So, I recall recently reading a tread about the combo breaker not working right, and I certainly have felt the AI’s combos becoming rather insane since the last update.
I’ve also heard that the AI has not been touched in months. Since code doesn’t just magically change it’s self, but can do some very weird things when variables change, I’m considering if the new mechanic of Doomskulls is related.
Looking at the doomskulls, just one doom skull exploding near the middle of the board can create 21 possible cascade opportunities. It is by far the most effective way of creating random cascades, giving more unique cascade opportunities than even an L match. More rarely, if you have two or three doomskulls you can get up to 30 or 38 potential cascade opportunities.
Now, I don’t know how the combo breaker is coded, but it seems that since 3-matches have a maximum of 11 possible cascade opportunities, with three more per extra gem and the biggest potential cascade maker, L matches, being extremely rare, the combo breaker is likely only tested for situations where maybe up to 15-20 possible combinations. It’s likely that the code isn’t able to handle 20-30+ possible cascade opportunities at once with only 6 gems to choose from.
Additional evidence that doomskulls are not playing nice with the code is the fact that matching doomskulls parallel to a 4-5 match results in the gems in the 4-5 match being exploded instead of matched. It’s possible that because the doomskulls are not resolved at the same time that regular matches are resolved that the combo breaker might be looking at a different version of the board from what the board actually ends up being after a match.
Exacerbating this situation is the largely mysterious “live difficulty adjustment” which no players actually fully understand since the details have not been disclosed on it, but generally the consensus is that the longer a match goes the more skulls begin to appear. More skulls mean more doomskulls, and so players who play the long game are much more likely to fall victim to doomskull cascades that feed into themselves.
It seems to me like this is the most likely culprit. So, I thought I would bring it up since I hadn’t heard anything about the problem being solved since someone said that it was being looked into a little bit ago.