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 Invisible Woman First Steps 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 Invisible Woman First Steps is worth Snap Packs or Tokens, 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: Is there a reason why Victora hand shows which cards are buffed in her hand, but Patriot doesn’t?
A: Glenn “The tech we use for indicating ‘future buffs’ in-hand on Ongoing cards is by default bespoke to the card receiving the buff. We made a special exception for Victoria Hand because tracking which cards would get it was fairly difficult for playtesters in ways that tracking it for Patriot, Ka-Zar, or even Blue Marvel was not.
The indicator isn’t the easiest to propagate across multiple cards because its unique to Victoria, but we may consider such an update in the future.”
Q: Why do you redo characters like F4 instead of making new ones?
A: Glenn “We wanted to celebrate an awesome movie with our partners at Marvel. We’ve also seen that players on the whole really enjoy seeing their favorite characters reimagined multiple times.
We’ve already done it with other characters (Symbiote Spider-Man, Agent Venom, Sam Wilson, Strange Supreme, Ultron) and expect to do it more.”
Q: Why does Mole Man summon rocks instead of Moloids?
A: Glenn “Rocks are an oddly charming piece of Snap, but there’s not really much support for leveraging them in interesting ways. Mole Man’s helping us set some groundwork for that.”
Q: What cards have naturally affected the game’s overall balance the most?
A: Glenn “Could be a lot of things, but one that comes up a ton that people might not expect is The Hood.”
Q: Why is Stardust a global ability and not location specific?
A: Glenn “Local wouldn’t be very impactful at all, as many relevant cards (like Hela) choose from available locations and would essentially ignore her.
We debated a range of Costs and values, but this was the consensus recommendation from our balance team. 4/7 felt like fair compensation for a card that can do nothing sometimes and has worse cube equity than a card like Enchantress against its primary targets.”
Q: For Silver Surfer First Steps, what does it mean to be winning “with” an on reveal? And can she trigger multiple times?
A: Glenn “It just means having an On Reveal card at a location you’re winning. Surfer copies the text permanently, she won’t trigger multiple times.”
Q: The season preview shows Ghost Rider”] with no vfx. Will he launch that way?
A: Glenn “Dev videos are often filmed with early builds of the game. I don’t personally track VFX merges to release builds, but I know we built and approved VFX for CGR.”
Q: Does Galactus First Steps announce his Herald to the other player?
A: Glenn “The opponent will see the Herald.”
Other Questions
Q: You’ve stated before that snapping and retreating help mitigate bad matchups, but most limited time modes don’t use snapping or retreating. Is there a reason for that?
A: Glenn “Largely, we’ve just received a lot of positive feedback about absent/lower stakes snapping feeling good in LTMs because many players prefer them as a lower-pressure alternative to ranked play and Conquest.”
Q: Have any variants been removed from the list that rotates in the shop?
A: Chris “Variants have not been removed from general pool rotation”
Q: Will we get more ways to obtain old Spotlight variants soon?
A: Chris “We’ll have more news on this in the near future”
Q: Is the team aware that some new variants are reappearing in the Shop labeled as “new” again?
A: Griffin “Yep, we’re aware of this issue. The team is investigating.”
Q: Why is it important to hide if your opponent is a bot?
A: Glenn “We’ve received lots of feedback about it being dissatisfying to know your opponent is a bot, so our long-term goal with bot play is to eventually make them mostly indistinguishable from humans, unless we’re using them for some sort of thematic experience (which we haven’t yet).”
Q: Why hasn’t there been a card that copies On Reveals from the opponent?
A: Glenn “Copying enemy On Reveals isn’t always beneficial, but we’ve considered such a card. A meaningful concern that has been persistent is Vipering such a card before playing Destroyer.”
Q: What feedback has suggested players don’t like knowing about bots? Plenty of content creators stream their rapid climb to Infinite using bots and they never complain.
A: Glenn “The feedback’s fairly plentiful–you’ve even included some here. If losing to a bot is frustrating, wouldn’t not knowing your opponent was a bot reduce that frustration? (Also, frankly I hear *a lot* more complaining about bots from creators than you imply).
The advantage is that players don’t have to spend time or effort considering the possibility, because the game is essentially the same either way. Asynchronous play is not so different, and growing in popularity among other games.
While we do use bots to pace matchmaking and cubes in the system, that doesn’t mean they lengthen it by definition. Bots play faster than humans, and they aren’t built to play optimally–even the ones that want to win, but obviously the ones that lose.”
Q: Any updates on the compensation for players who didn’t get webshop Milestone bonuses?
A: Glenn “We have sent out those Rewards and Milestone points to players that we identified. If you are still missing any, please contact customer support and they can investigate further.”
Q: Is there any hope of a patch fully dedicated to bug fixes?
A: Glenn “We have many different teams here at SD that don’t all work on bug fixes. Simply moving people from one who works on, say, LTGMs to bug fixes isn’t how it works. There are different skill types and expertise.
We’ll continue to prioritize bugs and making the game the best it can be, but we probably won’t stop other teams from doing their work just so one patch can be entirely bugs fixes.”
Q: Are there any plans to add cards that can interact with the banished pile?
A: Glenn “Nope”
Q: You mentioned you want to hide bots, so why do Grand Arena bots make it obvious by playing skills unnecessarily?
A: Glenn “Training bots to play and build decks in Grand Arena was a bit more difficult, but we expect them to continue to improve.”
Q: Do you think tech cards have too much influence matches in limited time modes?
A: Glenn “Tech cards having the capacity to limit champions lets us a) push the strength of each champion higher, because the metagame can react to them, and b) helps support a more diverse metagame overall by spreading the range of weaknesses and strengths in multiple directions.
I think we’ve seen that some tech cards and decks able to use them wound up stronger than we’d like in the game mode, though the impact has been a bit overstated. We never expected the first Grand Arena to be a flawless metagame—you all played more games with each champion than we played with all of them in the first 5 minutes the mode was live, it’s just not feasible for us to cover that kind of ground and get every guess right. That’s what live balance has always been for.”
Q: Will the new borders be added to the regular border shop ever?
A: Griffin “The new borders will be added to the general shop eventually, but not immediately. The team is still discussing how and when to release them.”
Q: Why aren’t certain bundles offered in the webshop like they are in game?
A: Glenn “It’s just a limitation of the Web Shop tech right now. We’ll continue to improve it as we go.”
Q: What has been the hardest card to write out in a way that was short but made sense?
A: Glenn “Definitely Galactus First Steps”
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: Are we at a point where we can justify a tech card for bonus energy with so many cards and locations giving it?
A: Glenn “I think so.”
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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