About the Angry Birds 2 Arena

[David Martin]

While we’re on the topic of Arena strategy – has anyone noticed that the Duck spell seems a lot more impotent nowadays? I can’t count how many times in the last week I’ve used that spell in the Arena, only for it to bounce off of nearly everything harmlessly, or else there’s an apparent “no-fly zone” for the ducks off to the left or right where I really need them to pummel a specific structure. This has made the Ducks a liability more often than they are an asset. Not sure if the spell was nerfed or if I’m just having a bad week.

Chili can be rather annoying too, in its insistence on almost always picking the top pig in a stack, but that could just be my bad luck, and it’s certainly nothing new. I try to save it for when there’s only one pig left onscreen and I don’t want to waste a useful bird on it, or there’s a cluster close enough together that exploding any one of them will take out the rest for sure.

And we all already knew how useless Blizzard was. Yeah, in maybe 5% of situations I can actually have Blues or Terence handy when that spell comes up. At all other times, it’s a dead weight.

The bottom line is that bringing extra spells into the Arena can sometimes hurt more than it helps. You’d think it would help because it essentially gives you a few extra shots, but if you have a spell or two clogging up your arsenal and you can’t get to the useful bids farther down without wasting one of them, it’s quite annoying.

[cognitive]

The same question as in the old version: Who the f*ck spends so much gems to win 300 in the end?

The natural limit of playing for free (no tickets) is – I think, please correct – play 5 games in a 3 hour period, win 4. If you do that and end up with 10 points per match, that’s four games x 10 = 40 games, times 5 cycles a day that’s 200 points a day.

Anything > 200 points a day involves tickets, either bought or banked. (again, please correct. My scenario is: free entry -> +1 ticket, win 1 (10), video bird +1 ticket, win 2 (10) -1 ticket, ticket win 3 (10) -1 ticket, win 4 (10) +2 tickets -1 ticket to play, lose 5th (-1 ticket). total 40 points and 0 tickets from where started.

The key in the Arena is to recognize and respect your competitors. If you see some guy who’s able and willing to put up 150+ points a day, there’s no point chasing them. You can finish second, and try next week. I’m not very competitive in nature but as the quote above says, there’s no point spending a lot of resources to win a limited amount of resources.

There will be a brief period of time where everyone collects the requisite 700 pearls to get the slingshot, and then we’re back to square one.

The thing is, by grouping everyone semi-good into Diamond League only, you invite a huge range of players. The scoring advantage of a +1 or +2 slingshot or +2 birds over you is simply too much to overcome unless one is a very skilled player.

[cognitive]

David, I feel the blizzard is a bit more useful now that there’s a lot more granite than wood or ice. Yet if you blizzard you also lose the advantage of toppling granite onto the next structure, plus your observations. I don’t use them very often.

Speaking of impotent, Terrence… Everyone else seems to be useful but there are so many cases where Terrence simply bounces off a single thickness of wood. Yikes.

[David Martin]

Yeah, ice doesn’t do much to damage ice. In that sense, Blizzard makes Red and Silver less useful than they were before. Matilda comes out about the same – she can still blow stuff up, but making her ricochet into a second structure is less effective when it’s ice. Bomb can make debris fly farther, but again, it doesn’t hit as hard. And of course Chuck is useless with ice. So 5 out of 7 birds are as useful or less than they otherwise would be.

I get enough Blizzards from treasure chests that I figure I might as well use them. I’ve found that they combo with the Ducky reasonably well, so when all else fails, I just use them on a big room to get them out of the way. I’m never going to use them in the DC or the main game, so I figure I might as well experiment with them in the Arena, at least at the lower end of a streak where I have a lot of leeway for mistakes. It would be nice if a Blizzard could at least sometimes trigger a TNT detonation, like it does when you use the ice bird in AB Space.

I too am frustrated with how easily Terence can get stopped in his tracks, when under similar circumstances elsewhere, we’ve seen him crash right through a building and keep on going. It probably has to do with the angle at which he strikes an object – if he’s going mostly horizontally and hits a horizontal support, it seems to absorb a lot of the impact, whereas if he were one pixel off, he’d hit a vertical support and that in turn would push against the horizontal one, leaving little to no resistance against Terence because apparently that isn’t transferred back through objects to him. Probably something in the physics engine that needs a little tweaking, but this is just a wild guess on my part.

[heybert17]

I have the same issues with Duck and Pepper so it isn’t just you, I have seen Duck not take out a single pig too many times recently, they used to wipe out a whole screen, 2nd only to Eagle.

For someone to get the max points each day they would have to be perfect, 10 points a round is not the norm even for good players, and everyone sleeps, no one should be playing every 3 hours.

[David Martin]

Everyone sleeps… what, you mean normal people don’t have to wake up every 108 minutes to push a button and save the world?

[CaptSternn]

Maiasatara, I can guarantee from experience that there is nothing in the program that prevents you from winning because of the number of arena tickets you have. I have an insane amount of tickets and I am winning streaks without using any tricks.

Not losing tickets was discussed here a lot a while back. Two updates ago some people lost that ability while some kept it, which was really bad because we were still fighting players with five spells. Now it seems all have lost that ability. But not as bad because the opponents are matched better and they don’t bring spells.

[David Martin]

Agreed – I’ve had some tough opponents since the update, but none that seemed downright unfair or that I was tempted to back out on. My birds are at level 9/10, and with a little extra effort focused on knocking down as much stuff as possible in the process of killing the pigs, I can often score higher shot-per-shot than a player with their birds at level 11 or 12. I see a lot more opponents with hats nowadays, but that doesn’t seem to be massively skewing the fight in their favor as far as I can tell. As I’ve pointed out before, the sudden difficulty spike in the Arena levels seems to have stumped nearly everyone.

[heybert17]

Does anyone know exactly how stars are awarded in the Arena? I can beat someone by just over a million and get 10 stars sometimes. I just beat someone by almost 2 million and got 9 stars. It seems very inconsistent.

[Anonymous]

Yesterday I beat someone by almost 4.5 mil (from memory he had about 5 mil and I ended up with 9.5mil) and that only gave 9 stars. Yet another time I beat someone by 2 mil (he was 2.5 mil I got 4.5 mil) and that gave 10 stars…Inconsistency is the name of the game it seems.

[David Martin]

Maybe the stars aren’t determined by a strict point margin, but by your percentage increase over your opponent’s score, or maybe there’s even a different threshold for how many stars you get based on the specific Arena you’re playing (since some of them are harder than others, and lower scores are more common across the board in some of them).

So really it’s the same complaint as the arbitrary 3-star thresholds in the old game. There’s just no transparency about it, so you’re not quite sure what goal you’re aiming for until you actually reach it.

[Anonymous]

@heybert17 @david-martin @chucky-2

I remember a while back that one of the Rovio employees said how the stars are awarded. It was either Banker or Clovos.

I know that back then, you had to get twice as many points as your opponent to get 10 stars. Going by that, and some tests that I did, I’m pretty sure that 6 required a score of 1.2x, 1.4x for 7, 1.6x for 8 and 1.8x for 9.

Going by your comments though, something seems to have changed.

[Anonymous]

@maiasatara I’d love to be in on this. :D

[Anonymous]

@partshade if that is it, they need a better system imho. As getting 10 mil on a set of stages where someone could only get 5 mil, seems nearly impossible without a full set of spells (and even then a little unrealistic for the majority of players).

[Anonymous]

@chucky-2 See, that’s the thing. Back then, it was completely possible to do, even without spells or extra birds. But the arena has changed a lot since then, while the star scoring system hasn’t. :P

[DDeck]

@james-simon

Honestly, it’s anyone’s guess. I also noted the change in the arena. Previously I would see opponents ranked below me in both star and bird level for streak=1 and 2. Then I would be highly outmatched at streak =3. This is what many here report. Then, coincident with everyone here noting the change, I got a streak=3-like opponent for the first two matches, then when I got to three, it was an opponent I’d typically have at streak=1, with all birds 1 or 2 levels below me.

Attempting to figure out the matching system and algorithm is a waste of time because they are constantly being tweaked server-side as evidenced by our observations.

And we already have strong evidence that we are all not playing under the same (to borrow term from numerical modeling), “boundary conditions”. I may be playing under one particular set of conditions, why you are subject to something different.

With the instabilities in the in-game currency going on now, I’ve just set it down and am killing time with something else.

[Anonymous]

@heybert17 @david-martin @chucky-2

Just played an arena battle and can confirm that the system has changed.

My score was 2,079 while theirs was 1,337 (Both rounded to the nearest thousand). I got 9 stars despite only having a 64% higher score than them.

Now that we know the system changed. How are the stars awarded?

@hank Could you shed some light on this?

[DDeck]

@partshade

For me, I’ve aways needed at least 2x their score. If you opponent’s score was 1337, you would need a minimum of 2674 for 10 points, but you only had 2079.

[Maiasatara]

After, frankly, far too much time and energy spent thinking about this game I’ve come to the conclusion that the sad, sad bottom line is this:

For all the struggle to “Rank Up” our birds the normal player will NEVER REAP ANY REWARDS FROM THR INCREASE! Because of the “algorithm” used to select our competitors, we will ALWAYS fall behind the people who have the disposable cash, the low self esteem that’s compels them to spend it being “better” than others. I literally did not get ONE MATCH against a person with a regular sling once I had gone bronze? Before that, all matched had plain old original sling. Now that I JUST ranked Red up to a 9 I have four Level 9 birds. Guarantee my first match in three hours WILL have more 10s.

There should be at least a period of time, right after we earn something, where we actually SEE the benefit. Give us the former algorithm for the remaining 24 hours even. If my “Community” or “League” or “Rank” was ALWAYS THE SAME PEOPLE (with similar monthly spending habits!!!!) then we are competing against a finite group. We could track our progress among each other. If you spend more, you Rank Out of that group and get thrown to the spending sharks.
Rank 1 – $0/month
Rank 2 – $0.01 – $4.99/month
Rank 3 – $5.00 – $14.99/month

@hank – I’m even impressing myself, here, with this idea born during the composition of this email, lol. To avoid people getting into the low group only to Spend Up immediately to screw everyone else, a player has to Opt Out of access to the store for the month l. So if you click on Rank 1, you get NO ACCESS to the store until your month is up. Or for higher Ranks, you’re frozen out once you’ve spent your competitive limit. This is very lose to fair!

[heybert17]

Okay this was a fun round. My opponent started with 2 Blues in their first 3 birds on a level that Blue is almost useless in most rooms. So I had the better birds to start.

I fling Torrence and be does little damage and I get 35,000, he flings Blue and somehow gets over 500,000 on a structure that there is no way Blue did that much damage.

Then I fling Red he fires and gets rid of the pigs but still can’t destroy the structure he wiped out somehow with Blue.

Then at the end after a round in which I got 1 Red, 1 Terrence, 1 Bomb and the rest were the birds least suited for this round I am of course losing. The final structure, one very close to the first structure my opponent wiped out with Blue, I have my video bird, Blue.

I get the expected results using Blue on a structure like this, almost nothing.

All of this was on a streak one in which I outmatched the opponent and should have had a good chance of winning.

[Davetv]

I’m new to this forum but I have been reading it for awhile now. After spending over 4000 gems yesterday on spells and premium treasure chest and playing and winning multiple streaks I closed out the app. When I returned today all of my level 11 birds had disappeared and all progress was lost from the previous session. I’m also losing spells the same as others. This is the second day in a row that this has happened to me. Needless to say I’m very frustrated at this point! I expect rovio to make this right. As much as I love this game rovio seems to have a hard time getting it right! Today I will backup all my progress before I close the app and see what happens.

[bossywings]

Ok, I´ve got to ask about double birds in the arena. Is it a bug or a cheat? I´ve met a lot of players who have double birds while playing.

Thanx

[David Martin]

Double birds are plausible. Say you have three birds left, and one is Terence. You fling Terence and fill up the damage bar. Then you get another Terence, and you fling him as well. Your opponent will see that you had two Terences in a row. (I’ve had up to three Blues in a row once due to terrible luck – one was my last bird, one showed up after watching an ad, the final one showed up after the second one filled the damage bar.)

The more interesting question is how the game manages to keep you from having two of the same cards to pick from at a time, when it’s possible for it to award you a duplicate of a card you still have.

[angrynerds2]

The Beakboxer stole my fun for this week, he leads with 1300 stars now 500 more than number two.
I’m on 10 with 450 stars what was enough to lead the group in the past weeks. Winning is no more possible and I won’t spend a single gem or spell in the arena this week anymore.

[jls]

I have determined NOT to use any spells during play, the ones I am given as a “Bonus” are just taken away from my supply, if I have any of that specific spell left that is.

I understand it’s a problem being worked on. I hope it can be fixed soon. I also miss the ability to cancel out of a match and NOT lose a ticket. It sucks when you open and find a person will all the spells and 11-12 level birds. Its a no-win problem. I just lose the ticket and come back later. I hope people will boycott those players.