Developer Update for the Week of December 20, 2023: Havok Edition (+25 Questions)!

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 will Elektra get a buff, why did the Sentry and Destroyer Bundle get changed, what was inside that small patch, 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 launch new card Havok! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight guide, as well as our Havok guide! Also if you haven’t seen the news yet, Series Drops are returning next patch! For more information about what cards will drop and more, check out the news here!

Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This weeks topics will be divided into Card Specific questions and Other questions.

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: I’m not sure if Glenn was around when Scarlet Witch used to be a 1/2 and saw a lot more play. Is there any chance she could be reverted to that?
A: Glenn “I wasn’t here, but I played at the time. She’s still a reasonable performer with a lot of good company around her winrate today, but not one of our strongest cards. Our reluctance to revert that particular change is that it was based on her outsized performance within the new user experience. That experience would still be affected about as much today as it was then, because it’s relatively similar.”

Q: What kind of balance knobs, like changing base power, are available for Blob?
A: KentErik “We could adjust his base power, as you noted. If that wasn’t enough, another knob would be changing it from the whole deck to some number-N cards in the deck.

We’re still pretty early in the discovery days of Blob and where he should be, so hard to say what, if any, changes will be incoming for him.”

Q: It was mentioned QA was doubling their playtest time for new cards. If that’s true, why did Blob launch with bugs and can crash the game?
A: Addison “I know the implication of the question here is ‘surely you didn’t playtest this card’ but I figured I’d chime in a little bit here as digging into the current Blob issues has been the bulk of the last couple days for me haha.

The crash issue however ties into some last-mile VFX changes that went in after the bulk of playtesting had already occurred. When Blob eats cards there’s a distortion effect applied to each card (and Blob himself) and its this distortion effect that’s the source of his crashes. The Rogue+Blob case throws the same exception for the same reason.

The fun part about this bug is that, while definitely more noticeable now that it’s live, it’s not 100% reproducible because it’s a timing related thing with the VFX that simply doesn’t fail sometimes.

With that in mind, it actually WAS caught during testing but because it was amid ongoing changes to the VFX, when it seemingly no longer occurred and the engineer couldn’t reproduce the issue it was thrown back to QA who also couldn’t reproduce it at the time and it was closed. Turns out, it probably still existed and we should have more aggressively investigated and followed up on it.

It’s definitely a miss on our end and I take the responsibility as the head of QA, but in a fast moving environment these types of things can happen when changes to make things look/feel cooler are coming in slightly off-cycle to the bulk of testing. We’ll try to do better going forward!

Hope that helps shine a light onto how this seemingly obvious thing went out into the wild. We have a fix coming down the pipes soon 🙂”

Q: Does Martyr have any balance knobs?
A: KentErik “Tons of knobs! a 4/15 martyr would probably be broken with a card like Zero, and super super broken with Prof X. that’s why she’s not that 😛 but we have knobs, and we’ll use them”

Q: Has the team considered changing Rogue to allow Absorbing Man to copy her On Reveal after she steals an ability? What about Copying an ability after the card changes to a Demon via Nico?
A: Glenn “Rogue *had* an On Reveal—she doesn’t once her effect resolves, outside of stuff like Electro and Blob. Absorbing Man can’t copy what isn’t there.

Ditto the Demon. If you can’t see the words on the card in play, neither will they.”

Q: Are you buffing Electra?
A: Glenn “We’re interested in improving Elektra, but we haven’t found a solution we like yet.”

Other Questions

Q: Does adding albums require a patch, or can you guys do that over the air?
A: KentErik “Patch”

Q: Why do you have to re-download all assets every patch?
A: KentErik “hmmm there’s always new assets with each patch, but it shouldn’t require a download of ALL assets. will look into it.”

Q: Would you change locations for flavor? Like make Castle Blackstone swap abilities with Muir Island since Muir Island synergizes better with Sebastian Shaw?
A: Glenn “Our primary focus for locations is that they successfully tell their own story. Sometimes that will incidentally link into SNAP cards that share their narrative, but the majority of games with a location don’t feature creatively complementary cards–they need to stand on their own. As a bastion of some ruthless, rich, and power-hungry mutants, we like the story Castle Blackstone tells.”

Q: I recently recieved credits (or gold) in my inbox for “compensation for ladder issues”. What exactly was the issue?
A: Glenn “The issue was relatively small, and impacted primarily post-Infinite players. In our usual Season reset, some players’ SNAP Points weren’t normalized correctly. We did a secondary normalization for them later in the season to better approximate a level playing field.”

Q: What are your thoughts on the lockdown meta?
A: Glenn “We prefer Lockdown to be a minority deck in the metagame that plays a ‘spoiler’ role against certain strategies. Whenever it sustains a place among the top decks, we at least investigate making a change.”

Q: How do you feel about the prevalence of Surfer decks in the meta each season?
A: Glenn “Silver Surfer’s a cool deck and we don’t mind decks ebbing and flowing over time. That’s the ideal outcome, as the number of distinct archetypes increases, because it makes deck selection more diverse and meaningful for players.”

Q: Can you get the base card spotlight avatar when buying a card with tokens?
A: Stephen “The spotlight avatar border is only for spotlight variants acquired in the spotlight cache”

Q: (Response from previous Question) Why can’t you get the avatar with token purchases?
A: Stephen “Spotlight avatars only apply to spotlight variants and are not on base cards regardless of method of acquiring them”

Q: Can your data see variable card power, and you balance with that data in mind? For example: Power levels of Werewolf By Night, Sebastian Shaw, or Blob
A: Glenn “No, because it’s too fuzzy to mean much. Locations and enemy Power modifiers are all super impactful on these values, and we can’t efficiently drown out the noise in the live data. We can internally, by playing games and/or building tests without those variables, but our samples are much smaller and less relevant given the discrepancies. Understanding their winrates and cuberates paints a clear enough picture, along with reviewing gameplay.”

Q: Is the team able to speed up the boot up and load times? What about the time it takes to open a cache or spotlight?
A: Stephen “We have been doing some investigations on boot up and loading times.  We want to improve it and we are always considering performance tradeoffs.  In the case of opening chests and other random rewards, those have to call the server so they will be slightly slower.”

Q: What was in the small patch that dropped lately?
A: Addison “There was some additional underlying client work but the big player-facing emphasis was a handful of bug fixes.

Specifically:
– Resolving Blob’s crash and accompanying weird issues with VFX preventing input
– Fix to the visual issue between Sebastian Shaw + Forge not updating power correctly
– Removal (hopefully!) of the phantom notification pip for PC players
– Addressing an issue that was preventing older players who hadn’t played in a while from logging in”

Q: Why did the upcoming Sentry / Destroyer bundle get changed so close to release?
A: Tucker “Datamines are often not quite final and we don’t intend for folks to be able to see em ahead of time. Datamined bundles could always get their values shifted around before release.

For this bundle in particular, the currently-datamined version also isn’t final: expect the final version to be more credit-heavy than either version before it (but less token-heavy).”

Q: If datamines aren’t always accurate, why don’t we see bundle previews anymore? It makes it very difficult to plan around what to buy.
A: Tucker “There’s a couple of tricky obstacles we ran into when doing regular bundle announcements, so we’re unlikely to return to those in the future.

– Bundles announcements have to go through localization so every player can see them in every language, which means we have to get them locked in sooner than we’d prefer. We’ve gotten tripped up by this a couple times where I made an adjustment after that localization cutoff, and the bundle in-game didn’t match the blog. If the bundle is juicier than advertised, no harm no foul! But if it’s the other way around we obviously need to make that right, and setting up that compensation is extra work that eats into the time we could be spending making the game better in other ways. (It’s a surprisingly large chunk of work to identify everyone who bought a particular bundle, then build & release an inbox reward that only targets those players.)

– Why is setting bundles in advance tricky? In the perfect world, we would build bundles very very close to their release date because we want to have the strongest understanding of what currencies players want and in what quantities, and it’s tough to predict exactly where the economy’s gonna be far in advance. It’s great to be able to adjust mid-season, because sometimes things happen in the economy we aren’t expecting (‘Woah, Legion’s a sleeper hit! Everyone spent a lot more tokens than we expected and folks need more tokens! Let’s shift the bundles around to be more token-heavy this week.’).”

Q: Tucker mentioned devs may modify bundles to change contents based on what players want more. Isn’t the recent change and player outcry of the token reduction a sign that players want more tokens?
A: Tucker “I’ll pull the curtain back a bit on this; this season specifically we’re seeing a dip in direct token demand and a very high amount of gold demand.

This seems to be attributable to increased activity in the variant shop; With albums & Shop Takeovers driving up interest in the variant shop, the amount of tokens distributed through that system (the 2000 token bonus) & the tokens distributed through the album system have gone up quite a bit, making a lot of players comparatively less interested in converting gold into direct tokens.

This is speaking in general though; even though a lot of players are engaging that way, that doesn’t mean everyone’s in the exact same place. Right now bundles have to deal in such generalities, but something I’m really excited about exploring in the future are bundles that automatically fill up with the currency you’re short on right now. Something like that feels like the best of both worlds to me.”

Q: Who is the saltiest / most tilt prone player in the Second Dinner office?
A: Tucker “Oh this one’s easy. One time Stephen got so salty after a Conquest losing streak that he made me lower the number of medals you need to get the variant.”

Q: How much weight does CL have on matchmaking?
A: Addison “CL brackets and MMR are handled individually. The CL bracket restricts the pool of players available to match against to the same range that you’re in. The MMR then influences who exactly within that bracket you’d pair with.

After reaching a certain Collection Level, you are placed in the XXXX+ range and it no longer really matters and is exclusively MMR based, you just won’t match with folks below that CL threshold.”

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: When i play Quake in whatever location and after the shuffle she is in Machineworld, is it intentionally or a bug, that my opponent gets a Quake?
A: Intentional, locations don’t resolve until after the card is played, but cards that transform a location get special treatment. Glen explains more below:
Glenn “The function for tracking whether a card had been staged and resolved has an exception to ‘hide’ from locations that were replaced between those two moments.

This predates me by about a year, so I can’t speak with certainty to why. My guess is the restricted location pool of early Series 1 made stuff like Scarlet Witch into a surprise Death’s Domain/Danger Room too common, so the exception was created to protect a good experience. That sounds worthwhile, so I imagine any adjustment we’d make would line Quake up with Wanda. However, the lift to do that seems pretty heavy relative to the gains, so I wouldn’t expect such a change anytime soon.”

Q: What would happen if i played a Shuri first then Quake? Will she be buffed or will she not count as played in the location that Shuri buffed?
A: Quake would be buffed, since Shuri’s ability triggers before the next card played is revealed. It’s the same reason why you can Juggernaut an unrevealed card away from Shuri and the card will still get doubled power.

Q: Ravonna on 2, Black Swan on 3, how much does Adam Warlock cost on 4? Will Black Swan affect base cost or active cost?
A: Devs don’t comment on datamined content. Great question though, just drop it back in the comments once the devs officially reveal it (likely end of January).

Q: What can I do with my 50 odd tokens?
A: I don’t have an answer for this, but I frequently have players asking for an answer to it. Moderators have removed my question a couple of times for the question being “too suggestive, try the feedback channel”. I wanted to highlight the question and acknowledge I am trying to get it answered for all the players who have asked and are stuck with 50 pointless tokens.

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!