[julrey]

How do you avoid boarding Astrotrain?

[julrey]

Right but on previous level upgrades you only got one of the three: speed, damage and defense would rotate out with each level. Are we saying that you get all three with level 16, or do we even know at this point? Has anyone actually pulled the trigger?

[julrey]

Speaking of these new level 16’s, has anyone determined what you actually get for it? I can’t imagine coughing up 8000 tokens (or equivalent gems) but if it’s just extra driving speed I wouldn’t even be willing to pay half that

[julrey]

I thought we were done with level upgrades anyway. They have way too many ways now to enhance your TF: levels, sparks, accessories… it’s just unnecessarily overcomplicated IMO (see also: Angry Birds 2).

[julrey]

That is utterly bizarre. “Hey, let’s make the softest targets the highest earners!”

[julrey]

Now that you mention it I do remember that, but I thought that was more a matter of they fixed a glitch rather than they kept the offscreen flying pigs but just balanced out the damage. Either way, every day the spark runs seem to get exponentially harder to the point where I project I’m only a week away from them being completely unplayable altogether. It’s almost like there’s an intentional cap built in that assures that, no matter how far you progress in levels on the spark run, you’re still only going to be getting x# of sparks per day: the point potential goes up by at a rate less than or equal to the difficulty level, so you’re working harder and losing earlier to achieve the same results day after day.

[julrey]

Thanks for the explanation on the “thumping”. Unless this is a glitch with a fix in the works having to fight off characters offscreen seems like downright cheating to me. Not that it matters, because on the levels right before I started encountering the thumping I was pretty much clearing everything scorable on all five levels and still not maxing out on points. It seems like a major case of diminishing returns was built into this new feature where you’re not able to power up your bots fast enough to keep up with the escalations in spark run difficulty.

[julrey]

Does anyone know what the deal is with the earthquakes on the Sparks runs that shake the ground and take serious damage? My Energon Grimlock just got nuked 1/3 of the way through the first level and I have no idea what to do except just take the damage

[julrey]

Finally got back in. Taken to a new weekly challenge we no acknowledgement that there was any previous problem. Deleted every single Rovio game I had on my phone as a result. Bye y’all, good luck sticking with your idle threats in the future

[julrey]

This has stretched on for enough hours that I imagine they’ll have little choice but to extend the tournament for another day to make it up to all those affected. If they don’t and I end up losing out on a surefire bot over their incompetence then I’m deleting this game for good (not an idle threat, I’ve never publicly threatened to quit playing over any prior issues, but at some point you just get into “last straw” territory)

[julrey]

There was a time when my bots were still around level 10 that I couldn’t seem to play nodes fast enough to replenish my gold coins before the existing TF finished upgrading. I’m still only sitting at around 6M but I can easily see getting to 100M+ some day without really trying. Just goes to show that with all the moving goalposts in the game today’s key material is tomorrow’s afterthought.

[julrey]

Re: end game state, the irony is that they’ve recently begun adding new levels in Angry Birds 2 faster than I can complete them. Maybe shift some resources to this game instead? Based on the cloud cover in the map it would appear the developers are barely at the halfway point of all that was originally intended.

[julrey]

Has anyone else largely discontinued running missions just due to the frequency of back-to-back challenges events? I’m reluctant to tie up any of my bots on missions when you never know which of them are going to be necessary at any given time on the challenges.

[julrey]

Yeah I used to wonder the same thing when all my TFs were still sub-level 10, but as you near getting maxed out you find that not only are you getting more coins and gems than you used to, but there are also fewer things to spend them on. I only recently hit level 15 on my last remaining TF, so my gem count is still pretty modest, but on the other hand I’ve built up 5.5M coins. When I was still at lower levels I found that I had to play nodes nearly constantly just to keep up with the number of coins I would need to upgrade the next TF when the currently one finished. I couldn’t have dreamed at the time that I would ever hit over 5M coins when I was struggling to come up with, say, 200k by the time my current TF finished upgrading.

[julrey]

My beef is less with the convoluted upgrade scheme and more with the ongoing lack of any endgame. I could justify running the same nodes over and over when most of my TFs were still at lower levels where you’d see noticeable improvement every time you leveled up, but truthfully after about level 12 most TFs were either already complete bad asses, destroying everything with ease, or else they were just destined to continue sucking, a la Optimus Prime and Bumblebee.

When I say “endgame” I’m not necessarily advocating for a planned finale or anything… I realize the moneymaking potential of this game is in indefinite play. But I don’t think Rovio has done a great job of staying ahead of regular players in terms of keeping that carrot dangling in front of us. Many, many players have been able to successfully max out on levels waaaaaay before that maximum is raised, amassing an absolute fortune in coins and gems along the way.

So to whatever extent I take exception to the silo vs coins thing, it’s that the silo materials seem like kind of a weak twist that fails to keep things interesting. The Energonicons were the last meaningful upgrade for me, and even then it turned out in the end that only a small fraction were worth messing with at all. By the time you’re maxed at level 15 you generally have all the firepower you need, so I’ve found myself using Goldslam almost exclusively to maximize my coins. Even there I now have way more coinage (5.5M) than I can realistically spend.

[julrey]

So with this thing nearly in the can, here are my own thoughts after playing this thing for a week…

PROS:
– definitely an improvement over the last challenge. I never quite bought the scoring explanation on the last one (ie. “well you get less points but you need disproportionately less points to get rewards”). It definitely felt like for the daily prizes in particular you had to play far more nodes to collect them.
– the return of Master Pig was welcome, although he maddeningly only seemed to show up when I’d selected one of my weakest TFs
– The ability to redeem Windblade for a mix of tokens and gems is a welcome development taking a lot of pressure off to score in the top 3 each day, but for that very reason I can see Rovio rethinking that option in the future if there turns out to be a lackluster response over these past few days. A lot of veteran players have enough gems that they could theoretically buy these bots and accessories outright without playing any nodes at all.

CONS:
– while I don’t miss the old partner setup, and can definitely see why they mixed things up by requiring us to select TFs from different squads to get the bonus points, the practical result of that is that node points were all over the board depending on how weak the squad was. In fact, in some cases I found that I was better off ditching the bonus altogether and selecting a stronger TF capable of scoring more damage. Either way, it means that folks who happened to be playing while the better squads were in the mix had a competitive advantage over someone who slept through those 4 hours and woke up to find Bumblebee and Optimus Prime were their bonus options.
– as has been mentioned in another thread, the varying squad desirabilities exposed in this challenge has really highlighted how essentially worthless most of the older, original TFs are. Probably not much to be done about that at present, but the next time Rovio increases the max levels again they should strongly think about evening out those shortcomings.
– Since I didn’t get Windblade last time around I welcomed the second chance, but it sounds like there were a whole lot of players who scored it the first time and had little incentive to play again. I do think Rovio needs to keep these rarer bots in periodic rotation – completism is the only incentive most of us maxed out veterans have to stay at it – but they’ve gotta provide enticing alternatives to those players that already have the TF in question.

Anyway, just my .02. Looks like I’m going to come up short on the 6000 tokens, but should be able to make up for it with gems fairly easily. If I’m being honest I probably would have made a more concerted effort to play more frequently if the latter wasn’t an option, but instead I hedged my bets by conserving my gems to make up the deficit rather than risk squandering them on additional chances and still not getting to that 6000.

[julrey]

I can tell you exactly what the problem with Bumblebee (and several other TFs) is: each TF is designed to excel at one or more of three things: firepower, shield and speed. Bumblebee is pretty much all in on the latter, which would seem to be a deliberate design feature, but the problem is that of those three proficiencies speed has never really been nearly as important as the other two. Even with the slowest bots I never really have any trouble dodging falling towers or fireballs from the mortar towers. It’s an almost completely expendable asset.

[julrey]

Yeah, sorry, I did mean challenges, not missions (updated the subject line accordingly). I haven’t opened a trouble ticket, no, just wanted to take the temperature of the forum and see if this was a widespread problem that was already being addressed.

I really wasn’t worried too much about it when it appeared to be a one-off seasonal thing, but if these are going to be ongoing I wouldn’t mind being able to participate.

[julrey]

@rumblebee: I’m using a Samsung Galaxy S4 from Austin. To be clear, the previous issue of (occasionally) unleashing shotgun pigs on a character level that was in no shape to make it out alive was fixed pretty good with the last update, but this current one seems to have not only reintroduced the problem but escalated it substantially, to the point where where you can’t nuke levels fast enough enough you already had a huge stockpile of crystals to use (or are willing to spend boatloads of cash to pay for an insta-stash of them).

It also does not appear to be an issue with anything but L10 TFs from what I’ve seen so far. For instance, after unlocking Arcee and Airachnid I am assigned appropriate difficulty nodes for those characters.

[julrey]

@optimuspig: “I’ve also noticed that going from L10 to L11 makes a massive difference. Of the TFs I’ve upgraded from L10 to L11, all of them were getting pounded at L10, but successfully completed their nodes on the first or second runs after upgrading to L11.”

This is what makes me think it probably is a legitimate glitch, even if it’s one that encourages us to line Rovio’s pockets. It seems to be happening exclusively with my L10 guys. Problem is that’s all they seem to want to queue up nodes for right now and I can’t harvest crystals fast enough to blow up the nodes that I can’t beat.

Also, I haven’t made any progress on upgrading anyone to L11 at all… I haven’t even gotten Airachnid unlocked but even so I’ve spent the past couple days just trying to get Arcee up to an acceptable level. They aren’t lining up impossible nodes for Arcee necessarily, but at lower levels she’s not exactly harvesting a lot of coin either.

Looks like ultimately, by the time Rovio fixes this glitch, most of us will have already powered through it for the most part. It’s just the game is really, really lame right now.

[julrey]

@soloaz: “I haven’t run into this problem yet. None of my TFs are at L10. In fact, all except Arcee are at L6 and L7”

From what I’ve seen this only seems to be happening to L10 TFs. My problem is that these seem to be the only ones that the game wants to queue up nodes for, and it’s Very Hard every single time. Well, I powered up my L10 TFs from the weakest first so I basically don’t have any powerful or durable enough to make it through any of these nodes.

So basically the game has turned into one big holding pattern for me, where I complete the one node that the game deems to give me at a sane difficulty setting, gather a few thousand coins and then wait for that one node to regenerate because the rest are tied up with nodes I can’t beat.

It almost seems less of a “glitch” and more of a deliberate ploy to get those of us who have invested in the game since the beginning to finally break down and either buy Jenga or pay for crystals so we can bomb the nodes we can’t beat. I’ve only got Arcee up to L4 but I can already see that I’m going to struggle to harvest coins fast enough to initiate the next upgrade as soon as the last one finishes.

[julrey]

@audioman612: “I’ve never once had to save up for an upgrade. It’s the insane amount of time it takes to upgrade.”

Curious, are you using Jenga mode? I’ve pretty much always had to work incessantly to collect enough coins between upgrades in order to not have any inefficient periods where I don’t have any TFs upgrading at all. But then I’m one of those guys who is too cheap to pay for Jenga.

In fact, I think this new difficulty level is a deliberate ploy to very nearly force you to buy Jenga. All of my TFs without exception were on either level 9 or 10 – about half and half – and even my level 10s can’t get through a single level now without getting killed (I upgraded my weakest TFs to lvl 10 first because why wouldn’t you?, but that seems to be working against me here).

Right now I’m lucky to have a single TF with a difficulty level coming up that can actually be completed. But I’m more dead set against Jenga now than ever, just on principle alone if anything.