If the picture you’re referring to being a poor team was mine, then it was the standard green seer giant spider and double kraken team that’s usually a decent bet for green days. Most of our lot use it on green days because it’s generally a pretty safe bet. Or was. Lol.
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Trolls aside - just wait till 3/4 battles every day on gw are exploit cycling. I remember the company used to joke about designing a game meant to lose.
The cpu is no longer set up that way - it wins regardless - by design.
Although I do expect the pc version will be patched before it becomes too big an issue there.
The speed enhancement is offered solely to offset the tedium of the 30 move plus cycling exploit. You will always remember to use it because it reduces the cpu turn time before you lose, and move on to the next cycling team.
Like justice its another designer joke.
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What has changed exactly I can’t say, but I have a lot of matches that are lost by turn 2 or 3 at the moment.
My exploders leave a lot of 4+ matches for AI to take, and new 4 matches appear a lot from the top. And, unbiased as I am, it’s mostly for the AI…
One match I did win was pretty funny though. Opponent Star Gazer buffed Orion, caused a cascade frenzy, killing my first 2 troops. I then proceed to win with Aurora and Jarl looping forever. (well actually, it wasn’t that funny…)
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I noticed a lot more Skull and extra turn drops. Not just for the AI though, also for me.
I often had matches where every finished turn resulted in an extra turn for the opposing side (which started a chain of said extra turns).
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Lost 4 GW matches again to cascades today.
The cascades combined with the insane overpowered cards due to 50% stats.
Game is now just as unplayable on PC as it is on console.
Again, this is my opinion… If it’s not happening to you, I’m really glad for you.
But with my luck, I get the sh!t end of the stick ALL the time.
RNG for the win.
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I think it’s just your experience, while some may have a similar one, I was lucky enough to win all today including against 3x Astrals doing 31 true damage in the paragon fight. Love my new Orc red team, AS is useless when you bring in so many new troops 
Now, I think people are seeing more cascades this week because of the use of empowered board modders, rather than anything else.
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@Mad_Butch i think we still dont have the console AI (decision making) so their looping looks different then ours
about cascades - im playing on 4x speed ever since the update so i couldnt care less 
but as far as i can tell it didnt feel like the enemy got too much luck, probably no change
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Haven’t lost a match since the update so i haven’t noticed any change regarding the AI. .
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Well If today I will loose another fight because of the ridiculous cascades for the AI (which in my case is happening…) I think It’s going to look a lot like risky business. I know I’m not the only one and some guild members have the same thing going on. If it continuous I don’t see this to be a fun game anymore and me leaving GoW for good is a high possibility. It’s sad because the devs fixed some other issues and they did so very good in doing so. But with this new update, there are just too many bugs/changes or whatever that is literately destroying the reputation of this company. And that my friends is the really sad part, because I believe they mean well. I could be wrong though and it’s my opinion. I’m just not happy as it is right now since this update, the observations of the cascades and other console type stuff.
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Just in case it’s difficulty related, I’m playing on Warlord 2.
Which is most likely why I went 1-4 in GW two days in a row.
That is unrelated to the cascades though.
I still saw those happen in guild wars as well in farming traitstones.
The question now is, could it be related to difficulty?
So if you recall what you played on, please update your post.
Thanks!
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i played on normal, and i think there might be a bit more cascases for both player and ai but i didnt play much enough for it to bother me, wait a week or two for me to make up my mind
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What you don’t see is the green seer, (cos she’s dead ALREADY), probably the most important troop in that team. With a surge and the right banner you fill her in one turn occasionally and with a good board can start looping on the first or second turn. No mana blocking to speak of, she’s a feeder for the three troops below so I have no idea why you’d think a pretty much universally lauded team ‘sucks’.
Each to their own I suppose.
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Did some testing, and did not notice any “cascade” issues, but did notice a significant difference with gem converters (like Justice). So I think this is probably the issue console players have been reporting which causes the excessive looping, it’s cause has just been misplaced. @Mithran’s post above is a really good description, so I won’t restate all of those points again, other than a quick comment on the converters.
I can confirm this, after doing a bunch of test battles with Justice on PC and comparing to mobile. However, the Sirrian post @Mithran links to is more related to the AI (which reportedly has not yet been changed for unity), and I think the issue is more related to the “overwriting” Alpheon describes in Nimhain's Lair: June 12th - #135 by Alpheon . Because the Unity code doesn’t overwrite the same colour the way it did in the previous (or current mobile) code, a lot more gems are converted. Obviously “a lot” is relative, but my testing showed it to normally be an extra 3-4 gems. While only a few gems, it seems to be the tipping point, where “normal” boards seem to align extra turns at least half the time, and partially primed boards almost all the time. Note that this occurs for both the player and the AI, it seems to be a change in the mechanics rather than the AI.
And based on that, adding in a slightly smarter AI who can’t always be baited and whose colour preferences can be tweaked (coming “soon”), as well as the inability to nerf your opponents with weaker defences (seems to be live on PC, but not on mobile), and the game is going to become much more challenging.
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That sounds exactly like what we’ve seen on console for a long time. While @Mithran wasn’t asking for a nerf, I think the balance will need to be examined, since the new normal appears to favour the spawners. While it works equally well for the player and the AI, it has the potential to focus the meta in what I think would be an unhealthy way (exactly as we’ve seen on console with Justice/Mab).
I think your predictions in the last paragraph are spot-on as well. Easy for me to say, since your predictions are my recent history…
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I would propose that they keep it as is (not overwriting the spawned color) for the players, but change gem spawning to allow overwriting for AI only. This would make it more fun all around!
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Disagree with this in a huge way. There are enough “AI cheats” threads now when both sides are equal, so having different code opens the door for all sorts of new complaints and bugs. Plus, having a fair and even field for both sides gives you the opportunity to use strategies to overcome any issues. I think the current/new convert code is likely best, and increasing/decreasing the specific number of gems targeted on a per troop basis to achieve the correct balance would be the best way to handle this.
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I was referring to the team hidden within the “show details” tag (click the arrow) in my post. Though you probably shouldn’t have taken that loop team versus mab, since it stops functioning well if they get basically any match 4.
I linked the post for this bit, specifically, which refers to the reliability of being able to loop over, and over and over with just spawners:
And in a later post, this:
I’m saying before we get that far, we need to look at why this is happening, because it wasn’t really a problem before. The code that makes spawners miss more often after five extra turns, for one, appears to be not functioning at all. I’m starting to wonder if “five” really meant “zero” in the previous Adobe Air code. Simply changing the amount of gems created also changes the amount of mana they generate along with how often they get an extra turn, and with this engine, I think we are going to be hard pressed to find a sweet spot.
The thing is, single color spawners seem way more reliable as well. This may have something to do with the claims of “streakier” RNG on console. Things like Kraken even seem to cluster up way more. Queen Aurora, which I had tested for a while prepatch as decidedly mediocre because of her fairly big miss rate is now able to self loop 2 or 3 times for me before getting a board rich enough in the color I want to fill the entire team in one big blob. I’m not seeing the amount of critical fail misses that I have before… the games I’ve lost are 99% to taking stupid teams loop teams that shouldn’t work at all and failing to charge them or trying to force my way through through freeze - and if I get that first cast before they freeze me, I win anyways.
Basically, its like I’m playing a completely different game. I’m perfectly fine with converter looping (I highly prefer partial fixed loops like Alch/Terrax, Hellcat/Sekhma) because you have to examine the board, get alignment, and occasionally look a couple turns ahead to make sure you won’t put yourself in a bad position and if you do happen to screw up and paint yourself into a corner with a checkerboard pattern you don’t have converters for you have to work to dig your way out of it. Spawn looping has none of that, you fill one troop, cast without priming and hope for your extra turn (fairly high incidence at that), then just spam spells without having to think until one side disappears. Mab has potential to stop it, of course, and we will likely be seeing more of her… but the team in question also functions off spawn loop mechanics.
I know we still don’t have the AI patch and the AI patch will make players lose more, but it will do so by making this type of thing easier for the AI to do. Having a higher loss rate due to having more unwinnable situations doesn’t necessarily confer “challenge” in my book, in order to have real “challenge” in this type of game you need to have the ability to make a number of consecutive good decisions/less bad ones in any given situation in order to have a favorable outcome and/or make the “good decision” less obvious. Loop teams that use a fixed color converter instead of two universal ones, for example, are more “challenging” to use in that regard, converter + remover chains are another. You can keep these going, but you have to examine each situation separately and make good decisions - a bad decision can easily cost you the game because you feed a ton of mana, or back you into a corner and cause you to waste several turns. Starting Board does not favor you > you get looped to death by gem spawners occasionally is not really additional “challenge” because you are largely removing player decision making from the table. I’d much rather we keep player decision making at the center of gameplay.
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That is a very interesting hypothesis. I had assumed that the issue was strictly about the difference in overwriting as Beanie was suggesting. The good thing is that both of these should be fairly easy for the devs to identify (as they already have with the overwriting issue).
You are hitting every nail on the head, here. Too often, the losses we experience are truly unwinnable situations, and these are the most frustrating losses: when you take the right team to beat your opponent, but through no fault of your own (a couple lucky drops setting off an endless AI loop while you have made every ‘right’ move available), you lose anyway.
Sometimes though, I wonder how an experienced and careful player would ever lose if not for these kinds of things. You talked about losing due to forcing a wrong team against a particular opponent, or just taking bad matches and leaving opportunities for the AI. With the first turn advantage, advance scouting and a superior ability to analyze the board, the player has every advantage over the AI. It really is a difficult balancing job to introduce challenge without relying on casino mechanics.
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But it isn’t the job of the devs to make us take losses, though. The thing that really matters is if we are engaged. Consistently winning without thought is bad because you don’t engage. Providing content that promotes different thought patterns, even if it is just a color switch, is essential to this - the recent addition of Sekhma and her synergy with hellcat, for example. Its still more than possible to enjoy the game long term at a consistent 99% win rate so long as you feel your decisions have impact. Take that off the table, and it becomes less engaging - win or lose. And thats a bad thing.
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That’s a fair comment. I think it would be OK if every match was winnable as long as the player is willing to tailor their strategy and troops to face the challenge posed by every particular defense team. Mindlessly using the same team in every PVP or GW match, or playing quickly and carelessly, should result in some losses (such that the losing player can look in the mirror to find the cause of their failure), but having every (or nearly every) fight be potentially winnable, even if win rates for careful players approached 100%, would feel more fair than the current situation on console, and increasingly on PC.
A thought about Sirrian’s disclosure about the loop-breaking code. I wonder if the structure of that Valk/Justice/Mab team is somehow side-stepping the intent of that code, rather than it just not working at all. That team generates extra-turns in 3 different ways: Valk converting to make 4/5 matches, Justice spawning to make 4/5 matches, and Mab casting to get extra-turns based on 13+ blues. This is very different from Anariel or Jarl self-looping by spawning their own colour, so maybe the turn counter is only ticking when Justice self-loops, but not when the other two are extending the AI’s turn. With the console AI, it isn’t uncommon for the AI to pick up 5-10 turns with Justice casting only 3 or 4 times once the team gets going.
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