Turned holiday gems off. Still a constant skull storm during ToD to F people over. I’m guessing it’s their new idea of scaling difficulty. 
It’s an amazing way to make people not want to play their game.
I just turned off festive themes, played 1 daily delve and 1 tower of doom and noticed way more skulls then when i still had it on earlier today.
Can’t play with holiday skulls when they’re on, can’t play with it off when holiday skulls are off. What the heck.
Lol… Fair enough… I’ll go back to Holiday gems being on and see if it’s more favorable. They could stop breaking shit when they add shit… That would be nice. 
Update: The festive gems being on or off doesn’t matter. It’s simply the game choosing to screw you over pretty much.
- The luck factor that gives the AI endless Cascades after Trickster clearing the board.
- Random status effects Always being barrier or blessed for the AI.
- Or having the difficulty of the game be dependent on time of day.
The last loss was definitely my fault. I knew the AI was on Max difficulty. But I wanted to see if the skulls would still be an issue. They weren’t. The AI ripped me a new one in different ways instead. 
I noticed if I eat a breakfast with three pieces of toast, there are less skulls than on days when I eat two pieces of toast. Also, if the number of swear words I’ve said is an even number, I tend to get more cascades. I tried turning holiday gems on and off, but I need to perform more experiments because I was playing on the East side of my room, and at 4PM I see more green gems if I play on the side that’s closer to Salt Lake City.
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Didn’t know that you have this kind of humor. 
Well I mean like I saw it earlier and interpreted it as a real bug: “The game is keeping a skull storm active across many games and it stops if you toggle this setting”. That’s a tangible, provable thing and definitely qualifies as a bug.
But as it goes on I get the feeling “skull storm” was meant to mean “I’m upset because I lost to a series of improbable skull cascades”. That’s not really a storm, and toggling game settings isn’t really going to change it.
And like, I’m also not invalidating the feeling, because it sucks to be on the receiving end. But this is reality:
This is a game where the teams that win are the teams that are really good at one or more of the following:
- Manipulating the board so they get multiple free turns.
- Manipulating the board so one or more colors is eliminated, thus creating high probabilities of massive cascades.
- Exploiting boards manipulated as described above to generate large amounts of skull damage.
The bad side of this kind of gameplay is if one gem falls out of place, you pass the turn to the CPU with everything set up for them to get it. Worse, often their team is good at one or more of the talents, to, so you’ve tilled the field and planted the seeds then lost the turn before the harvest. That’s when you get hit in the face with 1,800 skull damage, 8 free turns, and a lot of other stuff that is improbable except your team is designed to create that improbable scenario.
I’ve said for a long time I think there’d be less overall resentment and accusations of RNG manipulation in a mode with no free turns. That means if you did whiff with your converter, an entire class of “how the CPU can kill three troops with no recourse” gets eliminated.
I mean, seriously. I played 300+ PvP matches this week with the Skeleton Key team to finish off the Thief class. My team is designed to win in like, 6 turns, ignoring whatever the opponent is trying to do. There are no decisions to make.
So it follows that sometimes when I face another Skeleton Key team, if my first move isn’t spectacular, they beat me in like 6 turns, ignoring whatever I am trying to do. That’s not “a skull storm”, that’s “a team that is broken if you enjoy slow, strategic play”.
Ok, I was wrong.
I’m not sure where to share this, but I’d really like to suggest any form of smelting low tier treasure troops for their superior counterparts. Nothing drains the will to play this game like getting hundreds of actually useless coin pounches and gold rings that you can’t even burn for souls.
When you playing kerberos/kraken in doomtower on floor 25+ and you get your highest anti-devour-streaks with continuous 10+ misses in every 2nd battle and kill the enemy troop with the dmg from this cast before you eat only 1 ******* troop 
Unentangled High King Irongut with 38 attack missed fourteen devours in a row against a Jar of Eyes/Bandit hell team. Finally got one devour, up to 71 attack, then missed three more in a row, just to show me I was still at the RNG’s mercy.
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Yeah, I had a miserable match with that exact team setup with my irongut. I managed to boost his attack to be able to devour, but Thief Hero summon spam was out of control. Skull kill a bandit, instant bandit. Devour an enemy? Next turn, jar of eyes puts another one there so I can’t target the hero still. Skull hit the bandit again another bandit shows up. Devour the summoned troop, bandit casts and hero trait summons a bird in it’s place.
By the time I was able to actually target the hero with a devour, I had devoured enough to have 500+ atk, and had killed at least 5 bandits with skull damage.
When you are suppose to get 3 daily delve runs to do and the game gives you 2. The list of issues/bugs never reduces but increases.
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Irongut missing with 99 attack. I wish I recorded it.
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I don’t see you talking about all the times he didn’t miss with 99 attack, so this is clearly a case of recall bias 
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When you finally manage to get a Major Orb in the Vault, and it is a major orb of Growth smiling at ya.
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When Goblins has 8+ free turns multiple times per game.
I typed an entire rant about it in Discord before they finished.
The thing I hate most in video games is when I have to put my controller down and wait for the computer to finish making a long, complicated series of moves. I want to feel like I am empowered. I don’t feel like that when there are 30 seconds or longer between my turns.
I don’t care about Frozen or any of the other counters. I normally beat the hell out of a Goblins team. But that 1% where they get a perfect setup still remains the most miserable experience in all of GoW. I would argue it’s even more miserable because it’s gone from “welp I lose 75% of matches” to “I win 99%”. People who make the “just use a counter” argument are just jerks trying to make me mad. Joke’s on you: I’m already mad.
It is NOT satisfying when the only way a team wins is by making you watch a cutscene.
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Is this part of the Why Players Think the AI Cheats Part Deux: Hyper Fighting Championship Edition? saga?
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Ughhhhhh I know. All of th3se things have happ3ned to me just about. Except some of the later game stuff. Just cracked 1000 recently.
So much in agreement. I’ve spoken of extra moves by ai after matching 3 g3ms… Or taking my extra turn. I really hate it when a troll “doubles the amount of _____ gems etc…” And from three gems on the board suddenly has thirty. All positioned of course for extra moves. Or a sudden screen jump in the middle of me matching and it’s their move. Especially on delves. Seeing my guild facing teams in gw and seeing scores like 45000 to 0… And we have higher scores than teams five brakets above us. I would have added to the whole thief bandit thing… But I can control boards very well w my own team iv3 developed and I only lose to seriously redonk teams. (If ya can’t beat em…) So it’s hard to complain. Although I do notice the bandit furiously spawning as I get smacked around… Until a crucial point where a spawn would help and then… Bye by3.
This game is awesome and it’s taken me months of pure enjoyment (of not having to spend 200-300 just to have a decent ev3nt team like some other gambling sites…er…games I could mention ) to have enough frustrations built up to join in here.
Heres my thing. I believe that if the game was merely scaled to be more difficult as one progressed and all of these factors like rng or luck or % of time hits were not present… Sure there would still be some issues like this but it would fall under the (stuff happens in a game sometimes) umbrella. All of these interferences are done obviously to force spending. Or at least fuel the gamer (gotta freaking beat this) drive. But skill is far more important to me. One strength of this game that blows away any other ive played is the need to kind of play chess sometimes. So they made an ai that can react to a point which is ok…but imagine if this could be done without having to do all the things being discussed here?
Segway into the most annoying thing ever in any game. Hearing things about breaking game economy. Just stop. Hearing that from anyone involved w the game in question is like hearing your tax man say “I’m sorry” when you end up owing… No it’s not it’s like pee wee Herman going onto Emeril live and reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in really bad pig Latin and with a horrid falsetto Spanish accent. And the feeling you have after reading that is about what I feel. Game economy.
Now to be fair this game is far more generous than my last couple games both in terms of login rewards and what you can get for $… And the devs and moderators from what ive seen So far don’t make me want to chug an entire tank of gasoline and throw a lot Zippo in behind… So the last annoyance was more general than game specific…
But just don’t. Ever. Say that to me. Because I’m actually Pee wee’s cousin and I will drive that guy to your house…
Kidding aside. It’s nice to have a place to rant a bit. Gr3at idea for the post whoever it was. I’m not scrolling back up to tag. Great posts all around.
Annnnnnnd somewhere theres a room w like three programmers giving each other high fives and scoring their player lottery…
When i play a gw match and the 4th fight is against this goblins and i must watch this video or cutszene or whatever you wanna call it from turn 1 or 2 till my death or with “some luck” the 4th troop has maybe 20-40hp and zero mana… and after this forced loss(!) the 5th match is a again this team and all goblins are afk for the entire fight and do nothing (and i have no controll over the board or so), then i know, something is going on… this is not “random”…
so… yes, the ai is cheating, when they want or the time is coming or someone in the universe gave me a forced loss. this goblin god mode is to often in perfection for rng!
Well, gw is gw and by now everyone should know, usually i dont have much probs with DE but monday had a DE team that got a perfect match.
AI turn 1: it get a small cascade that fill rock troll and give extra turn, cast rock troll that fill DE and make a 4 match, everyone poisoned and Tassarion get turned into a baby tassy.
My second turn: nothing special, not even a 4 match.
Ai turn 2: again AI fill rock troll and get a extra turn, fill both DE and Scorpy, DE make the baby tassy even smaller, Scorpy kill Alderfather and Infernus.
End of ai turn 2? a mini baby tassy and a Sekma that looked like this:
S**t happen, better move on and peace, it happen even more in gw, that is, the 2 days after had np with DE teams.
Gobs? still no gobs x now this gw, had a loss with them past GW, but if i consider all the times i butchered them, again move on.
One thing you can do and i did ages ago playing GoW is disable controller vibrations, even if in real nothing change you “feel” the cascades shorter ;p
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