[ADBjester]

Hello All,

You’ve seen my posts here, but I’ve left the AB2 family.  I’m now playing AB Evolution instead, which seems to have fewer exploits and is more reasonably competitive.  Though it has its own flaws, they are FAR fewer than AB2, and the game is more aggressively supported by Rovio.  It also plays “better” without payment.

See you in the Oinktagon Arena!  As for this forum, peace, out, and best of luck to all you long-time AB2 birders.

Jester

[ADBjester]

Hello All,

You’ve seen my posts here, but I’ve left the AB2 family.  I’m now playing AB Evolution instead, which seems to have fewer exploits and is more reasonably competitive.  Though it has its own flaws, they are FAR fewer than AB2, and the game is more aggressively supported by Rovio.  It also plays “better” without payment.

See you in the Oinktagon Arena!  As for this forum, peace, out, and best of luck to all you long-time AB2 birders.

Jester

[ADBjester]

I finally beat him.  I got lucky, but gained insight in the process.

I beat him because I got lucky on rebounds and hit the boss from the back several times in early shots.  This is not the preferred way.

What I determined instead (mainly from watching opponents in arena matches) is that what you need is a very powerful white bird with superpower regeneration of 3 turns.  Damage the boss as much as you can with the first three birds, and then take him out with a ridiculously powerful white bird superpower shot, before he can attack. You then will have enough power left to take out the minions before they defeat you.

If you go into this match with only 5-turn regenerations, you’re going to lose, because you can never take a superpower shot before the boss attacks.

Level 20 isn’t enough.  You need a level 40 or better bird, so you may have to grind a while to earn evolution material.  (Keep taking the occasional shot while you grind — you might get lucky like I did).

Jester

P.S. Please note that these forums are dead in comparison to the in-game ones, at http://forum.angrybirds.com.  The Nest here is great for AB2, etc, but the real chatter is at the other site.

Jester

[ADBjester]

I am stuck here, too (it is the next to last challenge in Chapter 19), for the same reason. As level 37, I can’t ever do enough damage to off the boss, and if he’s allowed to attack even one time, the match is over.

I went Googling for videos on how to beat it and only found January pre-launch videos… but the boss in those videos was FAR less powerful.

I have resigned myself to being stuck here for a while (I still try it when I’m out of turns elsewhere), until I can get enough evolution material from dungeons to level up at least 3 four-star white birds.

If anyone has any insight on how to beat this level while still ranked in the mid-30’s, your input would be welcome.

Jester

[ADBjester]

I agree, and was just coming here this morning to make this same post.  But the criteria is not strength + trophies (as it should be), but trophies alone.  My first week in the game, I mastered the arena after a slow start, and landed in the Champions league as only a level 29.  When I get matched against a 70+, it doesn’t matter if I land all five pigs over the line every time — the opponent’s strength plus the damage I did leads them to multiple KO’s, and my damage against them is minimal even with five in their court.

I’d rather see a cap put on the point spread.  I can still often beat someone 15 levels above me, but not fifty.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@DC228 Cost effective has nothing to do with it.  Level 1 and 2 birds are NOTHING but fodder for leveling up.  You don’t want to level up a 1/2 bird, ever.  Those should be merged into Level 3+ birds.

You’ll very quickly reach the point where leveling up even a Level 3 bird is only useful to acquire a “Collection” bird for an evolved 3-star.  You’ll want to save your coins to level up the (more expensive) level 4+, or evolved, birds.

In short, as you acquire Level 1 or 2 birds, either merge them into at least a level 3 bird, or (if you have none of the same color), sell them to clear inventory space.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@N33R:

Farming coins is tough work.

Every ~10 minutes, you’ll get an arena ticket.  Play it.  You’ll earn green keys.

Every time you build up 10 or 15 keys, and when you have 2500 XP of the same color, visit a dungeon.  You’ll earn 75 coins for beating it.  That amounts to 75 coins every 2 hours, give or take.

Play every Adventure you can, as well (at least once every hour).  You’ll gain coins, among other rewards.  (Not even going to get into coin rewards for limited time promos….  trust me, use them).

As you hatch eggs via the above, sell the 1 and 2 star ones.  Not much gold, but it keeps your inventory level low, and adds SOME gold.

You can effectively mine about 800 coins per day.  It’s not enough to level up evolved birds daily, but it will let you get them to level 20.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@Kpnanny:

It means, if the adventure starts in the “blue” region, then choosing blue birds to go on the adventure will reap greater rewards.

IOW, it takes fewer birds (XP) of matching region color to move the bar to a 12 hour quest with higher rewards, than birds of a non-matching color.

I tend to go for 3-hour quests during the day, and 12-hour quests overnight, and I’m more willing to consider “matching colors” for the overnight quests, as they are unlikely to “tie up” birds while I sleep.

Jester

 

[ADBjester]

Had them a few hours ago.   They went away.  Server issues happen.

These aren’t the birds you’re looking for.

You can go about your business.

Move along.

Jester

[ADBjester]

I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.  It isn’t as much luck as I thought, and Dmitry is only partially correct in that it is all about team strength.

Since posting, I’ve managed to rack up 600 trophies in the current (Bronze II) entry level league, good for second place.

You can easily defeat a much stronger opponent, if you’re able to keep 4 or 5 pigs on their side after your throws.  Even if they are stronger, they can’t do much damage to you if they get minimal attacks.

In matches with a Boss Pig, the boss pig will release its wrath only on certain turns.  When you have one of those, focus on standard pigs being pushed to the other side, and don’t worry about Boss Pig unless he’s a “1” and going to pounce.  Then you MUST get him to the other side, at all costs, that throw.

Diagonal angles aren’t as useful as you’d think.  Your bird tends to get into a side to side motion and doesn’t push birds.  I now try to go for motion towards the center line.  There’s still luck involved, but more often than not, it works in your favor that way.

Jester

 

[ADBjester]

@cognitive:

If you’re sitting on top of 30,000 gems, you could run into two dozen pigs and the rewards would still be worth it all the way to the top. But I doubt most AB2 players have this level of stash.

Hitting 22 pigs costs 51,170 gems, and that would be four pigs higher than expectation (even with the bias I’m discovering built into pre-jackpot floors).   30K in gems isn’t enough to make the climb reliably.  I didn’t start making it on a regular basis until I had enough to withstand 18 pigs:   38,370.

Even now, I’ve sometimes fallen 9 floors short, with 52K in reserve.  And I have made it up with less than 30K a couple times, as well.

It’s “random”, I still believe that, but I no longer believe the odds are the same on each floor.  I do believe that those odds per floor don’t change from run to run, but it isn’t 25% every floor.

Even then, a great (or miserable) run now and then isn’t mysterious.  Statistics says they SHOULD happen….. sometimes.  In today’s run, I hit only two pigs in the first 20 floors.  But from floors 48 to 59, I hit pigs on 6 of ten possible floors.  It happens.

Jester

 

[ADBjester]

@cognitive wrote:

I don’t have enough gems to climb the tower, unfortunately. I rarely go above 2 pigs’ worth. But, at lower levels, hitting 6 feathers then pig near  daily, easily 50% of the time for me, isn’t inspiring a lot of confidence in their randomness.

I do, though only once.  :)  I’ve saved them up over months of buying the letter, and have about 52,000 now — enough to climb to the top *most* times.  (I can hit 22 pigs and make it.  Expectation is 18 pigs.)

You’re a stats guy, cognitive, so here’s an interesting insight.  Just because I was so firm in my belief, I figured I could be susceptible to selection bias as well, so I started tracking.  I’ve been up the tower four times today.  (I sat on pig 90 and restored, so it never recorded the fact that I got there, and never awarded me anything).

I randomized the chosen card by just going 4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1 ad infinitum.  I’ve chosen each card the same number of times.

One was a miserable run that ended on floor 78.  The others made it to the top.  Thus, I turned over 71*4 – 9 pig-possible cards, or 275 cards.  I should have hit 69 pigs, on average.  I hit 77.  Above expectation, but a very small sample size, so it doesn’t worry me.

What does concern me is the floors just before jackpot floors, those ending in 4 and 9.  I tracked those separately.   There are 18 such floors per run, so 72 floors, less the three I couldn’t reach on the bad run.

I could have expected to hit just over 17 pigs on these floors, combined.  Any guesses as to the actual number?  Bueller?  Anyone?

THIRTY THREE.   47.8% of them were pigs.

Again, this is a small sample size, so this could just be noise, but it’s a MUCH bigger outlier.  Had this data been within reason, I might have abandoned the tracking, but that makes me want to gather up a couple hundred climbs… which will take time.

I’ll keep everyone here posted.

Jester

 

[ADBjester]

@ryan-kochie wrote:

Would love to see them do this for the ToF, prove it’s random. Agree on gems and pearls counts stored locally (and feather counts?), besides just how easy it is to exploit, it also makes backing up player data harder when their device breaks down, causing those saving up to 25k to be frustrated if they lose their pearls.

No, the fact that gems and pearls are local and feather counts are server-side is what makes it exploitable.  You can spend gems to acquire feathers (in the tower, or with Legendary chests).  You can buy hats with pearls.  Then so long as you backed up right before the spending spree, and so long as the game has contacted the server once to update the server-side hats and feather counts (just visit the trail and back to the home screen), you can restore.  You will restore your gems and pearls, but your upgraded hats, slingshots, and feathers will NOT revert to the backup state — they are server side.

It should have been obvious to Rovio that anything stored local side would be far more easily hackable…. but I also understand their need to keep server communication and database writes to a minimum.  It makes the servers far more manageable for them to depend on client-side storage for some things… and now its too late to change it without a great deal of effort.  (Could still be done, though).

Jester

[ADBjester]

@cognitive wrote:

Jester, I’m afraid we will disagree here. I have 32 years experience as a software developer, anything from mainframes to Android.

Then we’re speaking as peers, though with an experience gap.  I’ve been developing software since 1977.  32 or 40 years, makes little difference.  :)

The mystery points brigade is simply shorthand for badly designed points awarding based on percentage of destruction. I can understand 3-4M from a single bird, I do it too. But to string several of these in a row, always towards the end of the game, and always when you start with 1M per bird is a bit difficult to understand.

I still think this is selection bias.  I have *never* experienced this, with one exception:  Those very rare cases where I run out of birds before the opponent does. In this case, he races through his remaining birds, and can easily rack up lots of points.  I doubt you’re mistaking this for your MPB, though — it’s pretty obvious when that happens that it is multiple birds.

Tower probabilities? My first job was a statistical analysis programmer, and I’m married to a statistician. My current job involves lots of data analysis. Tower odds are simply not 25% per card. Not at 4th, 9th, 14th, etc levels at least, and getting worse as you go up.

Cool.  I worked for 12 years at PokerStars.com in statistical analysis, catching cheaters and bots through heuristics, designing much of the software used to do so. I also spent time answering hundreds of customer Emails about suspected non-randomness, and always (without exception) was able to provide a statistical retort based in fact, demonstrating complete randomness.

Care to make a “gentleman’s bet”?  I don’t know if you have access to enough gems to do it, but I do.  Climb the tower to the top a statistically significant number of times, and record the specific levels you get pigs.  Ensure that you, the user, selects randomly in one of two ways (or preferably both, comparing the two):  Always choose the same card, or rotate in order (4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1, etc).

I would wager you’ll find the distribution of pigs on every floor where pigs are possible to be within 1.5 sigmas.

Since the tower can only be climbed once daily, it will take some time to build up a reliable data set, but I’m confident it will quickly converge to the norm.

Is it wrong to say that points are easy to get early in the game for you but then as the game progresses points are harder to come by? The destructometer is simply not linear.

Who told you it was supposed to be?  Of *course* it isn’t linear.  Both the meter itself, and the points values at which extra birds are awarded, appear to be logarithmic.  Points are no more difficult to come by on later levels of an arena match than on earlier ones.  Filling the bar to get that next bird, though?  Yes, and clearly (and wisely) by design.

I just started a match, and I’m going to note the approximate values.

Before first free bird:  0 points, 0 meter, full 9 card backlog

Throw 1, Bomb.  Cleared level.  Free bird at 4.6 million, total score 5.7 million, bar 2/3 full.

Throw 2, Silver, cleared TINY level.  Free bird at 8 million, total score 10.4 million, bar 15% full.  Still full deck.

Throw 3, Red.  Left one bird, free bird at 14.6 million, total score now 15.2 million, meter nearly empty.  Still full deck.

Throw 4, Matilda, egged the last bird.  15.6 million.  Meter didn’t move.  8 cards, opponent has 9.9 million and 3 behind.

Throw 5, Terence.  Strike.  20.7 million.  Meter at maybe 40%.  Opponent at 12 million.  I have a 5 card edge on them as well.   (See what I mean by “I rarely lose?”  This is typical.)

Throw 6, tough choice.  *NO* chance of a strike, unless I use the Eagle (others are blizzard and popper)…. but it’s a room propped up by balloon wedges, so Eagle won’t score highly.  I’ll go with Eagle, as I always believe a Strike beats using two pigs.  21.6 million.  Meter barely moved.  6 behind, and opponent up to 16.2 million.  YES, that 4 million point gain is reasonable.  I scored nothing.  THEY finally threw a bird like I’ve been throwing the whole game.

Throw 7, Popper.  Not as effective as I’d have hoped.  22.8 million, bar now at 55%.  Opponent picked up 4 million as well.  Level NOT cleared.

Throw 8, second on room, bomb.  Still didn’t clear.  25 million, opponent has 22 million.  Bar at 85%.   Note that my opponent was probably filling his bar more quickly than I the last couple throws, simply because he was lower score, and the next free bird was “cheaper” for him.

Throw 9, third in room, Chuck.  Cleared room.  Bar at 95%.  26.3 million.  Opponent 24.1 million.  He has 2 birds left, I have 6.

Throw 10, Blizzard.  Inched me up to 26.9 million for a free bird.  27.1 total.  Did not clear, did not intend to.

Throw 11, Chuck.  Horrible throw.  30.6 million to his 27 million, but not only didn’t clear, but left two birds far from each other.

Throw 12, Chuck, headpopped one.  31.0 million, opponent is done at 27 million.  I have four birds left.  Meter near 20%.

Throw 13, Chile.  This is what he’s good for.  Cleared the last bird, and some structure.  31.9%, meter MAYBE 25%.

Throw 14, Ducks.  A throwaway bird at this point.  33.2 million.  Yes, my scoring is slowing down… because I use my powerful birds up front, unless a spell or specialty bird is called for.  Now I have Blues and Silver left, and no ice in the structure.  Bar at 33%.  No choice but to use Silver and hope for the clear, but it doesn’t look good.

Throw 15, Silver.   35.5 million.  Bar at 50%.  This is NORMAL.  My last free bird was at 26 million, and I shouldn’t expect another one until about 40 million.  The number of points between free birds is non-linear.  Left one straggling bird that Blues *might* clear, but I won’t get a free bird.  Game over.

Throw 16, Blues.  35.9 million, got the last pig.  Winning streak 4, 8 stars.

Now, this is pretty typical for one of my matches.  In fact, I didn’t win by as much as I usually do.  8 stinks.  I have 106 stars in the arena, and have played 11 matches.  (You do the math).

Game physics changing? Of course they do. How else can you reach a faraway pig with a given bird one day but not the same distance and same bird in a different room?

Different room, different distance.  Some rooms you can throw Blues all the way to the end.  Others are very long rooms where you can barely get Chuck there with a boost.  All rooms are not to the same “scale”.  Watch the pig sizes at the various zoom levels.

Big prizes? True, 1 in 5 in theory. Not in practice.

Statistical analysis, please, or its just a theory subject to selection bias.

I used to play backgammon. The best consumer grade app cheats like you would not believe. I found out how, posted on Apple store as a review and not only the review was censored, I was almost banned from the review section. To their credit, the way they cheat was light-years better. Easier to do that than fix the software.

Backgammon is a “solved game” — there is always a “perfect move”, which is why such software is banned.   Poker is not solved because of the amount of hidden information.  And Angry birds isn’t you vs. someone else, where there’s incentive to cheat.  It’s you vs. a recording of someone else, in an unknown room (though I believe it’s likely the same series of rooms), with unknown spells, with those spells being treated in an unknown manner.

Think about that.  I just documented a run where I had 5 spells to start.  How often are you matched against someone like that?  Now, is my run ever included in the pool for you to play against?  If it is, how are my spells “removed”?  I use spells to judiciously pick off troubling birds, but almost always reserve “real birds” for the first throw in a room.   If my run is used, and my spell throws (and their points) are just removed, then my run may be at a natural advantage to one that had no spells, because my birds that “count” are more frequently thrown at pristine rooms with high scoring potential, while those of others might be spent or wasted on the stragglers that my spells take care of.

We just don’t know.

What I do know is, it isn’t some conspiracy by Rovio to clear the inventory of infinite spells (which can still be had).   If they had that intention, they’d just wipe out the spell inventory of anyone who didn’t buy them, or the gems — it wouldn’t be hard to calculate which spells in inventory are legitimate if their database is in ANY way accurate and complete.

It is also not a conspiracy by Rovio to intentionally favor one player over another, not to offer odds other than that which would be dictated by a truly random source of entropy to extract gems from players more quickly.

Decisions we’re not privy to in the scoring system, or the playback system, or the matchup system, might not be what you’d personally prefer, but I’ve watched this game evolve since 2015, and every change has been seemingly thought out, and tested in focus groups before being given to us all.

Rovio’s simply coming to grips with the inflation caused by infinite spells.

Can’t argue with you there, at least on the premise.  I think the 25K hats were a poor decision (and one I bet they wish they could undo), and I think storing gem and pearl counts on the local device instead of on the server is probably the worst decision they ever made.  If anything ruined the game, that did, as that one fact is what makes most exploits exploitable.

In the end, though, you may not like the changes, but I think overall they have made the game better…. and had the game started where it is now, and without any gem or pearl exploits, nobody would be complaining.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@ryan-kochie wrote:  They update every 2 weeks in general. I would hope for a major bug like this they would update sooner, but probably have to wait 1 more week. At least do a patch. But they have their update schedule I suppose.

—–

I doubt you’ll get an answer from Rovio (aside from “next update”), for a couple reasons, but I can offer you some better speculation.  Why no hard date?

1) They can’t, due to conflicting store front schedules.

2) Everyone hates vaporware.  Software releases shouldn’t be preannounced.  They should just happen. To do otherwise invites all kinds of trouble when you “miss a deadline” (and let’s face it, if Hank said “next week”, and then a showstopping bug delayed it two more weeks, you’d be on him like flies on a pig pen).

So, when will you see this fixed?  My guess is, not as soon as you’d want, though it would be pleasing to see otherwise.

First, Ryan, they don’t “release every two weeks”.  There’s a huge difference between the rollout of new bird rankings or new “trail” levels (those just happen, without needing to download from the App Store), and an actual content drop (splash screen changes, underlying program code changes, new hats or new gameplay concepts introduced).

While we do get new levels and cards every two weeks, a content drop is scheduled far less frequently.  I don’t have exact numbers, but think about the recent updates and you should get the idea.

Before “Spring” it was “Easter”

Before “Easter” it was “Valentine’s Day”

Before “Valentine’s Day” it was “Winter”

Before “Winter” it was “Halloween”

So, we’ve had five versions in about 10 months.  That jibes with my recollection of prior updates, too — about one update every 8 weeks, give or take.

I would bet money that the next SCHEDULED update isn’t slated until at least the end of July.

I would also bet money (but would be happy to lose) that it will be difficult for them to come out with an unscheduled patch, primarily due to Apple’s store requirements.  There’s no such thing as a “patch” in the Apple store.  Even a one-byte change to correct a spelling error would require a re-download of the entire 425 MB installer… and AB2 isn’t exactly unpopular.

Apple often restricts developers of downloads that are both HUGE and FREQUENT to scheduled release dates.  Rovio may not be *able* to deviate from their internal schedule per agreements with Apple (or other stores)…. and may be prohibited from even acknowledging this by that same contract.

I hope I’m wrong, and that they can get a new version out.

But don’t get your hopes up.

Jester, who has absolutely no inside information whatsoever and is only speculating

[ADBjester]

@ryan-kochie wrote:   @hank, care to comment on the randomness of the treasures? How we can get rewarded the feat before selecting the card?

—

Having worked in gaming, I predict Hank will not answer, not because there’s a conspiracy, but because it’s a ludicrous theory.  So, I’ll say what Hank likely wants to (my guess), but cannot:

It never happened.  You think you saw it, due to pre-selection bias (you already believe it is rigged, so you see what you’ve already trained your mind to accept), but you did not.  If you think it happens…. show me a video capture of it happening.

There is NO reason for Rovio to game the odds, because getting caught for it NOT being random (which is EASILY proven by anyone tracking outcomes over time) would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

They are MORE than happy to charge $1 per 100 gems (or less, with bulk discounts), and recoup them (and those they give away as grease to get the rubes to buy more) by offering places to spend them in game…. in completely random fashion.

Someone above said they don’t get the “top prize” often enough, but I also don’t see that.  I get it about what I should (mainly because I don’t have selection bias and don’t gripe when I see 1000 gems and didn’t get it this time).  The *really* big prizes don’t come up every selection, and when they do, you’re only one in five to get them.  So, if you see a 500 gem card go by that you didn’t get… you weren’t supposed to.  Not because it’s rigged, but because one in 5 means 4 times in five you get the booby prize.  That’s how naturally short odds work.

I have the same opinion of those who claim the “mystery point brigade” is rigged to make them spend gems in the arena.  (This theory is that they can be winning an arena match only to have an opponent race from behind with several million points, to overtake them very quickly).  This is also bogus, as I’ll address in the “About the Arena” thread.

Ditto the “game physics change day to day”, i.e. one day Terence is invincible, the next day, can’t hit a thing.  The game physics are constant — it would be foolhardy (and fairly easily reverse-engineered — decompilers are *everywhere* now), and would provide a horrible gaming experience.  (Instead, players play differently from day to day or session to session — sometimes more alert, sometimes less, etc).

It continues to boggle my mind how many people actually believe that Trump colluded with the Pigs to rig the game.

Oh, did I mix my metaphors?  Sorry.  Eggs on my face.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@cognitive wrote: “If you hit level 90 of the tower every single day, that would suggest you have a rather infinite supply of gems, because every such climb, assuming basic probability rules still apply in the ToF (lolz) would mean you’ll hit around 20 pigs. After the first few I think each pig is 2000 gems or some large number. I’m not sure most players could cope with spending 1000-3200 gems a day on ToF, let alone many multiples of this. You do win gems on the way, but not enough to replenish pig gems.”

1) Having climbed the tower daily, and tracked how many pigs I hit, I assure you, the tower is indeed random.

2) You will not hit 20 pigs (on average) on the way up. Of the 90 rooms, 19 of them have no pigs. Only 71 rooms have pigs, and the odds are truly 25% per floor. You’ll hit about 18 pigs to reach the top, give or take.

3) The progression in pig cost is: 20, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, and then 3200 for each one after that. 18 pigs will cost 38,370 gems.

4) The guy with 83 million gems was likely playing on a jailbroken device, or an Android. It’s a common exploit, easily Googled (try “unlimited gems Angry Birds 2” as a search term). I, however, have not hacked the game or jailbroken my iPhone. I do not have millions of gems on hand. In fact, I currently only have about 43,000, all earned or paid for.

5) I *do* pay for gems. I buy the $10 letter every month, as they are the cheapest gems out there (about a third the cost of buying them in bulk), though it takes time and discipline to save them up to the point where they can be useful.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@cognitive said: “If you managed to collect 300 blizzards in the last month or two since the Lady of Infinites retired, that’s an impressive accomplishment. Finding time to play long enough is the real issue.”

I play less than an hour a day. I spend more time “not playing” to do this than I spend slinging birds.

@katydid said: “How in the world are you increasing your spells if your not buying them?”

*you’re. :) I climb the tower to level 90 daily. This awards me 10+ each of each of the five spells — sometimes more. In the era of “apathy leagues” (I’ve only needed to earn 180 stars this week thus far), that’s more than enough to increase spell counts.

The method to climb the tower daily is well-documented in this thread, even for those of us on jailed devices.

“The only way is to have friends send gifts and you send them gifts in response.”

Wrong. I haven’t received a single friend gift in the past 60 days. Yet my spell total increases daily on all fronts… and I’ve not jailbroken my iPhone to do so.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@cognitive said “In case you have not noticed… The Infinite Spells bug has been fixed. Unless you amassed thousands of spells, you’ll run out and then you’ll see what the other people above say.”

My spell count continues to rise daily, thank you very much. The fewest I have of any right now is Blizzard, and I have over 900 of those. I had only 600 or so when Our Lady was removed. There’s more than one way to pluck a bird.

“Without spells scoring 9-10 stars in an Arena match is not possible consistently. The latest update all but eliminated the 3-5M score players. Minimum I see now is 8-9M, which, without spells and with a bit of bad luck is not easy to win. With spells, consistently 20-25M.”

Wow. That’s…. ok. With 5 spells, I consistently score 30 million per match. I regularly break 35 million, and my current record is over 46 million. I say again, you’re not maximizing your birds. I don’t bring spells because I need them to win. I bring them because I need to win ten stars almost every time.

“We did not become bad players, the rules simply changed (again).”

Doesn’t matter. The rules are the same for every player. They didn’t change just for you — they changed for all of us. A good player adapts to the circumstances, just as a major league baseball player adapts his game based on whether today’s umpire has a tight or loose strike zone.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@michele-mitchell

[quote] Now I can be pitted against someone 30 flock points below me and still lose even if I use all five spells AND the extra video bird. [/quote]

I agree with @mike-fairclough — up your game. If you’re not earning 8 or 9 stars with ease when using spells, you’re not optimizing your birds. Here are some hints:

1) If you have the spells, always bring FOUR or FIVE in. There’s a very good reason for this. Four spells is 8 cards “behind”, and 5 spells is a “full deck”, 9 “behind” those on deck. When you fling a bird, you will NEVER get the same bird as one in your deck (even the unseen “behind” ones).

Best case scenario for me is bring everything but the blizzard (which is harder to come by anyway), and (usually) use my MOST POWERFUL CARD SHOWING first. Why? Because played correctly, this will score 4+ million points, and award two bonus cards — the powerful one I played, and the blizzard I didn’t bring. You start the game essentially with 4 million points and a full deck — a huge head start.

2) Your goal is *not* to clear all the pigs. Your goal is utter destruction of all elements — ice, stone, wood and pigs. The non-pig stuff is worth MASSIVE points, way more than the pigs, in fact. It’s the difference between knocking a pig off the top of a tower left standing, for 300,000 points, and taking the tower out at the base, and causing all the bricks to fall off the cliff, for 2 million points.

3) Note that doing #2 above has a side benefit — more “bonus birds”. Yes, they come fewer and farther between as the score racks up, but maximizing points can easily be the difference between three or more birds that you wouldn’t have had without all the above “max points”. It’s WAY easier to win when you have not just the “5 bird” advantage from bringing spells, but three MORE birds from playing spot-on. With an 8-bird edge, you can’t lose. (I can’t remember the last time I flat-out lost an arena match.)

4) You want to do this with as few birds as possible, of course, so plan shots well. Use Red to push towers over on one another. Use Silver to undercut a tower to make it fall the direction you want it to (to take out another tower). Use the spitting flowers to their full advantage — they can often help you one-bird a room that would take three birds without them. Ditto the portals, and the gravity wells. Spaceman pigs can help if strategically popped as well. Think your way out of wasting birds taking out a construction pig or magic pig (those that will block your shots), and find a way to take out the structures they are standing on, rather than directly. Combine this strategy with #2 to REALLY make things hum.

5) Endgame: If you’ve saved a Mighty Eagle toward the end, and have two birds left, ALWAYS elect to clear the room with the Mighty Eagle, and take your chances with the regular bird in the next room…. unless you are 100% certain you cal clear that room with the regular bird. There’s nothing worse in the endgame than having an Eagle and a bird…. and not making it to the next room, where one bird is potentially a final 2-3 million if it’s a “good” room for that bird.

Hope this helps.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@triph0p

> KKP: Is ridiculous now. I used to play it daily and even spend gems to beat
> the boss when needed but now it’s pointless with a today’s lvl1 boss being so tough.

WHAT?! Today level 1 was trivial, and level 2’s boss was mildly challenging. It was Level 3’s boss that did me in. I tried 3 times, and gave up. But if you think the FIRST boss was hard, then you need to re-think your bird strategy. First boss today was more often than not one-birded, and rarely more than two.

> Mighty Eagle pause exploit: I almost regret posting that trick here but I’m
> glad some of you got to take advantage of it while it lasted. It also lets me
> know Rovio is reading this site and just looks to piss off the people that play
> and spend the most on this game.

You give yourself too much credit. You posted that, what, 10 days ago? Apple’s rigorous approval process (especially for games that will be downloaded millions of times, like this one) are not lightly dodged. If Rovio only became aware of that exploit when you posted it here, then it most assuredly would NOT have been ready in time to QA for this update. That one was going away, whether you posted it or not.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@hubert-lo

> My biggest issue is Rovio have let the exploits existed for so long where they
> should have patched them immediately. Now they take it away the game is less
> enjoyable for us to play.

True, but for the 99% of people who didn’t know about the exploits because they don’t Google, or don’t come here….

And as a programmer, I will tell you:

1) Some of those exploits are absolutely non-trivial to patch, especially on Android where security is a sieve, or due to the logistics of SWITCHING where item counts are stored (from local storage to the server, which could place high load on the servers).

2) Not all of the exploits have been closed. Our Lady is gone, as is Mighty MIGHTY Eagle, but there are others still there, including ones that don’t require you to hack your phone.

As a player, I’m going to reveal little, other than to say that on the whole, they made the game MORE exploitable with these changes, not less. The primary reason for this is that it is now far easier to exploit for gems and black pearls, without hacking or jailbreaking your phone.

The deduction of how this could be done is left as an exercise to the reader, but for me, I’ll trade Mighty MIGHTY Eagle and Our Lady (whom I never used) for easier access to pearls and gems any day.

Jester

[ADBjester]

You want odds? Here’s your odds. The pigs *are* random — I’ve tracked it. One in four, +/- a standard deviation or two.

For those that haven’t played to the higher levels, know that the rewards get better per floor at about the 25th floor, and about the 45th floor. By then, the gems card is worth up to 610 gems, and the feathers card can be up to 2400 feathers. The gems never get high enough to make it worthwhile, but SOMETIMES you can find yourself “on the plus side in gems” around the 20th floor…. having spent 170 gems on a lucky streak where you’ve hit only three pigs, and lots of gems.

The odds of reaching the 90th floor? You have to get past 18 groups of four (not counting the hats-only floors). Thus, if you expect to get to level 90, you should expect to hit 18 pigs on the way, plus or minus 2-3 pigs.

The progression of the cost of pigs stops at 3200 gems. All after that are 3200 gems as well. The running totals, then for subsequent pigs hit are:

1st – 20
2nd – 70
3rd – 170
4th – 370
5th – 770
6th – 1570
7th – 3170
8th – 6370
9th – 9570
10th – 12770
11th – 15970
12th – 19170
13th – 22370
14th – 25570
15th – 28770
16th – 31970
17th – 35170
18th – 38370
19th – 41570
20th – 44770
21st – 47970

Thus, to guarantee a 91% chance of reaching level 90, you need to be able to afford to hit 21 pigs. That would cost 47,970 gems. If you are at the other end of the bell curve, and make it hitting only 15 pigs, you can escape spending only 28,770 gems. Only one game in a hundred or so will cost less than that to reach the top, statistically speaking.

I can’t do it — I have an iOS 10.x device that is not jailbroken, so I can’t cheat, but if you Google for “unlimited gems AB2”, you’ll find that those that are on Android, or older (iOS 8) jailbroken Apple devices have exploits available that can give them literally 2 billion gems, and THOSE people can climb the tower to the top, every few hours.

The same hacks can be used to have the tower give a few hundred thousand feathers as a reward (leaving every bird maxed out the moment a new card is introduced), or oodles of spells. Said hacks don’t work with pearls, because unlike gems and feathers (which are stored locally on your device and can thus be hacked), your pearl count is stored on the Rovio servers.

Like I said, though, we iPhone users have to muddle through without access to such hacks. I’m grinding through 9,000 pearls now, and have only 26,000 gems saved up (mainly because I buy the “letter” every month, which are the cheapest gems there are, only $10 for 3000 gems if you come back every day).

So, there you go. That’s the odds, and they aren’t very good, nor cheap.

Jester

[ADBjester]

@jo-ha @KayBird I just saw a guy in the Arena who obviously has all the new hat sets and whos birds are now at Level 48, but I cannot explain how this could be possible.

I will explain at least two ways this is possible, both of which have been mentioned on this forum in the uber-thread.

1) They’ve used a jailbroken device or other insecure devices and used a hack that gives them unlimited gems. There are several such hacks out there, easily found via Google. With billions of gems, it is trivial to reach the top of the Tower daily.

2) If you don’t have a device that the above works on (i.e. you use iOS 10), you still do not have to pay for every hat. If you have accumulated only 25,000 black pearls (still a feat in and of itself), you can acquire all 21 hats that cost 25K. This is because hats are stored on the server, but pearls are stored in your device. You just back up your device, buy a 25K hat, restore your device from the backup…. and you get your pearls back, but keep the hat you bought.

Note that #2 also works with 1600 gem treasure chests for leveling up birds as cards get released. If you’ve saved up enough gems, you can back up, deplete your gems on 25x chests for 1600 gems, which will give you feathers and level up your birds. Then you restore, and the feathers are still there (stored on the server), but you get your gems back (stored on your device and restored with the backup).

So, even if you’re an iOS 10 player, all you need to do is accumulate a few thousand gems (easily done, especially if you buy the $10/mo 105 bonus gems letter — these are the cheapest gems in the game by far), and 25K black pearls…. and you’ll have all hat sets and instantly be able to acquire any hat set released.

As a side bonus, opening all those chests gives you not only feathers, but hundreds of each spell (except blizzards)…. so it’s never an issue using all spells in every arena level.

Jester

[ADBjester]

Please allow me to play devil’s advocate, people.

I think the Halloween update has made the arena BETTER. It did exactly what it needed to do — diminished the power of spells, while evening out matches through the exact same “flock power” calculations that I illustrated within this very thread a few months ago.

If your reason for it “not being fun” any more is that you don’t routinely get a 7 win streak and 750 feathers…. well, golly, gee, we can’t all win *every* time. And that’s what was happening before. Every match was the original flock of your opponent, vs. your flock of 7 + 5 spells, and often mismatched.

Players were getting not streaks of 7…. but streaks of 70 or more. Losses were rare. It was grinding to keep up with all the other grinders, and wasn’t a challenge. It was a time sink.

Now, it is competitive again. You can load up on spells… but they don’t do you much good. You stand a risk of losing.

Note that spells are *STILL* valuable…. but their optimal strategy has vastly changed. Before, if you had a mighty eagle, you wanted to use it first, because that increased your chances of being awarded ANOTHER eagle. For top scoring, you timed your spells such that you got spells as bonuses. (Note, too, that the long-time complaint about getting a Blue as a bonus is related… as if you hoarde the blue, you’re more likely to get it when you spend it).

NOW, you absolutely do NOT want to use a spell to open a room. They are 1/30th of the scoring power of the flock birds. Use your flock to clear most of the room…. and then if you didn’t strike, use the spells to pick off the stragglers, leaving your flock birds for “first shots” in the next room.

In turn, those “first shots” will score much more highly, and bonus birds will be more likely to be flock birds. Now, spells are BAD to get as bonuses… so you want to spend them while your meter is low.

So, in short, to all the whiners, knock it off. You had it good for a while… and now Rovio has evened up the matches. That’s what you SAID you wanted, but what you really wanted was a way to win without challenge.

Where’s the fun in that?

Jester