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, Kraglin! If you don’t know if he 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!
Also be sure to check out our weekly variant competition, where you can show off your best variants and splits every week for a chance to win a free season pass for this season OR next season!
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: Can you explain why Jane Foster doesn’t pull out 0-cost cards when Black Swan’s active ability has been applied, but Jane Foster’s On Reveal works when Mr. Negative applies 0-cost cards?
A: Glenn “It’s our design intent that she only affect cards in hand, but I agree the text could be more clear. I’ll flag it for revision or a fix after review.”
Q: Do you think Stardust is good for the game, without considering stats or playrate?
A: Glenn “Your question isn’t answerable without considering the stats or play rate—those are among the primary factors in determining whether a card is good for the game, as they directly account for its impact.
I do think the game is better with a card like Stardust playing sheriff sometimes, and I assume we’ll vary its pure strength over time the same way we have with many other tech cards.
Q: Will Drax Avatar of Life be banned from the upcoming Sanctum Showdown?
A: Glenn “We usually like to at least see a card in action before banning it, as that’s a pretty extreme action, but I’m sure Drax will be evaluated.”
Q: If I am not mistaken, one of the reasons that Cull was originally a banned card in Sanctum was because Sam Wilson’s shield was a 1-drop. Now that Sam Wilson has been reworked, will the ban on Cull be revisited eventually?
A: Glenn “I expect so.”
Q: As of the current patch, Wiccan now checks the turn he’s played to see if you’ve spent all your energy. This is intended or a bug as this only started to happen this patch?
A: Griffin “This is definitely a bug and the team is investigating now. Thank you all for the reports!”
Q: How do you feel about Jean Grey and Daredevil becoming more popular in contest to Star-Lord decks? Is it a signal of a unhealthy meta?
A: Glenn “I don’t think them being played signals an unhealthy metagame. I think Jean Grey in high volume can be concerning. I mostly think Daredevil is cool and satisfying.”
Q: Do you think Morph qualifies as a card that should get “character” specific text so he can’t target skills?
A: Glenn “I think this would be a fine change, I know it’s in the queue.”
Q: After the patch, Spider-Ham no longer has any animation to show what card he hits. Since this wasn’t in the patch notes, was it intended or a bug?
A: Griffin “Spider-Ham had an issue where it was incorrectly turning its target into the ‘Pig’ card. This was a relic of its previous functionality. In fixing this issue, it also turned off the animation which is not intentional. The team is working to restore the animation but keep its current functionality in a future release.”
Q: Are you aware of the longstanding bug where Captain Marvel doesn’t see Hydra Stomper’s power?
A: Glenn “We’re aware of this bug. It’s on hold right now as we’re implementing and evaluating some substantial and fundamental revisions to how abilities work in the backend, and these updates should impact this bug (and many others).”
Other Questions
Q: After the webshop Galactus Spin was switched off and replaced with daily credit bonus, the team said that may bring it back. Since it’s been a year and no update, is Galactus Spin not coming back.
A: Griffin “When we switched to the new Web Shop last year, we didn’t simply ‘switch off’ the Galactus Spin feature. It was a feature of the previous Web Shop that wasn’t able to be moved over to the new shop.
We stated we want to bring back something similar to the Galactus Spin, we’ve been prioritizing other essential backend features first that will allow us to work on things like the Galactus Spin in the future.
The average value of the Galactus Spin was around about 100 Credits before, so while it may be less exciting to high roll the value has remained fairly consistent.”
Q: The latest patch notes stated you are trying to reduce needless clicks and make a faster UI, so why does Conquest still have so many menus to click through after a win?
A: Glenn “We complete development work in stages over multiple sprints, and prioritize to maximize our impact. Some areas will get attention before others.”
Q: When a new card is released, how soon do you start looking at stats/data and what do you look at first?
A: Glenn “We start looking pretty much immediately at all of these things, in addition to sentiment and content, and track progress over the next two weeks. Past that, it may vary depending on what we see to less direct attention or more.”
Q: Has the team considered changing Grand Arena to pair prebuilt decks vs other prebuilt, and custom vs custom?
A: Glenn “It’s on our wishlist but isn’t a simple change to the structure of the game mode to split its queues, so we’re finding the right time for it within a relatively full queue. I imagine it’s most likely to get worked on after Draft, but could be sooner.”
Q: Since Big Hero Six was based on Marvel content, and it’s all owned by Disney, could we see any of those characters in Snap one day?
A: Griffin “Interesting question! I’m not a comics expert and didn’t know this fun fact. We work directly with Marvel when it comes to choosing which characters, locations, etc, from their catalogue. They’ve been amazing partners in letting us explore all sorts of different areas of their history. That said, I’m unsure about Big Hero Six, specifically. It could be possible!”
Q: Does bad player sentiment towards new cards hurt the team’s morale?
A: Glenn “That’s not the sort of thing that affects any of us, certainly not a morale issue. We know some cards won’t turn out as exciting as we planned; that’s part of why we have our balance passes. And players’ card evaluations can vary a lot, in any CCG.”
Q: If Deadpool’s Diner has separate ques for each table, why can’t Grand Arena use tables as ques?
A: Glenn “The modes have substantially different architecture. Diner was developed around having tables; Grand Arena wasn’t. It’s sort of like asking why you can’t just add more rooms or levels to a house that already exists.”
Q: Does the team try to make the most popular characters the “best card”, as least in terms of highest playrate each month?
A: Glenn “Yes, we like to feature our most popular characters on exciting new cards when we can. They’re popular; we want to fulfill the fantasy of playing with these characters, and it’s clear players want that too.”
Q: Even though you have scheduled OTAs, will there ever be a time where you do an emergency OTA? The majority of players are quitting this season while others are abusing the new Star-Lord.
A: Glenn “Our OTAs are spaced so tightly together that adding another one adds a lot more disruption than it tends to solve issues, but we can do them. That’s basically what we did for Team Clash, though it was planned.
However, the ‘majority of players’ are certainly not quitting 😆
If Star-Lord needs adjustment, he’ll get it, and you (as well as everyone else) know that. In fact, that’s one of the reasons to emphasize consistency with our balance process. We want to build faith that if something is frustrating, it will change. That matters WAY more to retaining players than whether a nerf happens one or two days earlier.”
Q: Over the past 9 days, I’ve earned about 540 cubes in ladder (not counting conquest). That is ~77 ladder levels. All I’ve achieved is to go up and down between 85 and 89 over and over. And over. How would you, as a player yourself or a game developer, rate this experience?
A: Glenn “It sounds like you’re facing with a challenge commensurate with your skill level and/or deck selection so far this season–it’s neither too easy to not be worthwhile, nor too hard to be insurmountable. That’s the goal of matchmaking. I’ve certainly missed prestige ranks in games because I got frustrated, but it’s only frustrating because I value achieving a rank I know is within my reach.
That can be tedious–I wouldn’t consider it actively desirable, but the alternatives are basically too easy (we know this is bad for us and boring for plays), more volatile (you would likely not enjoy swinging from 93 to 73 and back more than this), or PVE (not our model). This is quite often how laddering goes in F2P games–peaks and plateaus.
We do build our matchmaking with the goal of posing a challenge that can entertain most players for up to a month, because that’s how long the season is and running out of goals tends to be a bummer. I’m understand you’re not making Infinite as fast as you’d like, but that’s not really all on us–plenty of players do.”
Q: Are you really testing cards thoroughly before releasing them? Are you checking engagement data to see how players feel with overtuned cards? I, for one, have been less and less engaged on a daily basis.
A: Glenn “I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling less engaged, and you’re right that we have data on engagement. Your experience isn’t necessarily representative of the majority, or even a meaningful minority. Data cuts through the anecdotal experience of which group wants to talk about their experience the most on social media. (Spoiler: it’s almost always the group having a bad time.)
Another reason we collect data is that players are often wrong early but right late, just like us. (I don’t even have to look very hard to find pre-release content shooting low on Star-Lord. He also was supposed to be good.) Plenty of cards spike winrates or play rates for several days before calming down. Being overly sensitive to card performance would mean making lower-quality decisions overall.
We have dedicated balancing resources, but game balance isn’t an exact science. The exact same team of people worked on Spider-Punk, Weapon X, Shou Lao, and Star-Lord. League of Legends has multiplicatively more resourcing dedicated to game balance than we do, and regular adjustments up and down are a core part of their game as well.
As for Star-Lord specifically, he’s more nuanced than you assume. Star-Lord’s individual card winrate isn’t anything special, but his cube rate is quite good, and specific cards from one of his decks overperform him by a lot. That tells us there are lots of weaker Star-Lord decks being played, people aren’t retreating enough, and 1-2 Star-Lord decks are very good. So should Star-Lord be weaker, killing the other decks to put the top ones in their place? Or should we adjust the top ones down? Or are the top ones in fact the element suppressing the weaker ones?
Answering those questions (and more) are basic fundamentals of live balance, and time to gather data helps do that too.”
Q: Based on your previous answer, do you think this season is just a typical season’s meta, and there’s nothing meaningfully different with Star-Lord?
A: Glenn “It is intentional that the gameplay of seasons vary from one another. If we didn’t want that, we wouldn’t make new cards or do balance passes at all–that’s their purpose.
Will that mean some seasons are more or less enjoyable for some players, sometimes even large groups?
Yes, definitely–no game designers are hitting the bullseye every single time, me and the rest of the design team included. But the tradeoff is that many more seasons do get to be interesting and exciting by pushing at the boundaries.”
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 Alliances are so neglected? with so few rewards nobody seems anymore motivated to reach max rewards!
A: SD recently announced that they were dialing back Alliance rewards since their data showed a very small percentage of players used Alliances. While those rewards have been redistributed into places like LTGMs, they have been gathering feedback about Alliances after that change.
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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