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Since Boot Camp is maybe the most dishonest part of the game (and that’s really saying something), I just roll my eyes at this change.  Boot Camp is often the most transparent cheat, they usually just give you exactly what they want to give you: there are probably more strangely surviving pigs and “coincidences” here than anywhere else and there are major recurring patterns of “have a strangely bad day” then the next day “have a strangely good day” over and over and over.   So Rovio suddenly inventing a new rule here that makes it harder to get coins just feels like Boot Camp’s utter riggedness at its usual.  They’re going to let you have exactly what they want you to have, no matter what.

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Had 4-5-6 but didn’t get the Plinko boss.  Wish I had.  Instead after all the DC work I got one of Rovio’s cheat screens, where I hit the boss with red, silver, bomb, all of the structures that could fall on him, the rocks above his head that crashed down and hit him directly, and he still only had lost half his points.

I wish there was an Angry Birds customer bill or rights.  One of the first items on it would be that the damage done by birds and structures has to remain consistent, and Rovio can’t just drastically change the amount of damage things do on certain screens  just because Rovio wants gems (and real money).

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Advice on things that happen on the TOF so many times that it’s far from coincidental:

— get a pig two cards before the hat card.   Pay, but if you continue the next card’s a pig.   Happens all the time.  So if you see a pig two cards before the hat cards, stop with that pig.

— pig on the second card you get.   Stop if that happens and don’t even pay the 20 for that pig.  Early pigs are a sign they’re gonna keep giving you lots of pigs and its not worth your gems.  Leave TOF for that day without paying it anything.

— the day a new “adventure” opens.  Play the automatic button.   It almost always wants you to have the first two adventure hats so you’ll play the adventure, so you usually get a good haul early on.  After the first two pigs it can go either way.  You almost never get the third hat that day no matter what, but it sometimes lets you get the fourth hat with maybe just paying the 100 gem pig.   After hat 4, your chances of getting anything else usually dwindle, but risk it if you want.

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Yeah, I’ve had impossible final rooms on the DC for four days in a row, which might be some kind of a record.  Boring.  Today’s is another where they’ve closed off the exits so unless you use up major amounts of gems and just keep pounding the boss you can’t win.  No thanks.  There’s a difference  between challenging rooms and rooms that are lazily designed to just use up gems.  I play challenging rooms; gemsucker rooms get no gems from me.

Maybe they’re trying to do some kind of “See Zeta wasn’t so bad, these rooms are even worse” thing, but Zeta was bad and this is tedious and unless they start providing some genuinely winnable DCs in the next day or two, I’m out.

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Forget the DC today, the final room is THAT one; the one some of us won’t play.  As always, when Rovio gives us THAT room, I immediately stopped the game and put away Angry Birds for the day— they don’t get even a single gem from me—for anything— on days when THAT room is there.  If you’ve played for awhile you’ll know the one I mean.

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Ding Dong Zeta’s gone (we hope).

Maybe Rovio finally got the message that the way they had Zeta in the game was like anti-advertising for their movie:  Zeta was so incredibly rigged and frustrating in the game many players probably never, ever, ever want to see her in anything again, let alone paying to see Zeta in a movie.

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Not only is Zeta often suspiciously hard to move, when she finally does move she also seems to be programmed to often land in “dead” spots where pretty much none of your birds can reach.  I’ve had this happen a lot with Zeta, including today.  The chances of this happening so often with any real probability is pretty much nonexistent.  It’s clear the whole intent of Zeta is just to be a giant gem suck, and like a lot of the rest of you, I want her gone.

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I am so sick of Zeta.

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@AggieGuy

Yep, that’s the screen that when I see it I stop and am immediately done with Angry Birds for the day.  Won’t play it.  Never gonna play that one again.  Pointless.

As to the new villain, I know his name is Zeta, but he’s always gonna be known as Gemsucker to me, because so far that’s the only screens he’s appeared on for me.

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Yep, the DC is really easy today until the last room, which is the biggest gem sucker in the whole game (and that’s really saying something) and one I refuse to play.  It’s pointless.  The second I see that room I quit the game for the day.  There’s no other reason for this room to exist other than to sucker people into throwing gems at it, and as long as Rovio keeps it in the game they can say goodbye to me playing anything else on any day I encounter it.

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Gem sucker yesterday, gem sucker today, and probably gem sucker tomorrow.  Won’t play ‘em.  Knock it off, Rovio:  not a single gem for you unless you play fair.

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To add to what Buster and AggieGuy are saying, I’m getting that same room suspiciously often lately.  It’s one of Rovio’s default gem sucks so the second I saw it I stopped playing.  Gonna do the same thing every time this room comes up:  it’s pointless.  KP’s health is set at “ridiculous” and it’s way too obviously set up to always position him so most of your birds can do nothing to move him.  Why spend gems on this kind of garbage?

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Hmmm…  I’ve had the exact same DC two days in a row… never seen that before.

And it’s an absolute garbage gem-suck, 4-5-5 and micro-unpoppable-pig city, even on level 2.  The first screen on level 3 is ridiculous, designed to take all your birds.

Not giving Rovio any gems on this cheating trash.  Wow, they really do get worse and worse, greedier and greedier.

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If Rovio really wants to improve the experience of people with higher FP, how about they put even a little effort into actually designing some new creative challenges rather than just doing nothing but making it so on the same old levels you have a ridiculous and unforgivable number of physics-defying unpoppable micropigs all the time and on boss levels greedily making the boss pretty much impossible to pop without spending tons of gems while simultaneously lazily making what were once openings to knock the pig through into floors?

If Rovio were serious about improving the game experience, the formula is very simple: Quit being so lazily greedy and start putting some effort and creativity into the game.

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Unfortunately I don’t know how it could apply to your situation, but I did find one way to make Rovio respond after days of them ignoring me:

The situation was that I’d bought the daily gem letter.   Rovio did an update about halfway through the daily gem period I’d paid for and then suddenly they weren’t giving me the daily gems I was due.  I contacted Rovio.  No response.  Contacted them the next day.  No response.  Contacted them the next day.  No response.  This went on for about a week.

Then I remembered that when I downloaded the AB2 app it was through itunes.  So I contacted itunes.   They responded immediately and were very nice.  On hearing my situation, they refunded the daily gem money I’d paid.

Guess what happened immediately after that?   Yep, Rovio finally contacted me— the very next day— so very apologetic that I’d had a problem with the game and if only I’d send them my email address etc. they’d make sure I got those daily gems.   Ummmmm huhhh.

Again, unfortunately pretty much the only thing you can play on with Rovio is their utter greed, so if you can find a way to make them think they might even lose a penny from you they’ll probably suddenly find the inclination to respond.

I wish I could be more help because, believe me, I know how frustrating it can be to deal with them.

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Okay, other than having a spot that’s deliberately there to make the pig undefeatable without spending about a billion gems, what’s the purpose of the game design and having this hole here?  (And, no, even Stella can’t be positioned to lift him because of the ledge).

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Rovio’s cheating in the Arena is becoming intolerable.  Today I’m playing an opponent who runs out of birds at roughly 37,000,000.  All the next screen, he has no cards and his score doesn’t increase; in other words, his play is over.  Next screen after that (two screens after his gameplay has ended) I start closing in on 37,000,000 and I look up at my opponents score and it’s suddenly 44,000,000.

This is the second time in the last few days when  Rovio’s blatantly added significant points to my opponents’ score a screen or two after his gameplay had ended.  This isn’t even funny; there’s pretty much almost no way Rovio could make gameplay more dishonest.

They’re not even pretending anymore.  It’s really infuriating.

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Just in case anyone was asking the question “hey, do you think it would be fun if you had only one type of bird and you had to use the same bird over and over and over again?,” the Stella Adventure definitively answers that question.

And the answer is “No.  No, that would not be fun.”

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Beware:  at least the first two boss levels on today’s KPP are ones where Rovio’s once again significantly reduced your hit power on the boss so you can hit him with about a billion things and he barely loses any points. The one way to defeat him on level one is to knock him to a place where you can use Pink’s bubble to float him off the screen, which is starting to boringly be the “trick” on a lot of boss levels.  I don’t know about the third level, because today’s KPP is such another obvious greedy gem grab I stopped playing.

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I’m almost impressed:  I’ve been playing Angry Birds 2 for a long, long time now and I’ve never seen a level that cheats more than level 5 of the current adventure.  Rovio must be so proud.

Seriously, the number of improbably surviving pigs on this level is truly something to behold.  Not something good, and definitely not something fun, but it is, well…  something.

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Thank you @RawDataSystem, you’re a genius!

The one— and only as far as I can tell—  way to get past today’s Daily Challenge Boss Pig without spending any gems is to save Pink until then and use her bubble to float him off screen.  You must use her first (she’ll be the only bird you’ll need there).  Otherwise, it’s a complete Rovio gem grab and you’ll waste all your birds and probably have to spend tons of gems.  I wouldn’t have completed today’s DC without your advice, so thanks again for the help!

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Rovio outsmarted themselves with this one.

Ordinarily, with their usual bad faith, they’d suddenly start making the cards you got a really bad combination so you’d be tempted to pay to shuffle the cards, but the problem for them is that the game usually gave you the worst combination of cards anyway (like if you really need Silver he won’t be in your hand), so most players aren’t going to notice any difference.

Second, they’ve already long established in the arena that paying gems to change anything (like your opponent there) not only usually doesn’t help you, but often hurts you.

So why on earth would anyone spend even one gem to shuffle the cards?

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The last boss on today’s KPP is another of those horrible new trends from Rovio, where they’ve taken a common boss level and closed off the exit point so the only possible way to defeat the boss is to keep pounding him with birds.  And the birds, of course, don’t seem to have their usual point power.  This is the second time in the last few weeks where they’ve done this; this new thing about closing off exit points needs to stop right now.

The only way Rovio could do a more obvious gem grab is if you got to that screen and it just had the words “Pay Us 360 Gems or Else” written across it.

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Ummmm, can somebody explain to me how my opponent’s score mysteriously went up two screens after he’d used up all his birds and spells, and how at the end of that round the difference between my score and his was exactly 1000 points even, so I had to either watch the advertisement for a new bird or lose the round?

Golly gee, if I didn’t know any better, I might suspect there were some shenanigans going on around here.

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Also keep in mind that sometimes the DC Boss levels are deliberate gem/cash grabs, so use your instincts and if you sense it’s not a fair level of if you experience a number of weird “wait, I thought that bird was strong, why is it leaving so many pigs” moments, STOP playing that DC immediately and definitely don’t spend any gems.  You can come back tomorrow, when hopefully you’ll have a more honest DC, and, believe me, as a longtime player, no reward is worth funding Rovio’s mind-numbingly obvious cash grabs.

A recent example of this is where the Boss level closed off the point where you usually can knock the Boss off the screen, weakened the birds’ hit power (as it often does when Rovio’s cheating) and made it so you’d just have to keep hitting the Boss with birds over and over, but wouldn’t be able to finish the Boss without paying gems (I believe there’s a thread about this super obnoxious cash grab level elsewhere on his forum).

Long-story-short, if you’re a new or inexperienced player, it will seriously help you early to learn that on levels where Rovio isn’t acting in good faith, stop playing that level, go do something else, and come back tomorrow.  Learn early the lesson: do NOT feed Angry Birds 2 gems or money when it’s being corrupt.