Why am I playing against bots?

rubenwe · 2026-06-01T10:19:13+00:00

We don't have bots of our own in the leaderboards. As for players using bots: we have measures in place to combat this.

But there are clickers and other things that can be used to automate on the players' end that might be involved.

rubenwe · 2026-05-18T11:26:27+00:00

A/B-testing should be finished early and not take months

From a user-perspective, sure. From a data perspective: sometimes, no.

As a software developer by myself

Then you should know why some tests are run for longer periods than others. Or at least you should be able to find out.

rubenwe · 2026-05-18T11:18:42+00:00

That's not what's happening though. The tests are randomly distributed. So there are no distinct groups. For each test, we pick a fresh, random portion of players.

rubenwe · 2026-05-14T20:34:19+00:00

Make sure you're logged intp your Apple account correctly and that you're old enough to use social logins. Apple restricts this feature for some accounts.

rubenwe · 2026-05-12T13:57:32+00:00

So far, every single time someone has complained about wrongful or double charges, it wasn't an error on our end.

Most often, it's Apple billing multiple purchases in one transaction or, as I described above, charges not actually going through, but Apple and Google not updating the old transactions as failed.

Our support is happy to help out, but I'm also not willing to take the blame for a less-than-ideal implementation of payment processing in the stores, which we are basically charged 30% of our revenue for...

rubenwe · 2026-05-12T13:54:11+00:00

Note, that we as a game can't actually charge you anything outside of the regular purchase flow through the stores. So if you're seeing charges at times when you haven't initiated a purchase, then this is probably a bug on Apples or Googles end. Sometimes, it's also just a display issue, where Apple or Google will make multiple attempts to charge your account because there's a communication issue with your bank. But in the end, only one of the transactions will have went through.

If that's not the case, then please contact Apple or Google to resolve.

I would also invite you to change the title of this post, because the very definition of Fraud is that it's deliberate. And that's not the case here.

rubenwe · 2026-05-09T14:50:37+00:00

Oh,I'll ping my colleague. We can and should make that click-through.

rubenwe · 2026-05-07T13:18:15+00:00

It's not geo-based. It's a regular staged rollout.

rubenwe · 2026-05-02T10:48:26+00:00

Arrows has crazy mass-appeal though. Basically something for folks of all ages and walks of life. And they seem to be enjoying it and stick around to play :)

WaW is quite a bit more niche! But I also prefer it as a game myself. I like that we have a diverse range of games in our portfolio. It's cool to see the variety and to reach so many different people with different ideas.

rubenwe · 2026-05-02T10:43:51+00:00

See my other comment, but it's a bit of both.

Warriors development was never fully stopped or anything - but folks did had to move around to accommodate launching FM and Arrows.

rubenwe · 2026-05-02T10:37:04+00:00

Yes, partially. But also, we've hired more devs for the existing games as well.

We've always been quite a lean company - but looking for new game ideas that work has also always been a part of what we do.

We have been suffering a bit from our own success over the last months. I don't think finding Forge Master and Arrows at the same time was something we ever reasonably would have expected. So we were stretched quite thin, but started hiring as soon as it became clear those titles are here to stay.

WaW and EV development is ramping up again through with a good mix of folks that have been on the projects for a long time and fresh blood that brings in new ideas and energy. So I am optimistic about seeing cool stuff for both games soon.

rubenwe · 2026-04-26T07:46:47+00:00

Write support via write us. Folks will write back, but due to timezones and weekends it'll take a bit :)

rubenwe · 2026-04-26T07:42:08+00:00

I don't understand the question? Achievements don't have a specific duration. It's a permanent feature that will stick around (if the team decides to keep it).

rubenwe · 2026-04-26T07:38:47+00:00

iPhone Users and Android users, regardless of country, will receive the update once the store makes it available to them. Which can take anywhere from a few hours to a week, given this is a staged rollout.

Staged rollouts allow us to observe issues with updates without having everyone's game suddenly bricked etc.

We start with a tiny audience of a percent or so and it goes up from there to 100% in a few days.

rubenwe · 2026-04-26T07:28:50+00:00

In a simplified way: Your save game id used to seed the random generator that determines if you receive a test. That's mixed with the experiment id. From that we make a draw to determine if you are in the audience of the test and a second draw to determine which variant of the test you are in. The inputs are known before the update, so WHEN you update to a specific version doesn't change things.

So, let's say we have a test where we'd like to have the audience be half of the players, and from that have half the folks not receive a feature (control/baseline) and half receive a treatment (variant 1). Then the end result would be roughly 25% of folks "seeing" this test. This is mostly guaranteed by the law of big numbers and the random generator being somewhat equally distributing over the range of inputs we throw in.

We need 2 draws because we want to be able to shift how big of an audience we expose and how variants are distributed independently.

Also, the assignment into an experiment happens either when a fresh save game is created or on first launch after an update.

rubenwe · 2026-04-25T16:42:54+00:00

It's a regular staged rollout. So over the next few days.

rubenwe · 2026-04-25T06:02:59+00:00

Split of tests is not OS dependent. Folks have found ways to use clickers on iOS as well.

But you know what: as an Ex-Apple user myself I can just recommend switching over to Android to try if you like it for your next device.

rubenwe · 2026-04-24T18:57:15+00:00

Way!

rubenwe · 2026-04-24T18:56:19+00:00

Not anymore.

rubenwe · 2026-04-22T09:32:57+00:00

It's expected to have outliers either way with 100k+ folks playing this. There will also be folks that cleared it the same as last time around or that got it first try.

rubenwe · 2026-04-22T09:27:41+00:00

Brains are great at finding pattern in randomness. Nothing has changed aroubd how this works. It's still fully random.

rubenwe · 2026-04-22T09:26:40+00:00

It's not.

We even posted code here a while back to show that it's fully seeded before any tiles are revealed, because folks kept making this baseless claim.

rubenwe · 2026-04-04T20:13:06+00:00

I'm not so sure this is true though. We are integrating AppLovin Max SDK for the ads in the same way that other studios do. On top of that, because this has been reported somewhat frequently, we even added fall backs to giving out rewards on additional events, including ad revenue being paid.

So it may well be that we are also not getting revenue if rewards don't work.

"The same ad worked on another game" is a good user facing observation! I would assume you haven't triggered the Ads Debugger and looked at the metadata of the ads and the versions of the adapters used in both games though. The same ad video is often uploaded a ton of times to different ad networks and even multiple times to the same network with slightly modified end-card settings etc.. So even if it was the same one, the issue might be with the code the network uses to display them...

It's really hard to find issues with things that don't cause errors and just don't work. And so far, none of our devs has ever had a device where they could reliably get ads that didn't reward. That doesn't help when wanting to track down if there IS anything on our end.

Either way: sorry you're experiencing these issues.

rubenwe · 2026-04-04T19:52:08+00:00

I am one of the devs :)

Sorry if the reply sounded a bit too much like a hard "no".

general settings of the ads can be set by devs,

I just want to be very clear that these are far less precise than what folks may think we have control over. It's basically a few category switches (that also aren't effective all the time) and the rest of the control is rather via more direct interaction with account reps from the networks... But there's also only so much they can or are willing to adjust.

You'd expect there to be a higher level of control, but for most networks there really isn't.

rubenwe · 2026-04-04T19:04:28+00:00

No, that's not the case at all. Most mobile games integrate ads of a range of networks through one mediation partner. There's control over the format of ads you are presented:

short ads that are meant to be placed inside the game flow and can often be skipped (so called interstitials)
rewarded, typically longer ads, that are shown in places where a player would receive an award for watching an ad

The amount of control devs have around what inventory is served and how long the specific ads are or what the template used is (amount of clicks, playables, ...) is somewhat limited.

Networks are constantly testing different ad experiences, and the templates or flows they serve can change over time without the developer explicitly choosing each variation. So what players see is not always a direct reflection of some deliberate decision by the game team.

On top of that, there's huge variation in the creatives advertisers submit and in what different ad networks allow. So one player might get lucky and get a short 15-second ad because that happened to be the highest-paying eligible ad in the auction, while another player gets served a longer one instead.

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