You make good points, and I’ve never been unwilling to change my mind (not saying I have yet, but I’m always trying to learn and understand better).
I think we all agree that the problem has multiple factors that contribute and it is probably true that both the AI and spawning are significant factors. We’ve currently got the “smart AI” and agressive (?) spawning, while PC/Mobile has “dumb AI” and restricted spawning. It would be interesting to see what happens if we could flip one of those levers, but it sounds like the devs are going to flip both at once.
The revelation that gem spawners aren’t random is still mind-boggling to me. I get that it gives the devs another tool for balancing troops, but you’d think that just being able to change the number of gems that spawn would be enough.
Here’s a funny thing. A long while back… I think it was the update that introduced traits and traitstones, there was a bug where if you did a kingdom’s side quests (which was what you had to farm if you wanted a stone… Was before explore) where the gem pattern to start was always the same. The seed number was never randomized. Further after you made a move, the gems that fell likewise fell in 1 of 2 or 3 distinct patterns and colors. So if you made the same opening move, most of the time the board would look the same while on occasion 1 of the other patterns would drop instead but those would always be the same different look too. So because the seeding was the same, you would get definite non random results. So definitely not a surprise that gem spawning wasn’t fully random either.
I remember that too. I actually made a special team to take advantage of the fact that I knew EXACTLY what Gems were going to fall in exactly what order . Kept that one quite and didnt share (as soon as you tell the Guild everyone knows).
It never occurred to me at the time that it might be related, (and I kept that bug close to the chest)
So, I was wrong - sorry to stir things up unnecessarily. The proposed fix will be to only nerf the gem spawners. Personally, I’m not convinced that I’m wrong about that not being enough to solve the problem, but nothing to do but wait and see since I haven’t played the PC version to see how it works.
I can tell you one thing… On pc/mobile you only see justice league once in a while and it is very meh… Nothing i avoid to be blunt about it.
In contrast to that i played i think about 30 battles last night including my 5 gw and probably 27 or 28 were against justice league. If rhat is any indicator of the effectiveness of the proposed solution then i would think after a while justice league on console will be no more than a bad memory
My concern is still that we’re talking about two different environments. On PC, they’ve got the nerfed spawners like we will get, but the AI is still the old one. None of us can say how the Justice league will function when PC/Mobile gets the new AI and console gets the change to RNG. At that point, we should all be playing the same game finally, but which Justice League will we see? I don’t know. At the very least, it will be a step in the right direction, but it might not be far enough.
I’m pretty sure Salty did assure me somewhere that the team is looking at this with the console AI in mind, so I think I need to leave it there.
Do you really think this next update will include crafting, or is it just an update to give us Urskaya and the Justice / gem-spawning fix?
Also, just so I’m clear, am I correct in understanding that console will not be getting the PC/mobile AI? We will only be getting their gem-spawning algorithm? I sure hope that’s what I’m hearing.
. Kept that one quite and didnt share (as soon as you tell the Guild everyone knows).