What is it with all the cascades?

daveomite

Something changed - unannounced. Massive cascades hitting you from out of the blue, even happening on the AI's first move. I mean 50-60+ AP type cascades that means they can completely destroy you immediately.

Add that to the bug with Carnage's passive, causing him to run the power over and over again at strange times, even if no power used... just isn't helping.

Please, stop pushing out updates that seem to break more than fix things. This isn't just happening to me, numerous players have all mentioned issues just like this.

Unknown

I've had this problem since at least Deadpool, on and off.

Carnage PvE was absurdly bad with this. I had one clear where I burned through my entire roster and couldn't even finish a match, even with 10 health packs (ended up grabbing the useless nodes and featured ones for a few points). Had one match, as an example, where a cascade took out 2 of my heroes, from full, within the first 3-5 rounds.

Had been getting the "game forces 2x3 matches on you at the start of the match through cascades" thing sometimes, but that was pretty much a new low. You know it's bad when your phone screen goes to sleep before the cascade stops.

Unknown

Something is definitely off. I mean, the ones of us playing longer than a year know this never ever happened before. I don't think we will ever get anyone to admit to it, but please devs, fix it and don't admit to it. Fine.

acescracked

It's there to balance the 5 extra health packs we get.

Malcrof

I watched carefully as i did my full clear of DC in ISO8, didn't see any enemy cascades out of place. I got a massive, close to non-stop one off a magneto red that led to a thor yellow.. killed the entire enemy team with 2 abilities.

I have noticed few miraculous AI cascades lately. They only ever seem to happen when i am very close to beating a board with only 1 person left... then the cascades happen and i lose. but i think that is mostly just happenstance.

JVReal

I've grown accustomed to the cascades and they do feel more common to me now. What bugs me more is the makeup of the board according to the AI characters.

When AI has Cap out, blue floods the board, and not a purple in sight. When the AI has MNMags out, board flooded with Purple and poor Groot has only 3 blue at the end of the match, never having been able to get his strike tiles out.

It seems to me when the AI has a high AP character, it seems to drop a lot of match 3's from the top feeding those powers. I used to be able to deny blue, red and yellow to cap and leave him for last. Lately, I've been seeing mini cascades where the AI has 10 blue, 10 red and 8 yellow by turn 3.

That is what is bothering me. The boards favoring the AI, to the point where I have decided to color match the opposing team just to try and take advantage of the boards colors. And I do believe the AI has learned to deny us AP too, matching away the colors we need when they have no powers that require it.

Wonko33

There has been a post like this one every week for as long as these forums have been running, my guess is you are experiencing a string of bad luck or that a character you started using has a tendency to modify the cascade rate because of his powers.

More likely, D3 is out to get you

Unknown

If the AI isn't smart enough to make a match 5 on the board how can it be smart enough to make them fall from the sky?

reckless442

Wonko33 wrote:

There has been a post like this one every week for as long as these forums have been running, my guess is you are experiencing a string of bad luck or that a character you started using has a tendency to modify the cascade rate because of his powers.

More likely, D3 is out to get you

Daveomite doesn't exaggerate and he is not the only one seeing this. I've wiped three times in the Carnage event due to cascades into 5-tile matches for the AI's Prof X. Each match, there were at least three match-5s that the AI got from cascades. I've never wiped more than twice in any event and this one still has 24 hrs to go. I'm also seeing massive cascades with other opponents, but have managed to survive them.

These crazy cascades are not the product of character selection. The cascades that I am seeing are usually occurring within three or four turns, before anyone has really used powers. And the teams that are having this happen mostly are Carnage, Hulkbuster, Prof X or Carnage, 4Thor, Prof X. Those are not characters that cause the board to shift massively (except for Carnage's green, which has never caused the cascades). Sometimes the AI used Iron Fist, but his purple has not been the cause of these cascades.

Malcrof

There, now you can have some cascades as well.

Unknown

And meanwhile I got a cascade on the first turn that basically wiped out the other team, it was glorious.

Cascades happen, and they happen more so if certain powers are used beforehand to clear out certain color tiles. When a critical tile comes out it makes a cascade much more likely. There are all sorts of reasons a cascade might happen, but you'll note that it's not like they're happening every game, or even every 5 or 10 games. You might notice one or two a day on average, and you probably aren't even counting the good ones you get as part of the trend. You just notice that every so often, you get screwed, though less often than the AI does because you can play intelligently and plan your moves.

You're playing a match-3 game. Cascades are a natural part of that format, and adding in powers that do funky things to the board and two players that are hunting for specific colors are going to increase that likelihood. I guarantee you that assuming this is due to a broken game or a malicious dev team is going to make your experience of these accidental events much more negative and make you hate the game simply for being what it is.

Unknown

My experience contradicts with the random theory. I notice them much more in the A.I.'s favor when events or subs are ending, and I notice them more often (but nowhere near as frequently) in my favor during off-times, when there's no time crunch and you're unlikely to shell out for health packs.

I also notice that there's some variation, sure, but I've also noticed trends that move past random.

Entire clears that go bat-crazy with A.I. cascades almost every turn. One or two clears before my nasty clear during Carnage PvE, I had a favorable clear (extremely, extremely rare) in which every match was just a flow of cascades wiping out the A.I. team.

I'm not a fan of either, and would much prefer to have balanced clears, especially since the nasty ones are almost always in the A.I.'s favor, and there do seem to be hidden event triggers to prompt cascading. Part of this is due to level discrepancies so it might be better with super scaling turned off. Remains to be seen. But in either case, cascade-flows don't feel like playing the game with tactics and strategy involved - just feels like playing a slot machine when it goes into that mode.

I haven't really played enough prodigal sun to know how it's been going on this event. Honestly, I've been pretty fatigued with this game and not been playing much lately. Too much grind and having to play on their schedule instead of mine. Haven't been playing PvP at all for similar reasons (I refuse to shield hop and arrange my day to conform to when I HAVE to play in order to place).

TxMoose

GunnerMcGrath wrote:

And meanwhile I got a cascade on the first turn that basically wiped out the other team, it was glorious.

Cascades happen, and they happen more so if certain powers are used beforehand to clear out certain color tiles. When a critical tile comes out it makes a cascade much more likely. There are all sorts of reasons a cascade might happen, but you'll note that it's not like they're happening every game, or even every 5 or 10 games. You might notice one or two a day on average, and you probably aren't even counting the good ones you get as part of the trend. You just notice that every so often, you get screwed, though less often than the AI does because you can play intelligently and plan your moves.

You're playing a match-3 game. Cascades are a natural part of that format, and adding in powers that do funky things to the board and two players that are hunting for specific colors are going to increase that likelihood. I guarantee you that assuming this is due to a broken game or a malicious dev team is going to make your experience of these accidental events much more negative and make you hate the game simply for being what it is.

first clear this morning in the pve, I got a ~30 ap cascade in one of the harder nodes. made the node a piece of cake. was worried about scaling since I came out so clean but second clear wasn't horrible.

xellessanova

IT'S ALL SCARLET WITCH'S FAULT!

Before ULTRON came around, these crazy cascade threads weren't constantly on the top of the General Discussion Forum... afterwards, players of all types from super vets to super newbies have become united by one thing! The curse of the Random Number Generator gone mad! The probability manipulation powers of the Mistress of Chaos! Pink tiles falling from the sky! Human sacrifice! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!

BURN THE WITCH! STOP THE MADNESS!

Malcrof

xellessanova wrote:

IT'S ALL SCARLET WITCH'S FAULT!

Before ULTRON came around, these crazy cascade threads weren't constantly on the top of the General Discussion Forum... afterwards, players of all types from super vets to super newbies have become united by one thing! The curse of the Random Number Generator gone mad! The probability manipulation powers of the Mistress of Chaos! Pink tiles falling from the sky! Human sacrifice! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!

BURN THE WITCH! STOP THE MADNESS!

We must be sure..


Does she float?

Unknown

The Ultron event gave us a really nice opportunity to analyze some of the game's statistics, because every single turn the top row was completely replaced, giving us a fresh eight tiles in a row. There are 5,764,801 ways that those eight tiles can be distributed by color (7 different colors including team ups, to the eighth power). There are 12005 ways that those eight tiles can have a run of at least five in a row (making a critical tile). That means that the odds of seeing a critical tile in the top row after Ultron destroys a row are about 1/500. Did anyone actually see crits coming at them that rarely? Or even close? I typically saw at least one every other game (figure a typical game is 20-30 turns). With 1/500 odds of seeing one on each turn, the odds of seeing at least one in EIGHTY turns is under 15%. In fact, you don't reach 50/50 odds of seeing that happen until you hit 350 turns. What that means is, on average, you should see a crit in a brand new top row once every 350 turns. Probability is funny; it's not unrealistic (just very unlikely) for odds like that to turn into two crits in a row. But then you also should see it fail to happen for a thousand turns or more sometimes. Never. Never. Never, did that happen. I'm happy to share my math with anyone who wants to see how I'm getting these numbers. The point is, there is absolutely an element of color clumping in the algorithm. I don't believe that it favors the AI; just this morning I started a game by killing the AI's max X Force in one turn. Crits turning into crits turning into death! However, the increased damage caused by cascades absolutely does favor D3 overall, because it forces us to use more health packs.

Unknown

Another fun one: How often have you seen a new row all the same color? I've seen it a few times. The odds of that are 1 in 823,543. Being dealt a royal flush in five cards is slightly more likely; 1 in 649,740.

Heartburn

"RNGesus had but one AI. And for him he let the cascades flow"

Unknown

Here's something to add fuel to the fire.

I was just doing some Hulkbombing this morning in pvpland when I faced off against a team with Loki. The board starts me off with a match-4 and a match-5. I was like yolo and took the match-5 which cascades into a match-4. Loki's green goes off twice. ****! One turn later later, it presents me with another match-5 and I'm like yolo. That match turns into another 3 match-4s that make Loki's green go off 3 more times!! Thankfully I was able to pull off a Patch BR, Carnage Red and a dual match to finish off Loki before he took all my ap.

So yes, there has been an increase in cascades that are out to harm you.

*puts on tinfoil hat*

/sarcasticrant

Salgy

daveomite wrote:

Something changed - unannounced. Massive cascades hitting you from out of the blue, even happening on the AI's first move. I mean 50-60+ AP type cascades that means they can completely destroy you immediately.

Add that to the bug with Carnage's passive, causing him to run the power over and over again at strange times, even if no power used... just isn't helping.

Please, stop pushing out updates that seem to break more than fix things. This isn't just happening to me, numerous players have all mentioned issues just like this.

the real question here, is will there be a "Cascade Suck"?!?

CaptainFreaky

xellessanova wrote:

IT'S ALL SCARLET WITCH'S FAULT!

Before ULTRON came around, these crazy cascade threads weren't constantly on the top of the General Discussion Forum... afterwards, players of all types from super vets to super newbies have become united by one thing! The curse of the Random Number Generator gone mad! The probability manipulation powers of the Mistress of Chaos! Pink tiles falling from the sky! Human sacrifice! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!

BURN THE WITCH! STOP THE MADNESS!

Well yeah, but the tiles are purple.