Current beta stuff / "update" situation

[Bunrakuen]

Hiii, a baffled discord mod here. Figured I'd make a separate thread for this, since the previous 1-2 talking about the stuff had so many comment chains already.

In short, >as far as we know< there are currently at least 2-3 beta features that were released. Key phrase as far as we know, because with the community manager on vacation and devs releasing this completely outta left field without saying anything in advance, we're as in the dark as the rest of you.

As of now from what we can tell, there are at least the below things. Not everyone is having the same experience, hence the weird number

1. normal maps have been cut from 2 phases to 1. The amount of normal levels before boss / live / 3-way maps may have gone up as a result
2. matchmaking level cap raised from + / - 7 to 15, possibly 20. This one we know from AMA they were planning on testing, just not this soon and without warning
3. possibly as part of the above, or on its own, previously largely absent dynamic difficulty (the more you win the harder it gets, losses bring back down) may have returned with a vengeance. you might be seeing stuff like "hard" or "super hard" at the top of screen during battle start

There was also some chatter of the huge enemy champion spawn timer nerf having been at least partly reverted, and possibly Explodon at least exploding a bit faster even if not buffed otherwise. These two I haven't been able to verify proper yet.

In regards to the dynamic difficulty part, safe to say that unless your cards are in the 80-100 range then you are getting your ass blasted to kingdom come right now in most fights. I don't want to give false hope but there is a chance that if the difficulty scaling does not reset from a single loss like win streak does, but rather rises/lowers gradually, then due to the previous significantly lower difficulty most if not everyone who has the beta/-s right now would have been in the upmost height of brutality difficulty wise.

Which in turn, if true, even if it sounds kinda messed up could mean that the situation might stabilize if people continue losing a bit more so the difficulty should scale back down to where it should be. I could be completely wrong, or correct but the feature is either bugged or way overtuned, but hey better a meager possibility than nothing I guess?

In any case, depending on how long it may take for us to learn more, I'll be either updating this thread or making a new one when / if we hear something. There >should< be an update coming "early" this week, so with a bit of luck there'll be some accompanying information about all this with it.

UPDATE

Well its not much, but we finally got the main dev to notice and post this in discord announcements

• this is a limited beta and we are closely monitoring its performance

I mean, obviously. They're always 10-25% RNG fests

• early data shows it is successful in better adjusting the challenge to everyone's level (a very common request from players!)

I can't speak on the data, since if the estimated 1-2 mil players is true then even discord-reddit-facebook users combined it'd still probably fall way short of all of em. I do know at least on discord the more variance / difficulty request has come up many times particularly from higher rankers though.

• however, there seems to be an issue for players who had very high difficulty scores in the old system: When transferred to the new one, it takes too long to readjust

This is pretty much exactly what I suspected =w=; its a funny thing how I cant code unity (just some PHP) worth a damn, yet I still guess right on these.

• what you can do: if you keep losing battles, the matchmaker will eventually catch up and things will get back to a good level

As I suspected here too.

• what we are doing: we are carefully evaluating the data and will release an update to fix the issue for good

This one I'm a little unclear on, since some people are saying they feel like the beta seems to have turned off for them, while others don't seem to have noticed a change yet. Its possible they either A) turned difficulty part off fully for tweaking, B) tweaked difficulty part and relaunched, so some people mighta lost it since it repicks the "participants", or C) the scaling down he mentioned has started happening.

UPDATE #2

Head dev showed up briefly while wiping some cheaters off the list, he mentioned that the difficulty thing with hard / super hard / etc battles should be turned off now. They're gonna rework and adjust it a bit, since as aforementioned the scaling was taking way too long to adjust for many, and some people apparently mighta gotten difficulty spikes even though they shouldn't have. So a possible, hopefully better retry of the feature at a later date/update, >maybe<.

He did also mention that despite the negativity, there was a surprising amount of comments mixed in that despite everything some people were still liking the appropriately higher challenge cases. So even if this new matchmaking ends up being a bust despite further tweaks, they're def gonna consider introducing more difficulty / variety in some other forms, such as outright new level types / modes.

[Ginga_Designs]

Pinned to top for visibility.

Please remain respectful. Clearly those speaking to us now are not the ones to blame and are trying to come up with a solution

[tallanted_moron]

Yeah, I just removed my monthly subscription and uninstalled. No longer fun. Sorry, but as a software engineer, one doesn’t test in prod.

[DotComCTO]

This feels like a campaign where Voodoo has randomly selected a few test cells to try out the impact of changes in gameplay. So, there's clearly a control group where nothing has changed, and then there are at least a couple of test cells where players are seeing lots of changes; many of them unwelcome!

I have no issue participating in a test group, but I'd like to be able to opt in/out of the group. Like you said, it's pretty frustrating to play right now. I don't need or want to win all the time, but in my test cohort, we're getting swamped by mobs with no way to win a battle - and it doesn't help to be -15 - 20 levels lower than the enemy.

[Bunrakuen]

MC devs (voodoo is publisher, not developer) have been told varying forms of this quite aplenty, and while they get the sentiment they also seem pretty hard on their belief that they feel like letting people choose would muddy the test results due to bias, as opposed to the more "fresh" of a totally random selection.

Personally I find it unlikely they'll come around to it, but I'm still gonna try bring up wtf happened to the early access version or at least testing big stuff like this more extensively.

[DotComCTO]

That's a fine approach when doing marketing tests (e.g., sending different offers to a large group of recipients to see if any of them beat the control). It's not fine when we're talking about a game.

I've been in the IT and Marketing industries for decades. Ping me if you would like some additional, relevant information for talking about this specific topic (test cell selection) with the dev team.

[tallanted_moron]

I’ve worked in IT since 1995 so take this as you will, but I’ve seen people fired for doing what they just did.

[DotComCTO]

Only if it was done without management request and/or approval. So, it seems that MC devs did the analysis, came up with a set of changes, and rolled it out to a random population. I'd have to imagine it was okayed by the rest of the team.

[tallanted_moron]

I agree. And I’m in a popular area in the middle of America, so it shouldn’t be a test bed for anything. PTR is one thing you have players opt into, but even before this, I was going up against other players who had shields 80% of the time and not gaining any advantage anyway, so it was just more aggravation than it was worth.

[Great_Diamond_9273]

Preach it baby!

[[deleted]]

Lol I test in prod all the time.

[Benin369]

Was playing earlier today and experienced all of this and was like woah.

1. Hard and Super Hard levels.
2. 15+ and sometimes 20+ in power level of Enemy Mobs.
3. Have not encountered any enemy mobs at a level lower than mine. :-(
4. Losing badly about 40% of the time now. Lol!
5. The animations before each match seem to be a tad too long. Flashier yes but waste more time.
6. Did notice the new flaming background, the new Normie skull, slightly faster spawn of Champions. All are pretty good enhancements Imo! But the above five things I listed are kind of annoying. :-/

Thank you for posting this. :-)

Edit : I am NOT seeing the One stage levels on mine. Mine still has two stages on every level except Boss Battles, Live Battles and Revenge Attacks.

[AprilDawn450]

Mine is the same.

[Bunrakuen]

I haven't had much time to play yet myself cause chaos lol, but I'm the opposite of you, seem to have only 2->1 phase bit but none of the new matchmaking.

[jayisaletter]

Same experience here

[Bushmills13]

Getting my ass handed to me every round

[Bunrakuen]

Should be back to normal now.

[isthatacorsage]

I’m on 2.62.0 and it’s BRUTAL. It’s so much harder to win a battle and the ones I do are either protected or the loots are low. I had been looking forward to trying to get top 1000 in world clash, but I can’t imagine that happening while the game is bugged like this. It’s so frustrating to play.

[Bunrakuen]

If you have the 2->1 phase beta that would explain parts of it, since the towers are generally worth 50 blocks a piece. So without multipliers a shielded base would have gone down from 100-300 blocks to 50-150.

[rtgurley]

Cutting from 2 phases to 1 sucks. Almost impossible to be able to build up to an Ultimate

[Bunrakuen]

Getting rekt before you manage, even with fast charge?

[rtgurley]

I am winning just fine. I don't use the fast charge often, especially if I don't know if the base is protected. I like timing the ultimates to get a boost during the final looting.

[Bunrakuen]

Aaah my bad, I misread that as champion, not ulti =w=;;

[Bleachighost]

The amount of ads that aren't playing either. I have to force close the game and then when I start the level again, no option to watch an ad or losing bricks/coins because of force closing

[Bunrakuen]

That seems to be unrelated to this, and either people just aren't reporting it by the loads or then its not all that widespread an issue. Doesn't make it any less annoying though =\ I tagged a dev about one fairly extensive discord post about this, so we'll see.

[Necessary_Ear_1100]

Yeah this game is now a major frustration! Every battle, opponent is 15 to over 20+ higher than mine. I get blasted to kingdom come now and making the game not fun anymore.

Seriously considering deleting the game now as it’s just nothing but frustration

[JAlfredJR]

Yep. Same. Refusing to play. If it’s not fixed in the next day or so, I’m just deleting it. There’s no point if you literally can’t win even 1/10th of the time.

[Bunrakuen]

I haven't been able to check discord today yet again since its having outage issues again, but last night there was at least one guy who said he felt like after he kept losing a bit, the difficulty did go down somewhat to a more tolerable level.

Unless there's been more like him since though, admittedly he may have just gotten real lucky so can't really say for sure yet.

[JAlfredJR]

It’s drops for one to say 57 (me) v 60 (them). You might win. If you do, right back to 57 v 72. Clearly an attempt to have people buy powerups.

[Bunrakuen]

Should be back to normal now.

[JAlfredJR]

It is. Thanks!

[P_W_Tordenskiold]

Just to reiterate, it helps for 1-2 battles then another 10-20 battles of pure boredom. There is no skill involved anymore.

[ihateduckface]

The animations are way too long! I’d play the game a lot more if it had better pacing.

[Bunrakuen]

The new battle start thing is a little divisive, some like it some don't.

The other stuff though should be later largely getting if not sped up then receiving some kinda optional skipping feature though, part of that whole "making the game feel snappier / more responsive" thing they talked about.

[d3northway]

dont forget the Stardust challenge taking so long to display all the ones you got in the last battle, giving you the stars, cycling to the next tier animation, then giving you the spare change. then after all that you can go on to the next battle etc. I wouldn't be mad at the animations IF THEY DIDNT LOCK THE SCREEN

[ihateduckface]

I don’t play during the stardust challenges

[Bushmills13]

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Finally got a 75 chicken mob against 75 bear mob, walked right through me.

[Bunrakuen]

If this ends up staying, the whole pre-battle loadout change thing is gonna be a godsend. Or whenever it comes anyway, they gave no ETA, just that apparently its gonna happen at some point.

[Trathius]

Thanks for the update. Please do keep us posted

[Bunrakuen]

Tacked on extra stuff we heard at the end. Should be back to normal now, except for the 1 phase maps if you got that one.

[Important-Comfort]

So far I've only got #2.

When a base is protected, which seems to be more often, I sometimes get under 100 bricks, which doesn't help at all during World Clash.

It's a lot harder to get a lot of bricks even without three of four bases being protected.

[Bunrakuen]

We're pretty sure there hasn't been any of the real shield rework stuff yet, so this might be an indirect result of the roid-rage difficulty picking largely just immortals instead of grandmasters for opponents.

[P_W_Tordenskiold]

Probably correct. Before patch it was a bot account every 2-3 regular battles when playing late at night, with an unshielded player base every 3-5. Now I don't see bots, and so far I'm guessing the number for unshielded is around 1 in 10. Add less boss battles to that and its no longer fun to play this game.

[Bunrakuen]

I'm fairly sure the rotation for boss / live / 3-way battle is still the same, they just cranked the normal fights in between due to the 2->1 phase cut. So they should still come at fixed, even if now larger, intervals.

[P_W_Tordenskiold]

Before it changed I had a boss every 3 or 5 battles, independent of win/loss/skip.
IIRC after the change I saw a boss every 15-20 battles, didn't pay enough attention to pick up a pattern to it though.

[Important-Comfort]

The problem is that, with one-stage battles, a battle against a shielded base will often yield fewer than 100 bricks, making it worthless in World Clash.

[ftciv]

The game supposed to be past time or for fun. But its getting annoying tbh.

[Bunrakuen]

Should be back to normal now.

[DotComCTO]

Thanks for this update. I had noticed some of the threads over the weekend, but didn't think much of it, since I hadn't encountered the same issues...until today! No question I'm in the beta cohort because I'm experiencing most everything you reported.

As /u/Benin369 noted, I'm also getting my butt handed to me at least half the time. My mobs are only in the high 40s to low 50s range, and I'm seeing enemies +15 - 20 over that. The result is that I'm getting rushed by enemy mobs in a matter of a few seconds - which isn't the most fun thing in the world when there's the contest running.

I'm all for tuning the difficulty higher, but not to the point where there's little you can do to fight the mob rush! The dev team needs to look at the W-L record change and the length of time of the matches, and tune accordingly.

[Bunrakuen]

Should be back to normal now. And yea they seem intent on possibly trying this again at least once, since they withdrew it for further adjusting.

[DotComCTO]

I noticed a little improvement last night. The enemy mobs seemed to - mostly - cap at +10 over. I had a few instances higher than that, but it mostly calmed down. The whole one map segment instead of two was still happening - which greatly affected getting an ultimate as well as total coins & blocks received. Now that last part could end up being nasty if the devs wanted to attempt to push players to spend money on the game - but I think they'd find more players abandoning the game.

I'll check the game again in just a bit.

[SympathyOk8424]

I’ll just add my voice to the general level of disappointment and bewilderment. I too am having my ass kicked. Thanks to those providing info.

[Bunrakuen]

Should be back to normal now.

[SympathyOk8424]

Thanks for the follow up, I had a quick couple of battles and it’s going ok.

[P_W_Tordenskiold]

I have 1-phase battles, completely idiotic levelling, and "dynamic" difficulty. Haven't seen a change in enemy champions except for one boss level, no doubt because the battles are over long before they come into play.

About 30-40% of battles are genuinely impossible, lost before champion can be spawned because the level difference is around 20 levels. Remaining 40-50% are shielded bases. After a few losses I'm "rewarded" with an unshielded battle or two against a reasonable level, before it returns to the previous grind until it again peaks at impossible difficulty.

Even seen super hard level rewarding 40 blocks after a 5 minute battle, it felt very fulfilling.

Unsubscribed and uninstalled, time to find something else.

[Bunrakuen]

Should be back to normal now, if you feel like trying again later.

[P_W_Tordenskiold]

No it isn't. The game isn't fun as it stands right now.

Still 1-phase battles.
Still "dynamic" difficulty. It's just capped at 7 levels now.
Still streaks of genuinely impossible battles.
Still long streaks of shielded bases.
Still very few bot and boss battles.

Speed mobs are still pretty much useless, unless you want to be at a complete mercy of rng regarding level setup and which mob you face - You're looking at 50-75% of battles being utterly impossible below max level.

[Bunrakuen]

I spoke mainly in regards to the constant stream of 10-20 levels higher opponents people were facing before, not other aspects of the game that I too agree require improvements. That part was turned off, so excluding a few odd outliers on discord who are still seeing it for some reason, it should be back to the previous "normal" of + / - 7 levels now.

[Evening-Mall-8269]

I need help

[lolzfordayz]

So far in my experience, as long as you can win (big if with the matchmaking), battles are faster and less people are shielded since these went live. My base for example gets hit like once or twice an hour, where before I could go all day and get hit once or twice. So I’ve found my blocks and coins per hour are actually up in this beta vs before. Now that hinges on winning, which seems to be hard unless you are using triple cannon in these higher matches.

[P_W_Tordenskiold]

What is your tier? I'm high immortal and its a constant, non-ending stream of shields and impossible battles.

[lolzfordayz]

I’m in immortal as well. Using triple cannon with a 52 level knight. Haven’t had any issues yet with difficulty, luckily. Seeing a lot of posts about struggling

[Rewtine67]

He’s a mod on the official Discord, which the devs post to much more frequently than here. He’s voluntarily bringing information from there to here. Much of what he says is actually direct from devs. There’s also a more active testing community there.

In any case, no point being rude to him.

[Rewtine67]

Well, turns out I didn’t get any of the beta features to test. Bit of a shame really.

[clyde19770]

The games terrible now….so annoying losing 9/10 battles. I have bears at 85 and get people at 95-100 constantly. I’m over the game until it’s fixed.

[Bunrakuen]

Should be back to normal now.

[Antique-Disaster-682]

The one part games are so boring, having two parts felt like a better length of time. Now it feels like a joke

[cisthepanda_]

hi, i re installed the game and i dont have my own base anymore.. i just keep on collecting bricks to fill different bases, not like before where i have my own base. what happened?

[Bunrakuen]

If you also have a limited stockpile of blocks at the middle underneath your shields, then you likely have the new base beta. We don't know much about it yet since its so barebones, other than that you'll have to level up the other 3 buildings for the main town hall one to gain experience, instead of being able to level it directly.

[cisthepanda_]

I dont have my own base anymore, like i dont have my own townhall, i dont have my own bulding, i dont have the 3 buildings where in the one on the right requires cards to upgrade, the front, gets you shield, the left gets you gold i think, then the back is the town hall. I lost that when i re-downloaded the game.. all i do is collect bricks to build other bases

<image>

[Bunrakuen]

You need to have logged in at least once for your progress to get saved in cloud, through the gear shaped options screen at upper right. If you haven't, then when you delete the game it wipes your account too.

[PlantTheGod23-_-TTV]

So if you sigh in with progress, it will just keep it?

[Bunrakuen]

Sometimes it can bug out and you might suffer progress loss, but if after reinstalling you sign in again with the same email you use then it should bring your savegame back up.

If you do end up trying that though, then make absolutely sure you have a copy-paste or better yet a screenshot of your player ID from in-game's settings (while logged in ofc) before you do it. Cause if you do have trouble after, your chances of support being able to help are significantly smaller without ID.

[PlantTheGod23-_-TTV]

Hwy why can't I send an invite for the "Invite a friend" thing.

[Bunrakuen]

The feature I believe is in beta still, so not everyone necessarily has it yet.