By removing “the sliders” on defense. The update has managed to make the AI an unstoppable force. No longer are the days of “skull baiting”. Nor, the AI giving you a chance by making a bad move and the player being able to make a run because of it.
Why is it so difficult to make an AI that is challenging? Not too easy, and not too difficult. Just right.
Codename it “Goldilocks” and focus all of your attention on a complete AI rework. No more UI reworks, no more messing with just the troops themselves and no more added features please until the core of the game is fixed.
I’ll be happy to beta test it endlessly until it is as near perfect as possible.
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I don’t have an issue with the actual AI but the RNG seems seriously out-of-wack. Oh and the bugs, bugs, & glitches really takes a fair amount of the fun out of GoW.
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RNG is symbiotic with the AI in my opinion.
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i think what ryan also means is sometimes your fights are pure luck not tactic .its like roulette
and that has something to do with the ai and how he handles there turns
and that wasnt the case months before thats for sure
i am in a guild who is in bracket seven so it doesnt matter for us so much but i can imagine for higher brackets it does. i will give this post also my vote for a new AI and for beeing a beta tester
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I’d also like to point out that troop ability design is also getting more & more RNG based. General examples would include: destroy/create random gems, affect random allies/enemies, random chance to consume enemies, summon random ally. It’s getting to the point where almost everything has become random and made worse by shoddy RNG/AI.
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I agree. And maybe there can be some incentives to use something other than the same meta teams over and over on defense. Defensive colors maybe?
My argument defending the overall game design (AI being a part of it) is that everyone is literally in the same boat. If you think about it, everyone has to face the AI the same way. Everyone fights the same AI in PvP. When you face the AI in GWs, so does the enemy guild. The AI is not giving absolutely anyone an undeserved edge, NOR is preventing absolutely anyone from accomplishing absolutely anything in the game. So, in this context, I see no issue with it whatsoever. Just part of the game design.
If at higher levels it got so tough, that you would be losing 50% of matches to it (or even as many as 20%) just due to unfair advantage, that is a reasonable problem, however anything less does not bother me. Got to say that if the majority found that less appealing/satisfying I would not mind a change to that either.
Two issues for me. 1. The AI behavior needs a re-think and a reduction in the RNG/super lucky streaks.
2. Frozen needs to be changed to only trigger if the all troops of that colour are frozen, and not on skulls at all. Almost every guild war match is against Mab, which should tell the devs something about the frozen mechanic being to strong.
At the moment GW/PVP just isn’t fun.
Most of the content is the same few troops and doing everything you can to minimize the AIs chance to go on a lucky streak.
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This may be a minority opinion, but I think they’ve been tweaking the AI & RNG in between updates, week-by-week.
Last week my best PVP teams were struggling all week. I was still winning most of the battles, but they were long, drawn-out, and managed to be both tedious AND anxiety-producing.
This week: all those same teams are romping thru PVP. It feels like gameplay before all the recent updates-- I’m winning 95%, there are some challenging matches but many easy ones too.
Is no one else getting that?
PS they haven’t forced the update on iOS yet and so I don’t have it yet. Our GM is also an iPhone user, ran the update and found it broke the Dungeon. So she reinstalled the game as instructed to fix the Dungeon bug and ended up locked out of her account for the last 2 days!
Ugly UI = problem I can deal with
Bugs that lock me out of the game = NO THANKS!
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I see nothing in the client/server communication that leads me to believe they have the capability to adjust the AI or RNG outside of patches.
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They just changed it on the last update.
At first, skull baiting was working right after the update. By the next day that was gone again. PvP and GW seemed to be normal or at least decent the following days. Then for the past 24 hours. There will be runs of a few hours or so where the AI is out of control for no rhyme or reason. The best way to overcome it is just stop playing for a few hours. So if the devs want a die hard like me to just play the game less often. Then message received.
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I think the unique Guild War Defense points will fix the GW Mab issue. But do nothing for PvP. So my fix for Queen Mab is to change her trait from 4 gem matches. To just 5 gem matches will trigger frozen. A freeze that cannot wear off without a cleanse or the death of a troop.
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No, they have not made the ability to tweak the gem drop rates or any other aspects of the battle system dynamic. I just diff’d the login payload between 3.1 and 3.2 and no such data exists.
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You have access to info I don’t have, so I’m sure you’re right.
Yet, yet… it’s anecdotal I know, but the difference in play has been so pronounced between last week and this week, and delineated so sharply by the reset… it just feels to me like adjustments are being made behind the scenes.
Like I said, I haven’t done the UI update yet, so nothing has changed on my end. Maybe it’s just the fact that everyone else has run the update and have adjusted their defenses accordingly, IDK.
Maybe it’s just paranoia (or in this case, since the changes are positive, I think the technical term is “pronoia” 
). And I hope it’s not too tendentious to bring this up but-- paranoia and increased sensitivity to every ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’ run the player or opponent might have is another unintended consequence of all the behind-the-scenes fiddling with RNGs and AI behavior.
I still enjoy playing, but fundamentally I no longer “trust” the game. For example: every time I hit an enemy troop and they end up at 1 life I wonder if that’s a legitimate 1 life or a luck-enhanced 1 life… and the fact that I started noticing this ‘lucky last life’ syndrome immediately after the last update (3.1.1 or whatever) makes me more suspicious.
This is a subtle but significant negative, and one likely not to appear on the dev’s spreadsheets, except in terms of players playing less or leaving the game (and I don’t know that they are in any significant numbers).
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How can that be when they took away the gem priorities slider and I have witnessed the behavior change accordingly from the AI?
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Oh, I can’t say if they changed things as a result of the patch itself. All I am observing is the payload (at login and at battle start time) which is the only real way they could adjust the behavior without releasing new patches, and there’s nothing in there that points to any day-to-day change in AI behavior being possible.
With the AI sliders removed, it wouldn’t surprise me if the patch itself changed the behavior, but any stretches of good or bad luck you get with no client updates are just that – good or bad luck.
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“luck” being determined by AI. I really wish we’d stop referring to it as luck. That’s a talk for another day though. Thanks @Lyya for your insight.
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I posted this in my Guild’s Discord last week, I think it sums up the essential problem of the moment:
Note: I have been confronted with a version of this screen many, many times.
Gee, it’s almost like Queen Mab is horribly unbalanced. I run into Borealis very infrequently, and there’s been a few Ice Golems this week with the construct event, but Queen Mab is really the only troop whose freeze effect feels genuinely unfair and anti-fun.
As a dissenting opinion, I enjoy an occasional match against Mab. Her third trait is so dangerous to my preferred style of play that any match against her ratchets up the tension measurably. I can’t make mistakes, or else I get frozen and everything grinds to a halt. The problem I see is that everyone is using Mab in their defense teams precisely because she’s so dangerous. Hopefully the new changes to GW defenses will at least make that part of the game more varied.
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