Home › Forums › Angry Birds 2 Forum › About the Angry Birds 2 Arena
- Replies
David Martin@david-martinSpell usage went up a lot with the addition of the Arena Winning Streak. This isn’t something we planned for, it’s simply an effect of competitive players stacked against each other. We are however discussing internally how we should handle spells (@pappybear) and the impact it has on the Arena.
Spell usage went up because guys failed to notice that you left a loophole open, in which a player can force quit the app right after winning an Arena match, and then have all the same spells they just used available to them again after restarting. I observed this myself just a few days ago. In general the game is good about remembering the state of some things, such as your gems and feathers, when the app quits unexpectedly (either due to a crash or the player purposefully force quitting), but other things such as spells seem to snap back to the way they were on the last startup, or the last time the player entered the Arena screen.
Now imagine a player discovers this loophole after having acquired one of each spell. They will then log a ton of Arena runs using all five. Other players will get matched up against these runs time and time again. The only way one can even hope to keep up is to exploit the same loophole (or spend a lot of cash, I guess).
Making matters worse, you can forfeit a match at the very beginning (when first shown your opponent’s birds and spells, before pressing the button to begin the fight) without losing your ticket. This allows players who don’t mind resetting their winning streak to potentially play infinite matches on a single ticket, simply by always rejecting opponents they know they can’t beat at the first or second match (because winning the first match gives you a free ticket and forfeiting it at the very beginning loses you nothing).
It sounds to me like you guys could use some more thorough playtesters, to discover and close these loopholes before the players can use them to make the odds extremely unfair for everyone else.
Jon S@jon3800The pearls are only used to purchase hats, I’ve haven’t seen any other use for them. You can only win them by completing the DC’s, winning in the weekly tournament.
yetThe hats essentially are score multipliers (+1 for party hats 20 pearls each), (+2 for crowns that sell for 100 pearls) and (street caps which are also +2 multipliers and sell for 100 pearls each). If you have bought the early bird package…Red still has his crown, however he loses the sceptre and robe. If you get a complete set of hats, your slingshot also gets a score multiplier. I’m been playing the tournament for most of the day today, and I’ve been seeing a lot of dressed up birds and thankfully no 5-spell cars specials like the last update.
I haven’t tried out the DC yet I’ll let you know when it silver’s challenge becomes available. I’m focusing on getting my birds into elder emerald. I’m usually not keen on doing them since the boss levels are ridiculously hard, even with all my birds at level 12.
David Martin@david-martinWell, so far I’ve got nothing but good things to say about the update. Arena opponents now seem much more balanced comparative to my own skill level. I haven’t seen any with spells, but I have seen some that really challenged me due to being at level 10-12 or so. I can take ’em… usually.
Kudos to whoever designed the new Arena layouts, which have a lot more screens that can’t easily be cleared with a single bird, and seem to be stumping a lot of my opponents at first. I feel like this puts us on more of a level playing field. It got to a point where I had the old ones memorized and it was simply a matter of pointing a bird at the exact right spot and hoping I got lucky on several screens. Now I have to think on the fly, more like I do in the campaign levels, and that’s what I like about playing Angry Birds. This change seems to reward those who have played through the campaign levels well enough to understand the many scenarios they may face in different worlds of the game.
(However, the exploits I mentioned above do still work. You’ll want to fix that eventually, but I guess it’s less of an annoyance now.)
kelshe@kelsheYou can no longer back out before pressing the battle button. Well you can but now you lose a turn. So you’re given the choice of very possibly losing or using gems/spells/$€£¥ to have any hope when pitted against a higher ranked player. I think that there will be even fewer 7 game streaks than before. And everyone was complaining about the dearth of streaks before.
Pappybear@pappybearHi All. Update seems to have brought some balance to the arena. I have noticed the mini pigs whom seem to always magically survive has gotten worse. ?
kelshe@kelsheJust backed out of a match that I was obviously going to lose. The opponent greatly outmatched me with all birds at 13. No point in playing that game and I’d rather forfeit than play a game that won’t be won.
cognitive@cognitiveDavid Martin nailed it. Scores went from 4M per match to under 2M, which is just fine because that’s reality. With the use of a handful of spells I won a 7 streak handily, which was impossible a few weeks ago.
Also agree with the mini-pigs, they seem to be even more immortal than before. Now clearing a room is often a 3 bird ordeal, unlike previous single bird rooms…
Overall, I’m quite pleased, plus I’m in the graveyard league, I’m ahead by 200 points and banking tickets and gems.
David Martin@david-martinHuh, that’s weird, I was just going to ask whether the mini-pigs had been nerfed. I’ve noticed a lot of situations today where the piglets actually popped after falling shorter distances than I remember (like when there are several in boxes and the box remains intact most of the way down), or rolled off the edge of a surface where previously I would have expected them to float on the corner. You know, actually behaving logically for a change.
I think the piglets are harder to get to in the Arena simply because the structures aren’t set up to make it as easy to knock on into the other, so it’s been my experience as well that a room can take 3-4 birds to clear. The difference is that I notice my opponents scores going up in similarly small increments to my own, which means we’re both struggling with the room in a way that is actually fair. It’s hard, but I expect it to be hard just from appearances. I’ve seen far fewer “unlikely survival” scenarios where an entire structure is leveled and one piglet remains alive in the rubble, but I’ll keep flinging and see if it was just a fluke.
Regarding the spell glitch: I’ve noticed that my spell count seems to be out of sync between the Arena and the rest of the game. Even more strangely, when I get a spell within a level by filling up the Desctruct-o-meter, and then I use it within the level, it seems to decrement my spell count and that is remembered outside of the level. Then I go back to the Arena and the count is restored to where I’d expect it to me. Apparently I’ve force quit out of so many Arena matches that it just gave up.
CaptSternn@captsternnOverall new update seems great. Arena matches are fair and I don’t think I have seen one opponent using spells. The ring of fire is nifty, need to work on how to use it better. Don’t like losing a ticket when backing out of a match, but then I really have no need to back out since no opponents are bringing spells. Thanks, Rovio. Big improvement. Hopefully we will get some time playing before some come along and figure out how to make it lopsided again.
Also nice to have some new structures and rooms to change things up.
heybert17@heybert17I see many people like the update, but I am still being highly outmatched by level 3 and now I can’t even back out if these matches.
The actual game play seems to be a bit more fair right now, but one thing we know for sure, once the cheaters find a way they will take control again, they always do, so not being able to back out is a really big let down.
David Martin@david-martinThere seemed to be two primary methods of cheating before:
1) Acquiring/reusing all five spells by exploiting glitch’s in the game’s ability to remember that you had already used them. Now that we don’t see the spells our opponents are using, this may only matter in that the cheaters are earning more stars via arena wins than we are. It should no longer cause you to lose a specific arena match.
2) Having birds leveled up to an insane amount that doesn’t match the apparent amount of time they’ve spent playing the game (for example star level in the 20s or below, with birds at level 11 or 12). I’ve noticed that the system now always matches you up against someone at your own star level. This could still be a problem for someone legitimately at a lower experience level, but from what I’ve seen the matching algorithm is doing a much better job nowadays, so presumably if you had all your birds at level 4 or 5, for example, you’d see someone at your same star level with birds at or just barely above your bird levels.
In short, cheating is still possible, but the net effect of it should be way less frustrating for an honest player now.
heybert17@heybert17I just played a streak 4, and I actually had the advantage over my opponent, but just like recent losses, I was winning with 2 birds to go but my opponent got a flurry of cards at the end that buried me by over 600,000.
I know I have ZERO chance of advancing beyond my 4th place position before the end of the week with the new “improvements, although the people ahead of me seem to not be having any trouble collecting a lot of points. We’ll see what happens next week when we are back on level ground.
CaptSternn@captsternnDavid, I don’t think the spells of the opponents are hidden. I think they are not using spells. I play without using spells and I am winning most of the time, coming close when I lose. I don’t know how Rovio managed this, but they seem to have made some really great improvements. My opponents are very evenly matched with me at this point.
Of course all of my birds are maxed out at level 13, so I can’t get opponents with higher level birds. But the star ranking is the same and most of my opponents are also maxed out at level 13.
But Rovio did leave the ability for us to use spells in the arena, so they didn’t cut off the possibility of their revenue. They also gave us ways to get even more gems without paying, so that is cool.
As always, AB2 is a work in progress, and I am still loving it after all this time. I can’t remember when I played any of the older versions, though I still have all of them installed with my progress in place.
Hopefully this update will make the game more enjoyable for people, then I can come back here more often without seeing all the pain and frustration. Of course there will always be some of that, but it was really bad the past few weeks. And it was justified. Even I quit trying to win the arena. I would still fling the birds for fun, not to achieve anything.
kelshe@kelsheSo there is a player in my league this week who is listed twice. Buster Piggums, in 6th and 8th place. One of his rankings is 68, the other is 70. Both have a lot of bronze, silver and gold medals. Very strange indeed.
PKBOO@pkeeversWith the inclusion of the pearls released just this week how can I now suddenly be playing against players with a full set of crowns / hats already when they cost 100 pearls each and can only be earned via daily challenges and the arena? I’ve got two upgraded birds and estimate it will take 2 to 3 more weeks of play to achieve this.
Cheaters or hacks.
Nevermind@deaftalk@pkeevers Some of us already had Red’s crown, you start off with 90 pearls, the last 2 daily challenges offered 30 pearls a piece…that’s 160 and the party hats are only 20, there are only 7 birds, so do the math.
Start with the party hats, it’s worth it. Once all the birds have a party hat you get the Bronze Sling.
heybert17@heybert17Okay, winning until the very end when my opponent gets a flurry of cards and takes over in a single second is already getting very old.
Angry Beaver@sambeaverFor now arena seems better that it was. As i restarted the game (it stuck on log-in screen and i have no FB account so i lost all progress) and not reached star rank 8 yet i can’t say nothing about weekly tournament but for now i have 6 wins in a row without using any spell. My new random nickname is ‘Terry Star’ (old was ‘Vogel Hawkins’).
bossywings@bossywingsHi
Think I´ve found a bug. When you get a spell filling the Desctruct-o-meter and using it, you´re losing a spell of the ones you´re saving. And another thing: this thursday i got 2 golden ducks, 3 blizzard, 2 chilis and 3 pig inflators whith treasures. But when i started the game on friday i´ve lost 2 of each. And i haven´t been using them in the game even if i got the via the Desctruct-o-meter. So now i´m down 4 golden ducks, 2 blizzards, 3 chilis and 2 pig inflators. Other than that i´m a happy flinger.
Regards
Djangosmum@djangosmum@james-simon – you get the chance to buy hats with the pearls every day when you go into the Arena to claim your daily feathers.
hamvestor@james-simon@djangosum, I must be missing something, because I’ve never seen an invitation to buy hats with the pearls. I’m not even sure what you mean by claiming feathers in the daily arena. I’m 12-0-0 in the Arena, having won gold in all 12 of my Arena competitions, so I’ve won feathers, and I get feathers or gems when I claim treasures periodically during the day. Is that what you are referring to, or am I missing something? I’ve often wondered why other competitors seem to consistently have birds ranked higher than mine, and wondered if there was a way to get/buy feathers that I am not aware of. Sorry to sound like a novice, but I seem to be missing some opportunities here!
kelshe@kelshe@james-simon, to claim your daily feathers, go to the arena, click the bird with the exclamation point and claim the feathers. You will get feathers equal to your star ranking plus 10. So, if you’re star rank is, say, 10 you’ll get 20 feathers.
- Author
Home › Forums › Angry Birds 2 Forum › About the Angry Birds 2 Arena
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.