I used to play the PS2 version of this game and always had tons of fun before brain juice started to run out. The thing is, the difficulty in that game could be countered by a thorough strategic planning in battle and carefully made characters. As it’s the same franchise, i was left to make some comparisons and I’ve found the root of all problems which won’t require a such a change that would break the current money milking traditional mobile game design
And the problem is: if the gem board sucks for one player, it sucks for ONE player. There’s nothing at all that you can do about it and the enemy (or other player) will keep unleashing hell on you. Speaking of which, the matchmaking in PvP is ridiculous. I’m not a brain dead weasel who can’t think a couple of movements ahead but seriously, there are so many people that i have fought who drained my whole shield in just 1 1/5 hits (the second got a chunk of my HP)
Solution, veeeery simple solution: give me skills to reshuffle / remake the whole field / change gem type / etc. It will not unbalance the game, it will not stop people from buying gems, it will not completely remove the luck factor (which is ridiculous for a match 3 game where your opponent doesn’t use the field)
Basically, give me more skills. There’s 0 reason to make them scarce once only ONE player will use the gem board, it gets so repetitive after level 10, you rely on luck and chest items. I came after years that j don’t play the PS2 version just to check out, and I was immensely let down by the life spam of this game
One more thing, the game doesn’t explain to me why sometimes I just deal no damage even tho i made (for example) a 5 yellow gem combination
I couldn’t attach this print i took of how unbalanced it is. I don’t know why, I’m posting with my phone
But anyway, there’s no way I could win that because it’s totally based on the luck that I’ll have 1) the right gems 2) the right place 3) the right quantity to stand a chance
The PVP matching an opponent also seems to have some major flaws in it.
From what I observed the matching is very heavily based on Gear Score, but this ignores several factors which can have a massive imbalance on the match.
While playing through the story on a first character as a ~L20 player I was getting matches against L45+ players. That immediately gives them a ton more health, higher masteries and power, which in turn boost the strength of their attacks making it possible for them to one-hit-kill you on their first turn if their ability gets powered up.
Now with the 0.36 update, existing players were gifted some items to help adjust. For those that were L50 this meant a bunch of Epic items. Now PVP is less about a good build or strategy, and about luck finding an opponent who was playing before but hasn’t got these items equipped so you can kill them with a skull match on round 1.
Getting a bad board at the start can be a problem. In 0.35 this could be mitigated by having 4 different colour low cost spells, so you could quite likely power up 2, 3 or even all 4 on the opening turn. But with 0.36 nerfing spells, the chances of being able to get enough mana to fire even one on the first turn is both unlikely and heavily dependent on the board you get. And since to be competitive on the leaderboard needs a round 1 kill, PVP in its current form is all about power and skull matching combined with an opponent with weak armour and health.