Welcome back to another week of Burning Questions! This week, we're talking about skip weeks, location hate, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and Celebrity impersonators!
1) If I can't get every card, how do I choose which ones to skip?
This is getting more and more tricky. Second Dinner tweaked their design and new release testing systems a while back, and I believe we are seeing the fruits of that now. In seasons past, you could look at the schedule of upcoming cards, and there would be obvious must-have cards and easy skips. This is no longer true, as the design team has improved at ensuring new cards are desirable without being overbearing. The only recent card that could be called overbearing was Red Hulk, and his necessary nerf was far gentler than what needed to be done to cards like Elsa Bloodstone, Werewolf by Night, and Alioth. Cards like Red Guardian and Nocturne are much harder to make decisions about. They are both clearly good, but you can get by just fine without them in your collection. Second Dinner is no longer releasing cards you absolutely must have in order to compete. When meta-defining cards are released, it's easier to know you'll get your money's worth. Spotlight Caches are precious; if all the cards are good, none are easy to skip. Namora is a good card, despite the bizarre collective pre-release sentiment that she would be bad (did people misread her? Did Namor and Orca confuse everyone?). Still, she's not absolutely necessary to own. I think Sasquatch is in basically the same category: clearly strong but not meta-warping. The other side is that with no bad cards being released, decklists are becoming more stacked with Series 5 cards, making keeping up with the meta more expensive. Looking ahead to the Eternals season, I find every single card intriguing—the same is true of the datamined July cards. I think the time spent choosing cards based on power level may be over. Now, you should choose cards based on how interesting they seem to you personally. Some cards are perfect deck-building puzzles, while others may fit neatly into one of your favorite existing decks. Just get the ones you're most excited to play with and you're less likely to feel the sting of buyer’s remorse.
2) Why does everyone hate locations so much?
Mention almost any location, and you'll be met with a negative opinion about it. Whenever a new location comes into the game, it is met with animosity. Hot and Featured location days always spawn negative comments on social media. So why do players hate locations so much? Is it just the usual gamer complainers, or is there some deeper reason?
I have a theory about why locations elicit such strong negative feelings: locations are the primary source of randomness in the game. They are the aspect of the game that is hardest for the player to control. Sure, the game is between you and your opponent, but it can often feel like it's you vs. locations, and your opponent is just incidental to the experience. I think because the game has such small decks, the RNG aspect of the game needed to be baked into the locations. In a traditional card game, randomness heavily resides in your draws. In Magic: the Gathering, for example if you draw too many or too few lands (your energy base) or your most expensive cards either too early or not at all, you'll likely lose the game. Personally, I think locations are vital to keeping the game fresh and replayable for hours on end. The team has been on a hot streak, making interesting and dynamic locations. I've liked basically all of them since they changed their approach and removed/reduced some of the most restrictive locations in the game, like Plunder Castle and the Sandbar.
I also feel that by not raging at location RNG, I can take advantage of them more easily. Knowing that players tend to hate certain locations (District X, Great Web, Lamentis-1, Danger Room, Tarnax, Mindscape, Subterranea, etc.) affords a great deal of free Snap equity. In particular, my end-of-month stats always show hefty win percentages on Great Web since people dread it or get tilted because of it rather than playing around with it optimally. Don't fear the Danger Room! Embrace Tarnax! Welcome the Worldship!
3) This week, we got a new Black Widow variant in a bundle. Many people were quick to point out her resemblance to a certain singer-songwriter.
Billie eilish what are you doing here 🤭 https://t.co/lAaYJB21TU
— キウイStorm (@NotKiwiStorm) May 18, 2024
Eilish Widow isn't our first celebrity look-alike. We've also got:
Dolly Parton - Enchantress
Lady Gaga - Magik
Tom Cruise - Black Bolt
Pokimane - Rogue
Famke Janssen - Typhoid Mary
Emma Watson - Colleen Wing
Michael York - Namor
Scooby Doo - Cosmo
If you've got another celebrity look alike, find my Twitter thread and post your own!
Let's wade into the official Marvel Snap discord with some community questions and developer answers!
4) Q: I encountered an interesting mechanic which could be a bug or a feature. So when a Negasonic Teenage Warhead (NTW) hasn’t triggered and an opponent plays Magneto and moves NTW to another lane Magneto gets destroyed.
Is that intended?
Shouldn’t the move from Magneto apply the NTW’s condition after Magneto was played and trigger only on next card is played in that lane?
A: Our trigger system is set up such that On Reveals happen before everything, and triggers only look for their "event" when it's their turn to potentially resolve. We don't queue up multiple elements every time a card is revealed.
So the order in this case becomes Magneto moves NTW, then NTW makes her check. "A card was just played--was it played to my location?"
-Glenn
Author's notes:
As someone who plays a lot of NTW, I've been taking advantage of this Magneto/NTW interaction for months. Glenn notes that this happens because she checks which cards are played to the lane she is in after On Reveals resolve. Here's a list of useful Negasonic Teenage Warhead interactions to keep in mind:
- If Magneto pulls her to his lane, she will blow him up
- If Cannonball knocks her out of his lane, she will not trigger
- She will not trigger when pulled by Doctor Octopus or Gladiator
- If Spider-Man pulls Negasonic with him to another lane, she will not trigger
- She will not destroy a card played into Lockjaw or Quantum Tunnel
- Red Guardian can defuse her before she goes off
- She will not destroy Professor X (or Armor) played onto her lane
- On reveals like Doctor Doom or Namora will trigger before she destroys the card played onto her lane
- Copies of her made by Sinister London or Arnim Zola are active and can detonate even if they are copies of a NTW that has already gone off
- If your opponent plays into Sinister London, she will only destroy the first card played and it will still be copied, regardless of how many NTWs you have there
5) Q: It feels like SNAP in the first five months of 2024 has had more minor and major technical issues that it’s entire prior history.
- missions not refreshing
- multiple hot fixes after a few patches
- in game errors
- patches delayed as often as they are not
Not trying to point fingers or whine - if anything this just highlights just how smooth the first year and half of the game was.
I’m curious over what might have caused the change - both out of curiosity and perhaps some concern that this will be the new normal.
As an observer my guesses involve heavy duty backend work as Nuverse is shuttered AND adapting to a major new version of Unity.
A: Hmmm, this is an interesting question.
The reality is that it’s been a wide range of different “things” that have caused the recent instability. And unfortunately we got hit by several all at once which was…fun.
Some of these are byproducts of old code and features that had weird issues that would cause failures down the road that we just weren’t aware of. The best example is with Spotlight Cache and US Agent’s release. This was a byproduct of a weird bug introduced when the system was first developed that would see the feature fail on week 41…It was one of those things that wasn’t caught because it required specific purchase patterns in the previous week (week 40 in most players’ case) to occur and these types of purchase patterns weren’t something we were doing when testing content hookup week over week and we didn't have content hooked up (even as placeholder) that far out when the feature was first being tested. As a result, it wasn’t ever seen internally. And when I mean ever, I mean the first instance of this exception happening was on production the day everyone saw it and was followed by thousands almost immediately after.
Other things you list are a byproduct of changing philosophies on what it means to be a liveops title. The increased frequency of hotfixes is the most obvious. In some cases it’s to address content hiccups and whatnot, but we’ve also been frequently deploying client hotfixes (in addition to the backend ones that you all don’t see) to address issues that we might have previously been content living with for a month but are now prioritizing because we don’t want you all to have to live with them for that long. Similarly we’ll often run into an issue late in the testing cycle that we don’t feel safe trying to shoehorn into our initial release candidate and would prefer extended testing time but that we feel is important enough to get out ASAP. All that being said, I know one of my goals for the next year (literally written out in my recent self-review even!) is to reduce the frequency of client hotfixes because they are a tremendously heavy lift on our end and it’d be a better experience for all of you to not have them as well!
You mention underlying engine changes as being a likely source of some recent issues because of previous comments we had made, and you’re absolutely right. In hindsight we should have left it in the oven a little longer but we had some corresponding timing issues that required it go out when it did (Unity was deprecating services for older versions so we had to get onto the new version). At the time though, we (I at least) were relatively confident in the changes and knew there’d be a hit to initial performance when people had to redownload assets but figured it’d resolve pretty quickly for people. It’s just unfortunate that the build we released with that change also coincided with other major issues (like that sweet, sweet Spotlight cache one).
Ultimately, one of our guiding principles is to become “LiveOps Wizards” and while we’ve had some recent stumbling blocks, a lot of the “stuff” behind the scenes that’s been related to those have been in pursuit of that goal. We are always striving to try to deliver content, features, and changes quicker and with higher quality release over release, just sometimes that is easier said than done. As QA, it’s kind of my job to be pessimistic a lot and to assume that the build’s going to fall down and the game’s going to explode, but realistically I’m optimistic that over the next few patches we’ll be able to get back to a reasonably reliable update cadence with far fewer technical hiccups and a more robust feature set to boot!
Thanks for the question, and thanks to yourself and everyone else for being patient with us while we work through these hurdles!
-Addison
Author's notes:
I have been concerned about this as well and it's nice to see such a detailed response from Addison here. The game has felt especially buggy in the last few months, with particularly annoying issues related to the collection track and loading times in various places. I hope the team will make some progress on these issues over the next couple of patches.
That's it for this week. Join in on the conversation in the comments by sharing your answers to this week's questions and hit me up on Twitter if you've got a Burning Question!