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 Captain Marvel! If you don’t know if she 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: Will Zombie Captain Marvel move to a location that is tied so you can win it?
A: Glenn “No, you aren’t losing a tied location.”
Q: Is there a reason why Moonstone copies 1-Cost ongoing cards, when it only really applies to Ant-Man or Quinjet?
A: Glenn “Not specific thought, but it’s a given that we’ll eventually make some that qualify.”
Q: Why does Zombie Giant Man buff multiple Hordes (if there are more than 1), but he only gains the Power from one of them?
A: Glenn “The Horde ability grows all Zombie Hordes—that’s not unique to ZGM. His second effect just checks the Power of the strongest one.
We could’ve worded ZGM to be more clear about how he functions with multiple Hordes, but because the base case for Horde is by design that there’s only one, these words would have been more confusing more often than relying on players to learn the weird thing separately.”
Q: Does High Evolutionary affect your Hulk Champion in Grand Arena?
A: Griffin “High Evo does NOT affect your Champion Hulk.”
Other Questions
Q: Any updates on sending out Twitch drop rewards?
A: Griffin “We appreciate your patience. Our team is still investigating how best to resolve the issue. We’ll be sure to update everyone once we learn more.”
Q: Did Snap’s matchmaking go down?
A: Glenn “There was an AWS outage affecting many different applications [at that time], including our matchmaking.”
Q: Are there any plans to increase the number of Tokens earned every 120CL?
A: Griffin “No plans for any changes right now.”
Q: If the team isn’t adding Tokens to the CL track, is there no plans to address the Token economy? What about adding tokens to Alliance rewards?
A: Griffin “We’re always keeping on eye on the economy, and that includes the Collection Track and Alliance Rewards.
We’ve stated before that being “collection complete” isn’t a goal we consider when it comes to designing Token rewards.
As for Alliance Rewards, I don’t believe we have any plans to make any large scale improvements beyond fixing the issues that occured earlier this month as well as planning ahead for future 5 week seasons.
It’s all about prioritization for us when it comes to tackling the next thing that can make SNAP the best it can be.”
Q: Players were able to use special codes in the webshop for a short time, but they no longer work. Were these limited time or quantity?
A: Griffin “These codes were datamined and/or turned on in error. We quickly fixed those issues when alerted. We’ll let players know if/when they return.”
Q: Why are hand-buff strategies being continuously supported, but have no real counters?
A: Glenn “Hand-buffing is actually an archetype we’ve struggled to push up to a competitive space, so we have been trying to create strength in the archetype. However, there are several effective counters—that’s been one of the challenges, the same counters work while the upsides are delayed until you play the card.”
Q: Does Fogwell's Gym double the boosters of a match when it gets revealed, or when or at the end of the game?
A: Glenn “End of the game; it has to be in play.”
Q: Is it intended that the Dark Fantasy pack includes variants from Elsa Bloodstone’s season pass?
A: Griffin “Yep! Intended.”
Q: Why is there a cap of 9 on tickets in the limited time modes?
A: Glenn “As we iterate on LTGMs and learn what makes them tick best and rerun more efficiently, we’re also working on identifying elements of commonality that can be unified. Sharing certain baselines can make the process of developing new and old events a lot easier.”
Q: Why are some champions removed from this round of Grand Arena?
A: Glenn “Grand Arena is going to build a large roster of champions over time, and we’ll rotate through them with each refresh to provide a new experience and introduce more dynamism to the mode’s metagame.”
Q: With Rian Gonzalez making Zombie variants for all of the cards this season, was there any thought given to letting her make a “Horde” variant that appears when you use her variant to spawn the horde?
A: Glenn “I think it’s a great idea.”
Q: Is draft mode still on the docket?
A: Glenn “Draft Mode is something we’re working on, but not a lot more we’re ready to say beyond that.”
Q: Have you considered adding Spotlight Keys back alongside the Snap Packs, so that newer players can benefit from the old system to get cards faster?
A: Glenn “That is largely the purpose of the [Snap] Packs, as they offer cards (and the chance for bonus cards) at a more efficient rate relative to their price in tokens than Seasonal Packs.”
Q: Why was I sent a bunch if Boosters to my inbox when Sanctum Showdown ended?
A: Glenn “Any unspent Charms are converted to Boosters once the event ends.”
Q: Have you ever considered making some things seemingly random but not quite to improve the player experience? I’ll provide an example: Subterranea shuffles 4 rocks into your deck. This means if you’re unlucky with your shuffle, the next 4 cards are rocks (I’ve had it happen to me). But you could make a rule like “two rocks can’t be next to each other” to avoid that.
A: Glenn “Generally speaking, we avoid these kinds of rules. As players discover them, they layer additional memory burdens on assessing the game state, and they can also feel unfair—people have different thresholds for what constitutes the integrity of the game.
That said, I have no real issue with such a practice—the opportunities that meet my criteria are just few and far between. In digital games, pseudo-random distributions are becoming more common, in my experience.
One example of a spot where we technically did this was actually the currently defunct Sanctuary II. It always gives each player a different Infinity Stone, because we found that more fun.”
Q: How much randomness is too much?
A: Glenn “I’m not aware of a useful unit of measurement for answering the question. ‘How much randomness is too much?’ requires quantifying it, which is difficult in complex, changing systems. We don’t have a reference distribution or expected frequencies, the way math problems would.
How we approach randomness involves a lot of consideration around how and when we apply it, and what kinds.
In gaming, we often use the lenses of ‘pre-decision’ and ‘post-decision’randomness. Essentially, are you making a decision based on a randomized premise (like your starting hand) or before a random event (whether or not to play Gambit). Prior to Hearthstone, most CCGs heavily indexed on the former–digital games have exploded usage of the latter, and Snap’s certainly among them.
Generally speaking, pre-decision is fine and fun–foundational to most games. For post-decision, we aim a majority of it at setups and conditional effects, letting it feed into the natural entropy of how games develop in unique ways. Surge is a great example, where each ‘roll’ opens up a new possibility tree and subsequent decisions. Ares is more of a single big bet, but has his place and fans as well.
So, that’s card design in brief.
As for games, that’s more nuanced. When I started here, one of the things I wanted to change was how few games saw turn 6 resolve. Turn 6 was where lots of awesome plays could happen–in late 2022, it was too obvious who would win, and thus turn 6 didn’t happen very often. So the design team did target a shift to create a little more uncertainty, in part by flattening polarized winrates for cards but also by increasing some of the variation.
Generally speaking, I think it’s ok for lots of turn 6s to be decided by flips–not all, but it’s part of Snap for sure. Flips even out in the long run, and skilled players can tilt true flips with consistent play and by recognizing opportunities to get lucky. When both players get to the end of the game and both think they can win, that’s really an ideal outcome–lots of games struggle with balancing catch-up mechanics, or mercy rules, or players AFK’ing, but we don’t really have any of those issues due to how Snap’s designed.”
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!
Last week a question was asked about bots in conquest. After the article went live, the devs gave an update on specific instances on when they are used. I edited it in last week, but I am reposting this week in case anyone missed it:
A: Brady “There are almost no conquest bots, and Infinite never has bots. Here are the two exceptions:
First Conquest game ever on each particular tier (Proving Grounds / Silver / Gold)
Extremely long queue timeouts (usually 180s+). this is very rare
Overall, bots in conquest are <0.5% of games”
Thank you to the dev team for reaching out and giving a more precise, updated answer!
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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