About the Angry Birds 2 Arena

[cognitive]

Today I had a few experiences that are cringe-worthy:

Round 1: Get a clown with two Mathilda’s and 40’s stars (I’m 32)

Round 2: Get a clown with over half his birds being level 5 and 26 stars

Round 3: Get a clown with 3 level 5 birds and 18 stars.

Come on Rovio, I can understand the pressure to perform. I have been playing video games since pong came out. When I was in undergraduate I had the university high score in several games, despite good competition. This is getting out of hand.

[Proteus]

@aeshna i playing in newer version and i didn’t get rewards everytime i ranked up, neither small chest for ranked up nor big chest every tenth level.

[tinostar11]

My most Interesting battle today.

View post on imgur.com

Note that I’m 23 Levels ahead of the Player ( they’re at Level 14 ) , but they have 2 Level 7 Birds and 5 Level 6 Birds.
I won the match rather easily.
Someone must had payed their way to those levels that fast.

[DJLarryt]

I’m pretty much done with the arena. It’s a complete waste of time. Go up a star level and Rovio awards you with what, 3 gems or a spell? Seriously. Especially when stars and medals do nothing for you. Placing in the Arena is near impossible and a week’s worth of anguish, being tethered to the game every three hours and gem-spending against hackers and rich kids may get you 50 – 100 gems, which in turn really gets you nothing special. Going for one more try (80 gems) is almost the first place prize!! WTH!

Ever since the update I can’t even get near a win. I mean, the margins I get beat by when trying to play fairly is not even 100,000 points, it’s more like 3x and 4x my final score… And I “Strike” or “Birdie” every level and my birds are all at level 6!
Ridiculous.

Anything remotely fun is being rapidly stripped from this game due to greed.

[cognitive]

It feels like the cheats are really trying to stay under the radar, hence the low star count and supernaturally good birds.

But the three card Monte at the end of the game is alive and well. Just played one (and lost but not by much).

I think the whole point here is that with levels > 450 becoming impossibly difficult for most players, the Arena attracts more players, hence the cheats find fertile ground.

[MVNLA2]

I’ve noticed different strategies in the arena. Many of my opponents seem intent on clearing all debris from each room. Thus they may use 3 birds while I only use one. Sure, they get higher scores in the beginning, but they run out of birds much faster than I. My strategy is to use as few birds as possible to clear a room. There are a lot more points available in the next room. I do fairly well against somewhat evenly matched opponents using this strat.

[cognitive]

You have to hit the sweet spot between the two – but ultimately unless you have superbirds your strategy is sound.

Arena is all about saving your resources to use in “juicy” targets, you know, these nice big target rich structures. And if you are stingy with your birds you have more chance to clear more levels, hence, a better strategy.

[tinostar11]

And I thought my first one I posted a Few days ago was bad , this is a whole new level.

View post on imgur.com

A Level 5 , with 3 Spell Cards , 4 Birds at Level 8 , and 1 oddly at Level 3.
Must be a Millionaire to have those birds at Max Level with only being at Level 5.

[MVNLA2]

Well, I actually made it to Diamond league! Now what?
It is interesting that most of the people in my diamond league are in lower leagues, mostly amethyst and emerald, but one lonely vanilla!
I did get an opponent that had 2 Matilda’s in the cards showing. I thought the program was written so that this wouldn’t happen? @bankler
Oh yeah, I probably have a screenshot if that would help.

[DJLarryt]

It’s funny how nobody seems to get one of saved previous matches where I go up against a level 8 flock with 5 spell cards and I burn it right off the bat, netting maybe a total of 500,000 points (which would guarantee my future opponent 10 stars for sure).

Rovio must have a filter to only include wins over x,xxx,xxx points to induce the player to lose and buy into more rounds.

[Sutekh137]

@djlarryt

According to bankler (who has not posted in 8-9 days now), you are always facing your opponents latest run. Now, as for how Rovio decides WHICH opponent to face, that’s a whole ‘nother questionable grey area.

Thanks,
sutekh137

[DJLarryt]

Thanks @sutekh137- and interesting, I only win maybe 1 / 10 Arena matches these days and most of the time my score is annihilated by the opponent… maybe max score 1,5xx,xxx or so… again, some other player should be profiting from my loss :p and mentioning it here.

I’m a good player, I just find lately that there’s a lot of f*ckery with the physics and pig strengths, for example, micropigs not dying even when being buried by a ton of stones, or bombs blowing up inside a structure and not even the blocks beside the bomb disintegrate.

And we’re all familiar with the situation when your first board takes 3 or 4 birds to clear by some bizarre instance, you might as well ditch the match.

[Sutekh137]

@djlarryt

As I may have mentioned before, I’d say I used to win around 60-70% of the time, and that didn’t change with the previous update (I don’t really know about the more recent update since I didn’t even last a week after updating before I quit due to multiple reasons.) I could usually score around 300 stars in a week, so at 10 battles a day times seven days, that 300 stars for 70 battles, or 4.3 stars per battle. Since it was relatively easy to get around 7 stars per win, that brings up a percentage just north of 60.

I agree that the physics gets screwed up quite often, but I also remember opponents where they well and truly suuuucked — super low scores where an abysmal effort on my part still got me 5-6 stars. Note: I would always bug out of the game if I saw someone sporting a massive level advantage or 3+ spell cards. This helped skew things to lower opponent scores, I am sure.

And while I agree that quitting out after a bad start is a reasonable response, I almost always would finish an Arena run no matter how bad I was getting beat. If nothing else, it was a “nothing to lose” scenario where I could relax myself and practice for the next Arena run. Leaving a match uber-frustrated and then going right back in for the second run was usually a recipe for two losses instead of one.

Thanks,
sutekh137

[MVNLA2]

@djlarryt — I have gotten a match where my opponent had 0 birds, and obviously I won. It totally filled up the win bar! I have also gotten opponents with only 1 bird, and again I won easily.

[candicejain]

I think I found someone cheating. Terrence #40153 went from 60 to 61pts from 6-630am yesterday morning. Umm…you can’t get less than 5pts per round in the arena. He gave himself away by doing that. Then, from 630am to 430pm today he is now magically at 131pts?!! At 630am today he was at 86. Totally fishy. He’s a level 32 and I’m 38. Anyone else run into this?

[MVNLA2]

@bankler — I started collecting data on scores during arena competitions since the 3/24 update. I must say that the scoring calculation must be exceedingly complicated and possibly still full of bugs.
Is it possible you could tell us anything about how scores are determined?

* It seems that even when players are at the same star level and have the same ranking for their birds, their destruction meters fill up at different rates.For example, on the first room:

  Player   Birds flung    score    destruction meter  
  MVNLA2      1           657067    0.1 full
  Opponent    2           628496    0.2 full

My conclusion is that you must get some minimum points in terms of destruction meter level for flinging a bird, as long as it does some destruction.

* What I really don’t understand is this:

* At the end of the 3rd room, the opponents score was 1789516, the destruction meter was at 0.2 full, and he/she had 4 birds left.
* At the end of the 4th room, the opponents score was still 1789516, but the destruction meter was at 0.4 full and he/she had 3 birds left.
* So how did the opponent clear the 4th room without increasing their score? Why did the destruct meter increase 0.2 when there was no increase in score?

[Rovio_Bankler]

@mvnla2 Thanks for the report. I don’t have a clear answer on exactly what happened. I will try to push for making an effort to bring some improvements to this. Your report is useful for tracking down any bugs that might still occur. I appreciate it.

Generally, the score for a room (complete destruction) is calculated like this: 100k * BirdLevel, plus any extra score from strike or birdie (and headpops). So destroying every single block, pig and everything else in a room with one single level 6 bird should give 625,000 points (600k from destruction and 25k for the strike). There might be small deviances from this because of different reasons (causing approx +/- 10k points)***.

Q: So how did the opponent clear the 4th room without increasing their score?
A: There is no way of telling if your opponent cleared a room. Each time you throw a bird, your opponent throws a bird. You are synchronized in terms of throws, not rooms.

Q: Why did the destruct meter increase 0.2 when there was no increase in score?
A: Good question. Honestly I have no idea how this would happen.

*** (Technical detail) The deviance comes from that the score multiplier a bird gives is not updated until after it has impacted. This means that for the very first block a bird destroys, the multiplier from the previous bird might still be active (or even be 1.0 in the case of the absolute first bird thrown). Scoring a strike in the first room (which had 38 blocks and pigs) with a level 3 bird actually gave me 319,672 instead of 325,00. It doesn’t affect the end score that much I guess, but I’ll try to get around to fixing this at some point.

[DJLarryt]

I wish I was this guy that I just played in the Arena!!! >:-(

View post on imgur.com

[cognitive]

Beyond funny! Thank you for sharing :)

[Aeshna]

@djlarryt – that is class. I had a photograph of an opponent with 2 bombs and a Terrence, but yours beats mine.

I didn’t bother to watch the video for an extra card at the end!

[DJLarryt]

@Aeshna neither did I. I just happened to glance up and noticed that. Of course I didn’t even get close to their final score.

It’s kind of funny that my last card was also a bomb. I wonder if that influenced how their final cards ended up so that it would insure they beat me (or encouraged me to watch the video and lose anyway).

[cognitive]

I can’t help but wonder how this is possible – methinks the cheaters have some mystery app that sends fodder messages to the AB2 app, by writing or overwriting some file in AB2’s memory. Which begs the next question… AB2 is a couple hundred megabytes, why is this info not encrypted somewhere?

[CaptSternn]

We see a lot of strange things in the game, but has anybody ever seen this happen?

No, I was not cheating. Don’t know how, don’t want to know. Watched the other player’s birds going away while his score never moved. Not a single point. He had two level 5 birds and the rest were level 6.

[cognitive]

Cheating going bad?

[angrynerds2]

This week almost every round I met an opponent with three or more higher level birds and or many extra cards.
How did they manage that with the low daily reward of feathers?
They all scored 500 000 or a Million more points than me, although I’m not a bad player. Really annoying.