Yes, this is what I’ve been saying. Thats why I’m advocating turning it off completely, for all versions. Lets see how that does.
i hope you found the goblin at fault right there and the issue will be addressed
i still think the extra surges and non-override spawns are not necessary but i can see how the “bugged combo breaker” should be addressed and fixed first before further adjustments (if they are indeed the case behind it)
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Welcome to Gems of War Loop.
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While i also tend to agree, Guardians already did this to a lesser degree before the patch, while also having a very significant impact on the battle offensively (huge statbuffs and skullspam), which is why i disliked their concept from the start.
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@Mithran I’ve experienced the same. Often I won a game with just clicking Venoxia and Lady A without even looking at the board. It’s magic.
I’ll just put Lyya quote here.
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No, Krudler never played on console, but I recorded an hour of console gameplay a few weeks ago. You can see it, and some other stuff, here (it is the 4th video in the original post):
For the record, I didn’t see anything remotely weird, but I wasn’t doing focused testing like Mithran is doing, and wasn’t using gem-spawners myself, so none of what is being talked about here was likely to show up.
Two of my other videos were testing AI customization settings. In those, I was using spawners, (actually, I was using spawners on the AI team), so there might be some examples to look at there. I don’t have time to rewatch the videos right now, but will try to in light of Mithran’s findings sometime soon.
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In retrospect, I think part of the issue is that many of the reports seemed to point in the wrong direction. Many of the claims related to “cheating AI” and “magic skydrops”, but most investigations into those seemed to show things working the same for the player and AI as well as most gems falling from above seeming to be sufficiently random. @Mithran really helped narrow things down with his testing, and now that the problem is being described differently (specifically gem creation/conversion seeming to be clustered around existing gems), it became much easier to see, reproduce, and hypothesize about the root cause (likely inverted/buggy combo-breaker code). Good news is that this clarity might make it easier/quicker for the devs to roll-out a fix, which is a win for console and PC 
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Exactly.
For the record, I do still think that there might be something to the skydrop thing as that has also seen a number of confirmatory reports since Unity was released on PC. However, that was always a rare event and seldom turned a match the way that the gem-spawning does.
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Yes! Turn it off. I agree ABSOLUTELY, there is no way turning it off (especially on console with the enhanced AI) can be any worse. I’ve posted hard numbers of GW points from the top Guilds and its clear the original PC version is dramatically easier to win. 750k vs 1M.
Currently on console in GW as soon as the spawners gets filled you have 0-2 turns before the game is over and you loose. Period.
@Mithran Excellent testing and record keeping. Kudos
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From what I’ve seen in other videos AI is a dummy and sometimes does stuff other than just spam, even with the improvement. And “raw” casts arent affected, so if you don’t get that first extra turn, which is actually random if you only use spawners, you won’t see the phenomenon. Even from the AI, its doubtful you’ll see stuff to the degree as what I posted with the mantises. But the good spawn looping teams don’t need 40+ turns in a row to annihilate you. They don’t even need 5 sometimes. Thats probably why it didn’t garner as much attention on Console, where a huge majority of the complaints were focused on V/J/M which from an outside perspective was also clearly spawning too many gems because they weren’t overwriting and that was blamed as the reason for the incidence of extra turns - plus combined with the overall effect each cast had on the battle, it was over fairly quick.
A skydrop that gets an extra turn, however, can easily be the “first extra turn” that triggers the chain spawn phenomon, which would feature heavily in recall bias. Very easy when it also fills up whatever spawner they are using on a match 4 surge, another thing that the Adobe version didn’t feature. However, I have seen things that are a little bit streakier than normal in this regard, but haven’t able to pin it down (and it appears to happen on both sides of the fence). It could just be bias because of how much effect a given cascade had on the overall flow of the game because of the reasons listed.
I suppose the next thing would be to test would be the incidence of cascade extra turns after you’ve gotten a bunch of extra turns or after your opponent has. Does anyone have a bit more knowledge about how the actual “combo breaker” code is supposed to work? This time, I’m referring specifically to the one that is intended to stop the AI only from getting strings of match 4s as skydrops and is supposed to be gradually turned off in PvP. I have some knowledge, such as the bottom of this post. I’m mostly finding complaint posts about when it was turned off in 1.0.9 PvP, and as someone who always played on hard before then, never noticed a difference. I hope fighting my own defense team (or another in friendlies) will be comparable in this instance. Don’t have time now, but I’ll be setting up some tests later where I use troops on one side that intentionally get several extra turns in a row and troops on the other side that just clear space and see if there is maybe a “reverse combo breaker” type situation going on.
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I re-watched the infamous skydrop video, and it was a vertical match-4 that was the first step in that 5-drop chain, so that would fit with your hypothesis. So few of these have been captured on video that it will be very hard to confirm or reproduce. I honestly don’t really see it being worth even trying to test at this point. Some investigation/confirmation from the devs on your existing combo-breaker hypothesis would be the logical next step, in my mind.
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Well, yeah, after that. I think I’ve submitted all I need to on that front. Heres one more, just in case:
I knew I was doomed either way if they got a single extra turn, so I might as well lean into it.
It also goes to show the magnitude of the spawn streak breaker code. Far too much influence on where stuff spawns, even if it was working as intended and reversed. If this code is to ever exist in the game again, I feel it is kind of essential it doesn’t do the thing where it causes spawns exactly one space over from existing gems and cause a critical fail, because that is also dumb. If spawners need to be streak broken in the end, gems should only be moved away from actually random distribution if there is already a match 3 in an area it would spawn, and then subsquently randomly spawned in another spot instead thus breaking your turn, so that every other broken streak is not a critical fail.
Can we get some dev confirmation that this is being looked into @Saltypatra?
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All of this is beyond fantastic. However… Where are the knowledgeable postings from the developers that have access to the code? Who knows for certain what other aspects are in the coding they purposely left out of the PC version (to keep AI parity with mobile). Buy the time the AI gets added to PC, rolled out, talked about on the forums, tested by the community, identifying any problems, then updated based on those changes rolled out to console. It feels like will be 2018.
I would really appreciate it if @Sirrian dedicated 1 or even 2 hours per week of time for one of the developers to comment on concerns such as this. Obviously not every Nerf Centaur post… but the big issues.
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Was that 21 consecutive turns without you giving up the board, all with “random” spawners (and one 4-skull match that you grabbed), often without a loaded board?
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I think that they’re tinkering with something right now. Either that or I’m going crazy.
For the last 3 or 4 games I’m lucky to get an extra turn after casting Gar’Nok. That hasn’t happened all week.
My other looping teams aren’t getting the match four’s afterwards either.
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Hi everyone, we’ve fixed a bug with our gem spamming adjustment which was leading to the behavior you were seeing in @Mithran’s videos. You should be seeing the change active on PC after you restart the game/daily reset if you don’t. This only affects PC, as Console doesn’t have the gem spam adjustment yet.
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My gem creators are basically not refunding turns right now; Dramatcally reduced chance of 4 gem matches
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Lol popcorn ready
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I’d like to make sure that you turned off the spawn adjustment completely rather than just reversed it. Preliminary tests are showing an almost complete inability to get an extra turn now after the first one, but it could be just random actually being random at this point. An improvement from just streaking everything to death, I suppose, but still broken if that is the case.
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So, just to be super-clear, Console will still have the same spawning problem that Mithran documented until the next update?
Not being snarky, really just want to make sure I understand, because as bad as Justice is on console, I’ve never seen the kind of stuff that Mithran showed in his videos.
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