Changes to the Ranked Ladder + Featured/Hot Locations With Days of Future Past Season
More updates from Second Dinner, developers of Marvel Snap about upcoming changes to the ranked ladder, Featured/Hot Locations, and more.
Since our last Developer Update post earlier this week, we’ve had some important upcoming news that were made via the official Marvel Snap Discord. Notably, Second Dinner’s Principal Game Designer Glenn Jones has been answering some game related questions (for example, regarding the upcoming card Kitty Pryde, and so on), as well as Leading Product Stephen Jarrett, and Associate Game Designer Rada.
Table of Contents
Improvements to Ranked Mode
With the new Marvel Snap season Days of Future Past coming up on Monday, we’ve had some important news regarding the state of the ranked ladder which has been causing a bit of unrest in the community in regards to the matchmaking, MMR, bots, no rank floor except for Infinite rank, and so on.
We aren’t happy with the current state of ranked. We have a change going live with the start of next season that we hope makes it a little better, but we think more changes are needed after that too
We have a blog on ranked mode improvements coming out on Monday
To clarify the blog on Monday is about the new season and includes information about ranked mode changes that start with this new season
Stephen
Here is the proposed change – 5 times more bonus Cubes are rewarded every time you reach a new ranked tier (i.e. 50 Cubes, going from 19 to 25 instead of 20).
Based off our data, it was taking players too many games to get to the rank associated with their MMR. We also saw player feedback that the ranked climb was feeling tedious, so we are trying some changes that will hopefully improve these both.
Stephen Jarrett (official Marvel Snap Discord)
We have seen the excitement and anticipation around us discussing more about our plans to improve ranked mode and the matchmaking experience. We want to share more information about the future. 1/3…
Our first short-term improvement goes live with the start of the new season. We’re increasing the amount of bonus cubes earned when reaching a new tier from 10 to 50. However, we are not done making adjustments! 2/3…
Stay tuned for a new blog including future plans for ranked mode and matchmaking in the next week or two. …3/3
Originally tweeted by Stephen Jarrett (@stephenjarrtt) on March 6, 2023.
Reduced Featured and Hot Locations
Starting with Quantum Realm, Featured Locations duration have been reduced from 48 to 24 hours going forward, and it appears there may even be some “off” weeks where there is no Featured Location according to the data. Furthermore, the Hot Location for this week was cancelled (originally scheduled to be Shuri's Lab).
This is an interesting change as some players thought Featured Locations for 48 hours were too long.
Update: Here is the official announcement confirming this, plus the frequency has been changed to 50% (up from 40% for Featured, down from 60% for Hot). There will not be a Hot Location this week.
More in the upcoming patches…
Going forward, we will try to communicate individual topics better on Marvel Snap Zone between developer news from social media to here.
For example, the Booster acquisition change that was meant to go live in the previous patch is now live:
Improvements to card acquisition is also in the works, as well as new cards showing up in the next refresh of the Token Shop after their release.
There is an improvement for it in the next patch and an additional one in the patch after that. Will share more soon.
This is an area we will continue to invest in until we get it right. New cards need to be exciting
There are more changes than that. For reference – I also had a follow up tweet to the one you referenced because the change to the new card coming up at refresh will not come until April.
Stephen
As well as interesting information on measuring fun factors for cards:
Yes, we measure fun–it’s more important cards be fun than balanced, that’s what makes them appealing! Among my duties as a game designer is to forecast the player experience and interpret their feedback, as well as how the data corresponds to that feedback.
On Leech specifically:
Most card games, ours included, manage keeping many different cards fun and strong by ensuring there’s meaningful counterplay against all of them. Designers often call cards serving this role “release valves” in that they remove the pressure created by strong cards. Leech is exactly such a card–his role is to offer players a clean answer to decks trying to pack all their Power in at the last minute, such as Silver Surfer or “DeathWave” decks. This isn’t because we don’t want those powerful decks to exist, but it’s because we want to ensure a variety of powerful decks can exist.
Release valves, especially ones that restrict players, become most problematic when dominant decks include them as wide-ranging protection. We don’t want Leech or other valves to be our most-played cards for their Costs, but it’s important for them to exist and be good at their jobs, which is a careful balance to manage.
Glenn
Let us know in the comments if you’d like to see more in a timely manner!
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Having reached legendary in HS and mythic in MTGA, grinding rank in Snap feels so much worse (and I generally enjoy Snap more). I don’t know that it’s comparatively harder/longer to reach Infinite (closest I’ve gotten is 91 after really grinding the past week), but it feels worse. Often cube gain has little to do with how well I played and more on how much my opponent and I want to gamble on the current game.
I’m running an optimized (boring) ramp deck because I don’t have the cards for Thanos/Shuri decks, and climbing 1-2 cubes at a time sucks. It makes the 8-cube losses on a really close game that could have gone either way discouraging rather than fun (which they are) because on average it takes 4-6 games to get those cubes back.
Maybe shortening the amount of cubes to reach each rank or having some kind of streak bonus (like getting bonus cubes for winning 1-/2-cube games in a row) would feel more rewarding and make more people like myself want to grind to reach infinite because the slow climb does not feel worth it right now
One thing that I have always hated is the 1-2 cube gain at a time. I have always thought an elegant solution to this should be that during an opponents retreat, while they only lose the cubes listed at the top, the person who snapped prior to the opponents retreat (or the person who stayed after the snap) should get the cubes that they would have played for. So if snapping on turn 6 causes a retreat, the person retreating would lose 1 cube and the person who stayed should get 4. It might feel like an actual win to cause a retreat as well rather than an anti-climactic “Welp, I just wasted 3 minutes for a single cube..”.
And I do agree it feels like most matches involve mostly gambling on the RNG rather than how well you or your deck performed. Neither HS nor MTGA has nearly as much RNG as Marvel Snap does. In most CCGs/card battlers, the only thing you have to worry about card draw and perhaps an RNG associated with a specific card. But in Snap you have to worry about card draw and you don’t even draw all your cards, you have to worry about RNG of certain cards/decks (of which there are a lot of gambling archetypes), and the locations which can make or break your deck. It’s gotten to a point where if the opponent snaps before turn 3, I tend to retreat and only lose a single cube because why would I want to stay and gamble more cubes when I don’t even know the locations…
I agree, the Snap mechanic is fun at first; but disastrous for long-term since it discourages playing to your outs to see if you can squeeze out a narrow win, which is the most satisfying and fun experience. Rather, it turns into Poker, where you only ever play the way above average hands and drop out otherwise, except the element of psychology and bluffing is much more limited, ending in frustrating losses governed by chance.
Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. I personally think the high RNG and shorter games in Snap make it fun and replayable, but being rewarded for ONLY optimized play runs counter to that and makes it boring
I like the idea of a streak bonus!
Personally, I hope they release Mephisto (if you win, double the cubes you gain) sooner rather than later. He’ll be able to insert some additional cubes into the ranks, though he’ll likely be a rare pick due to the nature of him being 0 power for 6 energy. (Perhaps in Hela and/or Mr. Negative?)
I also like the idea of introducing a location that doubles your cube gain that game much like Mephisto would. Let me be clear: these shouldn’t double the losses the losing player incurs, just double the winnings. This way you’ll have that occasional game where you’re greatly rewarded for winning that one game, which I imagine would feel great. Also helps with just another way to insert a couple of cubes into the ranks.
i like articles like this, keep up the great work 🙂
This is the first season I will be sitting out. I reached Infinite 8 times but, for me, the grind just got boring. Most people can’t get the cards they want, and the lack of a casual mode means people just tend to spam meta decks. It’s a shame, the game has great potential, but the devs obsession with artificial scarcity is hurting it.
Most cards in this game are quite easily gotten free-to-play. I would say it’s quite friendly to free-to-play players that way. I do think however they’ve missed the mark SIGNIFICANTLY on balance. 2 Season passes in a row where the season pass card is dominating, followed up by a big bad Thanos meta? Yikes. I liked the game better when the biggest thing I had to worry about was a Destroyer ongoing deck.