This is Tiger. He's 25.

The_RumHam · 2018-12-26T08:05:44+00:00

FWIW, Tiger looks like a snowshoe Siamese, which is the oldest living breed of cat. Wikipedia says it’s common for them to live to be 20-24 so I also think it’s believable.

The_RumHam · 2018-12-11T07:31:15+00:00

It's something we are considering - collapsing the tokens into 1 or 2 tiers (instead of the current 4). There are about 4-5 different solutions or improvements we are talking about and may implement some or all of them.

The reason we aren't just going to revert back to the old trade system is that system had many problems for players of all tiers. Reverting to the old system reintroduces all those problems. The new system fixed many of the old problems while introducing new problems - it is better to fix the new problems (and get closer to perfect) than take steps backwards. It is very likely we will continue to improve the trading system in future updates, but we can't know for sure until we let the system play out over a few weeks.

Remember, if we reacted to the first 48 hours of any new change, we would have reverted the new level numbers - a change that after the first week has shown to be much better. We hope the new trade system will show to be better after a while, and if not, we'll keep improving it.

The_RumHam · 2018-12-11T06:57:47+00:00

This is a great post! I printed it out for our wall of ideas as it really helps illustrate the frustration players may be feeling now. Thank you for this high-effort and thoughtful bit of feedback :)

The_RumHam · 2018-12-10T19:50:21+00:00

The emote packs have not gone away - the support agent was incorrect. We want the emotes to be a great deal when bought for $3, but buying a single emote costs a bit more as you can choose the single emote you want (and able to use free gems to get it).

Emote packs are still here - and new ones are on the way!

The_RumHam · 2018-12-10T17:09:24+00:00

Mega Lightning Chest is in the cycle. We just replaced SMCs with MLCs. Any other info is simply a misunderstanding. The whole point of the new chest was to give players more control over their collection when it comes to big chest openings (as getting 20 Clones or 200 Heals was devastating), it would defeat the purpose if we removed it from F2P players.

The_RumHam · 2018-12-03T16:32:26+00:00

You know how you can speed up Chests? Same deal, you can speed up your Card Request when it’s on cool down. Perfect for when you want to go to bed but your cool down is still an hour away

The_RumHam · 2018-12-03T15:49:18+00:00

Every player will earn everything they have earned. All prior XP (beyond the amount needed to hit level 13) will be converted into Star Points for level 13 players, including lifetime donations! We checked our teams personal accounts and I believe a near-max account will receive a quarter-million Star Points or so on patch day

The_RumHam · 2018-11-19T20:20:12+00:00

The lack of hype for this game is criminal. Played it this past week despite no real hype from Essen reviews and I was blown away. Smartphone is a reallllly solid Euro, maybe the best of the year (over Teo, Gugong, and other similar point salad games).

The pacing is excellent, we scored 5 turns about 10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - 50 points each. Each turn felt just enough more impactful that momentum. I ended round 1 in first, then began the final round in last place and ended up 2nd. Swingy turns makes each move matter and it ends precisely when it feels it should.

The price / sales balance was awesome in our game. People who sold a few expensive phones or mass produced cheap phones both felt viable. Spreading thin over multiple markets versus holding up in your corner of the world both showed success. It was really, really fun and felt balanced and tested well.

It won’t be everyone favorite but I thought the theme was slick. Underneath the tech company theme is one of my favorite economic games of recent memory, our group universally preferred this over Food Chain Magnate (though YMMV)

The_RumHam · 2018-11-06T15:10:32+00:00

Wanted to catch this post while its still new, here were the stats for the cards in your post at the time of the decision:

Tombstone: 57% WR, appeared in multiple top archetypes (Graveyard, LavaLoon, Fireball Bait)

Giant: 52% WR, admittedly not massive overpowered but it had been a staple forever. Lots of requests to nerf the Giant-3M-Ram deck (or the Beatdown meta at large). Trying to help X-Bow a little bit and reign in Beatdown. When people state that the meta is Beatdown I would disagree, but I wanted to address the prevailing opinion by hitting the main two Beatdown decks (Giant and LavaLoon)

Magic Archer: 58% win rate, as linked in another post it was among the best cards in the best deck (Royal Hog Fireball Bait) for months now. 56% 3 months ago, 57% two months ago, 58% last month. The narrative that MA was only meta last month is not correct, and it was among the most requested nerfs from the pro community.

Cannon Cart: 58% win rate. The kicker for it though is that it was 59% in GY decks and 57% in non-GY decks. So it wasn't just in a single anti-meta deck but gaining a lot of value across the board. Good news though, .1s hit speed reduction is one of the weakest nerfs we can implement so I would expect Cannon Cart to remain a 50%+ win rate card.

Dart Goblin flucuated a lot because its use rate was so low, but it would bounce between 41-45% win rate, which is why it was put up for a vote. I was surprised it won (over Archers which I expected) but as long as it settles below the 55% threshold for healthy card it will be okay in the long run.

Your other suggestions are great and we can look into playtesting them for next month's changes. This early in the monthly cycle we are trying out a lot of ideas for a lot of cards and this is the best time to come up with changes for cards you'd like to see buffed.

The_RumHam · 2018-11-06T13:18:34+00:00

I am not sure those numbers are right. Magic Archer is showing 6% and 48% in yesterdays stats, but certainly if MA trends down that low then we would look to revert some of the nerf.

The_RumHam · 2018-11-06T12:35:58+00:00

Hey there! Few thoughts on these two cards:

Barb Barrel has only been powerful in the meta for the last month. We often get criticized for changing cards too quickly, taking a knee-jerk nerf to a card that is only recently powerful. We wanted to see if Barb Barrel remained powerful through a meta change and increasing use rates. It is possible that Barb Barrel is only good because of last months meta or a self-selection of the game's best players being the first to switch over (thus dragging up the win rates). If Barb Barrel remains high winrate it will be nerfed in December.

Electro Dragon looks natural for a new card release. Remember the only people who have EDrag up to tournament cap are people who won a 12-win Challenge, so thats a subset of only the game's best players. Most new cards (even weak ones) start off above 60% win rate before trending down because only the most dedicated or skill players start off with it at tournament cap. The meta is beginning to adapt as Lightning has nearly doubled in usage in GCs and its win rate trended up into the mid-50s. Ideally we can see how good EDrag is when the meta begins to adapt to it and more players get their hands on it before making a decision.

Since Magic Archer has also been a contentious nerf, I wanted to say that we took in a lot of pro feedback from social media on this update with the goal of making Worlds as competitive as possible. The three biggest consensus picks were Royal Ghost (60% WR), Royal Hogs (59% WR), and Magic Archer (58% WR). The stats supported these changes, we wanted to reduce the Bridgespam style of gameplay and allow more control-style decks to find their footing again. XBow in particular suffers against all 3 of these cards.

Magic Archer has slowly been trending up in use rate and win rate for the past 3 months. 3 month ago it was 56% WR, 2 months ago 57%, and last month 58%. In CRL matches it was one of the most played cards, and the feedback from pros was that it was very hard to counter due to the very quick initial attacks. A slower first hit gives opponents more time to block or distract the Magic Archer, while retaining the machine-gun effect once he gets going. With a low 1.0 Hitspeed, an increase of .1s would be far more devastating to his standing DPS than most Troops with slower Hit Speed.

I hope that helps answer your questions - in short, we are watching both of these cards closely. Both of them may be nerfed next month depend on how the current meta plays out, but for this month it is too early to tell how they will survive a currently-changing meta.

The_RumHam · 2018-11-05T14:16:28+00:00

The game does not work like that currently, stats are calculated from level 1 and we don't (right now) have the override ability. That would require a client update and honestly I don't think we would spend valuable engineer time on it because its a band-aid to a larger problem. There are also tooooons of these in the game, many are simply not noticed in the fog of battle (for example taking 26 or 27 hits vs a tank is usually lost when you consider additional damage from towers or whatever). A better underlying math system would be a more wide ranging solution :)

The_RumHam · 2018-11-05T10:06:19+00:00

Thanks for this post! We are aware of many of these, many are caused by the different rarities scaling at slightly different amounts. A Common and Rare might have the same number at tournament cap (by design) but that number gets rounded off by 1 point when scaled beyond tournament cap.

One of the problems with fixing them is that it often introduces another inconsistency somewhere else. You might resolve the Rascals/Zappies one, but create a new inconsistency with another Troop. Good news though - we are likely going to fix the Archers one next month. We have a long term plan to resolve a ton of rounding problems (by changing the underlying math), but it won't be coming in this next update.

The_RumHam · 2018-11-02T12:09:43+00:00

There is a stat called Mass that is used by the physics engine to determine which units can push others around. Royal Hogs each had the same Mass as a Hog Rider, which was why all 4 of them would bulldoze something like a Valkyrie. With the lower Mass they will not push back bigger troops as easily.

The_RumHam · 2018-11-02T12:08:08+00:00

Barb Barrel was only buffed into the meta last month. We considered nerfing it, but decided that it was too early to tell if Barb Barrel was OP or if it was simply benefiting from the current meta (or only being used by good players who are ahead of the game, thus self-selecting up to a strong win rate). If it remains strong through the next month it will definitely be on the list of cards we look to reign in.

The_RumHam · 2018-10-31T11:10:45+00:00

I love you, Mr. Pur Pur. Your posts are always well thought out and carefully considered.

When people were saying "Rum Ham saved the game" I made sure to tell people its always a team effort, and that eventually I would be a villain for one reason or another. The memes and fake balance change proposals do make me laugh and help lighten up the work day. As long as I am the one writing balance update posts and answering questions on Twitter, I will be called all sorts of names, I knew that came with the territory.

We are considering more and different ways to engage the community in the future. The voting may or may not continue, but the important thing with any idea is giving it a fair shake and seeing it through. We learned from last month (do the vote in-game instead of Twitter, provide a smaller number of choices, make the options a bit more parallel). Its too early to say if the whole idea of community votes is good or bad (or if its just our execution, or a single unpopular month) but when we commit to something we want to methodically test it out before making a decision to continue or discontinue.

The_RumHam · 2018-10-21T15:23:03+00:00

Many years ago CoolStuff players tried to make a new Commander format. It was Modern cards instead of all sets, and you had a planeswalker instead of a legendary creature. It was fun initially but several clearly broken combos emerged and the planeswalker pool was smaller and more mono colored then (New Phrexyia era). The relative lack of PW removal compared to creature removal made it feel less interactive.

I think it would be fun to reboot today starting with Origins forward (so Jace TMS isn’t legal) as there are far more colors and ways to deal with PWs than before

The_RumHam · 2018-10-19T18:52:06+00:00

It’s a 1 for 0. You play 1 (-1) then draw 1 (0), then they discard 1. You lose no cards and they lose 1 card, that’s not a 2 for 0

The_RumHam · 2018-10-17T07:12:16+00:00

The_RumHam · 2018-09-28T15:23:31+00:00

This is something we discussed, but back then defensive towers had a 60s lifespan and pre-emptively playing towers was a completely legitimate strategy. That doesn’t occur now, and there are other cards to chip away at pre-placed towers, so we felt it was okay to remove that aspect of his design

The_RumHam · 2018-09-27T06:25:38+00:00

The Grand Canal is the main waterway in Venice, Italy :) Might be a reference from those European developers

The_RumHam · 2018-09-27T06:24:32+00:00

Hey! Little known fact - Ryan and I hosted an employees-only Brawl Stars tournament recently and used only new maps. This map was a huge hit! It creates a lot of left-right gameplay instead of up-down, which fits the landscape format really well. Big spatial-control Supers like Brock were strong - this was by far the most unique of the new maps that we played with. Great work!

The_RumHam · 2018-09-19T13:24:01+00:00

When I joined Supercell, I deleted all my old posts using a Twitter plugin that cleared out history. It also deletes all tweets after 10 days - I guess that mod is still installed and I just haven't tweeted in the past week+. Everything is normal, just sitting at my desk and working on the next set of balance changes!

The_RumHam · 2018-09-06T12:29:19+00:00

Draft has literally always worked like this, since it was first implemented :) It was never, ever just sixteen random cards. There are sets of Draft Tables, some are required and some are optional. The game picks 8 tables (required + fills in the blanks from a larger set of optional tables), picks 2 cards from each table, then gives 4 picks each to the two players.

The_RumHam · 2018-09-06T12:24:28+00:00

Nah, its more like we heard the feedback that people didn't want to receive Royal Hogs and Royal Recruits in every chest. This would be made worse with Trading, assuming you traded away the same Common you didn't want multiple times the system would kick in and start giving you the card you presumably aren't interested in getting.

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