I’m whining about this in Discord right now so let me be clear how I think it breaks down.
When I get a lot of extra turns in a row, it’s neat but doesn’t make me super excited. 99% of my game play is in Explore or PvP matches I expect to win. So 99% of my long streaks of extra turns aren’t exciting, because it means I win in 8 seconds instead of 10.
When the CPU gets a lot of turns in a row, it is infuriating. Since I’m 99% in games I expect to win, this tends to feel like something is being taken away from me unfairly. It’s especially punishing in the new events because I can’t retreat without losing what little prizes I’ve accumulated.
So, TL;DR for the devs:
If I get 80 extra turns, I barely remember it.
If the computer gets even 3 extra turns in a row, I get angry. Especially in events.
So I wish I could try a game mode where free turns are capped at 3. It’d be nice if we optimized things away that make players very frustrated when the CPU gets it but only moderately happy if they get it. That’s a lopsided deal. Even if the AI isn’t cheating, and the RNG isn’t biased towards streaks, we have a situation where if I get equal treatment compared to the CPU I am angry and feel like it’s unfair.
I say this on the tail of 3 Invasion events today involving the CPU getting at least 10 free turns. I am not exaggerating. During one game I made a move, left the iPad on the counter to pour my coffee, and when I came back the CPU was still making moves. There is no amount of preparation, skill, or strategy that can overcome that kind of thing.
(Also this excludes situations like ridiculous Hellcat teams where it’s expected you’ll get almost infinite turns regularly. Still, I’ve had an interesting number of games where the board treated yellow/red as if they were diseased and I lost because 8 different times I could only make a single 3-match with Alchemist or Hellcat.)
The last sentence is a really good point about gaming psychology that I hope the devs have given thought to.
As someone who loves (loves) looping teams, I am terrified of how I would fare in your proposed game mode. Particularly since transformers can set up multiple 4- or 5-matches, which you might be forced to leave on the board.
Invasions/Raids are SORT OF a taste of that. There aren’t many creature types or kingdoms that can support consistent looping. This is where my current round of salt really comes from.
In PvP, I don’t see this kind of looping so much because my teams are designed to either A) Win/Lose within 30 seconds or B) loop ridiculously. It does grate on me in Explore, last night I had a ton of matches run 30s or a minute longer because I had to wait on one last CPU opponent to finish making 8 moves so I could kill it.
You could just have it be “no extra turns.” There would still be lucky cascades and huge mana fill opportunities from transformers and exploders, but none of the helpless frustration of watching the AI take an endless turn.
I wouldn’t miss Goblins one bit, and freeze would probably have to change, but it would be more strategic again for sure. And it would slow down games, which would help with the “problem” of players gaining resources too quickly.
Well…it guess my points have been mentioned before, but still I’ll reiterate some:
raid boss, in my opinion, are the worst game mode yet. People kept complaining that meta teams in PVP and GW are boring, but this one is even worse. You’re facing basically the same team every time for the whole weak. I don’t know who thought boss’ ability to one-shoot any troop disregarding barriers was a good idea, but it’s really not. There is little strategy involved in a game with overcharged opponents when just a tiny bit of bad luck (we get quite a bunch of that) makes you certainly lose the game and one certain hero weapon is your only reasonable choice nine times out of ten;
Special weapons are utterly useless. I can’t think of any person in their sane mind using random spawner in a game where one slightly astray move costs you the fight. Moreover, can any of these weapons be used realistically outside raid boss game mode?
invasions are a bit better, however, not by much. They, too, get more boring than any meta-defense team in PVP and we don’t really have much of a choice to counter it;
rewards for individual fights in both raid boss and invasion are much too little and should receive a significant boost, preferably more boost with every battle a player wins;
bounty…if the rumors are true and both shop prices and amount of points to get the rewards will be increased then, I think, this mode is simply not worth investing any gems (well, maybe lowest tier to get bounty captain). The way things stand right now Tier III is the most I would advise any player to go for. If things get more expensive…well, just f*** it and buy as little as you can;
orbs…of growth (especially one level growth) and traiting are virtually useless to anybody except beginner players (and beginner players are not likely to get them anyway). Orbs of clans and ascension are okay;
gnomes…while drop rates of vault keys are fine during gnome events, the vault rewards are certainly not, so me, for example, I’m saving my vault keys for the time being. While, with effort, I’m able to live with rewards like 100 souls and 2 minor traitstones when encountering gnomes in explore, those things are completely unacceptable in gnome vault. Traitstones in the vault should be no less than runic, souls in the vault should be no less than 1000 and gold in the vault should be no less than 10k, I suppose (yes, I also was a beginner player once, but even then small amounts of souls, gold and minor traitsones was not a problem for me);
apart from the things mentioned above…when can we expect Arena issues to be addressed? Dawnbringer question is one thing, but also troop pool hasn’t been updated for ages. And why are we facing hero weapon with a team of random troops instead of hero weapon with troops that particular player had chosen for his team? My brother once showed me a screenshot of him facing my hero in the Arena and, needless to say, none of the troops in my team was what I had chosen for that particular weapon: they were just some random selection.