Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after the launch of the new Series 5 card Nova Frankie Raye and the latest OTA! If you haven’t seen what was changed with the balance update, be sure to check out the official patch notes!
If you don’t know if Frankie is worth Snap Packs or , make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the card and new decklists!
Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This week’s topics will be divided into Card Specific Questions, Other Questions, and Questions From You!
See all individual questions and answers updated in real time!
Card Specific Questions
Q: You mentioned The Hood was the hardest card to balance around, so why is that the case?
A: Glenn “I was including design decisions within the question, as design and balance are meaningfully linked. He’s just very efficient in decks trying to do many things—destroy cards for benefits, bounce cards for benefit, efficiently play Power, play multiple cards, etc. And he doesn’t really have dials we *want* to turn, though we could.”
Q: I just had a game where my Silver Surfer First Steps copied my regular Silver Surfer on a Wong lane, but she only went off once. Is this the intended effect?
A: Glenn “This is a bug we caught and have corrected for the 8/19 patch, but I wasn’t aware it didn’t make it in ahead of the release.”
Q: Why is Fantasticar still buffing She-Hulk?
A: Glenn “The fix required a patch to be implemented, so it will go live with our next patch scheduled for 8/19.”
Q: Is the team aware Terrax released with no animation?
A: Glenn “Yes, thanks for the heads up. We’ve let the team know.”
Q: Is it a bug that Frankie doesn’t get a Power double if Arnim Zola is used on her?
A: Glenn “This is not a bug. It’s the same interaction as Angela or Bishop not getting +1 Power if they were put into play by Jubilee, Gladiator not being destroyed if he summons an enemy Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and a variety of other similar circumstances. (Well, I guess the Negasonic would have to be indestructible itself, but you get what I mean).
Frankie needs to ‘see’ the card get staged, revealed, and resolved to trigger her effect. Then the trigger checks if the card costs 6. Since the copies were created in the middle of that chain, they missed their check.”
Q: Why did Havok deserve a nerf after end of turn cards got nerfed and got a counter tech card added?
A: Glenn “1) He had one of the highest winrates in the deck, 2) the balance on his trigger was generous because it cost a lot to get two triggers out of him–that cost changed with IWFS.”
Other Questions
Q: Why did you decide to make the X-Men pack only base cards, unlike the F4 packs that had variants?
A: Griffin “These Featured Sets aren’t meant for just one segment of players. We stated they’ll feature limited-time combinations of individual Cards, Variants, and/or Featured Snap Packs.
Some will have base cards, some will be more Variant-focused.
Also, this isn’t the only thing we’re planning to add to the card shop to spend Tokens on. We’ll be adding more things in future updates.”
Q: Can you give more info on additional ways you plan to let players spend Tokens?
A: Griffin “The old ‘Spotlight Variants’ is one of the ways.”
Q: Will there be a new roadmap released with the next patch,
A: Griffin “No, there won’t be. Each time we attempt to tackle a new version of a Road Map, the road changes! The team has been working on adjusting our priorities based upon your feedback.
We’re still planning on creating a new one but we want to make sure it won’t be outdated as soon as we post one.”
Q: Is the team doing anything to improve internal communication so there are less issues between different departments?
A: Griffin “Absolutely. We’re meeting earlier, talking more, improving our documentation. It won’t be without errors, but our goal is to minimize them.”
Q: Is there any truth behind player claims of “cheater bots” in ranked that know your plays before they make theirs?
A: Glenn “Snap has a variety of different bots that we’ve used over the life cycle of the game. One of those bots we talked about very early, before I even worked here I think, which would make plays to win based on your own plays after you ended the turn, with information about the future game state. Colloquially, this bot has been called the ‘Daredevil’ or ‘cheater’ bot.
This bot is no longer active on ranked or in our limited time game modes! We’ve been significantly reducing its use for several months as we tuned a newer bot. That replacement was completed last month.
Our new ‘fallback bot’ does not have the ability to know what’s coming from you or random outcomes. It makes plays based entirely on its own understanding of Snap and how to play with and against the decks it’s learned. It’s a pretty good player, but that strength comes from how good its decisions are–not a massive information advantage.”
Q: Is the cheater bot still active in different forms? Players see bots that will let you win, but its always by a very small amount.
A: Glenn “Not exactly–we have variations on the fallback bot that plays more like a human with different skill range targets, but we are also still using the ‘Daredevil loss bot’ as a guaranteed loss bot some of the time. That information is necessary to achieve its winrate target (which is basically 0%), while other weak bots provide more mixed results.”
Q: Is Marvel Snap’s customer support outside the United States completely non-functional, and are they planning to end the service? Or do they simply not realize that their customer support is not functioning properly?
A: Jared “Can you let me know what you mean when you say the support outside of the USA isn’t functioning properly? Right now we answer support tickets from any region in the world, with no limitations. If something isn’t going well I’d love to know so I can work to improve it.”
Q: Why did you have cheater bots to begin with? Doesn’t that ruin limited time game modes too when you have to pay entry tickets to play?
A: Glenn “To be clear, we haven’t used the ‘Daredevil winbot’ in limited time game modes while I’ve been working on them. Ever since we started releasing these modes, we’ve been using previous variations of the current fallback bot instead.
I’ve talked fairly openly about bots in the past–the posts are searchable–so I’m not sure where the “‘finally’ sentiment I’m seeing around is coming from. Their purpose is twofold: to inject cubes into the system (which would otherwise shrink over time) and to keep queue times short while providing a competitive experience.
The old Daredevil bots used an information advantage to compete with players–they weren’t very smart, and even with info were highly exploitable. But more relevantly they weren’t even *fun*, which is why we set about replacing them.
As for why some people get them and others don’t, they’re uniformly distributed across matchmaking pools, which determine their appearance rate. If one player is consistently harder to pair than another, the former is going to get a bot more often. The alternative would be pairing players across much wider skill and collection gaps–we know players don’t like that!–or increasing their queue times.
As for why the bot should be a challenge? If its role is to substitute for a competitive experience in a low matchmaking scenario, that’s what we want it to provide as best it can.”
Glenn “Since I noticed some surprisingly ‘passionate’ confusion on social media around something I thought was clear: the purpose of the ‘Daredevil winbot’ was certainly never to add cubes into the system. That would be pretty silly since it…tried to win. Different bots do the job of losing.”
Questions From You!
Each week, I ask readers of the weekly dev update to leave their questions down in the comment section. That way we can ask those questions on your behalf, or let you know the answers if those questions have been asked before! I read each comment you leave, so I will be adding this section at the end of each week’s edition to highlight your questions that you asked last week!
Q: With Mr Fantastic getting nerfed just a week after his season, is the plan going forward to overpower cards when theyre paid for only, and nerf them when they become available for free?
A: Glenn “I see this narrative from time to time, but I don’t think it really lines up with reality.
Starting with the January 2024 SP, we’ve buffed (I think) almost exactly as many SP cards as we’ve nerfed?
* Buffs: Black Swan, Gilgamesh, Symbiote Spider-Man
* Nerfs: Agent Venom, Surtur, Sam Wilson
It’s possible I’m off there, going from memory. Skaar kind of interestingly counts both ways, since he released weak and we buffed him via card releases, leading to a nerf almost a year later.
These 7 cases out of the last 14 mean that we’re batting roughly 25% over, 25% under, and 50% about right. That’s not ideal—we do hope to target better than that—but it’s also not particularly disappointing.
As I’ve discussed many times in the past, we lean into strength for all our cards, Season Passes included. Releasing cards that are too weak to play can wind up looking a lot like releasing no card at all, which isn’t any fun at all, and we’d rather miss high than low to avoid a boring release.”
Keep Your Questions and Feedback Coming!
That’s all for this week’s update! Be sure to check back here at Marvel Snap Zone for next week’s update! If you enjoyed the amount of content in this edition, make sure to keep asking your questions to the developers by submitting it in their official Discord in the “#ask-the-team” channel. If you have questions and don’t use Discord, leave your questions for the developers in the comment section here, and I will make sure your question has been answered by the devs!
If you have feedback or changes you would like to see with these weekly updates, also let us know in the comment section!
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