Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly peek into Marvel Snap's hottest topics! This week, there were more patch issues, though help is on the way, Team Clash got started, and I did a little bit of a thing too! Read on!
1) What is up with all the bugs (again)?
For the second time recently, this is the hottest topic in the Snap community. After the patch, there were some loading time issues and crashes. My game was basically unplayable. It was incredibly laggy and slow. They pushed out an additional update meant to help with these issues. My issues disappeared, but I saw even more reports from people about crashes and loading issues. I suspect it's correlated with device type.
The other person I know of who was having significant issues before the supplemental patch was using the same phone as me. In this second round of crashes, much of it seems related to changing windows, swapping away from the game and back, and other behaviors that streamers need to do regularly. I am reluctant to say "I hope they get this fixed soon" for the second time, but I hope they are viewing the current situation with the gravity it deserves. The team is actively working on this issue.
I do have some good news! I can spread the word that the programming team was given permission to devote several months and extra resources to tech debt and bug fixes. Surely that took some convincing, but it's a great sign for a game at this point in its lifecycle, and it means next summer the game should be in a much more stable situation and have snappier performance.
2) What other teams do you want added to Team Clash?
Team Clash kicked off yesterday, and it rules. It's an entertaining mode that leans more into the perception of being in a world of superheroes working together and battling it out. The five teams are a great start, but they should slowly add teams as they continue to run this LGTM. What teams should they add?
The Brotherhood of Mutants
In early datamines, there was already a 6th team, the Brotherhood of Mutants. All of our teams so far skew pretty heroic, so it would be nice to have some villainous teams to battle. Plus, the Brotherhood is just cool. While it's not really, this could be a catch-all for X-Men villains, one of the best rogue's galleries in all of fiction. Perhaps we'll get this team when they finally add Toad to the game. Some of the most anticipated unreleased characters could fit this squad in addition to Toad, like Pyro, Avalanche, Mastermind, Destiny, Black Tom, Callisto, Dark Beast, Mimic, and Exodus.
The Fantastic Four
Wait, how could this work? Surely you can't make a Team Clash team with only four members? Considering we already have 8 core members of the Fantastic Four in the game between the originals and the First Steps cards, it's easy to imagine a large enough roster. It's weird being encouraged to play the First Steps cards alongside the originals, though. Does it shatter the illusion in a way? But there are some awesome auxiliary members of the Four like Crystal, Medusa, Luke Cage, Frankie Raye, and She-Hulk, as well as their children, Franklin and Valeria Richards, who are likely to get cards eventually. Plus, there is room for some cool alternate universe characters like the Maker and Blackbeard (The Thing).
The Illuminati
The great thing about the Illuminati is that you can include heroes from the original Illuminati and villains from later versions. Of course, the issue with a team like this is that many of the members already have more natural roster spots. But the teams don't need to be static and could be mixed up once in a while. You could also have Team X-Men Professor X and Team Illuminati Professor X as separate cards. This team would provide a nice home for Mister Fantastic, Namor, and Black Bolt, who don't have perfect fits right now. Beast and Yellowjacket would be great candidates for redesigned mode-specific cards. They could also draw characters from the Dark Reign Illuminati counterpart, the Cabal, to grab Doctor Doom and maybe even make a new card named Emma Frost. There is also the later version of the Illuminati run by The Hood with members Enchantress (Sylvie Lushton), Mad Thinker, Titania, and Absorbing Man.
Masters of Evil
Look, we really need some villain teams. There have been so many different iterations of the Masters of Evil that it's the best catch-all for a team of bad guys. The must-include members that would probably get mode-specific designs would be Baron Zemo, Black Knight, Ultron, and Klaw. This does bleed a little bit into the domain of the Thunderbolts, since the younger Zemo later passed his Masters of Evil off as the first Thunderbolts team. But we could get some wonderful new characters that would make great cards, like Whirlwind, Radioactive Man, and Screaming Mimi, added to the game.
3) Wait, you're not going to share your general thoughts on the OTA here?
I already did! ON VIDEO! I've started a new venture with the great LaurenWhatevs called Fourth Location. On our brand new YouTube channel, we shared our immediate reactions to the OTA, and I wrote my usual article on the OTA here on SnapFan. I also shared some prospective decklists for the post-OTA world at our new website, thefourthlocation.com. Thanks for taking a look at my new stuff and your support!
Now let's hop over to the official Marvel Snap Discord and grab a few developer questions and answers!
4) Question:
Are prescient bots (still) a thing?
Not too long ago, you guys said that you have gotten rid of the Daredevil win bot, but I can't help but wonder: did you guys implement other types of winbots, and how far did you go if you did so?
Rank progression in the last few seasons has been feeling excruciating to me: not because of players or the metagame, but because I very often encounter bots with unfathomably illogical, unpredictable decks. These bots seem to have beforehand knowledge regarding where I will play my cards or what cards I have in hand. Their Snap patterns are also incredibly suspicious, Snapping when I'm missing my wincons, even if I seem to be winning by all visible metrics, and retreating when it seems like they could definitely have a chance when I'm being "sneaky".
Answer:
We essentially have two kinds of bots:
-Lossbots: Pretty self-explanatory. They exist to add cubes to the system and ensure players move towards their seasonal goals. These bots can "see" enough to ensure they'll lose.
-Fallback bots: Bots we've trained to play Snap. These bots play Snap like humans, using their knowledge of the metagame and their own deck to make good decisions based on the matchups. It'll always play well, but we weaken it by tweaking parameters like the quality of decks available to it and its snapping/retreating principles.
This can result in the occasional false positive, such as a "bad snap" convincing a player to retreat when they shouldn't or a weak card being good in a specific situation. But on the whole these adaptations work well and this fallback bot doesn't have a positive winrate against any MMR range.
-Glenn
Scosco's Note:
It's definitely hard to distinguish between good play and a bot conspiracy. People see bots where they aren't, ascribe behavior to them they don't have, and have conspiracy theories about their appearance rates. I don't know what can reassure a game community about computer opponents. It could be one of those unavoidable things. The Second Dinner team has been refreshingly open about their bots as opposed to other games, which can occasionally fuel some of the conspiracies.
5) Question:
Why is the number of tickets capped at 9? What is the reason behind that exact number?
Answer:
As with all economic decisions in the game, it's based upon data. As we've said before, we're always trying new things to find the best balance of player engagement and player satisfaction.
-Glenn
Scosco's Note:
They definitely seem to have settled on the lower cap of 9. In the LTGMs we've had so far, it hasn't seemed as much more restrictive than 12 as I'd anticipated, but obviously, higher is going to be preferred by players. But I, of course, understand the economic requirements of an LTGM, and if this is the balance they've hit on, I can accept it. However, I'm really curious what their data and user sentiment will indicate about this new idea of tickets in addition to missions. They've never used both before, and my instinct is that it's more user-hostile, but I am hotly anticipating the community reaction to this. In addition, the missions force you to play multiple decks, while I know a lot of people like to find a comfortable pick and jam with it. I suspect players will feel like they're forced into playing something they don't prefer, but it could be made up for by its impact on matchup diversity.
That's it for this week! Come find me on social media, where I talk about Marvel Snap and comic books. And come check out fourthlocation.com and the Fourth Location YouTube channel!