Noticed a strange thing...

Unknown

Since the Hulk quests appeared, the game play feels a bit weird. Obviously, I am likely to be completely wrong, but game after game now starts with me having hardly any matches on colours for my chosen characters' key skills.

Its really odd, like no matter which characters I choose, I have to select colours I don't want with my move. Time after time. And when I match colours I don't want, the game offers colours I do just for the computer to take those.

I only mention it because it is becoming frustrating, and therefore noticeable. Like, I'm saying "Again! What the?" A lot...

Any thoughts?

simonsez

Kinda like how when you're facing Bullseye, the board is always littered with purple. Or when you go to prologue heal XForce, the board always starts with 4-5 yellow, tops... but when you're facing a super-buffed Ares, the board always starts with 3-4 yellow matches queued up. But this isn't a new thing. I've been paranoid about stuff like this since the beginning.

Unknown

Intellectually I want to believe that it's random, but I keep finding my self cursing the AI when they get insane match and cascades. Lately it certainly doesn't feel like I am getting similar cascades.

In one match with a lvl 100+ Venom, the AI kept getting big cascades and perma-stunned me. Venom alone was able to take down my entire team. Other people having a similar issue after latest patch?

Unknown

Yeah, sounds familiar. Easy to pass it off as paranoia, but it seems unlikely odds really. Sigh...

Unknown

That one Venom, Yelena, Lieutenant node is horrible at high levels because the Lieutenant keeps feeding Venom Pink meaning near perma stuns if you're unlucky, more so if there is a lot of Pink on the board for him to pink up. Some of the other feeder enemy combos are also quite horrid, eg Ragnarok plus green feeders.

polecat

It seems like something has changed with the way the boards are populated/filled. It also doesn't seem to be in either the player or the AI's favor. It's just crazy cascade mayhem or color starvation. I think I started noticing it with Combined Arms a few days ago. Lots of wins/losses with barely a scratch followed by a solid demolishing on the exact same (or similar) node. Not so much of a middle ground anymore and more luck based. It seems more pronounced on more difficult nodes where each hit counts.

Arimis_Thorn

Definitely feels this way for me. I just commented on a thread that AI teams 30-50 levels below my team and kicking the **** out of me making it nearly impossible to progress through the event.

And I keep saying "Eff this cheating game. I'm done!" and then pick it back up 2 minutes later because clearly I have a problem.

Unknown

It feels this way because the AI teams have the feeder for the AP they need in The Hulk so they're never going to not have what they need, so since they're always hitting their moves it feels like you're much slower than usual. Normally without the feeder it'd take a while for the AI to hit their moves too but The Hulk had some very unfair matchups in terms of what feeders your opponents get.

CNash

Purple feeders and Moonstone, for example - bring someone who can spam special tiles or every other turn you'll be eating pure damage from a boosted Gravity Warp.

Unknown

Today the AI pulled out 2 summon characters in middle of a match when I could have sworn they only had one....I am fairly confident the programmers have purposely stacked the deck in their favor to do as much damage as possible to players to ensure Health Packs are purchased quite frequently...

Unknown

I have also been noticing more boards at the extremes. Either they are completely devoid of value or they are filled with match 4s and 5s.

doc8998

Believed it was just a strange run of bad luck on my end. Using a team heavy on greens all around in one match earlier today, (and was a team 50+ levels higher than enemies,) and literally nickel & dimed them to death- even XFWolvie with only an 8 match for green never had enough to activate. Reds, yellows, & blacks being my other attacks activated once between all of them- and that was my very last hit to end the match. Meanwhile, Blues & purples rained down, and when any colors I could use fell, they of course lined up in a manner to be collected by the baddies.
But, it's seemed to be this way (today's fight was extreme,) almost the entire Hulk event. No matter who I use, it seems the board & cascades are just not falling my way. Believed it was just a bad run for me- appears others are seeing this, as well.
Regards,
Doc8998

Unknown

In the hulk PVE I've been seeing the same thing. I tried switching my team to focus on and because they seemed to be the dominant color for at least 5 matches. I cursed my XF (it's obviously his fault) then would you believe it...With rogers and falcon I stared down a screen littered with -_- It must be a fluke. I ran it back and what do you know. Plenty of for ares to go all postal on my a**. You can rest assured they were getting nasty cascades and the only I got was when Ares was coming in hot with an Onslaught. I don't even want to mention the massive amount of times I tried to play it safe and make matches in the top of the board only to see perfect opportunities for match 4 and 5's readily available for the computer to take.

Unknown

Certainly seems like something is a-happening, and it may well be related to health packs, then.
Glad you guys have actually thought this through and analysed the system, makes for a more coherent reasoning. Shame though, the game should be more fair.

Unknown

Well this must be quite a compliment to the programmers.
Imagine all that work to get the exactly opposite colours to drop depending on your current team.

Must be what they do instead of fixing of fixing alllll the bugs?
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Edit: [Disclaimer: I have not noticed any game bugs. Everything is fine]

CNash

You know, I thought it was just bad luck too - but almost every matchup in this PVE with the Dark Avengers, even when they have no goons to feed them, I'm coming out of it with 2/3 of my characters heavily damaged - and this is a post-transition team, Cap at 166, Patch and Hulk at 130. (Obviously I'm not taking Hulk along to fight Daken, that would be stupid - I sub in OBW). And more often than not, the colours I need aren't appearing with the same frequency as I've had in previous events. I bring Cap, I get no red/blue. Bring Thor, I get no yellow/green. OBW's on my team and I see no purple/blue. So the enemy team can wail on me before I can shut them down.

SnowcaTT

I've wondered about this recently as well: If I'm running storm/mags I see nothing but green/red. If I'm running wolvy/daken, I often see nothing but black/purple. I assume random, but when it starts showing up over and over...

Sort of like cascades. I'm sure it's just random--right? Yesterday was the start of the season and if someone had a dial they turned it up to 11: all the sudden previous PVP, current PVP, all PVE nodes started to cascade like crazy, damage impossible to avoid. It's funny to watch the first PVE node cascade over and over and over, at about 17 damage each cascade.

Bad luck I'll chalk it up to, but it certainly seems odd at times.

Unknown

The AI in PvE is really getting extra cascades. Here is what I have noticed:
1. AI with active characters, characters that match tiles. The AI gets on average 2+ cascades from the top of the board, meaning that cheap AP powered characters such as overpowered 1* Venom and Juggs get a huge boost. I have lost several matches to Venom because the AI was able to get perma stun from match + cascades
2. Against AI with active characters I get less cascades, multiple power use such as Thunderous Clap, Lightning Strike, and I Am Groot will not trigger a single cascade. This is very different from when playing against grunts, prologue, etc.

In the past I have chalked the AI getting more cascades to luck, but in a match after 4-5 uses of board clearing abilities in a match without a single cascade, this seems very very unbalanced.

Vhailorx

I think you guys really need to calm down. Do you really think the developers subtley tweak the tile drop percentages to key off of the player and ai rosters, all in the hopes of making the players slightly more likely to lose so they can sell more health packs?

d3p charges $10 to buy a 3* cover. They charge $2 to sell a single cover pack with a 16% chance of a 3* character and a MAYBE a 2.5% chance of getting particular character. Not losing points in pvp requires real money. Hell, leveling up a single 3* character costs something $160 AFTER you get the first three covers. I don't think the devs are shy about monetizing the game. Why bother with complex and subtle probability shifting in the tile drops?

There is nothing to see here. You remember when you lose because of bad tile luck and you completely ignore the times you open up a a match with back to back to back to match 5s and are off to the race. Look up confirmation bias, learn a little bit about human psychology, and move along.

Unknown

One time the AI got a cascade that left it with 31 AP in each color.

A few matches later it matches 3 Orange tiles, and we don't even have orange tiles. It couldn't use them, but the AI is obviously cheating.

But the worst part is when the AI uses Rage of the Panther when it has 13 Black. The description obviously says it works with 12 AP, not 13.

Just saying.

polecat

Vhailorx wrote:

I think you guys really need to calm down. Do you really think the developers subtley tweak the tile drop percentages to key off of the player and ai rosters, all in the hopes of making the players slightly more likely to lose so they can sell more health packs?

d3p charges $10 to buy a 3* cover. They charge $2 to sell a single cover pack with a 16% chance of a 3* character and a MAYBE a 2.5% chance of getting particular character. Not losing points in pvp requires real money. Hell, leveling up a single 3* character costs something $160 AFTER you get the first three covers. I don't think the devs are shy about monetizing the game. Why bother with complex and subtle probability shifting in the tile drops?

There is nothing to see here. You remember when you lose because of bad tile luck and you completely ignore the times you open up a a match with back to back to back to match 5s and are off to the race. Look up confirmation bias, learn a little bit about human psychology, and move along.

I'm not saying there's a conspiracy here or anything but it's also not difficult to lean odds one way or another. When the factor is slightly adjusted, you could end up with player or AI advantages, higher tile saturation of one or mismatched colors, etc. Done right and with subtlety, it will function as a variable - yet not entirely random - reinforcement schedule. Highly addictive. I'd be surprised if there was no form of house edge in this game.