Yeah, I’m in arena 3 at level 5 and I play against nothing but level 6 Chinese people who have upgraded epics I will probably never have like Witch.
Just don’t spend money. There’s really no reason to spend just a little money, it won’t improve your game at all, even a few hundred dollars won’t change anything, you’ll just speed the process a bit and be back facing people with better decks in no time flat.
If there was a way to spend a reasonable amount of money to get a tourney worthy deck, I would consider it, but the way the game is structured there’s no sensible way to spend money on it.
I don’t plan on giving Supercell a damn cent. There’s “pay to win,” and there’s pay to win. People complain about CCGs like Hearthstone being pay to win, but you can’t drop cash to straight-up buy a card, or upgrade a card, or anything like that. In Royale, you can pay to have your identical cards be better versions of free players and also pay for gold that can be used to get cards you don’t have at a price that’s absurd for non-whales to grind gold. You want that Witch? 2,000 gold for a single copy. In the meantime, I see your collection could totally use 88 Skeletons instead of the few rares or epics you wanted! Here you go!
They’re a smart company, but a shit company at the same time. The game was addicting and fun when I first started, but now it’s simply an exercise in frustration.
Eh, I don’t think it’s as bad as all that. Sure, if you want to play at the top levels you need to either grind a long time or pay a lot of money (or really, both), but how is that different than anything else? It’s not like you can just compete against the top Hearthstone players for a few bucks either. Same goes for LoL, Starcraft, Chess… Just because someone can have better cards doesn’t mean they auto-win. In fact, I doubt the difference of a few levels scattered across the cards is enough to turn anything but the most razor thin margins your way, and any gap larger than that probably just bubbles that player up the ranks. So if you see someone with much better cards, odds are they are quite bad or in the middle of a run of terrible play.
The thing that I do think is odd is the drastic difference in what the ratings mean during the workday vs. nights and weekends. It’s really like a 100+ point gap, maybe more, between the two.
The developers of Clash of Clans, Supercell, has been purchased by Tencent for $8.6 billion.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tencent-agrees-to-acquire-clash-of-clans-maker-supercell-1466493612
Don’t the Clash games make $8.6 billion in, like, a day and a half?
So, is anyone else still hopelessly addicted to this? Anyone excited about the new Tournament mode?
I’ve been bouncing in and out of Legendary Arena for the last couple of months, though generally spending more time “in” than “out”. Finished previous season at 3060, and will finish the current one at 3075.
I was very close to ragequitting entirely a couple of weeks ago, after playing 20 games in a row against people with at least 2 of the 3 really annoying legendaries; Princess, Ice Wizard and Miner. All are just incredibly cheap, powerful, versatile, useful in any deck, and pretty hard to counter profitably. The best you’d usually do was an even exchange. Overcoming a challenge every now and then is fine, playing at a 10% power differential to another player is not too bad, being repeatedly kicked in the teeth by players who have not just a small advantage but qualitatively different options available… Urgh.
Meanwhile I was just rocking the Sparky. Now, I don’t want to complain too much; getting that Sparky almost instantly boosted me from 2500 to 2900. But it is still clearly the worst legendary; easy to counter, and so inflexible that you pretty much have to design the deck around that card.
But I didn’t actually pull the trigger, since just when I was seriously contemplating uninstalling, I got a Princess from a SMC. And it’s really opened up the game again, so nice to actually have multiple viable deck options available. Of course now I’m part of the problem…
I made level 7 two days ago then down to 1700s again. Sad Panda.
I finally dropped Clash Royale after getting into an arena, then falling out, then getting in, then falling out, etc. It’s almost like it’s too well balanced. I’d go on long winning streaks, then a long losing streak. Of course, losing a match always takes more trophies than winning gains you, so that’s shitty. At some point I realized I’m just not interested in the rollercoaster anymore.
Having fits trying to push and hold past 1700. I have no legionaries, and around 1800 is when you tend to see at leat one legendary rather regularly. I think this game may be on its last legs for me.
I still enjoy this way more than most of the other time waster games I’ve played on my phone. The individual matches are still pretty interesting and progression has a much larger skill component than most games. I’m hovering right around the new arena at 2300, and that’s without any legendaries still. The challenge when hitting a wall is to figure out if you’re deck needs to be changed or even completely redone, or if you just need to focus on upgrading some cards. Playing against legendaries frequently does inform some of those decisions. I had to add minions back into my deck because flying units are the only real cost effective way I have to counter Sparky. They also work well on the miner. I don’t see princess often enough to really worry about her, and ice wizard is so common that I’ve just learned to deal with it.
That’s interesting. Do you really see a lot of Sparkies walking around without AOE air cover? As a Sparky player, minions are the least of my worries. Zap is the real Sparky killer, and since it’s so incredibly versatile it should fit into almost every deck.
I… uh… might have reinstalled Clash Royale after being clean for 9 months. Just for a couple of games, you understand. And it’s really fun again. All the opponents have crazy OP cards doing bullshit I don’t even understand. But it doesn’t matter because my decks were built for a 9-month old metagame, and everyone has forgotten how to play against Sparky-RG or Giant-Poison. So I just shot up the rankings by 500 points.
(Err… Ok, it might have been more than a couple of games. Help.)
I’m actually shocked I still play this one daily. I still enjoy it quite a bit.
Having now found the new challenges tab, I’m loving the feature. This is exactly what I wanted from the game a year ago: a mostly even playing field, but with the games having some consequences.
The level playing field is simple: it obeys the earlier tournament level caps. It’s not totally fair, since obviously most people won’t have access to most legendary cards. And of course it’ll take a while to work your way up to the level cap for the other card types.
And, the challenges are probably more consequential than the ladder games. On the ladder, losing a game just means that you lost a bit of rating and will probably regain it within the next few games (and vice versa). In the challenge mode your goal is to win 12 games, but you’re out of the challenge after losing 3 times. More wins will geometrically increase the rewards. You can’t just spam these, since there’s a small entry fee (in the paid currency). And since winning the big prize requires winning 12 out of 14 games, even a single loss is painful.
I can totally see playing the normal ladder games only the bare minimum amount to refill the chests, and do all real playing in challenges. (Or maybe the gem refill rate is so slow that this is implausible; never needed to pay attention to it before now).
Pleny of room in Black Company
I’ve made the first step on a dark road. I’d almost completely run out of gems, and there was this special one-use “congratulations for reaching Arena 10” special offer for a 100k gold, 1200 gems, and a legendary. So I put money into a free to play game :( Just $10, and I’ve gotten literally hunderds of hours of fun out of this game. But still…
Now, I’d mostly got it for the gems and the legendary. But being suddenly flush with gold, I then bought a Lava Hound when one appeared in the store. Then the very next day, there was another Lava Hound for sale, enough to upgrade the previous day’s purchase to level 2. It’s a sign! So I bought that as well.
None of the popular Lava Hound archetypes really worked for me (don’t have inferno dragon, and don’t understand how to successfully both defend and afford to play a Lavaloon). But at least I’m bouncing around the 3500-3600 trophy range, with a Lava Hound/double minion/lumberjack deck, which is a pretty significant upgrade from the 3000 where I was a few weeks ago. Not sure I can think of any good substitutions given the cards I can actually upgrade. So I think next step is going to be getting this deck’s commons up to level 11, and that should be enough to get me to the new Legendary Arena.
Haven’t cracked the challenge yet. Best run is 11 wins, and it’s really inconsistent. Anything above 6 wins still counts as good. The Electro Wizard just totally wrecks me, since the deck relies almost completely on short range low hp melee units for actually taking down towers.
You can get one 10 dollar special offer per account, per arena. So don’t worry if you miss it it will pop up again. If you are going to put any money into the game those are certainly the way to go. The ladder itself requires infinite money and all spending will do is raise the set point so I don’t see much value in investing in that, but getting all your troops to tourney rank and getting one of each legendary sets you up for all the fair play challenges.
Yeah, but the lower arena deals don’t look particularly compelling once you’ve already bought the best one. Obviously still better than just buying the gems for the normal price, but a super magical chest + 10k gold isn’t much to write home about.
Also even though the ladder is indeed a treadmill, there’s still some carrots for advancing on it :) Early on it’s unlocking new unit types. At this point I’d like to get to 4k for the end of season draft chests.
I’ve managed to peep into the Legendary arena for a couple of times now, but can’t yet maintain a position there. I’ve been rotating a bunch of cards to fill in more of the gaps.
Finally settled on the Rocket for the heavy spell slot; remote kills on air splash damage troops are crucial, and the Rocket is the only thing that’ll work on an Executioner. Took a while to learn how to use the Rocket, but once the timing clicks, nailing a rocket on a huge mob of units moving at different speeds is just really satisfying.
Subbed in Mega Minions for the Minion Horde as soon as I got them to a decent level, just for the durability to air splash units/AoE spells. And the last slot of the defensive unit has been most volatile. When I last wrote, I was using the Lumberjack. And especially at level 1, it just had no business getting in actual fights. The death-Rage worked occasionally, but more commonly it was wasted on not popping off at the same time as the Lava Pups, or on being the only defensive unit around. The Mini Pekka, Knight and Electro Wizard saw some action in that slot too; but I needed units in that slot to be able to stop a Barbarian Ram, distract Elite Barbarians, and have the DPS to deal with Golems in a timely manner. So in the end it was a job of for good old fashioned Barbarians. They’re pretty useless on offense, but that’s not what I hired them for. And even though I don’t use them for attacking, having a few Barbarians roll in toward a tower after a defence often gets the enemy to waste some Elixir defending, even though I had no intention of supporting the attack.
So my main deck right now looks like:
Tower/10
Lava Hound/2
Tombstone/7
Mega Minion/8
Rocket/8
Barbarians/10
Goblin Gang/10
Arrows/10
Minions/11
I could upgrade the Arrows, but there’s not much point, since I see max level minions once a week and that’s the only matchup that matters. The Barbarians are really close to an upgrade, but it might not help much. And the underleveled Goblin Gang is severely cramping my style right now; losing the whole stack to a Zap is just brutal. So I should be requesting Goblin Gangs, except I don’t know if that’s really a card I want to continue using.