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 can’t you preview black borders before buying them, are there bots in Deadpool’s Diner, could Blob be immovable without the Ongoing text, 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 Series 5 card Ajax! If you don’t know if these cards are worth the Season Pass or Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our Bonus Challenge guide!
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: Is there a reason why Ajax doesn’t update his Power in hand?
A: Glenn “This is a manual functionality we have to attach and it seems we just missed it for Ajax. It will be added.”
Q: Why was Hydra Bob’s balance change made so short notice?
A: Glenn “OTAs are generally finalized the Monday before they go live.”
Q: Why not keep Blob’s immovable ability and just remove the “Ongoing” text?
A: Glenn “The effect is an Ongoing ability, and coded as such. We could remove the tag, but inconsistently using the tag would create more confusion than it would add gameplay.”
Q: When Viper was originally nerfed it was due to the release of Havok and concerns for a turn 3 combo that could be devastating. Since that combo never became a real concern, why was viper never reverted to a 2/3?
A: Glenn “We felt White Widow filled a fairly similar role and that the 3/5 would have a more distinct identity and more opportunities to design towards later. The 2/3 was also very weak, so it would’ve been a sideways change at best, really. We prefer to try new things vs. retread old ground.”
Q: Has the team considered re-scaling vanilla cards to better match the power level of cards now?
A: Glenn “It’s been considered; afraid I’m not going to go much deeper than that on it right now.”
Q: Why does Luke Cage target both players equally, but Mobius targets both players differently?
A: Glenn “They’re different cards; many different interactions, unique goals, etc. Game pieces aren’t built or balanced based on linguistic parallels.”
Other Questions
Q: What has been the hardest card to make?
A: Glenn “Card implementation is mostly a question of ‘how do we go about doing this?’ vs. being quantifiably difficult. Some cards might take more time, but we don’t really measure them that way because sometimes things that are easy just happen to be lengthy.
Thanos or Nico are probably up there on duration, since they’re a bunch of cards and each one needs unit testing and QA.”
Q: There are many different types of games and some focus on pvp content, some on pve, and some have both. With SNAP all content seems to be pvp directed. Is this because the team feels that pvp is more engaging? Or some other reason?
A: Glenn “CCGs tend to more heavily revolve around PvP than PvE by their nature. Building a collection and expressing oneself through decks and gameplay is core to the fun, and that requires another person to experience fully. Even in CCGs that make it available, it tends to be more of an occasional side dish than anyone’s main course.
There are logistical and systemic elements to introducing PvE to PvP games as well, of course. And they can change your audience’s behavior. For example, I loved Runeterra’s Path mode, but that also meant I stopped pursuing Master rank (their Infinite equivalent).”
Q: How many officers can be placed for each alliance?
A: CJ “Each Alliance can have one Leader and as many Officers as desired.”
Q: How does matchmaking work in Deadpool’s Diner, and are there bots?
A: Griffin “Matchmaking is by table using similar rules to Ranked play. Bots will exist in Diner as a fallback to avoid long queue times.”
Q: With some Spotlight variants repeating in caches, will there ever be a Spotlight variant in both a cache and the daily offer shop?
A: Stephen “Spotlight variants that transition to the Daily Offer shop will not be part of the Spotlight Cache again.”
Q: With Spotlight variants now available in the daily shop, will they now be eligible for albums?
A: Stephen “Since they are in the shop then they would qualify as being potentially part of albums in the future as either a bonus variant or part of the core album.”
Q: Will the black border be a shop exclusive?
A: Stephen “Black Matte is exclusive to events and offers. It will not show up in the border shop.”
Q: Was it an oversight for black borders not to be previewed before buying?
A: Stephen “We have improvements in an upcoming patch to previewing borders.”
Q: Is it easier to create seasons around heroes or villains?
A: Glenn “Heroes, but we don’t mind mixing and matching them. There’s just a lot more heroes than villains, and they often have deeper creative and fandoms.”
Q: How many iterations of one character do you have at one time to make sure there are no hiccups at a locations or with other cards?
A: Bella “Not QA, but I will say we all join a playtest specific meeting to play cards being made in matches against each other. And cards go thru various iterations or just stick around for several playtests fairly often.
I mean, I tried out multiple Gwenpools before she released in those playtests. I don’t think the case in which I am referring to has a specific set amount of times a card is tested, but Addison may be able to provide more information if he wishes.”
A: Addison “^ yep, what Bella said!
The number of iterations we go through is whatever design throws at us. We have one person dedicated to being the initial gatekeeper through all of that iteration time and then once a card’s ability is locked down by design, that QA person drafts the initial round of test cases unique to the card and then a wider group of our QA team will hit those up and then expand upon them. Most of the time a lot of the playtesting time as a team that Bella mentioned are in the weeks prior to this, but sometimes emphasis on a card in playtest can overlap with its normal testing cycle.
The big trick here is that SOMETIMES there’s a card that is ‘finalized’ and goes all the way through testing but then Design is unhappy with for whatever reason and they rework. At that point the cycle just kind of starts over. Most of the time this doesn’t happen more than once for any given card, but I think we’ve had a couple that had a handful of false starts like this.
For game mode specific tests, NORMALLY that doesn’t come up as the game modes expand on the core functions of the game without radically changing things, however there are always edge cases. Recently with Deadpool’s Diner having an autosnap mechanic for raising the stakes there was a realization of ‘huh…Hydra Bob should probably get specifically tested against this!’ (Hydra Bob requires the player to explicitly snap fwiw)”
Q: Does Deadpool’s Diner use Hot Locations?
A: Griffin “Hot Locations are not active in Deadpool’s Diner.”
Q: Why not have 4-Week seasons each time?
A: Glenn “We (roughly) line seasons up with the months of the year, to make their starts and ends more intuitive as a schedule and let us use themes that might correspond sensibly to certain months.”
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: Will I ever be able to mark my favorite variants and have them swap randomly between matches?
A: Chris “It’s something we’ve discussed, there is a desire to do something of a similar flavor but nothing set in stone yet”
Q: Why is the daily offer shop almost exclusively album variants, which makes it impossible to find a variant you are looking for?
A: Stephen “Our hope is to get to a place where all variants are in an album (or more than one album). The result of that is more and more cards in the shop will be part of an album.
What I think you are really asking for is a way to get the specific variant you want. We have a dedicated data scientist and team focused on improving the daily offer shop experience to better offer variants that are relevant to each individual player. That work is ongoing and will continue to improve over time.”
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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