R58 UPDATE NOTES – SPEED UP & AUTOPLAY

I'm excited to try autoplay, but (and I could be 100% wrong here since it obviously hasn't debuted yet) I want to make my opinion known about the speed up.

I am extremely disappointed that the speed up 2x is going to be paywalled somehow. This is a basic feature we should all be getting for free, and if others are going to cheat and cut animations completely anyway for free then what incentive should I have to pay real world dollar for 2x speed?

• Available Speed Levels:
  • Normal animation speed (1x).
  • Speed Up animation by 1.25 times (x1.25).
  • Speed Up animation by two times (x2.0). (Can be unlocked in various ways throughout the Game and Shop)

A huge step in the game would be to have the AI play the moves as we set them up. Either right to left or left to right. This comes in to play especially with the Auto feature now. If requirements to max milestones are hundreds of matches Auto is a great thing but only if we can get the randomness of the order moves are used, out of the game.

Positives

• Repetitive activities are now much easier to complete with this update. There's a rewarding feeling to building up a certain character for tours/blitzes/stip tours that can autoplay their way to success. The AI isn't so smart that you can cheat victories, but if you as a human player put some thought into how the character is built, you can hold the AI's hand and find victory.
• For times when manual play is necessary, the speed up is very helpful to give matches a little bit more pep, especially when using characters that have excessively long animations.
• The ability to toggle auto on and off at will is very helpful for stepping in when the AI makes a mistake, or when manual play has achieved the desired result and auto play is all that is needed to proceed.

Negatives

• As of Oct. 17, it is obvious that the development team has grossly overestimated how this changes players' productivity. An adjustment should be made to meet the player base in the middle - while it's understandable that exploiters have poisoned the well, the maximum milestone in the first grind event after the update shows a disconnect between the fears of what the exploiters are doing to the game economy and the reality of what even the most savvy exploiters can do.
• On the subject of exploiters and autoclickers, the captcha is a wise idea, but having it be tied strictly to the number of consecutive times a player attacks a node, with no consideration to the speed that players are interacting with the node, is a very rudimentary captcha that frustrates more players than it slows. I hope the dev team can find a way to better implement the captcha to slow down autoclickers while having a smart enough equation to sort out players that are showing human tendencies when using the app.
• The autoplay AI, through early testing, appears to be dumber than the script used by enemy players in showdown and feud. This has caused some frustration in the community as it's undone a lot of assumptions that were made about how the AI works on defense - if there is a different script at work here, providing players with the correct script will actually go a long way in helping players understand these defensive tendencies and would provide some valuable knowledge for them to better build defenses against opposing players and build player engagement.
• At least on Android, the auto function is blocking the usage of the device's back button, even outside of matches, until the auto function is toggled off either in a match or in the pre-match screen. This is a very strange bug, but at least one that can be temporarily fixed when it pops up.
• This is a hypothetical negative, but it is widely believed in the community that 2x speed will be paywalled in some way that will further exacerbate a huge gap between heavy spenders and non-spenders or light spenders. I will revisit this when the roadmap for 2x speed comes into focus.

Autoplay is very convenient. On farming for tp or completing a lot of tours battles task for the faction event. The speed is very useful. But the downside of autoplay is the AI not playing the moveset in the right order and not even playing a charge move. I tested the order on which AI uses the moveset and I tried to change the moveset in that particular order but unfortunately the AI still plays the wrong order.

Autoplay is ok if you make your character idiot-proof. I guess it's good for humankind that AI doesn't solve the complexities of Champions though. We don't want this to turn into a Wargames scenario where Joshua becomes the top feuder in the game on it's way to solving the intricacies of global-thermonuclear war. Then we're all locked in a bunker waiting to see if the nukes that are flying are really about to land and end humanity or just a simulation.

I enjoy this game so much that I played the tapjoy games for a time and found one that I liked. In that game, I noticed it had autoplay and wished the day would come that this game would also have some version of that. Now that is here, I'm as thrilled as I was the day I found out the concept existed. The only shortcoming of it is being at the mercy of the unpredictable AI but I will gladly have those circumstances over the option not existing at all. I feel like autoplay actually gives me reason to spend time in the game as i can now do so while completing other activities.

Autoplay is a great addition to the game as a number of aspects can take a lot of time, but the AI does a lot of the moves incorrectly, especially snowfall and pyro gems. Hopefully this is something that can be ironed out soon.

One thing I feel needs to be added to the game is the ability to obtain plated that have not been obtainable in a while. Boss Plate and the All heart plate to name a few. Should you be allowed to use multiple plate tokens to get these. It's important that all players have a chance at these plates.

• Speed up; we will see how the 2x feature will be obtainable (pay 2 use is of course the way all of us are expecting this to be available - maybe another perk feature which is not pay walled by RL money), 1.25x is nice to have but nothing too spectacular of a game changer.
• Auto mode; what's the big difference using Auto mode instead of Auto Clear tickets? 1. Ok, tickets are only available for players who are using the subscriptions. 2. When I get this correctly, Auto mode counts for event points. Auto clearing won't be considered for event points. Right?
• Auto mode AI; this is discussed heavily by community and I can just agree to either put in a feature that allows us when activating Auto to choose the play style (ie moves from left to right / right to left / middle to right then left / middle to left then right / finisher use only when all other moves not loaded / choose mandatory move to be used on every turn) or fix AI to a degree that makes sense (as now AI is not using moves in a very logical way - with exception of using finisher move before everything else all the time)

Having the see the auto play for several days, here are my thoughts.

Overall, I love it. I love that I can turn it in or off whenever. It is the only thing that might make me do stipulations, if they stop crashing on me. (They crash on auto too).

what I would love to see is an auto play settings tab for each character. Allow us to set up the move priority and the gem break priority. I understand that we probably can’t stop it from putting snowflake gems at the bottom of the board, but at the very least I would like it to out the snowflakes on the board before hitting the break snowflakes move.