I’ll never understand people that keep playing a game that they believe “rips them off every chance it gets”. I know if I actually thought that about a game, I’d never play it again since I would clearly have no respect for the people making that game. Therefore, I wouldn’t want to play their game and continue to boost their metrics.
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I agree 100% asha
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I feel like a lot of words are being said to either support or attack a very simple concept, and because of the lots of words we end up talking about the wrong things.
I feel like common to every complaint about the meta are a few things:
- The best teams are designed to destroy entire screens of gems.
- Destroying lots of gems has a high rate of cascades and extra turns.
- So the teams incorporate effects that trigger on cascades and mo4/mo5.
- With decent luck, the cascades/extra turns result in refilling mana.
- So you destroy the entire board again.
- GOTO 2.
With a completely neutral RNG, this sets up high probabilities of large cascades and long chains of extra turns. This is a very good offensive strategy because if you get to spend more mana and do more things it’s way more likely you are going to win. Even with a good team, it’s hard to keep a chain going much more than 3-5 turns, so there’s strategy involved.
When the defense team does it, it’s miserable: you don’t get to make decisions while the CPU is looping. Any luck they get makes it even worse. The CPU doesn’t get upset if it only gets to make 2 moves before losing, but this really, REALLY upsets humans.
This isn’t really about the RNG, and it’s not really about any kind of bias. It feels bad to lose in this way, but the most powerful teams in the game all use the same mechanics. The only counter mechanic is “be smarter at it than the CPU”. That’s the problem.
I think the level of gem destruction/creation available is waaaaaay too much. I think the kind of nerf it needs to overcome the odds of ‘destroy 90% of the board’ leading to full mana and extra turns would severely piss people off and change the nature of the game. I think it’s clear this has been a problem and it’s only becoming more of a problem because, over time, more people are higher-level so more people are tired of it.
I don’t think the solution will be found in RNG tweaks. If you’ve got 3 troops on your team that clear the board with their ability, you’re going to get a lot of mana and free turns even if the RNG stacks against you. Even if you’re capped at 3 turns, the meta is still a race of loop vs. loop decided by who does the most incidental damage via skulls on their guaranteed 3 turns. Yawn.
The sad truth is the kind of nerf that will fix this is one that’ll cause a lot of people to leave. You shouldn’t be able to have 4 board-clearing or board-replacing team members. Troops should probably fall in “categories” and some should be incompatible. That might mean you have to choose to put Sylvanimora OR Krystenax OR The Dragon Soul on your team, but you won’t be able to take two at a time. It might mean the 1x Troll 3x Kraken team is illegal. It probably means the godforsaken 4x Astral Spirit team should be gone too. There’s going to be a lot of “good” teams at all levels that stop working.
But maybe if they do that, in the end, we’ll get a meta with 5 or 6 T1 decks that fit a good rock-paper-scissors games against each other. You’ll have to think about whether you’re facing a self-buff team, or a True Damage team, and what counters that, and if you have a team that does so. You know, maybe using more than 8 troops per year. Pipe dream, right?
The big question is, will anyone stay to play that one?
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I really love reading your comments. You’re clearly a very insightful guy(?) and you express your ideas well.
This might sound like it coming out of left field, but just looking at it as a vague and nebulous concept, what would you say to the notion of decompressing the duration of fights? There are many mechanisms that could be used (2 initial turns where Mana isn’t gathered, HP multipliers so games are less frequently match-3-its-over experiences, and things along this line).
I have not noticed any different effect from creation or cascade between player and ai. I’ve had “random” drops of 8-9 connected skull gems repeatedly. People keep missing some behavior pointed out early on in this thread.
If you play out long turns your setting yourself up for ai lucky events and vice versa. There’s also appears to be changes to combo breaker involving consecutive actions and not spell casts. So casting,clearing mana then casting will virtually guarentee a very very bad board with multiple 4-5matches for the ai. The ai will take one match,cast,refill on cascades, cast and end game.
Forgive me if I didn’t make such a big attempt to ‘search’ for some long-lost forum thread about dev gem drop remarks, as my past attempts at using forum search engines resulted in total joke results.
Also, and here’s the crazy part, I’ve just repeatedly had to ‘defend’ myself today by people ‘bashing’ my use of ‘old threads’, as if that’s somehow bad and evil.
I would appreciate people in general (this isn’t direct at you or everybody, just the ones who ‘think’ like this) stop trashing a person one minute for trying to find others in ‘old threads’ who might share relevant views, while at the same ‘expecting’ esoteric and ancient forum threads to be copy-pasted in double-time to clearly show some backing to a statement.
People are people and like anybody else they try to use the tools as best they can, cut the character attacks out in these threads.
Back to us, yeah thanks Lyya I’ll check out that link you posted,
thanks
Here ya go pimpin… Took me 52 seconds
Ect… Go ahead and read the whole thread, take it all in, and understand where your misguided accusations have gone awry.
And the best part? Its a locked thread so you wont get grief for necroing threads and we wint be subjected to your essays
Vangor
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Here is the exact post you want…
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clap clap clap, glad someone’s thinking and not resorting to character attacks to ‘defend’ the game…
was about to write a post myself and, because it’s along these lines, wanted to reinforce the concepts with the above posters…
- the issue isn’t necessarily ‘cheating AI’, it’s an issue that the way the game works now, with ‘infini-loops’, does -Not- match well with skills like ‘devour’, ‘disintergrate’, ‘damage and repeat’ turns etc (goblins).
The game started with very reasonble skills for most troops (99% had abilities that still left you ‘alive’ after being used), but now we’re at a point where a noticable chunk (the main 5-10 ‘op’ units) have actrocious skills that when used, and especially when ‘looped’, create an extremely frustrating experience for the players.
‘Recall Bias’ sure probably exists, just like forum threads are full of ‘I’m smarter than you YuO SuX jUU EssAIeSSES!!!11!!1!’ meanwhile it doesn’t dawn on a person like that ego-think will always reduce you to the animal level, etc…
Point is the way the game is now IS validly frustrating for players, and a lot of that is ‘taken out’ on the -premise- that the AI ‘possibly’ cheats. (Meaning sure it’s ‘debatable’ if the cheating is actually occuring or not, but the -Reality- of feeling ‘frustrated as —’ is as ‘real’ as you can get)
Hence the importance of posts like slyp’s etc, who realize the whole mixture is what counts not one aspect taken out of context (like AI ‘cheating’ etc).
We’re at a point where hmm, said this like 50 times the last 24, where the game’s pvp is designed to ‘fail’, in terms of gaming fun.
Die-hard fanbois who will use the same op leet units won’t care, I get that, we see ‘them’ all over the forums.
The majority of ‘normal’ people though, who play this as an exercise in creativity, exploration and an honest attempt at feeling good by doing something other than ‘always’ winning,
those players don’t seem to count anymore hence that "Alright, here’s 3 ideas’ thread etc I tried to start.
case and point your final exact remark, which is exactly the thinking along these lines →
you get it, hopefully enough others will too to try to push it in a different direction…
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Don’t even know how to post in the forum without posting to myself, lol…
anyways in regards to this whole ‘cheating AI’ thing, my stance comes down to this (like all views it can be shared by others, or not, you take whatever view you want)
- First and absolutely foremost, is that the premise is that ‘nothing is ever done to/a game’
Interestingly, this thread has clearly shown, with constant input of the devs themselves, that they are not ‘above’ meddling with code, compared to simply leaving it ‘be’, to what is expected, – a simple ‘50%-50%’ drop rate. (which is meant leaving all randomness ‘equal’, not to be messed with).
The fact devs admit they ‘change’ things as they see ‘fit’ is pretty much (what I personally) try to stress, its not a matter of an ‘exact’ thing occuring, but that tampering is going on. This is the most important ‘take-home’ lesson here, that devs do, will and -can- tamper with their games, whether people know it or not.
To be clear this is meant in a general way about games in general, not ‘GoW’ devs specifically.
Second, once you realize the first, then it goes into that ‘gray-zone’ quagmire, where, okay, ‘they say they ‘only’ did this now, but really, what’s stopping them from changing it later on?’
I understand that reaches ‘theory’ stages, but since the 1st we see is definitely ‘true’, then the second is left up to the person to decide…
Finally, after having read Sirrian’s remarks on the matter, I ‘feel’ strongly he’s a pretty decent guy and wants to be honest, but at the end of the day those various threads smack of double-speak and convolution.
No I’m not bashing anyone, what I’m saying is this - best said by ‘quoting’ someone in one of those threads who nailed it on the head →
" why not just leave it alone so both sides are equal ? "
If something isn’t left to be equally ‘fair’ at all times, who the he-- knows What you’ll get at any given day.
thanks
(in the end it’s the ‘insta-kills’ that are killing this game)
You are hopeless… Mute
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Man, you’re one of those few incredibly skilled people that can actually get on my nerves aren’t you?
lol (trust me that’s tough to do, not sure why Lyya doesn’t step in but whatever it’s clear you guys are like some kind of ‘family’ here, lol…)
Here’s the response -
with the way I type you don’t think I read through multiple threads by the time you even linked your lame ‘let mE AttaCkXX jUUUUuuuU MesAAGEEejejejeJJJJ!!!111111’
I appreciate you linking Sirrians post/thread I already read it before I seen your post (linked off one of the other threads)
I enjoyed seeing how he linked the actual code and results of his other games, I thought that was pretty interesting.
Unfortunately, there’s one thing left though…
Hope people read -this-, as it goes back to a fundamental thing hit on in that ‘Alright, here’s 3 ideas’ thing.
He linked the code, for the prior games, but guess what?
All Those Prior Games Had Cooldown Timers <-----
All the ‘comparing’ this game to that ‘code’ is moot, as long as krakens can ‘spam cast’ insta-death devours, in this game, which would’ve been impossible in the other previous games he made (with cool-down timers), then most are still missing the point.
(as noted in that prior ‘response to slyp’s’ post)
Guys check out the ‘Alright, here’s 3 ideas’ thread to see how these kinds of issues can be alleviated.
Otherwise yeah I think the coding is probably ‘fair’ it’s a matter of skills like insta-deaths etc that ruin it mainly,
cool thanks
Lol ouch! I am an ass! That one hurt…
Maaaaaybe this thread should be closed @Lyya
But if not thats fine i am muting it anyway…
Bye felicia
Forget if I answered you directly or not (I did slyp’s post), but what you’re talking about is exactly ‘expressed’ by cool-down timers as were actually in the original Puzzle Quest games (!!)
This is mentioned in a thread, "Alright, here’s 3 ideas " thread ,
please check it out (if you haven’t already).
(your post says ‘1hr’ guessing that’s one hour ago so you haven’t yet).
So yeah, cool-down timers are essential in a game like this especially with skill and abillities like ‘devour’ etc, (things like insta-kills etc).
A person is unfortunately nothing short of a ‘fanboy’ if they defend the state of the game as it is now especially in comparison to older ‘properly designed’ games.
And I don’t mean that to sound like an a-- I mean that in a functional ‘wanting to have a fun, playable non-frustrating gameplay experience’
Without cool-down timers units can basically spam-cast anything outrageously powerful willy-nilly leaving the player just sitting there ‘open-jawed’ at the ‘berserk’ mode it goes into wiping out whole (player) teams with only 1 or 2 AI units left.
This is what’s frustrating the cr-p out of most players posting in these types of forum threads, and rather ‘easily’ fixed with cool-down timers.
thanks
I will say this and only this, not trying to sound curt but it is how I feel distilled down to its essence:
If I wanted to play Puzzle Quest, I would.
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I say the problem isn’t “the games aren’t long enough”, the problem is “I don’t get to make enough decisions”.
Arena is nice for it if we ignore Dawnbringer games. The matches are over fast, but my brain isn’t off. If the opponent has Runic Blade or Black Manacles, I have to prioritize the hero. If there’s a Spirit Fox in play, that can be a problem. A handful of other troops like Rock Worm can really run away, so I have to care about those. Most of the time when I lose, I feel like it comes down to “I misjudged this troop’s power” or “I didn’t pick the right match on a certain move”, not “welp, skyfall.” It can make arena matches feel like puzzles, and I really enjoy it.
PvP, not so much. My team does what it does, their team does what it does. Part of that is because I’m still “early-mid-game” and don’t have 2-3 strong teams to swap around. But really there’s only 2 mechanics between the 4 “strong” teams I fear:
- “TDS and friends” get 8 turns and kill 3 of my troops in one turn, then I retreat.
- “Nobend/Fizzbang Goblins” gets 8 turns and kills 3 of my troops in one go, then I retreat.
- “Goblin King” is just trouble if I can’t kill him fast enough.
- “Troll Kraken” gets 8 turns and kills 3 of my troops in one go, then I retreat.
It’s not that the matches are over fast, it’s that due to luck there’s one critical turn that obliterates me, then the CPU slow rolls killing my last troop over the next 15 turns.
I don’t know how to fix it, other than noting “gem generation seems too powerful”. Almost every time I get Rock Worm in Arena I have a game where it gets 5+ turns in a row and solos the entire enemy team. I think that’s a sign even weak gem generation is too hard to balance. The same goes for massive explosions like TDS. The only maybe fair nerf for that is to make it “remove” gems, not “explode”.
But it could be that explosions/generation are to GoW what mana screw is to Magic: the Gathering: everyone wants to fix it, but every time a “solution” is tried everyone agrees it makes the game less fun.
I don’t know. I’m just sort of hoping one day I actually get a TDS so I can actually play the game too.
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Do you use the permalink feature found in your Personal Collection on gowdb.com ?
You can optionally share a link here which shows your stable of Troops.
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I haven’t sat down to do that just yet, I’ll try and get on it this weekend!
Actually… I didn’t realize it could auto-update!
https://gowdb.com/collection/735298d28fc81211eaa16ddc8786a3d1
Teams without names other than #1 are WIPs, either I’m not sure if I’m going to try and trait them or they’re abandoned ideas.
When I started I enjoyed doing my things my way right or wrong. Is that your play-style too or would you welcome ideas?
Ninj: Good lord I just got the pun of your name. Awesome 
I guess my old man eyes needed to see it in larger font on Lyya’ site! 
