[DDeck]

@doulgas

Do you ever pay 60 gems to replay, or just play once? (I only play once)

Yesterday I’ve had my best day this season and am currently in 38,037th place (:rollseyes:) with 5 hours to go. Only managed to score 37 million and will probably get only 28 points.

Last season, I would have considered that to be really bad.

[DDeck]

@chrispdog

Yes, I also noticed that there are many more rooms that are difficult or impossible to clear with one fling.

On top of that I personally feel like I’m seeing more little pigs surviving and more wobbly structures that don’t fall. I have also observed what feels like an unusually high occurrence of a bird like chuck or terence cleanly obliterating the bottom of a structure, only to have the upper portion (that contains the pigs) fall undamaged to the bottom.

Last season, I cleared enough coins for a roman hat. This season, even with the extra coins I’m only getting like 19 or so coins each day after maybe clearing a total of four or five rooms.

It’s almost like the extra coins for clearing rooms aren’t being added in the end.

[DDeck]

@exora

Since the latest update, there were two problems with spells. Apparently many people were reporting that the number of spells didn’t decrease when they were used.

I also noticed that if I filled the destructometer multiple times, I would NOT get back any extra spells.

A day or two ago, it appears that things returned to how they were before the update.

[DDeck]

Hmm… Maybe I’m going through a rough patch but since the addition of the bonus coins for clearing a room in MEBC, I can only score about half of what I averaged. Wasting tons of birds on structures that don’t fall or pigs that don’t pop. Doing much worse than I did last season.

[DDeck]

As of a couple of days ago, I now get spells in DC and map levels when I didn’t bring any in.

[DDeck]

@rawdatasyste

Insight into the industry in general? Yeah, but no information about Rovio specifically.

It’s quite obvious that Rovio has gone “all in” to the Vegas-style sleazy method though. Unfortunately…

[DDeck]

I don’t know about the arena because I don’t play it. For DC and map levels, no more spells. (As I said, it’s possible that different people are experiencing different things.)

[DDeck]

@djlarryt

On one side of the spectrum there are triple-A games that have Hollywood-scale budgets and development periods, with people knowledgable in “game theory” to balance game play and make it generally fun.

Then, on the other side of the spectrum, you have get rich quick companies that prey on people’s propensity for gambling, and they use this to generate revenue instead of great game mechanics. They design the game so it’s easy to get hooked and everything is free… up to a point — just enough to get you addicted. Then updates add micro-transactions, and it’s nearly impossible to progress past some point with out using in-game currency.

From a regulatory viewpoint, as long as it’s actually possible for a human to complete the game without buying anything, they’re allowed to label it as a “free game” in a store.

Now having said that… Rovio was never a triple-A studio, but they certainly focused on good mechanics and game play… in the beginning.

Everything lately is textbook sleazy tactics. Think of a level that is impossible to clear without spending gems. If the game didn’t eventually fall into pity mode where there’s a golden pig in each room, you could easily see regulatory issues for Rovio. Honestly, this game is so focused on gambling that it is no longer appropriate for children.

Remember that half the revenue of mobile games comes from less than half a percent of the players. AB2 is being optimized for that revenue stream, period. We can all quit, and it won’t make a difference. Rovio no longer even bothers to engage with this community.

Oh, and the game industry uses the same term that Vegas uses for players that spend huge amounts of money in the gambling mechanism: whales.

[DDeck]

Interesting. My assumption was incorrect that it was like this for all areas. Spells can still be obtained in MEBC my filling the meter multiple times.

[DDeck]

My guess is it will be like this for everything. It could just be a bug, but I doubt it…

[DDeck]

Is it just me or does this update remove the ability to get spells by filling the destructometer multiple times with one bird?

destructometer no longer gives spells if you only brought in birds

[DDeck]

@rhonda90402

Yeah, it’s completely random. I always had to work hard to stay in the upper bit of each of my leagues, but other people have only a few active people.

It’s pretty much just a joke right now.

The trick is to finish somewhere above the bottom three for the week, then just never go back to the arena after the weekly tournament ends. I’ve done that for a month before, and when I finally opened the arena, it showed me the results from the last tournament and put me in a new one without going down any leagues.

You know, this could be a bug that I am “exploiting”. Maybe Rovio will ban me for using flaws in the game to my advantage! ;-)

But it really doesn’t matter at all which league you are in because the league will be populated with players all from the diamond league anyway, and there is now reward for being in a higher league, the reward for winning is completely out of line with the cost in resources of winning. There is literally no point except for collecting feathers with win streaks, but even this is a waste of time because it gives you zero advantage over your opponents since their level increases lockstep with yours.

The arena is truly pointless now.

[DDeck]

We are all aways playing under different conditions — that has been clear from the beginning. For me, like many of you, the difficulty of the arena shot up to ludicrous level three weeks ago following an update. It would often do this the first week after an update but then revert the following week.

This seems not to be the case this time.

I just stopped playing because it is no longer fun for me. I think most of you know that if you finish a tournament, but never go back to the arena, you position in whatever league is fixed. That’s essentially what I’m doing now. If I hear that it’s back to somewhat normal, then I’ll go back in. Otherwise, it’s a frustrating experience that is not fun at all and consumes a ton of resources.

Why play a game that is not fun? What’s the point?

[DDeck]

How about this:

If you can’t figure out which ad network is serving the malformed videos causing the game to crash, and if you do figure that out you cannot get the ad network to fix the issue, and if you then further cannot make the app robust enough to handle whatever crap these ad networks throw at it…

Why not make “feats” for crashing the app?

Crash the app 100 times by watching a video (99/100)

Lose a winning streak by crashing the app (73/100)

Waste spells by crashing the app (33/100)

:-P

[DDeck]

@katydid @maiasatara

I often have problems with the UI becoming unresponsive when the game is paused. Yesterday, I was down by a few thousand points on the 6th match of a streak. The UI became unresponsive on the watch a video screen. Had to close the game and of course reset the streak.

Took a video. You can see me attempting to tap the different buttons to no avail.

You can see the video at google photos.

[DDeck]

@katydid

I have also had opponents all over the place too, with different slings, etc., but that was only during the first week or so after the introduction of hats. Since that time, I have only ever had opponents with my same sling and my same star level (excluding the initial botched release of this most recent upgrade).

If you are still seeing opponents with a different sling than you, then you and I are in different groups within Rovio’s grand experiment of tweak playing conditions while observing which positively impacts revenue the most.

[DDeck]

@james-simon

I think that it is only multiplied by x2, no matter how many x2 multipliers you buy.

I am assuming that if you buy one full set of x2 hats, you get the silver sling. You’re next full set gets you a gold sling. Your third full set gets you whatever comes next. (But because a full set of cowboy hats apparently gets you an azure sling, I have no idea what comes next.)

As I’ve shown, under the current conditions of the game, you only face opponents with the same sling. So I don’t see the point at all to add more modifiers (hats) of the same level. If you already have one full set of x2, then move on and start buying x3.

Now that we can see which hats the other players are using, it’s even more clear to me that the strange hat usage we see from our opponents (e.g., silver sling but many birds with party/no hats) is not real. It’s most likely manipulated post-run, server-side, by rovio.

[DDeck]

With the new update, you can see which hats the others in your league are wearing, which wasn’t possible before. Everyone in my group last week had predictable consistent hats matching their sling. There were zero birds with a silver sling and party/no hats. There are also zero birds with the newly introduced hats. It is the same this week (like others, I am already in this week’s arena).

This is in stark contrast to my opponents in the arena and provides additional evidence supporting my assertion that rovio is manipulating the hat modifiers post run.

[DDeck]

@haoledave

@david-martin makes a great observation. I had assumed that only runs that didn’t include spell usage were replayed for us. However, my observation of hat usage strongly indicates that the runs are being modified server-side. So it is also perhaps possible that our opponents really are using spells, but they are being removed from the run.

I too have seen back-to-back same birds being used by opponents which, based on the rules under which I play, should not be possible under those circumstances (e.g., start of the match). If there was a spell used in between, and that spell was culled from the run, then it would indeed appear that the same bird was flung twice in a row.

[DDeck]

@kedik22

@katydid

Glad you found this helpful!

[DDeck]

@djangosmum

Thanks! I glad you found this useful. I’ve grown a bit bored with AB2 but still need a good way to kill time so I though it would be more fun to kill time analyzing AB2 :) Of course all this will no longer matter as soon as Rovio makes another tweak ;)

For all I know, it could just be a random display bug, but I think not. The score my opponents attain as we progress through the rooms feels like it matches their bird + hat level.

I didn’t put the result in the above post, but I also looked at hat usage versus different streaks, and I did find a bit of a pattern. The hats total to a slightly lower value during streaks 1 and 7, with much less variance, meaning that you are more likely to get an opponent with weak/no hats at the beginning and end of a streak (based of course on my analysis of only 11 runs/streak 1-7…)

This makes the first match in the streak easier and also increases your chance of winning the 500 feathers in the end.

As far as no comments yet… shrug. It’s a bit technical and not in the main thread. The problem with the main thread is that you can’t link directly to replies because there is something broken on this forum that drops you on the first post. So I made this new post.

Thanks for reading!

[DDeck]

@adbjester

Nice explanation. I’ve been thinking about similar things. Because this forum is broken and you can’t go directly to links for particular replies, only to the OP’s first post, I started a new post to discuss this.

All my opponents have the same star level and sling as I do. If I level up a sling, then my opponents all have that same sling. I think this is “real” because the scoring appears to work as I expect assuming we both have the same sling. It is of course impossible to know for sure.

@hank

[DDeck]

@hank

Great! don’t forget to push to Google Play as well ;)

[DDeck]

@partshade

For me, I’ve aways needed at least 2x their score. If you opponent’s score was 1337, you would need a minimum of 2674 for 10 points, but you only had 2079.

[DDeck]

@james-simon

Honestly, it’s anyone’s guess. I also noted the change in the arena. Previously I would see opponents ranked below me in both star and bird level for streak=1 and 2. Then I would be highly outmatched at streak =3. This is what many here report. Then, coincident with everyone here noting the change, I got a streak=3-like opponent for the first two matches, then when I got to three, it was an opponent I’d typically have at streak=1, with all birds 1 or 2 levels below me.

Attempting to figure out the matching system and algorithm is a waste of time because they are constantly being tweaked server-side as evidenced by our observations.

And we already have strong evidence that we are all not playing under the same (to borrow term from numerical modeling), “boundary conditions”. I may be playing under one particular set of conditions, why you are subject to something different.

With the instabilities in the in-game currency going on now, I’ve just set it down and am killing time with something else.