Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly tour of the hottest topics in Marvel Snap! This week we got a small OTA and some massive acquisition news! Let's dive in!
1) Is the exchange rate for spotlight keys fair?
Keys are going away! R.I.P. keys, long live tokens! Along with the introduction of a new acquisition system centered around Snap Packs, keys are going to convert into tokens.
On average, it takes 2.5 keys to pull a new card. In the token shop, cards cost 6000 tokens. This brings the approximate value of a key to 2400 tokens (6000/2.5). When you factor in the 2000 tokens you get for hitting a duplicate (and the frequency you'll hit that before getting the new card), a key is worth 2800 tokens. Obviously, there are some complicating factors since you have a chance at more cards if you're missing more and there is some value to Spotlight variants.
However, in my mind, a key should be valued at a minimum of 2800 tokens. Anything less would be a loss of value for those who had keys saved up. That they've decided to make the conversion rate 3000 makes me optimistic about this new system. It should help the system get off on a better foot than the Spotlight system did. We're going to have detailed analysis of the acquisition change and Snap packs, so be sure to check back daily!
2) Will the OTA be impactful?
The OTA was pretty uneventful. Sauron is a significantly better card now, but it's hard to say if that deck will emerge as a competitive force. The nerfs to Iron Patriot and Galacta will tamp down mid-range “good cards” decks (we've now discovered, Second Dinner calls them “rate cards”). Overall, though, the OTA was very safe. I'm sure there are those that prefer that approach, but, as someone who loves OTA shake-ups, I would have loved to see them take some bigger swings.
A good example of this is Pixie. Moving Pixie to 2/2 is safe and unlikely to make an impact. Sure, a few people will tinker with her, but they'll quickly discover what I have from months of trying to make this fun card work: she's just too inefficient and unreliable compared to cards like Mr. Negative and Wiccan to justify using her for any reason other than personal joy.
If they had made my preferred change to Pixie, making her a 1/1, I still don't think she would have become an oppressive meta force, but she would have had a chance to become a viable alternative strategy. Hopefully the team starts taking some much bigger swings in OTAs.
Anyway here are a couple of fun Pixie decks to try out:
PixWolf
Hopix
3) What's your favorite Negative space variant?
The new negative space album is super cool. Better yet, all of the variants cost 700 Gold. They're all pretty cool, but the Black Panther is the best. They were smart to make it the album reward.
I'm a little sad we didn't get this Magik negative space variant at the same time, though.
4) Q: There currently seem to be a lot of problems with not being able to get into Conquest and HV games properly, with the issue forcing losses if it happens. While HV has fewer stakes, this is making Conquest extremely stressful, as it can cause you to lose quite a few tickets.
Is the team aware of this, and will any fix be able to be implemented before the season ends? I understand fixes take time, but this is pretty drastically affecting my ability to finish my Conquest goals this season.
A: Hey, thanks for this ask and apologies for the delay in responding! The situation was kind of in flux and we were exploring our options throughout the weekend and yesterday.
Over the weekend we saw reports of games failing to transition from matchmaking to in-game. We identified that this is tied to an exception related to asset handling that is occurring on the client that was on our radar but unresolved.
The volume of this exception all the way through last week was quite low, affecting a relatively small number of games prior to Friday. For reasons unknown to us at this point, High Voltage being turned on exacerbated this issue and we saw not only a fairly high percentage of games experience this in High Voltage but a much higher volume in Conquest.
We know that some players see this exception more often than others and we're not clear exactly why this is the case. Might be a behavior thing (certain UX flows or something like that), might be a progression thing (certain cards/splits/track progression), we're not clear.
This issue unfortunately requires a client fix to resolve. We explored trying to get a fix and build out the door this week but we weren’t optimistic we could get a build through the approval pipeline before High Voltage ended and the volume presumably drops again. So we have a solution in the next major client release to hopefully prevent this in the future and we expect the volume to drop drastically in the meantime towards the end of this week.
Given the impact on Conquest, for games that fail in this particular manner for the remainder of the week, you should see a replacement Conquest ticket granted to your inbox shortly afterwards.
-Addison
Author's note:
The game is in a rough place at the moment from a bug perspective. From frozen matchmaking screens and crashes resulting in lost conquest tickets to buggy visuals on new cards and flares that aren't visible, the game is in desperate need of improvements. I'm not sure how much of this is due to increased workload resulting from the publisher change—it makes sense there would be a harsh adjustment period—but hopefully next week's patch takes a giant bite out of some of these malfunctions.
5) Q: Following from Griffin's latest post in the game news channel on bounty changes for Alliance, it promoted a question that's been bugging me for while as it relates to communication on what's going on with Marvel Snap
Are there plans/is it a priority to make players not need Discord for game news, updates and things like that?
A: We absolutely want to improve our in-game messaging abilities. Those systems take time to develop and have various limitations. One, for instance, is localization. If we want to post a message to ALL players, it requires us to send it for translation which can take days to come back.
In order to remain timely with our responses, coming here and sharing updates is the quickest and easiest way to alert players.
-Griffin
Author's note:
A lot of players are only going to see information and announcements if they're in the game. I understand how localization can be a major hurdle to doing that with every announcement, though. Part of the problem is inconsistency in where information appears. As someone who needs to reference precise communication from Second Dinner VERY often, I constantly find myself having this mental experience: “Now, where did I see that information? Was that in game news on the Discord? Was it a team answer? Oh, wait, it was on social media. But was it on the Marvel Snap Instagram account, the Second Dinner Twitter account or Griffin's Bluesky account?”
That's it for this week! Come find me on Bluesky (@scosco). Hit the comments and let me know what you think about Snap Packs and the acquisition changes!