Table of Contents
Hello all! Welcome back to this week’s breakdown of what’s happening over on the Marvel Snap official Discord! This week, we get answers to questions such as: why did Arishem dodge a nerf, can we get a refund for full card reworks, will we ever be able to share decks in Alliance chat, and more! If you want to stay up to date with what’s coming and what answers developers have for the community, make sure to check back here each week!
This week’s edition comes after the latest patch and OTA! If you haven’t seen the big changes, you can catch up by reading the patch notes here and OTA notes here! Many questions reference changes from these balance updates, so be sure to be familiar with what has changed.
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!
Remember, you can check out our new Marvel Snap Developer Tracker to see all questions and answers in real time! Topics can also be searched, filtered, and sorted.
Card Specific Questions
Q: Why do you want to change the sound effects that tells the opponent Copycat stole an ability?
A: Glenn “As a general rule, we will be very deliberate when we want to inform the opponent of otherwise hidden information (Red Hulk). It was an oversight that the sound could be heard.”
Q: How is it possible that Copycat can steal the text of Thanos?
A: Glenn “Cards are drawn sequentially, so if the Copycat player was first in the queue then they could copy Thanos before he was drawn. His effect doesn’t start him on top of the deck, it just guarantees he’s drawn first.”
Q: Why do some cards, like Thena, resolve after locations? I thought cards resolved before locations?
A: Glenn “The default is that location abilities resolve before card abilities. On Reveals are just a special trigger priority that happens ahead of everything else.
A while ago, we had a strange mix of ‘end of turn’ triggers that did cause some things to fire at different times, and could be very confusing (and disastrous) with things like Starlight Citadel and Hala. In that world, a card like Sunspot was ahead of some locations but not others, because even though the words were the same they had different triggers in the code. We unified all of these a few months ago though, and now locations always go first.”
Q: Why doesn’t Arishem’s created cards show your favorite card variants?
A: Glenn “It wouldn’t be easy to implement—the game scene and the collection scene don’t really communicate a lot. While I imagine we could do it, our engineering resources are focused elsewhere right now.”
Q: Can you explain how Shadow King works differently than Valkyrie with his new update?
A: Glenn “Reading feedback, I feel fairly confident we should consider a change to Shadow King to set him farther apart, likely using the word ‘Reset’ for clarity.”
Q: Why wasn’t Arishem’s split bug not patched with the update?
A: Glenn “As we’ve said before, patches are locked about a month before they go live. That means Arishem wasn’t out when this patch was created, so we wouldn’t have known the generation was bugged at the time.”
Q: Why did you nerf all of Arishem’s cards, but not Arishem himself?
A: Glenn “There’s a reason we didn’t mention Arishem alongside Ock and Leech, and that’s because he’s a red herring. Arishem’s impact on these cards was demonstrating that it wasn’t fun for them to be played frequently. Being able to play them on turn 4 encourages that, yes—but before Arishem they saw very little play. Those are *both* bad states for cards, and we want to fix most in that situation. Ock and Leech seemed doomed to be irrelevant or oppressive, so we’re trying to find a healthy middle ground.
We locked this OTA about a week ago, so Arishem was stronger and has declined since then. But even knowing that, we’d certainly have changed Ock and Leech for the reason above, and Loki for the reasons stated in the notes. The only nerf we might not have made was the one aimed specifically at weakening Arishem, which was Blob.”
Q: Does the new Leech care about cost changes? Like Cost reduction or Baron Mordo increasing a card to 6-Cost?
A: Glenn “No, Leech will care about the original Cost of the card.”
Q: Since Loki was nerfed because of Arishem, have you considered banning certain cards from being paired together?
A: Glenn “It’s not the sort of tool I’m interested in using for game balance, no. It’s complicated and clunky. I think things like Legendary are good tools, or elements like limiting specific kinds of card in decks (like Runeterra’s champions) but ‘card and card’ aren’t appealing or effective.
There seems to be some confusion here though: Loki was not adjusted because of his efficacy in Arishem. Loki was changed because we want cards that add cards to your hand to have more utility in our game than ‘Loki food,’so the options became nerf ‘previous’Loki or rework him, and we chose to pursue the latter.
This was simply the ideal timing given his prominence in a strong deck with other upcoming releases being meaningfully impacted.”
Q: With Loki’s new ability, will you draw cards in the same order your opponent did?
A: Glenn “No, the cards are uniquely shuffled.”
Q: Could Loki’s old ability ever return to Snap in some format? Or has that effect been deemed too unhealthy for the game?
A: Glenn “I’m sure we’ll continue to support hand generation effects in the game. However, we’ll aim to do so in ways that don’t obviate the functions of those cards, as that homogenizes them. It’s important that Sentinel, Mirage, and Cable operate in genuinely different ways.”
Q: If Iron Lad copies a disabled Copycat target, what does Iron Lad copy?
A: Glenn “He would copy the disabled status of the text.”
Other Questions
Q: Have you considered making a card that says “If you do X, you win the game”?
A: Glenn “The effect is powerful enough that it can’t have a low Cost to access, but our games having fixed length means that such a card is usually going to make a lot more sense to implement as something like Galactus or Arnim Zola or Odin than say ‘win’ on the card itself.”
Q: Will we see more emblems and themes like Latveria’s flag?
A: Bella “More emblems and themes will come. But I cant speak to exact details of them.”
Q: If someone leaves an Alliance, will their contribution to the team leave with them?
A: CJ “The Alliance will retain the contribution.”
Q: Do location tokens (like ninja or monster for example) have upgrades like frame break or animated effects in the Snap vault?
A: Glenn “I believe so”
Q: Can something be done about the Snap Bot in alliances? With a 30 person group, it constantly spams 8 Cube win messages that make it difficult to communicate if not turned off entirely.
A: CJ “Thank you for the feedback. We are discussing internally.”
Q: Why can’t I join an Alliance that I have met the minimum requirements for?
A: CJ “Hi, this is a bug that will be fixed. Thanks!”
Q: Are there any rules to leaving an Alliance?
A: CJ “Yes, you can leave an Alliance at any time. We do have a limiter on how much you can Alliance hop in a 24 hour time period (2 times I believe).”
Q: How are bounties refreshed in your Alliance?
A: CJ “Ooh, this is a great question. So, the board is shared! So someone else in your Alliance picked up that Legendary Bounty. We ID’ed that we need to message that better and will in the future. Thank you for asking.”
Q: Can you add a filter to see a player’s highest post-infinite ranking?
A: Griffin “It’s definitely a request we’ll pass along to the team.”
Q: Can you match against fellow Alliance members?
A: Griffin “Alliances don’t change matchmaking at all. So yes, you can still match against your Alliance mates.”
Q: Will Alliances ever be able to share decks in chat?
A: Bella “Yes, that will come. Stay Tuned”
Q: Is it a bug that you can’t post discord links in Alliance chat? It’s a little weird you can add a tag for discord but not link it.
A: Griffin “It’s not a bug but rather we chose to not allow links to prevent spam, phishing, scams, etc. We’ll continue to evaluate these things as we go.”
Q: How long do you have to complete bounties?
A: Bella “Until the weekly reset”
Q: Why doesn’t Snap have any lore?
A: Stephen “Over the life of development of the game we debated adding some narrative elements but ultimately decided it was better for the player to tell their own story about their journey in Marvel Snap and we would focus on building the atmosphere and platform for those player stories to take shape.”
Q: Why do you do a patch and OTA in the same week?
A: Glenn “The patch is locked a month in advance and has to go through App Store approvals processes and heavier QA based on the kind of updates it contains. OTAs don’t.
We could release OTAs on Tuesday shortly before or after a patch goes live, but it would be more difficult for players to verify which update they got and for us to set up.”
Q: How do you feel about the effects of On Reveal vs Ongoing? Do you find On Reveal to be more Powerful?
A: Glenn “On Reveal are generally stronger, because the benefit is guaranteed once resolved. Ongoing are also more difficult to make, since the design space is smaller. However, they’re quite different in play and alongside other cards,so it can vary a lot.”
Q: When bounties have card pairings as an objective, are those hand selected, or purely random?
A: Glenn “They are not purely random or purely hand-selected, it’s a mix of informed automation”
Q: Can we get refunds for fully reworked cards? I understand you don’t want to refund cards with small changes, but full reworks make a totally different card than what people invested in.
A: Glenn “Our goal is to ensure that the changes we make to cards keep them relevant game pieces and thus useful for any player’s collection. That’s part of why we generally minimize sweeping changes to effects and try to keep the core of the card as close as we feel we can to the original. We know people get cards they like, and we don’t want to change a card into something they don’t if we feel we can avoid it.
In this case, we wound up feeling a bigger swing was necessary to support our gameplay goals for cards like Snowguard, Agent Coulson, Kate Bishop and other future content. As we said in the notes, we’ll monitor the situation closely and verify we’re giving Loki fans a card they deserve. In the interim, I’d encourage players to try the new card out and give it a chance before assuming it won’t be a good time.
On the refund question, it’s not a viable practice in concert with our approach to game balance, which is unique at scale and frequency in the genre and even live service. We need the freedom to refresh content in the ways that will be most fun to play. In return we’re committing to keeping that content viable or even changing it back, vs. using functional bans or extra-harsh nerfs.”
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: Why is there a booster cap? Am I being punished for enjoying the game, or is this a bug?
A: The cap is not a bug. It is intended to discourage bot farming, as well as encourage engagement across more days.
Q: Why are you avoiding answering this question: There are so many Series 5 cards, but no Series drops happening. Is something going to change to make it more sustainable?
A: Griffin “Here’s what I’ve shared beforehand when it comes to skipped questions:
‘There are some questions we simply can’t or won’t answer for varying reasons. Sometimes they’re things we’ve already answered elsewhere. Sometimes they’re about things we’re not ready to discuss yet. Sometimes the questions don’t have answers yet!
We try to pick and choose the best questions to answer that we think will be the most helpful or productive.’
The community’s thoughts on Series 4/5 drops and releases have absolutely been noted by the team.”
Q: Last week, you stated “highest rank achieved” is lifetime but that appears incorrect.
A: A different dev responded a different answer this week:
CJ “Currently it is showing current season.”
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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