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 don’t cards generated by Arishem get matching splits, is Arishem more popular than expected, can you join more than one alliance, 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 Season Pass card Gwenpool and Series 5 card
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, Alliance 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: Did the team expect Arishem to be this popular? Has he exceeded playrate thresholds?
A: Addison “Basically the entire QA team was saving keys for Arishem week”
A: Glenn “He has surpassed our expectations, but we did expect something on the order of High Evolutionary’s release from a play rate perspective.
We don’t make balance decisions based on the first 5 days or so of a card, since there are a lot of unique variables at play. Generally, we like to see 2 weeks of data before even considering any action.”
Q: Blob and Venom both “eat” cards, so why aren’t Blob’s eaten cards considered Destroyed like Venom’s?
A: Glenn “We wouldn’t have made the card using ‘destroy’ at all, due to its strength with cards like Knull and Death being inappropriate. While I get the creative dissonance over Venom and Blob ‘eating’ differently, gameplay comes first.”
Q: Why is Gwenpool featured this season when she isn’t a Deadpool character?
A: Glenn “We always look for opportunities to feature characters we think are awesome who might not get a season exclusively in their own creative or fit neatly into lots of other seasons. Some past examples would be Black Knight or Annihilus.
Gwenpool is an awesome character, so we knew we wanted to find a spot for her in SNAP. However, her canon isn’t obviously rich and appealing for players who aren’t already fans of her comics. Jeff did because he was a cute baby shark, but even fans of the MCU might not recognize Batroc despite him having multiple outings there. A “Gwenpool season” was challenging to cast and design.
Deadpool’s canon has a similar vibe—he has a great cast of rogues and sidekicks, but we wanted someone who felt like a Big Deal for his Season Pass. We think Gwenpool has that oomph, so we decided to solve both challenges with one season. In hindsight, I do wish we’d included Batroc too.
It’s true Gwenpool’s actual narrative doesn’t have much overlap with Deadpool, but the creative homages are visible and appreciable at a glance. That matters a lot, because we want a season that’s exciting for a wide range of Marvel fandom and familiarity. Hopefully the season helps many new fans find her comics!”
Q: Will Copycat show both players the ability she stole?
A: Rada “No, when she is drawn she will only show to the player that drew her. The opponent will be able to see what ability she has after she is played.”
Q: With Nico being in the final Spotlight Cache instead of Cassandra Nova, is her Spotlight Variant actually a repeat variant? Or is that image a placeholder?
A: Griffin “We really wanted Deadpool’s Diner, dropping that week, to be special so we moved Cassandra Nova, and her Variant, to the Deadpool Diner Rewards Track. In her place, we added one of our favorite Nico Minoru Variants to the Spotlight Cache.”
Q: Can Cassandra Nova steal power from a 0-Power card, like a rock?
A: Glenn “She can. We don’t treat 0 as a ‘floor’ for Power reduction in general.”
Alliance Questions
Q: What is the maximum character limit for clan abbreviations?
A: KentErik “Three”
Q: Can we use Emojis in for clan abbreviations?
A: CJ “We do not allow emoji use in Alliance Tag/Name”
Q: You have mentioned Alliance names have to be unique? Is that a unique Alliance name, tag, or both?
A: CJ “Currently it is the combo that must be unique.”
Q: Can you change your Alliance name or tag?
A: CJ “Both TAG and Alliance name will be changeable. Currently we don’t have a cooldown on it.”
Q: How many Alliances can a player be in at once?
A: Bella “One”
Other Questions
Q: What’s something you wish players knew about the development process?
A: Bella “That just because a good idea isn’t implemented right away does not mean that the devs ignore them or don’t care. We do care, and we appreciate player’s feedback. Sometimes things just take a lower priority than other things like major features or important bug fixes.
For example, I was talking to someone in here yesterday about keyboard shortcuts on PC. Lets pretend that conversation happened earlier in the year, we at Second Dinner would of course been busy focusing on Alliances/Deadpool’s Diner which come out this month.
Prioritization is of course a major concept used in many fields, anywhere from first responders to pro gaming. We have some very amazing people we work with who help us prioritize tasks, and we get to things in due time.
Think of all the items people posted in this discord with ‘why don’t the devs just…’ since the game launched, and look at the game now. I know for certain many have been implemented.”
Q: In Deadpool’s Diner, are there any to progression? Like how Conquest caps Inifinity tickets to the last week?
A: KentErik “No caps like conquest”
Q: Why is Deadpool’s Diner launching at the end of the season?
A: Stephen “The goal was to align it with the exciting new movie release.”
Q: When a Spotlight Variant releases into the variant pool, will buying it count towards the daily offer bonus?
A: Stephen “Yup! When a Spotlight variant is unvaulted it will show up in the daily offer shop and if acquired will count towards the daily offer bonus rewards.”
Q: Will Spotlight variants be in the same section as rare and super rare variants?
A: Stephen “Yes that is correct it will be part of the existing Daily Offer Shop”
Q: With the leaderboard for Deadpool’s Diner with the exclusive title “Best Bubs” for the Top 100 finishers, will your standing be based on Total Bubs on hand, or Total Bubs earned?
A: Griffin “A player’s Reward Track and Leaderboard level are determined by their total amount of Bubs collected over the lifetime of the event. That means the number will only go up if you win and not down if you risk it all and come up just short.”
Q: When will the next balance patch be?
A: Griffin “No OTA this week. We’ll be back next week with one.”
Q: Why isn’t the Maximum Effort Wolverine considered a bonus variant for the Wolverine album?
A: Chris “Hey thanks for catching this, the season pass variant for this season (Maximum Effort) was indeed meant to be a ‘bonus’ variant in the Wolverine character album. We will make sure this is added as soon as we can”
Q: What is the design process for making new locations? And how is it different from designing cards?
A: Glenn “I find locations far easier to design. There’s wide space, few balance issues, and lots of flavor potential.
Each season, we start with a handful of candidates for the location, and narrow down to two with the help of the art team. Then we pitch designs and try a few things, usually finding something we like quickly.
How locations help/hurt different archetypes is the primary thing we’re cautious about, but it’s fairly minor. For example, we know Destroy has been overserved in the past, so we’re more conservative there now.
We do like to look for fun ideas that have the potential to boost specific archetypes more than others, because that creates some good dynamism in the gameplay, but the majority of locations we want to mix up the gameplay without massively favoring anyone.”
Q: Any chance we get more than 2 new locations per month?
A: Glenn “It’s more likely we do one or none than three or more. We have a lot of locations already, we don’t really need to make many more. We mostly do because it’s fun and gives some interesting levers to pull in the metagame and other game modes long-term. They’re not especially burdensome, but I’d rather the VFX team work on older cards, for example, than bonus locations.”
Q: With the new Deadpool loading screen, is there a chance we see more loading screens now?
A: Addison “There was underlying work to allow us to update the screen (and to be able to do so remotely!). While I don’t know exactly what the plans are for it, I would certainly hope it’s a feature we intend on reusing!”
Q: How do you balance unreleased cards when you make new cards months in advance?
A: Glenn “Design occurs in phases, and one of those phases is specifically tied to release. A card can’t really make it that far until it’s on the schedule, and that step includes final balance.
We have at least three seasons in active development at all times, so every card at least sees deliberate play with cards two seasons after its release. After that, it may be more open to playtesters’ whims, but if we see something we want to test we’ll specifically assign it.
For example, while we’ve finished September’s cards, we just a couple weeks ago assigned bonus playtesting for one based on the design of a card releasing months later.”
Q: What is an interesting stat you can share?
A: Glenn “Drax once had the best winrate in the game, if you removed all sampling parameters and just looked at the 5-day average.”
Q: Where are the new Spotlight variants from last year in the shop? I thought they launched this week.
A: Stephen “They will start next week. It is based on the end date of when it ran in a spotlight originally (ie one year from the end of the week it first ran)”
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 don’t cards generated by Arishem get his border or splits?
A: Stephen “Its a bug we are working towards fixing it. We want players with a dope Arishem split/border combo to be able to show it off on all of their generated cards.”
Q: Are there any plans to use players preferred variants for randomly generated cards?
A: Stephen “It is something we would like to add in the future but no ETA right now”
Q: Have you ever thought about the possibility of players being able to exchange/sell their variants to other players?
A: Stephen “Our philosophy is we do not want players to destroy their collection. We do want to improve collection bloat at some point in the future though.”
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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