Ask the Marvel Snap Devs – July 5, 2022

On the Marvel Snap Official Discord server, the team over at Second Dinner are actively answering questions from the community.

With the new Love and Thunder Season Two starting and Marvel Snap now available for pre-registration in Australia and New Zealand, the game is getting prepared to be released for the wider world as the community sees various tweaks to the economy since the game’s soft launch.

We catch up on all the responses from the weekend all the way up to today. Check out the new Ask the Dev archives for more!

My opponent didnt play any cards or end their turn for thr first few turns, and then the msg that my opponent retreated popped up. Did they get timed out?

Ben Brode: it’s possible -or maybe they just actually retreated!

In the patch notes you mentioned only 10% of players would be impacted by the booster cap. Is that looking at 10% of all player accounts (active and inactive) or were inactive accounts removed from the dataset?

The reason I ask is because I know there are some people who created multiple accounts initially to get more play in and card unlocks and eventually stopped playing them.

Ben Brode: No, we only looked at active players. Although it’s possible we got it wrong – we’ll keep looking at the data and see how it goes.

Is there a chance, that there will be more characters from Agents of SHIELD besides Quake, Deathlok, Quinjet etc?

Ben Brode: there’s always a chance

Why do cards like Rocket Raccoon not get their effect on Sakaar but Mr. Fantastic does? Is it just an ongoing vs on reveal thing?

Ben Brode: Rocket Raccoon get’s his On Reveal but it doesn’t trigger because your opponent didn’t play a card there

Are there any future plans for a card/s that can “counter” triggered abilities similar to cards like Cosmos for Reveal and Enchantress for Ongoing? Cards like Angela, Bishop & Collector(and many others) can grow to very high levels of power compared to their respective cost without any interaction from the opposing player. And even in the event that they reach 9+ power, 1 Shang-Chi isn’t enough for multiple different cards with these triggers. Or are these type of cards currently considered fair and balanced at this time?

Ben Brode: We’ll have to see how things go – We aren’t apposed to making cool new counter cards

What is your balance philosophy regarding pools? Is it intended for all cards to be as equal as possible, or should there be a general increase in strength as you get into higher pools?

Ben Brode: We’d love for cards to generally be viable in some kind of deck. As you continue to unlock cards, you’ll get more options and more decks available, but the cards aren’t necessarily intended to be “stronger”.

in the collection can we have a filter for splits and one for art variants?

Ben Brode: love this idea!

Is collector gaining power from weird world intended? My opponent which I think was a bot seemed to know one of the locations was weird world, and played Collector turn 1 which seemed strange, then saw it gain about 10 power throughout the game just through weird world.

Ben Brode: We’ll take a look

Since Chris mentioned localization I wanna ask how you guys plan to localize card names since all of them are stylized. I guess for popular characters this wont be a problem, since most likely their solo comics already have versions of stylized logos for their names in other languages, but what about cards that never had a solo comics run, so you had to come up with your own logo for them. Will you also make stylized logos for them in other languages? This sounds like a lot of work.

Ben Brode: We did some tests in different regions and it seemed like most folks preferred the english logos with a cool subtitle, so that’s our plan

As developers what is your current priority right now?

Optimization? Game Modes? More Cards? Matchmaking? Progression? Monetization? Preparing for global release?

Curious what sort of updates we should be expecting in the short term future.

Ben Brode: lol is it ok to say all of the above?

Does Captain Marvel know she’ll be destroyed if she tries to fly into a Kingpin lane? i.e. does she realize agree won’t actually contribute to that lane

Ben Brode: yes, she won’t kill herself (unless it’s the path to victory)

Will there ever be a rewards system after infinite like you receive x amount of credits every rank after reaching infinite similar to how you get credits every rank after completing the season pass because after infinite there’s no reason to go any higher only missions

Ben Brode: Seems like a fun suggestion! We’ll chat about it

How much influence does your publisher (Nuverse) have over things like progression systems and monetization? Did they specify key features or requirements that influenced the way you designed the currency systems or other elements?

Ben Brode: They are passionate about the game and make lots of suggestions (because they love the game too). But these are decisions that Second Dinner is in charge of. Whether you do or don’t like some of the systems/monetization, that’s super fair and your feedback right now is very helpful in helping us determine the best path forward towards global launch!

When will iOS be able to play this game?

Ben Brode: When the game becomes available in your region!

During the beta are you going to do patches on a set schedule or will they mainly align when everything is wrapped up?

Ben Brode: we have a desired schedule but also we are working on our processes so things are not likely to go according to schedule all the time 😂

With the introduction of new modes, will additional reward tracks be introduced? Being able to gain cubes from friend matches is obviously not fair to those that grind it normally, but will there be any rewards to chase for those of us that only want to match against friends or bots?

I’ve mentioned it in other channels how my MMR is really messed up at the moment, and if the interesting rewards to chase only come from ranked, I don’t see myself playing for much longer after the release of the aforementioned mode(s).

Stephen: Future game modes will have their own rewards if it makes sense. Friend matches or practice wouldn’t have rewards but something more competitive or challenging would

Are the additional Split effects (such as stars / flares etc) supposed to not show on the card when on board? If so this seems like a huge waste and negates the ability to show off your split effects 🙁

Stephen: This is a tricky thing we didn’t want the split flare effects to imply something happening in gameplay so they focus on reveal moments and big card view. We can do a better job of making the reveal moment more exciting and eye catching.

Will the variant splits not counting with the base card split issue be fixed without a patch or do we need to wait until the next update for that?

Stephen: It will be in the next update

Just wondering if the team looked into having the boosters as a general currency so players can upgrade whichever card they want as appose to having to only upgrade the cards you have the specific boosters for?

Stephen: The system originally worked this way but we found that it made us less likely to try new cards, actively hoard wild boosters instead of use them, and forget to engage in the card upgrade system in general.

It’s always possible we add some wild boosters as a new reward type at some point in the future

What is the purpose of having high ranked bots? Are they exist only so the players get easy wins from time to time?

Stephen: We have a goal to keep matchmaking quick (less than 5 seconds). We may extend matchmaking times for players over a certain rank at some point in the future

With Wave leaving the season pass, will anything be done to make her accessible for people who want to pay but have been denied by the “Item not available in your country” error?

Stephen: This error is a platform policy from Google and Apple based off what regions the game is currently available in. We plan to add Wave to the collection pool in 4 weeks. We will also have a way after global release to acquire all cards and cosmetics from the season

How did the team decide on 8pm pacific time as the daily reset? Seems like an odd time when most games do sometime in the morning.

Stephen: We wanted it to be at peak gaming hours but we will most likely try different times in the future that are easier on our team to operate

Will there be a toggle to turn on/off the upgrade overlay (the glowy arrows on top of the image of a card) in the collection screen? I’d like to see my collection without moving arrows over them so it would be cool to be able to toggle them for when I need it

Stephen: We will keep iterating on the upgrade notifs and overlays. We want it to be exciting and easy to track cards you care about.

Are there hidden requirements that need to be met for certain variants to become available? I’ve been keeping track of which variants appear in my shop over the past two weeks and its always been 6 of the same 20-or-so cards

Stephen: There are no hidden requirements. It randomly pulls from all potential cards you have unlocked. We will iterate on the variant shop over time

So I spilt my carnage 6 times already no black and white why not?

Stephen: Black and white is currently disabled for players as we tweak it’s visuals. We will add it back in the future

Will marvel snap ever come to console? (Ps4, nintendo switch, xbox)

Stephen: Haha I hope so. We will see!

If season ends the first Monday evening (pacific) of each month, what happens in months like august when it’s a 5 week period between first Monday in august and first Monday in September

Stephen: We will have some 4 week and some 5 week seasons

There have been numerous questions regarding monetization structure, punitive updates, and consistent increases in bottlenecking. Will you ever answer these? Is there a reason you can’t discuss these topics?

Stephen: Our goal is to be open about what we are doing and why. If you have a specific question I’m glad to do my best to answer it.

So far there have been 3 updates to rewards that negatively impact players:

1) Reducing variants earned from collection level by 90% and was considered important enough to Hotfix. (Hotfix 6/8/22)

2) Changing the season pass from gold to in-app purchase (Season 2 6/6/2022)

3) Capping Boosters per day, effectively limiting the amount a player should play per day. (Update 6/29/22)

On face value, it appears the beta was to determine optimum monetization. What is the logic behind only increasing bottlenecks? Why hasn’t there been any implementation to counter-balance those changes? Is the absolute slog of post 1000 Collection Level being actively discussed and addressed?

Stephen: Variants – Our goal is for variants to be special. For each player to have different variants that make their collection and deck unique. Players were earning 1-4 variants per day. When everyone has every cosmetic, none of them are cool or unique. Mystery boxes are a short term fix while we figure out a longer term solution.

Season pass – Our goal from the beginning was that season passes would be for cash. I believe Brode made a few statements about this on streams and discord. The initial half season was for gold because we did not consider it a full season. It had no new card or thematic cosmetics. The reason season passes are for cash is because we want to be able to give away gold regularly.

Boosters – We want boosters to be a meaningful reward. We heard a lot of feedback that they felt throw away. We put in the cap to learn more. We have not made a final decision on what changes we will make next. We will share once that decision is made. We are going to add new features and ways to get your hands on more currency and more cards.

We are 6 weeks into the beta. A new awesome season is about to kick off. Exciting times ahead!