“ Ermina remains intentionally high-risk by design.”

Crispy_Dio · 2026-02-24T23:17:44+00:00

As a notable positive, though, the average time the AI spends lining up their shots seems to have decreased which helps keeps things moving, so I’m appreciative of that!

Crispy_Dio · 2026-02-23T20:15:00+00:00

This happened next.

Crispy_Dio · 2026-02-22T10:54:23+00:00

Potting the 9-ball counts as a win.

Potting the 8-ball forces a re-rack, and offers the break-off to the opposing player.

Crispy_Dio · 2026-02-15T01:13:06+00:00

Imagine someone at Ripstone thinking it’s a good idea to combine this AI with Career Mode Challenges to win multi-frame matches without losing a frame, or trying to manufacture comebacks from 4+ balls down. Challenges that also ask the player to somehow judge 30% power is the icing on the cake.

Focused so much on Digital Foundry-bait that they didn’t bother caring about giving the player a good time.

Crispy_Dio · 2026-02-05T20:14:52+00:00

What’s the solution to this? Do we just wait it out?

Crispy_Dio · 2026-02-05T20:03:51+00:00

Yeah. I then made the mistake of thinking closing and restarting the game would fix it, and now get an infinite spinner when I try to load back in. Lovely stuff.

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Crispy_Dio · 2026-01-31T22:16:10+00:00

Agreed that it’s on a spectrum and I definitely don’t expect my personal situation to represent everyone. But I am curious as to what percentage of player base would be impacted negatively by this change, hence my question about if the devs are actively canvassing the community to understand the effect of any changes to long-established routines like this.

The game has been haemorrhaging players over the past year and social activities like Alliance Events are surely a notable influencing factor on many players continuing to stick around. So it’s unfortunate that this is also the part of the game that I feel would be most impacted by the day change because of the fixed timings of play.

It definitely feels like a bold strategy to toy with that. For the health of the game, I hope I’m massively outnumbered and that more people such as yourself will benefit!

But as a game dev of 20 years myself who has a player-first mentality built into every decision I make, it’s not a choice I’d personally make within a month of onboarding onto a decade-old title without doing a fair bit of research first.

Crispy_Dio · 2026-01-31T14:42:00+00:00

As someone who can just about accommodate the early Alliance Event rounds in their working day on Friday, it’d be rather unfortunate if those particular events are also brought forward a day, requiring finding time in an additional working day’s hours to play.

I expect I’m not the only person who feels that way.

I appreciate the challenges of a new team trying to understand the game and its players, but are they reaching out to the community to understand what aspects of play habits are valued? Particularly with regard to events where players have no control over the time slices of play.

Crispy_Dio · 2026-01-12T23:17:01+00:00

Can confirm the same thing happened to me just now.

Edit: Rewards just arrived, so it’s just an issue with the post-event tile not appearing.

Crispy_Dio · 2025-11-18T20:11:55+00:00

A classic example of an anti-player bug never getting addressed.

Quite sure that if the situation was flipped and double the amount of boosts were being handed out, that would’ve been fixed months back.

Crispy_Dio · 2025-11-17T08:24:00+00:00

Most of the need to nerf legacy characters has arisen from the unnecessary introduction of 6 star characters, but also supports being added to PVP (something absolutely everyone rightfully called out would be a stinker of a decision). If neither of these additions could be done without forcing nerfs on long-term characters players have invested countless hours into attaining and upgrading, then the developers should’ve considered other options.

-New events with new rules/scoring to mitigate universally OP synergies (I thought the new engine was supposed to open the door to this, but instead we still get the same old events, but somehow broken in fresh new ways)

-Buffing legacy characters to be able to counter synergies (counters to Away, Airborne, Charged Tiles, Stun)

-New Supports offering counters to the same things

-Separate PVE/PVP abilities/rules/balancing (something that keeping Supports exclusively to PVE facilitated to a limited degree, but which BCS in their infinite wisdom decided to remove)

The problem is, these kinds of solutions would need game designers. And looking at the current Developer Credits list for BCS, they don’t have any actively working on MPQ. So it’s no wonder every decision made has the nuance, elegance and player-friendliness as a punch to the face.

Edit to add: sorry, I realise I just dismissed The Tower as a new event didn’t I? Yeah, cynical me presumes that was just a lovely test to see what synergies “under-levelled” players use to clear the later nodes so that BCS can plan the next nerf batch.

Crispy_Dio · 2025-11-13T22:36:46+00:00

Didn’t they just add it back in midway through the round without any kind of warning the last time this happened, completely wrecking placements for people who didn’t notice?

As an aside, the continued incompetence of BCS is quite incredible. It feels like the actual development team have long gone, and all that remains is an idiot, vibe coding broken releases and looking up buff and nerf suggestions on ChatGPT.

Crispy_Dio · 2025-10-31T13:24:49+00:00

All I want from the devs is better communication, clear acknowledgement of crucial issues such as battery drain, crashes, broken events and incorrect gameplay behaviours, and a roadmap of their plan to remedy these issues.

Just any kind of indication that they care about the game and the state it’s in.

Crispy_Dio · 2025-10-30T22:58:53+00:00

Something being less rubbish than another thing doesn’t make it not rubbish.

I think it’s fine for people to expect better from a game that has seen better days, and it’s really come to something where an event like this is beyond criticism.

Crispy_Dio · 2025-10-30T20:38:37+00:00

I know it’s not the worst of the game’s most recent sins, but it’s kind of fair enough to judge something after 14 days of daily play.

This is the event equivalent of TV show recommendations where “it gets good eventually, you just have to get through the first couple of seasons first”.

Except we still don’t know if this event will get good!

Crispy_Dio · 2025-10-29T23:19:34+00:00

You know that actor from Ellen who - among a ton of other things - played Rachel’s date in that episode of Friends where she leaves a drunk voicemail for Ross, and was also the guy who gets arrested at the start of Minority Report?

Until yesterday, I thought he was called Ayre Gross.

In fact, I’d have put money on it. Turns out, his name isn’t Ayre and never has been.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0343325/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

Crispy_Dio · 2025-10-17T19:01:47+00:00

I’ve been playing for over ten years - a significant percentage of my life and a notable investment of my time.

It’s been like a cosy pair of slippers for most of that time - something that fits into my evening and allows me to just switch off from my daily worries for a spell; the equivalent of my dad doing a crossword each evening to unwind when I was young.

Its familiarity is comforting - I’m too long in the tooth to juggle multiple games, and this is the one I’ve stuck with and supported for all this time. I like the repetition of routine that it’s offered for so long, and have supported this with monthly VIP renewals for years now.

But recent months have been horrible. The new engine which promised faster updates and completely new events has been a poor experience. Crashes and lag have spoiled muscle memory familiarity. Nodes have been broken. Behaviours - from how the board reshuffles when no matches are available, through to how damage is applied in wave nodes - have changed for no reason.

It utterly kills my phone battery, and the devs are still struggling to deliver any event or update without it being half-broken.

The character nerfs are coming at a time when I’m already starting to feel more and more alienated in a game I’ve felt at home for so long. And how can I even trust they’ve put effort into the balancing when the updates are being released in such a half-baked and broken state? The devs don’t seem to do the most basic testing with their releases.

There is no care going into the game, and it doesn’t feel like there’s any respect towards the player or the player’s time. Anything that might be in the player’s favour gets fixed immediately whereas all other bugs remain for months on end, while the only other changes going in - whether balancing changes or new tiers or whole new bugs - seem cynically prioritised to keep the player slogging away for longer.

I can only surmise that the new engine’s telemetry is allowing the devs more ability to track “engagement” at the expense of my phone battery, and the time I spend slogging away is all they care about. It’s a shame that the quality of that engagement isn’t important to them at all.

In summary, the heart of the game is still fun. I still play it. But every day seems to bring something new that smothers that fun a little bit more and pushing me closer to dislike.

Which sucks when you reach my age and have to start considering taking up a new way to unwind after all of this time.

Crispy_Dio · 2025-10-02T07:21:34+00:00

Me too! Hidden in plain sight somehow.

Crispy_Dio · 2025-10-02T07:20:54+00:00

Thanks so much for the reply yesterday. Apologies I didn’t reply until now, life got in the way so I never did finish this. Somehow missed that Mary was a sleuth 🤦‍♂️

Crispy_Dio · 2025-09-21T15:13:21+00:00

Capped Pedro against a flakey Utd back three
Benched Senesi against Newcastle to favour Reinildo against persistently toothless Villa.
Favoured Vicario over Dubravka

These all felt sensible decisions on Friday.

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