Enemy Cascade Limiting (6/12/18)

Pongie

While I like the change (a casino will never loosen the odds in favour of the player), I do hope the dev team didn't spend too much time tinkering with the algorithm/code.  

Moon Roach

ZeiramMR said:

Most surprising to me is that this can be deployed in a daily patch/push, and not a full release.

Least surprising to me is the number of people finding something to complain about.

It's a simple data change: AIMadCascadeMode = False.

KGB

Strange change. Like someone else posted I am not sure I'd have ever known if nothing was said.

I imagine the worst offender to this from an AI point of view is that annoying Sentry Fighter who tends to cause a LOT of cascades esp on PvE nodes that have 2 of them.

Otherwise since I run Grocket in PvE it means almost all battles are over in less than 10 matches and most times if there is only 1 tile mover the AI only takes 1-2 moves total so I rarely see cascades.

On the other hand what *would* have been a great addition is a new boost called 'protection from match 5' that functioned like a 5 cover Teen Jean Psychic Feedback. If the AI got a cascade match 5 it would fire (stunning enemy team and doing team damage) but ONLY from a cascade match 5 (ie tile drop). Let that boost be available in PvE and PvP. I'd happily use it regularly in important matches even if it did nothing (essentially it's insurance).

KGB

Tensuun

Hm... I'm actually somewhat interested in this change. I've had a few encounters (especially on 5-star Essential PVE nodes) where the opponent (scaled to some ludicrous level) made a vertical match-3 that cascaded into a vertical match-4 from the ceiling, which then cascaded into a vertical match-7, that cascaded into a match-6 cross, that cascaded.... And then I lost on turn 3, and had to health-pack my 1-cover essential 5-star character plus at least one of my very small pool of characters at a high enough level to compete with the SCL 7-9 enemies. 1-2 health packs spent solely because of a "lucky" cascade in the enemy's favor felt unfair — not enough for me to lose my temper or whatever, but enough that I felt pretty demoralized and pessimistic about my chances of getting a top-20 placement prize in the overall event. It's because this kind of thing doesn't happen very often that I heuristically just assume it won't, in any given match.

One time this actually happened during a fight with Boss Carnage in Round 8; I 100% cleared that boss node three times, and then on the fourth attempt scored a whole ~300 points before my full-health all-powered-up team completely wiped. (My alliance did end up fully clearing the whole event, so it doesn't matter a whole lot in my case, but it felt bad at the time.)

And yeah, sometimes I do get those kinds of cascades in my favor, but I don't assume they will, either. In PVE, I choose my SCL based on the number of powered-up characters I have; if I don't have at least two powered-up 4* characters, I probably can't fully clear every node on SCL 8 and should go to SCL 7 instead. If I happen to have four or more powered-up 4* characters, I can rotate through them to save health packs on SCL 9 and can give that a shot, but otherwise SCL 8 is the highest I can realistically try to place (or even get progression rewards) in.

In other words, in PVE, if I enter a node, my assumption is that I will win regardless of whether or not I get a lucky cascade. Lucky cascades in my favor usually end the battle 3-4 turns earlier, but with or without the lucky cascade, the outcome is that the characters I chose took some damage and then I won. Occasionally, taking out a specific opponent early can save health packs, but the benefit feels small or even negligible in some cases. Meanwhile, an enemy cascade at a bad time can force me to spend 3 health packs (a massive setback since I usually want to use those exclusively to compete in PVP) and I have to restart a battle from the beginning. It's a nuisance.

This could all just be rationalizing my own human negativity bias and so forth. But I do think it's an inherently asymmetric thing to begin with (enemy player has impossibly high levels and unlimited health packs, I have flexibility in character choices and an ability to make strategic and tactical decisions in pursuit of specific goals) and there was never a Platonic ideal of fairness in the first place.

HoundofShadow

Can we make the AI more intelligent? For examples, not matching own special tiles immediately after placing it on the same turn, letting it create a match-5.

At least this shows that the devs care about the players' feelings, and different players are concerned about different things at different stages of theit gameplay. 

We could have kept this change within the Prologue itself. I find the thought of players throwing their phones across the room because they were angry with the enemies' cascade hilarious. How many Stark Salary could they have bought with the repair cost or the cost of a new Samsung or an Apple phone?

Hadronic

The only time i get annoyed by huge cascades is when im fighting against 5* Thanos and the cascade results in a kill for the enemy. Needless to say that only happens in PvP.

Borstock

It's amazing how many people found a way to get annoyed by this.

Thank you, devs. I hope this encourages new players to stick with it.

Punisher5784

Borstock said:

It's amazing how many people found a way to get annoyed by this.

Thank you, devs. I hope this encourages new players to stick with it.

I thought the same too. Then after thinking about it, this was constantly requested over 3yrs ago. We got the "the AI isn't cheating, it's all RNG" response and we accepted it. In the past year or two, not many players complain about cascades and cheating, at least on the forums, and now the devs want to tackle this. If they addressed the 6th cover issue instead then I bet everyone would be happy, as that's a complaint that never died down since day 1 

babinro

This is a lesson devs need to apply to all aspects of the game. 

Please give it some serious consideration. 

No one enjoys a bad run of token pulls and if you insist on making them random then I suggest you create a similar system that artificially improves our odds with each pull.

Using Latest Legends as an example:

1:7 chance to pull a 5*

Since these tokens are so precious to your player base you better believe we feel when we're in a rut.  This could be true even if our average pulls over the last year were to exceed the 15% average.

So apply your randomized solution to token pulls.

Pull # 1- 6 are 1:7 chance as written.

Pull # 7 is 1:4 chance.

Pull # 8 is 1:3 chance

Pull # 9 is 1:2 chance

Pull # 10 is guaranteed

Apply similar execution to the odds of pulling a 4* in heorics or a Rank 3 on the Beginner Supports and so on.

turul

@LakeStone @Brigby

Some player abilities affected in a negative way by this change:

Match 4-5 passives:
Loki passive
Jean 4* passive
Mockingbird passive

nerfed by less likely triggering some special tile destroyal:
Deadpool 4* purple
Dr.oc 3* passive
Medusa passive
Daredevil and Spiderwoman traps
etc etc every 3rd character at least some way

nerfed by enemy not collecting Ap as before
-every steal power
-every power that gives bonus dmg on how many Ap the enemy has.

nerfed by enemy fireing less powers with less AP
Dr strange passive

Pr0spect0r

lost 3 straight matches against the flaptain in the crash due to cascades, this update cant happen soon enough

dokiy

Hmmm. This would also nerf the green Ultron sentries correct? If so, good!!!! I don’t care what my roster is at, those guys suck.

Wil88

 But we’re hopeful this will reduce the number of phones that get thrown across the room and improve people’s first impressions of the game.

Nice to see that I’m not the only one prone to launching my phone!!

DeNappa

While I see the problem you're trying to tackle, I don't really consider this a good development. I've seen some ridiculous cascades in my time, but for both sides. Win some, lose some, right? It doesn't really seem fair. Ridiculous extreme: you wouldn't just add a 'win' button on each node right, because what would be the point of even playing then?

Some alternatives for consideration:

• Limiting the enemy cascade nerf to SCL 6 and below. Heck, it could even be a sliding scale, where you start with a 3 cascade cap at SCL1+2 and add 1 for every 2 clearance levels after until 'uncapped' at SCL7
• Limiting the cascade nerf to certain powers. For example, most likely to cause this will probably be Jugg green, Sentry passive, Loki purple?
• By extension (I think I once posted this on the suggestions board): stop triggering match-5 passives if they involve tiles that dropped in during cascades.

qandols

There is also the opposite: stale boards when playing against powerful goons. All their countdowns resolve all the time and you just sit there helpless. Maybe harder to do anything about.

Kevin61

Sure, everyone that plays this game has had AI cascades that do serious damage to your team, myself included, but if you are so angry at a RANDOM occurrence then you should be playing another game.

//Removed Insult -Brigby

Bowgentle

LakeStone said:

We think game developers ought to make games for the pleasure of people and their actual brains, with all their quirky biases, not for some Platonic ideal of fairness.

So that's why you had roster based scaling in PVE for so long, and still have it in Boss events, huh?
For our pleasure.

Twysta

Do you remember community scaling? What a mess that was. 

Nick441234

Good god, I still shudder at community scaling. You'd dread waking up in the morning and seeing how much more difficult the fights have got while you've been asleep. That really was the most ridiculous thing they ever put in this game. 

Daiches

This is a waste of effort..