Angry Birds Star Wars 2 Naboo Invasion Level B1-19 Walkthrough

Thanks @sal9 for looking into this. A couple thoughts in reference to @wicket182‘s proposal. It seems to me there are maybe four types of people who use the leaderboard and walkthroughs:

1. People looking to figure out how to get 3 stars but who don’t post scores. That’s probably the vast majority of visitors.
2. People who like to have a sense of where they stand, maybe try to beat average, but don’t really compete for top scores. That’s most of the rest of the visitors.
3. People who compete for the occasional top score on a level and like to know how good their strategies are relative to the top players. There are maybe 30 or 40 of us (I’m in this group).
4. People who compete for the overall top score. There are currently three: @wicket182, @crazy-rider, and @wicket1822

Groups 1 and 2 aren’t really affected by this (though I guess on a level that would otherwise have a max score of 70k, having a few 250k scores can pull the average up a bit, but that’s it), and that’s the majority of users.

Group 3 is affected because there are fewer levels on which we can compete. The handful of top scores that I have keep falling to this exploit, and that’s annoying, but I guess not really that big of a deal. The problem that I have is that if the top players have pointless 250k scores from an exploit, when I come up with a new strategy, I have no idea how good it is. It removes all incentive to innovate.

In Group 4, it looks like @wicket1822 isn’t bothering to use this silly exploit anymore, so it’s really just a feud between @wicket182 wanting to keep his #1 ranking and @crazy-rider trying to overcome him. @crazy-rider is on PC where coins don’t cost real money (just time), and @wicket182 is on iOS where coins are expensive. So @wicket182 is spending lots of money to keep his #1 ranking, which is unfortunate. (Not that I have any problem with @crazy-rider making a run for the top spot.) There is no way to do this exploit without coins. You could do every possible carbonite reward and ad watching for a month and still not have enough of the right birds to do a single level.

But while lowering the max score as @wicket182 proposes would help save @wicket182 money (a valid goal as far as I’m concerned), it only affects three players. For the rest of us, lowering the max score doesn’t do anything.

I don’t know what fraction of levels have the exploit available. On B1, 10/24 levels have so far become pointless for competition. On B4 and P4, it’s 8/22 each. It seems like it could easily end up being between a third and half the levels, and that’s just a shame. And the more recently added levels have more of the hard-to-destroy stuff where the exploit works, so it may be worse than that.

An option in between would be to ban using it on any additional levels. Of course, that adds some urgency since more levels are being added to the group all the time. When the strategy was discussed and allowed, it only involved spoons — a fairly limited set of levels. Now it’s big rocks, catapults, and lightning balls. Are there more? What about gears? Big bones? It seems pretty clearly an exploit to me, and you have to use a whole lot of birds to make it work, so it seems hard to do by accident. (You can accidentally use two birds together in a way that’s banned, too, but it seems equally as unlikely.) If someone gets more points than are available by LCS (or by LCS plus the bonus for magically getting full destruction with a single bird), several people would notice immediately and report the score. Yes, someone could maliciously use it to get a barely new high score, but someone can use two birds together in a banned way to do the same. It’s all honor system with the occasional checks on reasonableness by other players, anyway.