modes that act like this is a game of skill. It is still, largely, a game of luck. That’s why awryan is mad.

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This is developer’s choice as apparently they want completely random everything with tiny adjustments. Instead, it is quite possible to filter out low probability events.

For example, can you get a board with zero brown or any other color? Yes, sure, happens rarely but it happens. The chance of that is about 3 x 10E-5 which is 3 in 100,000. This is an extremely low probability which might be filtered out. The starting board with less than 3 of a color can be set to redrawn. Same for board with more than 18. Similar filtering can be applied to other rare probability events. Margin can be set somewhere about 1:10,000 so as not to interfere with mythic pulling from glory chests. :wink:

It might sterilize the game a little bit, sure. To avoid that, it might be possible to still allow these things to happen if the random decides it wants to go for a rare event streak. For example, the board is redrawn and if second redraw also has less than 3 of a color, it is permitted.

Now, combo breaker seems to be a bit of a semi-functional. Certain things don’t trigger it and even things that should trigger it sometimes don’t. And there are multiple glitches with turns not counting, mana not gained, damage not applied, etc etc. I’m sure developers will try to fix these eventually.

I also think that awryan sees something that is not there. Winning streaks might have come from those who played this game from early days on when closing the game window when you are losing did not count as a loss and it was indeed possible to accumulate infinite number of wins without any losses. Or people consistently go for 1 trophy matches. Or maybe there is an undisclosed/unknown exploit in the system. But these seems like very unlikely IMO.

I’m aware of the old days. That’s why I made sure to mention that these win streaks are current. As in actively happily every week since at least 3.5 was released. I’m speaking of “currently undefeated in X amount of battles”


Not “longest win streak”.
Feel free to check out the current PvP leaderboards for more information.

Out of top 15, I found only a single “perpetrator”. IMHO, might be a glitch with the system. All the rest are perfectly normal.

Might be worth investigating, IDK. But yes, indeed, something is strange there as the numbers are really weird. :slight_smile:

Otherwise looks pretty clean IMHO. If really making effort and switching teams and cherry picking opponents, I can probably pull off something around 200 in a row. More than that is unlikely. Still might be possible, IDK.

We had a guild mate with something around 800, that was the highest one I ever saw after that closing game thing was fixed. But he was really really obnoxious and slow. And did not use single colored teams in guild wars of course.

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That makes total sense. If you use the perfect counter to the defense. It’s very possible. You won’t make the top 20 in PvP that way though. :grinning:
The highest streak I had was 120 over a 3 day period since the last patch. So I think you’re right about the 200. I have no clue how the difficulty thing works. But it seems like we aren’t all playing against the same difficulty in AI. Which for all players over 1k…I think we should. Regardless of guild, play style, or activity level.
Yes I’m mainly venting. But it’s mainly cause I love this game and I’m severely frustrated by it. So no I won’t quit it. But I can easily see why so many do quit it. Which makes my game life, and many other guild managers, way more difficult as well. Too many little issues add up to a big issue. And to me… Retention should be the #1 goal to be a profitable company.

  • it should be a balance. If the game is riddled with mechanical bugs. Make the game easier than normal for all. If there isn’t a single bug that effects game play (if that’s possible that is). Make the game difficult for all end gamers.

Salty… This isn’t an even playing field. For the 4th day in a row the AI has been ridiculous.

  • I cast Divine protector. Got an extra turn. Kill 2 troops.
  • AI makes a move.
  • I cast my Infernus. It does damage but no extra turn.
  • AI casts it’s Infernus 4 times in a row!
  • I’m not dead yet. Am able to take down one troop. Make one move. The AI makes a move and gets 3 moves from the Cascades resulting in skull damage. I’m dead.

    If the goal for the AI is to make me want to not play PvP then it’s successful.
    I don’t care if you want to call it luck factor or combo breaker. Whatever it is… It’s broken for me and I’m sure a lot others. While the other side of the player base is getting all the favorable luck drops it seems. Which means it’s probably looking in the code like it’s balanced when it’s really not. I wouldn’t care so much if this wasn’t also a guild wars week where I’m getting the exact same Dark Souls type difficulty against me in my GW matches. I made a build against today’s Paragon. Every single member of my guild that used that build beat the Paragon. Except for me. After 16 months of GW do I all of sudden suck at it? It may be the first yellow day loss I’ve ever had.

TL:DR… If there is AI luck. Then there’s also AI super natural. Of which I’m currently cursed this week. While others seem to be blessed by it. I pray, to the @Sirrian, looking down from above. Look into this matter before my only relief from my curse is to sacrifice my account.