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 Zombie Galacti and the latest OTA! If you haven’t seen what was changed with the balance update, be sure to check out the official patch notes!
If you don’t know if Zombie Galacti 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!
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: Something I noticed when reading Chameleon’s text is that he doesn’t have the (if able) text that absorbing man and mystique has odes this mean he can copy the text of skills
A: Glenn “That text would be redundant, because he already specifies that the target has to be ‘here,’ at his current location.”
Q: If Astral Projection picked The Fallen One, the max energy is set to 1, which is hardly possible for any strategy. It really looks like a design flaw of the combination. Should it be adjusted in some way?
A: Glenn “Some cards are just going to be ‘non-bos’ in any robust CCG. It’s up to players to build decks with that in mind. Wong’s pretty bad with Hobgoblin, but I wouldn’t call either design flawed.”
Other Questions
Q: Is the team aware of the large amount if player complaints about the variant shop? It can be next to impossible to chase variants you want when there are new releases daily, shop takeovers, and album variants getting priority.
A: Griffin “The team is absolutely aware of the this feedback and discussions about how to improve this experience are occurring often.
A full rework of the Variant Shop isn’t at the top of the team’s priority list right now but I’ll be sure to bring up this feedback again to them.”
Q: Since champions can’t be discarded, does that mean we won’t see a future champion that features a discard deck?
A: Glenn “It impacts what that might look like a bit, but no it won’t impact whether we ever make them.”
Q: Why didn’t Grand Arena have a zombie champion to match the season?
A: Glenn “There were a couple of factors, but internal timing and the evergreen nature we want to aim for with Grand Arena champions right now were the two big ones.”
Q: Climbing to Infinite can be a chore so you can get the cardback. Have you considered making the cardback rank 90 and gold be 100?
A: Glenn “The purpose of the rewards is to add satisfying motivation to the achievement of the ladder climb—it sounds like that’s working perfectly for you. I don’t think it’s necessarily an improvement to change them so that you might set the game down faster—that’s kind of the opposite of the behavior we’d hope for,.”
Q: Can you list what exactly are your priorities right now?
A: Glenn “For our priorities, LTGMs are a big part of them. We’ve made 4 new ones this year with a 5th on the way, a 6th starting up, and some of the refreshes we have planned, such as adding characters to Grand Arena, are about as much work as a season used to be. Plus, with the success of the Event Pass, we’ve been examining how to integrate it with other modes.
Another major priority for us is improving the new user experience, which we’ve been working on for a couple months internally. Excited for some of those changes to roll out, and we have a good bit in motion there long-term too. We’ll be focusing further on character mastery as soon as that’s progressed.
Beyond that, we’ve got individuals working on tech debt and improved tooling for everything from localization to Snap Packs, as well as all the regular stuff we’re constantly working on in teams with each season. We are still a relatively small team, building the game and working on a few higher-scope features at a time accounts for a lot of resources.”
Q: Were changes to bots overtime made to reduce the number of players at infinite rank? Or increase the time to reach infinite?
A: Glenn “We have not made any changes with the goal of reducing (or increasing) the number of players reaching Infinite, nor has there been any such change attributable to the bot changeover. We waited a long time to make the full switch because we were monitoring its performance for months to ensure a clean switch that could hit the right outcomes.
A solid correlating factor to slower Infinite climbs is, as one would expect, the presence of LTGMs. And we are evaluating ways to make the ecosystem better support both ladder and LTGMs.
To answer your question, if we did see unpredictable results or negative outcomes due to bot updates, we would examine our calculation, as with any bug report. And yes, among the factors we track is certainly ‘time to Infinite.’ It’s an important one!”
Q: Why do OTAs go live on a different day than patches, weekly, and seasonal updates?
A: Griffin “It’s simply because it’s the best time on Thursdays that all required parties needed to push it live here at SD are available.”
Q: Why are limited time modes matching players with much wider CL ranges than in ranked?
A: Glenn “CL is not a reflection of players’ skill, so you shouldn’t assume a higher CL player is necessarily stronger. CL is increased by spending credits and boosters, so it’s exclusively a mixture of longevity and spend.
We do use internal MMR to match players, which gauges their skill. We just don’t surface this value to players.”
Q: How is infinite rank calculated once you hit infinite?
A: Glenn “Well for one thing, SP isn’t calculated when you hit Infinite—that’s just when it’s revealed.
At the end of each season, we normalize your SP based on your MMR and seasonal play. So a strong player who played a lot will start the season with a little more SP than one of exactly equal strength.
Then, as you play, we continue updating your SP based on which opponents you encounter and how you perform against them.
So when you reach Infinite, that SP number is reflecting your journey to Infinite as well as your season-to-season growth as a player. If you played a lot of games to get to Infinite, you’re rewarded when you get there in SP for how much you participated in the season vs. someone who made it early and then stopped playing.”
Q: Are you concerned by the growing number of players frustrated by their climb to infinite?
A: Glenn “I’m always concerned, which is why I looked into many of the complaints directly, and some even specific to the player.
I’m not sure what to chalk it up to. More balanced metagames can make climbs harder, shifts that reward different tactics, social perception, spending more time in game modes, etc. The slight increase in complaints hasn’t correlated to any notable change in the data or the number of Infinite players.
Speaking generally, there will always be complaints, and feeling challenged by the games isn’t the worst thing to have complaints about.”
Q: Have you considered adding a priority stack feature like Legends of Runeterra so players can see the order of cards resolving?
A: Glenn “LoR really needs that feature, because its system is an exchange of actions between players. If I do A, you do B, then I need to know what B means to figure out if I should do C or not.
Snap doesn’t use that kind of system–both players make all their decisions, then get the results, then make more decisions. So while we could add such a feature, ours would look a lot more like a history log than explaining anything, because it’s all already happening. It would be complex to build, and potentially very invasive–think about how many turns you play where the effects didn’t need an extra reel to explain anything. So we’ve considered it, but it hasn’t landed confidently among our priorities yet.”
Q: Have there been any changes made to the number of Snap points gained for new/returning players vs regular players?
A: Glenn “It’s not gained any differently mathematically, but players’ MMR is the foundation for Snap points and MMR is based on opposing strength. However, we aim to build matchmaking pools fairly similarly across many ranges of strength, so that regardless of skill level your have a dynamic experience with a range of opponents.”
Q: With tech cards being nerfed, should combo decks like Torch/Tribunal or Mister Negative be adjusted?
A: Glenn “We address power balances on the 2nd and 4th Thursday of each month. While we always make balance adjustments, I wouldn’t agree at present that the combo decks you’re described are unbalanced. Sometimes they do very powerful things, sure.
As a game, Snap is built around all kinds of combos–they’re supposed to work. The tech cards that limit them and retreating tactically to protect your cubes are tools we expect players to use to navigate games of Snap. They’re not an excuse, they’re all part of the game.”
Q: Does the team play the live game without any benefits or modifiers to see what players are actually seeing? And can you acknowledge the persisting player claims of deck based matchmaking?
A: Glenn “Everyone on the team plays live without benefits or modifiers, because they don’t exist and because playing the actual game is important to our work.
Honestly, the deck-based matchmaking conspiracy irks me because the premise is silly. We already have MMR “rigging” games for fairness based on players’ relative skill—that’s all matchmaking is. If we wanted the system to flip a “loser” switch (we don’t), it’d just pair you against way better players (it doesn’t). Very simple and no deck knowledge relevant.
But beyond deck-based matchmaking being a terrible method…why would we do it? The practice you’re imagining is so unfun it makes you want to play less, but we’re in the “play more” business.”
Q: With the Golden Guantlet Finals happening just 2 days after the next OTA, can players get information on upcoming changes to prep better?
A: Griffin “Yes, we’re going to be sharing the OTA notes early next week to give competitors time to analyze the changes and adjust their strategies.
The OTA will still go live at the regular Thursday timeframe.”
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: Are there bots in post-infinite ranked?
A: This answer was about how matchmaking differs pre and post-infinite, but it does directly mention post-infinite bots not being present. Older answers state directly there are no bots in infinite.
Glenn “The ladder already uses the same matchmaking system in both places. The only major differences between pre-Infinite and post-Infinite play are a) the presence of bots and b) some thresholds around low CL matchmaking to improve the experience for new players making Infinite with a small collection.
To be clear, we don’t matchmake you based directly on your Snap Points–that’s just the number evaluating your seasonal performance. We matchmake based on CL and MMR before and after Infinite, but Snap Points are linked to MMR so they reflect it, in a sense.”
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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