AB 2 Glitches and Bugs

[Aeshna]

Completed 40 levels and finished level 560 over the last few days and not one treasure chest.

Twice I saw this bug – on the large striped rubber balls that birds should bounce off, Terrence has fallen straight through as if the ball wasn’t there. It happened both times on the middle ball of three, when the balls are near the bottom right hand side of the screen. I’ve a screen shot, not that it matters! I’ve not seen anyone else report this, it does happen quickly and the first time I did a double take. No mistake the second time it happened, the gap is too small for most birds to fall through, especially, the largest!

[Aeshna]

I think that the game designers are running out of ideas and to make the game more difficult resort to: adding more micro pigs, move tower structures further back and put a solo pig on a balloon platform in a few random places.

The red hot pig that explodes when hit, is now harder to detonate. I had one bounce of several balls, some roll off edges, some hit full on, but no explosion.

Whether these changes are bugs, changes in game play or just a figment of the imagination.

Over the last month, I think that the micro pigs are now harder to kill, so it gives pleasure to burst one well shielded.

Before –

After –

[David Martin]

@smwforever45 – I know the Destructometer takes longer and longer to fill up the deeper you get into the Arena, but I haven’t noticed it in regular gameplay. I’m still not clear on whether the higher scores you get for leveling up your birds actually fill the Detructometer faster – in other words, is the Destructometer counting the actual damage done before or after those points or multiplied? It seems to me that with my birds all at level 6, I’d fill it up 6 times faster, but this obviously isn’t the case or I’d have way more birds than I need for pretty much any challenge the game can throw at me.

@aeshna – I’ve seen that bug with Terence as well. I have a screenshot of it somewhere. Usually it’s when he gets wedged between a trampoline and some other, unmovable obstacle and the game’s collision detection does something screwy, making him stuck beneath the bouncy part of the platform.

At least they seem to have fixed the bug where hitting certain trampolines would make your birds lose their ability as though they had hit a solid obstacle. I’ll give credit where it’s due – they have at least been addressing some of the bugs we’ve pointed out, and not only the loopholes we’ve found that make the game easier. (Though it does seem like the loopholes are a lot higher on their priority list.)

[RedYoshi45]

@david-martin
Does it? That may explain some things I discovered in the Arena as I played!

Yeah I agree with you… although higher level birds seem to fill up the Destructometer a bit faster than a lower level bird does, ex. it fills up with faster with a Lv. 4 Silver than a Lv. 2 Terence, since you get more points for clearing structures with higher level birds.

I found something else that may be quite interesting. Not sure if you found it yourself already but I’ll send it to you in a PM.

[cognitive]

And it is exactly because of this reason that you see cheaters with all birds @ 5 and the guy with a ranking of 23 stars. You try to play one of those dudes and if he’s got 100,000 points on you per bird, the only way to win is if he stumbles and you don’t. And with immortal piglets as common as ice in the North Pole, you can guess what happens.

I’ve been paying attention to what I get and how I do and I still see I can win when the other guy has 3 pigs at +1 on me. Any more than 3 pigs at +1 and it’s not winnable, period.

[David Martin]

Either they fixed whatever was causing Arena players to float between leagues, or else I’ve just gotten way worse at the Arena. I went from two straight weeks of being #1, to somewhere around #6 last week, to still having 0 stars after 6 attempts so far this week. The opponents have been beefed up with spells occasionally, but not THAT many.

[JezzaH99]

This is what I’ve been saying for nearly a week now – the Arena opponents are always higher level birds giving you no chance of winning unless they mess up one go. Virtually impossible to win now

[David Martin]

@jeremyharrod – It occurred to me that this situation may actually make things harder on players who spend more time on the Arena and less time on grinding to level up birds. I’m in the Diamond League so there’s no higher to go. Currently all my birds are at level 6. My opponents have typically had two or three birds at level 7 and the rest at 6. I figure this is because of my own poor observational skills – I didn’t know for the longest time that those exclamation marks you saw on specific birds on the Arena home screen allowed you to click to get extra feathers. So I missed out on extra feathers for weeks before realizing this, and if I’d taken them, I’d probably be mostly at level 7 by now.

The situation where an opponent has 2 or 3 birds at a level higher than yours is not impossible to beat (especially when you consider that the opponent’s score doesn’t factor in the extra bird they may have gotten for watching an ad, thus you always have one bird up on them when spells aren’t involved), but I’ll almost certainly be hosed if I get into even one of those situations where a micropig or two improbably survives in a room that can normally be cleared with one bird. It’s the lack of control I seem to have over such situations that I find frustrating, because in most situations the room can be easily cleared with most of the birds in the flock, and of course my next three cards will have the one or two exceptions (usually Chuck and Blues) plus an unwanted Blizzard.

[JezzaH99]

Please explain what “grinding” is or how you do it. 2 of my birds are level 6, the rest level 5. I pick up the daily gifts (the exclamation mark) and am up to level 560. How else can I get feathers (I’ve managed the DC a couple of times but I don’t have much time in the day to play the DC that often and it’s very hard generally).

[David Martin]

“Grinding” is just a general gaming term. Usually it’s in the context of things like adventure or role-playing games where you can deal with new foes more readily if you have better items, leveled-up characters, etc., that you generally don’t get from taking the fastest possible route through the game up to that point. So generally you go back and play through levels/areas you’ve already played, either to be more thorough or just to repeat the same task in the hopes of acquiring extra items/experience points/whatever.

In the context of AB2, “grinding” was once marginally helpful in the sense that you might get a red treasure chest randomly within a level, but those were rare back then and they seem to have completely vanished now. So really, the only use for it now is to meet your 10-star quota for the day to get your 6 gems, and usually you can accomplish that via the Arena and/or Daily Challenge. So going back to “grind” through old levels is pretty much useless unless you’re a glutton for punishment like I am. It’s just that I thought this was the only viable way to get new feathers at a slightly faster rate than I otherwise would, and I realized I was wrong once I noticed the free feathers being given out daily on the Arena screen.

I suppose it’s good that repetitive level grinding isn’t necessary in order to be competitive in the Arena. Maybe that’s why they eliminated the red treasure chests.

[RedYoshi45]

From what I can see there is no such thing as “grinding” feathers anymore…
As far as I know these are currently the sources for feathers:
1. daily “!” gifts (right now, they give me 26 feathers for a random bird per day – I guess the number depends on how far you made it on the overworld, or on your star count, but I don’t know for sure).
2. 100-200 feathers are awarded for sure when you clear a DC (with the possibility to see which bird they’ll be awarded to), and there may be a few more feathers in the bonus chest you can open after clearing a DC.
3. The daily (or 12-hour if you bought the Mighty Eagle pack) free chests can offer small amounts of feathers – sometimes more, sometimes less.
4. Premium chests (80 gems each) may offer feathers too.
5. When your star count goes up by 1, you may open a small chest that can contain feathers. For every 5 stars you’ll get a bigger chest with better rewards.
6. Chests on the overworld can contain feathers.
7. Very rarely, even rarer than Friend Presents, you may get a red (or Premium) chest when playing normal levels. If you see one, take it and try to clear the level with it!

[RedYoshi45]

@david-martin
I still get red chests when playing levels!
However, they usually appear for me after I failed a level at least 3 times, and if that is the case I rarely clear the level with it.

[David Martin]

@smwforever45 – You’re right, for the most part – there is no “traditional” grinding, but some of these methods of earning feathers do require repetitive effort at levels/challenges you may have already played before.

#1 is a free daily gift. I believe the number feathers you get is your “star level” +10. I’m currently at “star level” 36 so I get 46 feathers each day. I see this as incentive to keep plugging away at the Arena even if I’m hopelessly behind, because I’ll at least get stars out of it and slowly advance. It’s also incentive to play new levels when they come out, but I usually get on that right away anyhow. (I don’t know if stars earned in the DC levels count toward this or not. Stars earned for replaying levels do not even though they count toward the daily achievement of getting 10 stars for 6 gems.)

#2 is probably the only one that requires significant effort and could be considered “grinding”, but even then, it’s not repeatable. You either complete it on a given day or you don’t. You’re also replaying through screens/bosses that make an appearance in the regular levels, just in a “remixed” fashion.

#3 is also a daily free gift, with the incentive to pay real-world money for more frequent gifts; either way, it’s not dependent on your performance in the game.

#4 might be based on player performance, because you can certainly get gems faster for doing certain things frequently, though you’ll get enough gems for it sooner or later even with minimal effort.

#5 also takes some real effort, and is a good incentive to keep playing new levels and/or the Arena. I’ll often notice that my “star level” is higher than Arena players I’m competing against even though my “bird levels” are slightly lower. I figure these players aren’t focusing on the new levels as much, which is really apparent when a Pig Bay or Gravity Grove challenge comes up and the otherwise experienced opponent appears to be stumped, judging from their performance.

#6 is obviously a reward for continuing to play the new game levels; I wouldn’t consider it “grinding” because to me that’s the main part of the game.

#7 Interesting. Are these levels you haven’t beaten before, or are you replaying them? I haven’t seen one in a regular level in a great while. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to keep hoping they’ll appear and that it’ll be within a level I stand a chance at completing.

[RedYoshi45]

@david-martin
About #1:
My current star rank is 23, it was 22 when I got my last daily gift – shouldn’t I be getting 33 feathers by that logic, not 26…? I’ll look into this closer.

DC levels do NOT count towards your star count since the stars are merely a way to keep track of your current progress in the DC. I looked into it before and it neither counted towards my star count nor towards the daily 10 stars achievement.

About #7:
I’ve only ever repeated two of the 233 levels I played so far, and in both I did not have a red chest appear on me, although that’s way too little to say whether you can get red chests by repeating old levels, or not. So far, all red chests appeared on me while I was playing new levels and got stuck for quite a bit. If I have another one pop up on me I’ll make sure to screenshot it.

[DDeck]

Regarding the recent phenomenon of arena matches against opponents with most of their birds at a level higher, based on what I’ve observed, this seems to be a workaround for (yet another) bug Rovio introduced to the arena.

Since this started happening, I have noted that none of my opponents get extra birds. If they start with 7 cards, after they fling 7, they are done. This makes it impossible to lose, so as a workaround, it seems that Rovio is just matching me against players who will obtain a similar total number of points with only 7 birds. (If I force quit the game a large number of times, I can eventually get an appropriate matchup.)

Of course, this is what I observe. Since Rovio tweaks individual players’ experience to study how they respond, you may not observe the same thing. That it, perhaps it’s just me.

[RedYoshi45]

@ddeck
Actually, that does not happen to me.
I am matched against higher-levelled opponents too (at this point, usually, 2-3 birds are a higher level than me, so not that much of a difference to myself), and often I get opponents starting out with EIGHT not SEVEN birds, and all opponents get at least one extra card, sometimes up to four. Everything is normal for me, apart from the 8 bird thing which is not normal.

[Proteus]

In the last 2 days, i found that umbrella pigs is getting more powerful and more harder to kill. Even Terence and Chuck only bounce off when hit him and he still alive with his umbrella doesn’t broke. And right now, this pig can appear in any single level, not only in the level when it’s raining. Seriously ?

[DJLarryt]

Micropigs have definitely been bumped up so they’re harder to pop. Yesterday I played an arena round where I hit one directly with Chuck and knocked him into the water (+1 hit). As I watched him fall in and sink, I saw ‘splat’ animation on the pig 3x more before he popped, which means it was a total of 5 ‘hits’ to get rid of him.

They must be taking steroids.

[DDeck]

@smwforever45

So often your opponents have only a total of 9 flings? That is still low I think.

Anyways, I guess that (as usual) Rovio is tweaking the experience for particular users and measuring how it impacts revenue.

[David Martin]

If it’s true that they’re tweaking the experience for different users to see what works best, that’s massively confusing, because now when I try to compare my experience to that of other users, the game may actually work differently for them by design. Makes it really hard to get a handle on how things are supposed to be working vs. what might be a glitch.

[DDeck]

@david-martin

They absolutely are, and have been from the beginning. There were a selection of users who only had three lives. Other people had different wait times between daily treasures. For some people, the ability to watch a video comes and goes.

With a large install base, certain tweaks can be made to a random sample of players to judge how it affects their in-game behavior.

I can’t really say for sure if they are tweaking the physics for individual players, though. Everyone here reports things like chuck/blues suddenly bouncing off wood/ice, but who knows if that is just crap programming, a term for a randomized outcome following a bird-object interaction, or something else entirely.

[RedYoshi45]

@ddeck
My average opponent starts out with 7 birds and gets 3 bonus birds so on average 10 goes.
Sometimes they start out with 8 birds and get up to 4 bonus birds – so a maximum of 12 which is quite a lot and pretty much impossible.
Sometimes they get only one bonus bird or none at all – these matches are a lot easier.

[David Martin]

Ugh, I was one of those players who had the three lives for a while. I really hated that because I was already irritated with the limitation to five lives (or really any number at all – it’s the underlying “allegedly free” nature of the game that has been my biggest complaint, but unfortunately that’s the trend in mobile games nowadays and Rovio simply jumped on the bandwagon).

At the time, there was an exploit where if I was still stuck on the level I was on when I had started up the app, I could force quit the app and restart with the same number of lives I had when I last brought it up. Basically I could play through the first two lives and then force quit if I thought I was about to lose the third one, and that way I’d at least pass one level per day because I’d have infinite tries at one I was truly stuck on. That loophole appears to have been closed when they changed me back to five lives, but I wonder now if it was truly a bug or an intentional exploit left in for the sake of playtesting (similar to how there were secret codes that gave you infinite lives in the glory days of super-hard Nintendo games).

All things considered, I’m a bit irked that the game is still in “obvious beta” stage after all this time, and they still see fit to ask people to pay money for help coping with some of the more irritating bugs that make the game unnecessarily difficult. Figure out how you want the darn game to work, THEN ask people to pay for it.

[Aeshna]

DC – Second section, last room. The last pig was a balloon pig. The balloon burst and pig fell to earth, as it was falling from a good height, I had a pop up message – only 1 pig left – 60 gems to continue.

Errr, no thanks, although if you’re that desperate for revenue, I’ll donate some gems. What’s your address?

[RedYoshi45]

Once upon a time, on level 252…

Thankfully, the magician pig slowly moved to the left, through the platform, and ended up falling down to the left.
Not that I would’ve lost anyway.