Team Answers Recap for Dev QAs - 11/24
Welcome back to Glenn Jones' Diary, our recap of the most important questions and answers from the development team on the Marvel Snap discord. This week there's news of some imminent changes, questions about character distinctions, and insight into the big report feature.
Q: I’ve been between many decks recently as I’m struggling to hit infinite in the 90s range. Why does matchmaking seem to pair me against opponents with the same exact deck I’m playing with or same archetype or mostly the same cards each and everytime I switch decks ? For example I hadn’t faced Galactus in hundreds of games so I tried my old Galactus deck . The moment I did this my opponent also was playing a Galactus deck
A: In a sufficiently large and random sample, many individually unlikely outcomes are sure to happen.
-Glenn
**There are a lot of conspiracy theories about this game and most of them can be explained by a combination of confirmation bias and sample size. I recently heard a conspiracy theory that Second Dinner is boosting highly unlikely RNG outcomes (like with cards like Lockjaw, Gambit, Wolverine, etc.) to make the game more exciting.
Q: How come Echo triggers after locations?
Wondering if this is about the wording “after an ongoing card is played” means it happens after locations trigger or just how the balance of it worked in design. Seeing an ongoing card get duplicated by sinister London and then only the first have its ability removed was confusing. (Would the same thing occur for cloning vats? Maybe it’s specific to sinister london’s wording?)
A: The default ordering for triggers is players, locations, cards. Cloning Vats and Sinister London interact the same way here.
We're aware there is a fairly significant amount of confusion around trigger orders, and we're considering the potential ramifications of changing that base order.
-Glenn
Q: I assume the answer will change based on everyone’s position within SD but what part of working on a new season is most exciting to you?
A: I love the process of coming up with the theme for each season and how much creativity it causes on the team to make that season feel super dope with unique variants, music, characters, etc. I always get pumped when we can do an MCU season or classic comic storyline season
-Stephen
Q: Are there any plans to look at the timers? There are streamers actively promoting the strategy of letting the timer run down each turn, and also snapping just before the time runs out.
Also, in Conquest, games already take a long time so players letting the timer run down just breaks the quick, "snappy", game play I love this game for.
A: We’re working on adding the ability to “undo” ending your turn, which will remove the primary incentives for this behavior.
-Glenn
**This feature cannot come soon enough. For me at least, t's a top two or three wanted change to the game.
Q: While Sylvie is technically just a variant of Loki, I feel like she is a big enough character to have her own card. What does the snap team think?
A: We don’t currently find MCU Sylvie mechanically and creatively distinct enough from Loki and Enchantress to merit her own card. She is in many ways an amalgamation of MCU/comics versions of those characters. Our thoughts could change, though.
-Glenn
Q: Is daredevil going to be reworked or removed? Or is the plan still to restore him back to his base function?
This feels similar to the kitty pryde scenario but nothing has been done in-game related to DD so I was curious if this has become a larger issue that requires a change to the card itself.
A: We have a fix to original functionality for Daredevil in an upcoming patch. The issue with him was inadvertently created by correcting some unrelated VFX bugs. It’s just not something we can fix via OTA.
The situation is unique from Kitty Pryde with regard to our threshold for disabling a card, which is very high. You can choose to not play Daredevil and experience no adverse effects. Kitty could crash the game for both players regardless of whose deck she was in, which is a very meaningful difference.
-Glenn
**I agree that while the Daredevil big is annoying, I don't think he should be disabled because of it. The threshold for disabling a card should be quite high.
Q: I’m sure it’s been asked countless times, but when are we going to see series drops? Are they still planned to continue? Or is this no drops thing indefinite?
A: We will share more info on series drops before the end of the year
**At least we have a deadline on the information now. I'm still bracing for bad news on this front.
-Stephen
Q: I would like to ask why there are cards that have similar effects, but their behaviour is different between them. For example, White Queen text says: "Copy the highest-Cost card in your opponent’s hand into your hand.", and it shows which card is copied, but Mirage, which has the text: "Copy the lowest-Cost card in your opponent’s hand into your hand. Give it +2 Power." doesn´t show the card that she got from your hand.
Also, for example, there are cards like Yondu, that shows the card that he destroys, or MODOK, that shows all the discards (despite you could check the opponent hand and know if he discarded the Swarms + Apo combo), but, for example, Cable and Mantis don´t show the card that they got from your deck. I understand that Coulson, Maria Hill, Nick Fury... shouldn't show the card, because they got the cards from an "Open" pool of cards, but Cable and Mantis take the card for a "Closed" pool of cards, which is the opponent deck.
Do you have plans to change this interaction? For example, it could be a good "nerf" to Loki if he shows the cards that he got from your deck, because isn´t the same, for example, if you´re playing Destroy, to play around a free Death + 5-Cost Knull instead Carnage + Venom, for example.
A: White Queen’s VFX was updated, but we’re rolling that back. We want to preserve the secrecy of her effect when cards are tied.
Generally, we prefer not to reveal specific information when cards are moving from one hidden zone to another, or from nothingness to a hidden zone. Not only does it make those cards stronger, but it reduces stress on VFX and the mental load for players. The total amount of information under consideration for players being lower makes the game simpler to play (less pure solving) and higher tension. Good players will win more with the info, but we think it’ll be less fun overall.
We’d never make that change to Loki for these reasons. Knowing all of the cards in your opponents hand is powerful and even appealing, but it makes games less fun on average.
As one relevant example, we consider it upside that Leech triggers before the player draws for turn, because both players know it’s possible that draw was the key ability they’d need. Uncertainty is more fun and synergizes better with the snap mechanic.
-Glenn
**I hadn't played White Queen recently enough to notice they changed this. It's definitely good they're changing it back.
As far as Loki, he needs to be changed in some small way in this. If not this change, then maybe they can come up with something creative. I think simply removing the discount would be a bit too harsh.
Q: How can I get this Captain Marvel card back?
A: It will be available next month as part of a new feature in our upcoming update
New feature? Could this be related to the long-teased cosmetics track? It does seem a little shady that that card back is teased in the season information and isn't on the season pass track.
Q: The team has mentioned in the past that different Marvel characters can have different cards even if they have the same mantle (See Spider-Man and Miles Morales). But there already is a variant of Spider-Man that uses the Scarlet Spider design. Does that mean there’s no hope for the boy Ben Reilly?
A: No; though it is a weird wrinkle, it’s not a dealbreaker for us. We could also consider Chasm.
-Glenn
Q: I reported a bug recently and I’m super curious as to what the team does/sees on their end?
So we provide our snap id and time of bug experience.
What do you see when we pull up our account? Is it just a bunch of code? or text of events? is there a recorded video of the match?
I'm curious cause most of these things are user interface/experience but the issues are with code. So how do you guys match code with vfx errors and etc.
A: It really depends. We have a few tools available to us.
One route is that we can plug in a manually reported bug ID into a tool that we use for exceptions tracking. When an exception happens in code, it automatically sends a report of that exception and when you manually report we can pair up the time and ID of the report with automatically sent exceptions to try to figure out what the culprit is. In many cases these bug reports will also send with a screenshot at the time of occurrence so that helps us figure out the UX or VFX side of things.
The other route that we can take is to use the reported SnapID and reported timestamp and look through a database of game data and actually see the recorded log of the game session. So if there's a weird interaction between cards or whatever, we can see exactly how they were played and try to recreate that session on our end.
Finally, if the issue is related to your account, providing your SnapID allows us to actually pull that data into our test environments and load up as a copy of that account to see what's going on.
-Addison
**Several bugs that I've reported (along with many other players, of course) have been fixed soon after. I encourage everyone to use this feature to help point the team towards prevalent bugs.
That's it for this week! Head over to the Marvel Snap discord and ask a question to potentially have it featured here!