Happy Pre-Halloween

First of all, yes, Waste Land is open now! The new treasure increases EXP received.

Hrmmmmmm... preparing for expansion of max player level?

Whoo! Free random rangers

I was all tickled when I got my Mach Brown and Mach Moon today in the mailbox but then when I opened the game this evening, I saw:

• Halloween Cony!!!!!!!!
• Gacha Event updated (limited time) - More on this in a minute

Halloween Cony is so cute. I love her little wizard hat. She reminds me of my first Cony, Magician Cony. When I first started playing the game, I got Magician Cony and I could not be happier. Halloween Cony brought me back to that nostalgic feeling a bit. It's funny to even use the word "nostalgic" for a game that is less than a year old, but it's been a long journey. 

Halloween Cony IS pretty OP. I like her a lot. I don't have her mastered, but even so, she's crazy powerful. Her cooldown is, as expected, a bit long, but it's not as long as some other "OP" splash rangers out there -- and this is based on no numbers whatsoever, by the way. It's based on me playing 2 of the new stages with her on my team and just kinda marveling at her. Her speed across the board is just fantastic. And the stats? Brace yourself.

488k splash damage! 3.53M HP?! :O!

Mine isn't mastered, but she's still pretty freakin' mighty

Back to the gacha event that is going on right now until the end of Halloween -- when I first read the splash screen for the first event, I was all super confused. What on earth does this even mean? Well, this is how it breaks down:

• It's a whole other gacha panel that costs 200 rubies to play once. 
• The possible contents of your gacha result are 4 or 5 stars only, meaning there are NO 3 star rangers in the Halloween Gacha
• Instead of 2 bonus free spins by paying 200 rubies, you get 3 bonus free spins (because if you do the math, 100 rubies buys you 5+1 = 6 spins, 200 rubies would normally buy you 12 spins. The Halloween Gacha buys you 13 spins instead). 

I haven't spent any serious money on the game in a few months and I've passed over a few limited rangers as a result. But this Halloween Gacha event is very compelling. It's attractive because you're guaranteed to not get any rubbish 3 star crap that frankly, I don't even use for combining anymore (I just sell for coin). It's more worth it than any Premium gachas were previously because of the 3 spin bonus. Now, unfortunately, you are NOT exempt from receiving farmable free rangers nor the lesser exciting 4 and 5 star rangers from the earlier generations, but it's still mounds better than receiving Hero Jessica for the 500th time. 

My yield from 600 rubies: 

Halloween Cony x2

Luke x3

Hip Hop Brown X2

Maestro Boss x2

Cherina

Muay Thai Brown

Junior Cony x2

Legend Boss

Luis

Somchai

Honey

Bernard

Sorcerer Cony

Gentleman James

Summer Brown x3

Biker James x3

Frog Brown x3 (first time I've gotten him in Gacha, but he was reportedly in the mix intermittently)

Sindy x2

Fighter Moon

Songster Cony

Macho Moon

Rapper Boss

Lightning Jessica

Abdula

Clara

General Brown

This Halloween Gacha event is going on for 2 weeks so if you wanna throw down some money, now's the time. It's what we've been clamoring about for months and this is LINE's response to our feedback. All in all, I'm pleased with this. This is the most satisfied I've felt with the Gacha in a very, very long time. Perhaps in all of my time playing this game. BTW, we are supposedly getting increased chances (whatever that means) to receive all October new rangers during the current Double Chance/Ruby Bonus period as well (until October 18). 

So with all that excitement, I'm heading into Waste Land! The zone looks pretty hard and I'm kind of confused, because I think I saw the birds from Maze of Illusion in the first couple stages... running out of ideas for enemy design, maybe? Oh and... guess who? THUNDER BROWN is the new farmable 5 star ranger. I would be pretty pleased with this selection, but I admit that Thunder Brown's arrival is dampened a lot by the availability of Driver Brown. Still, for players who didn't have the feathers, time or opportunity to grind stages to get the limited edition Driver Brown, Thunder Brown will make a great addition to the tanking team.

Oh and Alex is the new 4-star. Meh. :P

I hope you all have fun!

State of the Game - August 2014

It's been roughly 5 months since the dawn of LINE Rangers and the game has changed drastically since its infancy days. I wanted to take some time to just step back and look at our journey. At its core, LINE Rangers is a straightforward game with a simple goal: destroy the enemy tower and advance to the next stage in our quest to rescue Sally. It has a truly addictive nature about it and has captured the hearts as well as the wallets of many people. For players who have joined at various points in time, here's what the game looked like back then.

We've come a long way to save Sally

The game initially released on February 27, 2014 with 60 stages and 75 rangers:

• 11 5-star rangers + Honey (100 friend invitation gift)
• 12 4-star rangers + Frog Brown (50 friend invitation gift) 
• 18 3-star rangers + Elf Cony (30 friend invitation gift) 
• 15 2-star rangers
• 16 1-star rangers

5 cycles of new rangers were released on a monthly basis:

• March 2014 + 4 rangers: Sorcerer Cony, Opera James, General Brown, Macho Moon
• April 2014 + 6 rangers: KSM, Dancer King Boss, Bernard, Hip Hop Brown, Songster Cony, Red Brown
• May 2014 + 6 rangers:  Ola Brown, Lightning Jessica, Dwight, Dumpy, Abdula
• June 2014 + 7 rangers: Susu, Luis, Prince James, Best Couple Brown and Cony, Hitman, Cherina and Shu 
• July 2014 + 6 rangers: Rider Edward, Mully, Chichi, Summer Brown and Cony, Elle

The game today has 132 stages and 104 rangers. That's a 120% expansion of single player game content and almost 40% more playable rangers than the original game.

Let's let that sink in for a moment: The game has more than doubled in available content. For any game at all, if a game maker is doubling its content in less than half a year, it means the game is hugely successful and the pressure to keep the content fresh is very high. When content is in high demand for a mobile game with such a simple concept, the landscape of the game has to change in order to keep its customers coming back. 

Stages to Plow Through

Today when a new player joins the rescue effort to save Sally, they are given 30 rubies just for starting. There are plenty of players who just started the game and rolled Ola Brown, Cherina, Dumpy or some other similarly powerful 5-star ranger with their first 20 ruby Gacha. And for those players, stages 1-108 are pretty much a breeze, limited only by the number of feathers they can get their hands on. For players who didn't happen to win some super overpowered rangers, their experience is... well, not very different up until around stage 84. I know this because I've personally replayed the game 3 times over. It's all still basically enjoyable but you really don't hit a wall until you reach Temple of Ice or Altar of Flame if you are schlepping through with free rangers.

The most prohibitive factor is actually your player level and the amount of coins you have available to make your upgrades. Especially when playing with the experience boost item, your player level will mostly likely be higher than the level your pocket can support in upgrades. In any case, with some fairly diligent playing, one could realistically arrive at the front gate of Maze of Illusion within 2-3 days with the aid of a powerful premium ranger, or about a week or two with free rangers. If brand new players can blow through 90% of your content in a matter of days, you've got a real problem. 

New Battle Modes and Why We Needed Them

June 19: Enter Team Battle Mode, Friend Battle Mode and Endless Mode. Endless Mode is a really nice addition to the game because it will continually offer players more to do as more areas are released in the future. The challenge continues to mount over time. I wish that they were a bit more clever with EM's stage environment, but nevertheless, it gives people something to wrestle with when they are done with the end-stage of a new area. Friend Battle Mode is a neat little way to duke it out with your friends and earn as many Friendship Points as you like in a day, limited only by the length of your friend list. They were both welcome additions to the game. 

Team Battle Mode became the problem and the solution to the content problems between releases. The player versus player aspect of the game has shaped a competitive edge to the players of the game that didn't exist before. It solved the issue of people going days and even weeks with "nothing to do" because in Team Battle Mode (PvP), there's always someone different to face off against. Day or night, there was another team to fight, another point to gain on the ladder. 

The funny thing about this ladder mode is the fact that players can purchase more feathers to continue to battle, and the rapid rate of climbing up in score is a complaint that a lot of people have with PvP. Half  hour into the weekly ladder contest, there are plenty of people who have already burned dozens of rubies for more chances to battle and gain points. That's likely a bigger investment into PvP than many players are willing to put in. But consider the flip side. If players were not allowed to buy special feathers and everyone could only play Team Battle Mode once every 30 minutes, then we'd run into the problem of the top ranked players being zombies as they would not sleep more than 149 minutes at a time for 7 days straight. Everyone else could only hope to play as many feathers as they can in their waking hours. Furthermore, players are at the mercy of the random matchmaker because the points you gain/lose factor in the ranking of your opponent. Suppose the top 2 players in the ladder both play all 336 feathers for the week, but one of the players got unlucky and got matched against an opponent who was ranked much lower. The loss of even 1 point could mean defeat for the entire week. Where is the fairness in that? 

So instead, the system we have is one where players who wish to participate in the top tiers of competition can buy as many feathers as they wish. Each week since the release of PvP mode, the score of rank #1 has increased. Yes, indeed LINE continues to make a killing as players grow more and more cutthroat. It's a contest of who can play the most number of winning matches in the span of 168 hours. PvP was never intended for be a level playing field for all.

Thank you, nongmetoo

This picture by nongmetoo is a very nice summary of what happened last week (PvP which ended August 4 06:00 JST), and a pretty good setup for the coming week. She did a picture like this a week or two ago, unfortunately I lost it. The trend that I got from the two was that the player behavior at the top 20000 ranks has changed dramatically, and likely will continue to shift for a while. People have been increasingly buying additional feathers to push up in ranks. Six weeks ago, rank 301-1000 could be achieved at approximately 2500 points. Today? You need over 6000 points to secure the 150 rubies. A month ago, to win 100 rubies you could skate by and land in the 2001-5000 rank without buying any additional feathers and profit the whole 100 rubies. Today you simply cannot do it. You will land in the 5001-10000 rank by not buying feathers and playing very solid matches throughout your waking hours. 

It's not at all rosy up in the top tiers. If you want to get up in the 2001-5000, you need to spend some rubies, but the reward gain is only 20 more rubies than the next tier down. So can you jump from 5001-10000 rank to 2001-5000 buying just 20 feathers? It's very unlikely, unless you time your wins very carefully. In the top 101-300 rank, players are rewarded 300 rubies, but they spent over 100 to get there, netting under 200 rubies. In the top 3 ranks it is even worse, players spend well over 1300 rubies for the week to get to 15000 points. They only win 1000 rubies from the competition, so they are in fact netting -300 rubies just to walk away with the glory of being ranked 1, 2 and 3 in the world for the week. 

So what am I saying? Line created a competition that profits off of people who want to reap the greatest rewards? Well... yeah, they did, but you could say that exact statement about tons of other games. If you want a chance to win, you have to put down some cash. Does it create a situation where small cash players get pushed out of the competition? Indeed it does. It's almost like a game of poker. If you want a shot at the pot, you have to buy in. The more fierce the game gets, the more money is involved. At a certain point people will duck out of the race because it's just too rich. But at least in the Rangers weekly ladder, everyone walks away with a minimum 20 rubies back in their pockets. Armed with this information, you can judge for yourself whether you want to step into the fire. These days, I find it easiest to target a tier I want to sit comfortably in, and just do enough to stay there. Trying to climb past rank 5000 requires quite a lot of effort that even I am not prepared to put in, but there are many others who enjoy it very much.

Gross Revenue

Please bear with me a little because these are all relative comparisons and with limitations based upon the data available. According to the website AppAnnie, which indexes app information and sales, LINE Corp has been 4th or 5th place in worldwide revenue for games in both the iOS and Android (Google Play) market from April through June. This includes all of the game titles in the LINE library. So yes, they make a ton of money. 

Now I'm going to use an example and take the Indonesia market because Indonesians are consistently the heaviest traffic viewers on this blog. Based on the information on AppAnnie, LINE Rangers started to surge up in sales almost immediately after release. It steadily climbed up in the ranks of the top grossing app charts in both iOS and Google Play markets in March and April and has been hanging steadily in the top 100 ever since. The in-app sales trend goes as you would expect: Line Rangers dips a bit in sales when there is no event and nothing special going on, then rushes up whenever a big event like new stages and new rangers are released (not coincidentally with double 5-star chance events happening simultaneously). This sales rate for the game is mirrored in similar markets like Thailand and Taiwan. 

So clearly, the gripes we as a playing community have with certain aspects of the game are overshadowed by the huge popularity of the game in the last half year. Yes, the odds of the Gacha are becoming increasingly unfavorable. Yes, the new rangers are increasingly mind-boggling in strength. Yes, the new area is much more challenging than all the previous ones. But despite all that (which are debatable whether they are good/bad) the game continues to be a success. The feedback that LINE gets from each new release of content and rangers is that people get excited. They love it and they are willing to part with their money for the latest stuff. For better or for worse, this is what the revenue stream reflects. 

Versus Other LINE Games

Other competitive game titles for LINE include Pokopang, Cookie Run, Let's Get Rich and Tsum Tsum. I don't play Pokopang and Cookie Run at all but the revenue that those two games draw in are astonishingly steady. Especially Cookie Run, which is almost always found in the top 20 grossing games in the relevant markets. I wish I could tell you why that is, but since I am not an avid player, I don't really know what impacts their sales or whether players would find it compelling to make in-game purchases very often or at a specific time/event. I will say this, because I played it a couple of times and looked up some details: Cookie Run is not an in-house developed game from LINE. The maker is Devsisters, a Korean company. Cookie Run was hugely popular in South Korea for years before it made its debut as part of the LINE family to the rest of the world. So maybe this developer company has created something inherently unique from the rest of the LINE games that affects its sales pattern. Maybe it has just existed long enough that the game is coasting on a winning formula. But in any case, LINE Rangers as a homegrown game has earned a place in LINE's eyes as one of its most popular and surely one of its most profitable. [Also for those of you not aware, LINE Rangers' concept is not original. It's pretty much a copy of the game Battle Cats with prettier graphics and more lovable troops. LINE definitely did a good job making a simple game more appealing.]

One more sort of interesting thing I've noticed is, typically if sales suddenly rockets for one game or the other (like the launch of Disney Tsum Tsum is a very good example), the grossing sales of other LINE games like Pokopang and Cookie Run tend to fall a bit. This indicates to me that there's a really good chance the players of LINE games are roughly the same pool of people and that they probably play multiple LINE games. The time that they can spend on any given game is finite, and so if their interests turn to one game or another, the rest of them may not get much attention. So perhaps they have some kind of event cycle such that the games each get some promotional events which do not overlap. That way, the games don't cannibalize each other. Or if they don't coordinate this way already, they probably should think about it to maximize sales.

Concluding Remarks

I bet a lot of the info here is not news to many readers. Why am I writing all this? This post is meant to be a stake in the ground, just marking where we stand right now. Perhaps the game will take a left turn somewhere in the future and we'll look back on this current state of the game as the "good old days," who knows? 

Events are fun and exciting. And we get stuff which makes us happy

For me, it very much feels like the game is blossoming and we may be at the beginning of a stabilizing time. The last 5 months have given the developers a good idea of what works:

• Challenging content can be cleared with a reasonable amount of effort 
• We really like events. Giving us rewards sprinkled in the day-to-day like the boss stage events or ranger bonus events enable us to achieve what we want to achieve a bit easier. Some events gave us some rubies or chance at something powerful and useful to fuel our desire to keep playing (like the Clara event and Stage 100 SoCo event) 
• Tweaks to free rangers to make them competitive for current areas, as well as the addition of the 80% stat bonus for combining rangers 
• Dangling "limited edition" rangers in front of players to create the "need" to Gacha and promote trendy excitement

And it has given them a good idea of what doesn't work:

• Stage rewards which are not conducive to the current challenge. This triggered the shuffling of all the obtainable 4 and 5 star rangers in the early and mid-level stages a couple months ago. I have a strong feeling that LINE learned from their previous slip up and as a result, there was a good amount of thought put into the decision to include Alice, Opera James and Sorcerer Cony in the recent stages. 
• Giving select regions significant amounts of bonuses while other regional players do not get to participate. This is the age of social media. Everybody finds out about everything, and players feel bitter when they're excluded from promotional events when they are all playing the same game.
• Doing things "behind the scenes" and not giving us any notice of it happening. It really makes players crazy.

I know many people will have differing opinions about the current state of the game and what its biggest issues and successes are. And that's ok. Not everyone plays with the same goals and mindset. But it's nice to have this game that we all feel pretty good about so that there is this feeling of community. Line Rangers & Friends has been on the internet for just over 4 months and I have accumulated over 500,000 hits in a pretty short amount of time. The blog has evolved as well over the course of these few months. I feel good about that. Thanks for playing and reading and contributing to the game, everyone. One of these days, we'll save Sally! 

Illusionary Dice MoI Area 11 Treasure Effect

When I first heard that the Maze of Illusion treasure was increase in attack speed, my first thought was, "oh really, again?" :P My second thought was that it was one of two possible effects:

1. DPS (damage per second) of the ranger would remain the same, but the hit rate increases. Exmaple: Without the treasure, if Ranger X's DPS is 10000 and he hits once every 5 seconds, then his damage per hit is 50000. Assume that with the treasure his hit rate doubles, then he would hit once every 2.5 seconds while his DPS remained the same, then each hit would cause only 25000 damage. This scenario causes no total damage gain, but has its perks as hitting more often can be advantageous. 
2. Damage-per-hit remains the same while the hit rate increases. Example: If without the treasure Ranger X's DPS was 10000, he hits once every 5 seconds, then his damage per hit is 50000. With the treasure, assume the treasure causes hit rate to double, then he is doing 50000 every 2.5 seconds. His new DPS would be 20000, effectively doubling it.

One way gives us just marginal benefits while the other gives us significant gains. So which way is it?

Our friends at LINE Rangers 台灣社團 has done the research for us! The text you find contained in the box below is an interpretation of their new article, Increased Attack Speed Treasure Comparison.

Article comes from: LINE Rangers 台灣社團
Author: 小為，黃郁弘
Research participants: 黃郁弘，小為，為執著，張家銘，黃名楊
Editor: 小為

Summary

LINE Rangers 台灣社團's testing has indicated that Maze of Illusion's treasure effect increases the rate of attack while preserving the amount of damage per hit. Each ranger's "attack" in the profile card represents its DPS (damage per second), and the damage per hit is derived from this number. The treasure preserves the ranger's damage per hit value according to its original DPS, but because the treasure causes an increase to the number of hits the ranger produces in a time period, it effectively is increasing its "true" DPS value. We can multiply the profile DPS value by the ranger's attack speed to find out how much the DPS has increased. For instance, Alice's profile lists her DPS as 53128. With 100% Illusionary Dice benefit, her DPS becomes 96693*.

* This value was obtained by using the attack speed value discovered via research method discussed below.

So how good is this treasure? Since this area is so tough, many players have had trouble getting it. Once you get to stage 129, you have a chance to unlock it 100%. Not to disappoint, the raid team has finally obtained 100% of the treasure and solved the mystery of its benefits.

The Method

The test method used recordings of the rangers attacking as researchers watched them in 10x slow motion to see the attack speed of each ranger. They recorded it many times and took averages of their observations so as to minimize error. Their original attack speed values were posted in their first article on the topic here, which I discussed on my blog here. Here is a sampling of their findings post-treasure (measured in time between hits):
  - Sol's speed is now 2.38 seconds, down from 4.33 s
  - Witch Cony's speed is now 1.47 seconds, down from 2.67 s
  - Alice's speed is now 2.55 seconds, down from 4.63 s
  - Opera James's speed is now 1.50 seconds, down from 2.73 s

Compare that to the original attack speed and you will see that obtaining 100% Illusionary Dice results in a 0.55 attack time reduction.

100% Illusionary Dice Attack Speed Coefficient

By battling a friend who does not have the Illusionary Dice treasure unlocked, the testers (who all obtained 100% of the treasure) saw that the Damage-Per-Hit value has not been changed, which is key to understanding how the treasure changes our ranger's damage.

Example: Level 70 Witch Cony

  - Without treasure, Witch Cony's damage-per-hit against the tower is 35648 

  - With 100% Illusionary Dice treasure, Witch Cony's damage-per-hit against tower is still 35648

From this, we can deduce that the treasure does not affect base damage values. Witch Cony's original no-treasure attack speed is one hit every 2.67 seconds while with 100% treasure, she hits once every 1.47 seconds. Since the treasure increases attack speed while preserving her damage-per-hit value, it means that her true DPS value has been increased. Based on damage-per-hit:

  2.67 sec/1.47 sec = approximately 1.82 times

...which means that if you take her profile DPS and multiply it by 1.82, you will get her new DPS. The treasure increases DPS by 1.82 times. 

Other rangers' attack speed changes also reflect the 1.82 coefficient:

  Sol 4.33/2.38 ~ 1.82

  Witch Cony 2.67/1.47 ~ 1.82

  Alice 4.63/2.55 ~ 1.82

  Opera James 2.73/1.50 ~ 1.82

This is how we arrived at the previous example with Alice: 

   53128 (original listed DPS) * 1.82 = 96693

Afterword

Line Ranger stages 109 - 120 of the Skyscraper area originally released with the treasure "increase attack speed" but because they reduced the damage at the same time, they finally changed the treasure altogether to something else, increase attack range. The present treasure for Maze of Illusion carries the same description as the old treasure, but it is vastly different and very beneficial to players. Once you obtain 100% of the Illusionary Dice, go back to Skyscraper and you will realize just how much easier the area becomes with the treasure effect. 

But the treasure effect is not just a DPS increase. It has substantially decreased the amount of time it takes for previously "slow/very slow" attack speed rangers to produce one hit. For instance, before the treasure, there was a very good chance that Sol would be knocked back or totally killed before landing even 1 hit of his red bomb. But now his hits are only 2.38 seconds apart (down from 4.33 seconds), so one quick burp and the enemy loses 250k! 

Conclusion

Long story short, the new treasure is the second scenario that I posed at the start, the effective DPS is increased by a factor of 1.82. 

Regarding Castle in the Sky

What about the 1.4545 multiplier from the Castle in the Sky treasure? Where does it fit in? 

Rest assured, the Castle in the Sky treasure is still in effect and it is still a factor in our rangers' damage-per-hit. The new attack speed is simply doing that amount of damage-per-hit more often.

The calculation of our rangers' damage is getting more and more convoluted as they add more treasure effects and multipliers. And it's getting all the more challenging to backtrack because they took away the enemy tower HP values that we used to measure against >:O It's all bit mind boggling, but we're getting more powerful all the same so I can't complain! 

Thanks again to the gurus at LINE Rangers 台灣社團. They work tirelessly to find out all this cool information.

Maze of Illusion Part 2 (Stage 125-132)

For stages 121-124, see part 1.

[July 29, 2014 Updated with free ranger video selections]

Stage 125, 126, 127 

For players with access to mastered premium rangers (specifically Ola Brown/Songster Cony/Sorcerer Cony, Prince James/Dancer King Boss, Bernard/Dwight/Susu/Thunder Brown, Hitman/Abdula/KSM) then 125, 126, 127, and 128 will play quite similarly. The goal is to splash down the tower (there'll pretty much be no point in time where you can feasibly single-target attack the tower). The key obstacles to overcome are getting rid of the Ryo mushrooms at the front and the Dice at the back. 

The way to do it is to stall as long as possible during the enemy's first pass so that they all pop out. Then tornado them back and then allow all the non-boss enemies to walk forward ahead of the enemy pack. Then you can use ice shot, meteor, then invincibility to clear all the small enemies and weaken the slow mini bosses a great deal. Saving friend help for this critical point in time is best. This will be the common tactic used in just about all the strategies for the rest of the area. What will vary is the number of Spades and Crockys that you'll have to contend with in each stage, with increasingly stronger enemy towers. But the strategies are essentially similar.

And by the way, if you are having a lot of difficulty with stages 124+, spend the time to farm up a master Sorcerer Cony. She is very helpful.

In 125, you'll have 4 Spades, Ryos, Ambers and Dices. This is the free ranger method by Wei S, and it assumes you have access to at least a level 60 Sorcerer Cony from Stage 124.

Video Link

Here 125 done with Master Bernard, Dwight, Ola Brown, and Songster Cony.

Video Link

Here is another 125 done with Free Rangers: Glenn, Xan, Shu, SoCo, Opera James, from Arsoitee STSerbvong.

Video Link

In 126, you'll have 4 Spades, Ryo, Ambers, Dice, but no Coocoos.

Video Link

126 with free rangers: SoCo, Shu, Masked Moon, Xan, by michael suzuki.

Video Link

In 127, you'll have 6 Spades, Ryos, Ambers, Coocoos, but NO Dice, so you can feel free to use your shorter ranged splash units like SoCo and Opera James. Below are 2 good examples by nunbkk.

Video Link

Video Link

Stage 128

You guessed it... it's like all of the above, but worse. The combination of Ambers, 11 Dice, Coocoos, 4 Crockys along with 7 Spades makes 128 absolutely brutal. Here is my favorite way to do 128. You need to have KSM, one other mastered long range splash ranger (Ola/Songster/Shu), and Red Brown. Your KSM can be level 70+ and it will still work, but you should have either mastered Ola or Songster to make up for it.

Video Link

Of course, a free ranger strategy is possible for 128 and several great players have put out videos for it. But my favorite for free rangers is from a Thai player, Arsoitee STSerbvong.

Video Link

If you have mastered Susu, and a lot of other heavy hitting splash rangers, give this one a try.

Stage 129 - Ryo, Coocoo - Lots!

129 dials the pressure back down again, and things get simpler, but more intensified doses of small enemies. I think they threw this one in here just to give you an easily farmable stage for the last piece of treasure. There are many ways to deal with 129 because of its simplicity, but for main tank, Thunder Brown is my favorite choice. He's really not that pricey to deploy, he's very meaty, and his cooldown is about 2 seconds (mastered). He's spammably delicious! 

This video is by far my favorite strategy. It relies a little bit on friend help, but the majority of the pain being dealt is from master Shu while Thunder Brown tanks with his face in the shrooms. 

Video Link

If you do not have Red Brown, here are Scott, Rei, Glenn, Shu and Sorcerer Cony.

Video Link

Stage 130 - 2 Crockys, Dice, Coocoos, 5 Spades

After 129, difficult ramps up again as you head toward the end. Many strategies from 130 through 132 will assume that you have unlocked the treasure. And if you haven't, you really should farm 129 because it helps a lot.

Here is one way to do it with free + event rangers: Mastered Shu, SoCo, and Red Brown.

Video Link

Here is a 129 video with pure free farmable rangers by michael suzuki: Glenn, Scott, SoCo, Opera James, Xan

Video Link

Stage 131 - Short path with Amber, Ryo, Dice, Crockys, Spades

131 being such a short path creates a terrible challenge with the Dice. But actually, it's not bad at all if you have Sorcerer Cony because she packs serious punch. The first hurdle is to set up your team. You need to stall the first Ryo with as few lowbies as possible, meanwhile deploying as many Conys as you can so you have a small army. Once you get a few Conys out, you can tornado everything back. Follow up with invincibility, ice, and meteor. The goal is to kill all the Dice. There rest of the stage is just keeping the enemy from moving so Cony can splash the tower down.

Video Link

The Thunder Brown, Ola Brown and KSM trio on this video below by Cheng-Ling Chiang makes 131 fairly simple. If your Ola and KSM are not mastered, you could also throw in SoCo and/or Abdula in the team to increase your damage. If either your Ola or KSM are not mastered, the trio will narrowly miss the damage requirement, so you do need to make up for it by adding another ranger. This strategy does require you to have pretty high mineral production. If you're not cranking out enough units after the ice shot goes out, you might be too low leveled.

Video Link

Stage 132 - King King and everyone else

132 is the mother of all of the stages. It's got everything. The majority of videos out there require you to have Susu and if you watch the videos, even mastered Susu can't take the heat of this enemy procession for very long. I'll discuss 3 different teams to approach 132.

Premium Rangers: Another one by Cheng-Ling Chiang. This video uses mastered Scott, Thunder Brown, Ola Brown, Songster Cony and Dancer King Boss. Premium rangers, yes, but none of them are from the latest set of rangers. I love that this player pulled out Scott and Thunder Brown, rangers who have been long forgotten.

The strategy is similar to the Stage 124 technique. You stall with Scott and Thunder while leveling minerals and waiting for all the enemies to pop out. Deploy DKB and Ola with any spare minerals. Once they've beaten up your tower for several million HP, use Tornado. Then after using tornado, you wait until about halfway, when the enemies are still marching pretty close together to use Ice Shot, Friend help, Invincibility, and Meteor. After invincibility wears off and King King slaps your team with his hammer, you are guaranteed to get a Thomas, which will further slow down the group and stall while you wait for Hurry Up. You should keep deploying Scott nonstop, Thunder Brown on cooldown, prioritize Ola > Songster, and forget about DKB now. When Hurry Up starts, all the enemies lose half their HP, which should help you clear up King King, the remaining Spades and Coocoos. Once you are done with those, you have to deal with the march of the Hurry Up enemies, which includes another half-health King King. It will hurt, but if you keep the pressure on with Scott and Thunder, they should pretty much stop moving. Use Thomas as soon as you get him. Eventually, Ola Brown and Songster will KO the tower with splash. This is definitely a long battle, even with premium Gacha rangers. Impressive display by Cheng-Ling Chiang.

Video Link

Free rangers including Event Rangers: if you follow this video below by 黃小翰 and his team, you're doing basically the same thing as the premium rangers, but timing is even tighter, and there's a lot of stalling. After all 5 of the Spades have spawned, you'll already be dealing with 11 Dice. The video waits for Dice #18 to spawn before using tornado.<insert exasperated emoji here!> I believe there are a total of 20 Dice during the normal phase of the stage. 

After tornado, keep deploying Red Brown to stall the enemy pack to move slowly together towards you some more. Once there, unleash the pain with Ice Shot and Friend Help. Follow up immediately with Invincibility to maximize your army. Your goal while your items are in effect is to kill all of the dice. After invincibility wears off, you're just stalling again until Hurry Up and Thomas. Hurry Up will chop half of remaining health off King King and the Spades. After Hurry Up has begun, unleash Meteor and Thomas. That should get you very close to killing off the boss units so you can deal with the new Hurry Up units. No more dice spawn *until you get to the tower*, so just stall with Glenn (he's cheaper) and let Cony and Shu deal damage. Once you close in on the enemy tower, use Red Brown again because more Spades, another King King and more Dice start to appear. Continue to deploy Red Brown > Glenn > SoCo > Shu until victorious.

Video Link

If you don't have Red Brown or Shu, Wei S has a pure farmable free ranger method as well. The basic strategy is the same: stall and wait for many enemies to pop out. Up until tornado it's almost the same as the 黃小翰 free ranger video, however, without Red Brown to help slow down the enemy march and Shu to out-range the Dice, you will be forced to use tornado much earlier. The second significant difference with this video is that King King is much closer to the home tower when Hurry Up begins. It's a longer distance to push toward the enemy tower again, but I suspect he did this intentionally and there's a reason for this. Those of you who read my post about Stage 108 will recall the genius of allowing Hurry Up to begin while your troops are very far away from the enemy tower. Because the enemies have to walk a great distance to you, it buys you more time to exclusively deal with the faster, smaller enemies as they march forward ahead of the mini bosses and spreads out the mini bosses so you can deal with them one at a time rather than all bunched together. This is how Wei S deals with the Amber bunnies, Crocky and the new Spades during Hurry Up. It's tougher in its own way (and about a minute longer than the method with Shu & Red Brown), but such is the life of a free ranger player. Masterful video!

Video Link

Good luck, everyone! May we all find Sally one day...

Team Battle Balancing

This is a delicate subject. A lot of players have expressed that there are issues with Team Battle Mode (which I'll just call PvP, player vs. player, for shorthand). We know that the developers tweak the PvP parameters and the computer AI quite often because we see the game download "new resources." Each time they push new team battle files down, it throws us all for a loop because we don't know what they have changed. Teams you used to ride to victory one day may not serve you very well the next. But here is some breaking news from our friends at LINE Rangers 台灣社團 which may help explain what's going on. Their raid team published this just today, and this will change the way you think about your PvP strategy. Keep in mind that this is subject to change, and very likely will given Line Rangers' track record.

Team Battle Attack Power Reduction Ratio

Published and valid as of: July 14, 2014, 6:37pm. The text contained within this box is an English interpretation of the original article. 

• Article originates from: LINE Rangers 台灣社團
• Authors: 黃郁弘, 小為
• Testing Contributors: 黃郁弘, 陳安安, 小為
• Editor: 小為

The Line Rangers Raid Team is focusing on attack power specific to Team Battle this time. 

Rangers' attack power = DPS x Attack Speed x Attack Power Treasure modifier 

We discussed the details of this formula for finding actual attack damage in the attack speed post where the Raid Team hashed all that out.

The team experimented with rangers in Friend Battle Mode and discovered that rangers' attack power while in Team Battle Mode is weaker than in Single Player Stage Mode. The amount by which they are weakened is determined by the ranger's classification. 

Quick example:
Level 80 Alice's attack is reduced down to 33813. Level 70 Shu is weakened to 4049: Alice's attack power is approximately equivalent to 8 Shus on single target damage.

Test Method

The test team used Friend Battle Mode to do all their research. They allowed the opponent to attack their tower (since only the home tower has HP values now) in order to exact the damage inflicted by rangers. If you click on the article, you will see the pictures which illustrate Witch Cony inflicting exactly 24808 damage on the home tower, a farcry from the calculated 49616 damage per hit she should be making in single player mode. 

Sampling of rangers of various class types and their modified attack power in PvP Mode. The last column is the rangers' attack reduction modifier rate

Conclusion

The Line Rangers game has adjusted the damage rate practically once per week. Last week, splash rangers were reduced to 0.20, single-target rangers were 0.25. 

The week of July 14, highlights were attack class rangers 0.70, while other single target rangers were 0.50. 

This just continues to prove that Team Battle Mode is not ruled by splash rangers. If you have Dumpy, Prince James or Dancer King Boss, it's time to take them off the bench. You may find them surprisingly effective. 

For players who play with free rangers, Alice and Masked Moon are great choices. 

This week, attack rangers have the highest attack modifier as they're attacking at 70% power. All other single-target rangers are performing at 50% power and splash rangers are doing just 15% of their original power. Yikes.

Surely from the early days of Team Battle Mode, we have felt that something was not quite right. Our rangers do not perform the way we expect them to. Thanks to the team at LINE Rangers 台灣社團 we now know what was happening last week for a few days when it seemed as though our rangers were dying faster. Some modifiers must have been changed which created a difference in the actual damage rangers were inflicting and the way we expected our rangers to be performing. 

Some players may be outraged by this, but this info doesn't shock me, actually. A lot of games that have vs. player and vs. computer modes create a modifier for damage vs. other people because the pure damage in vs. computer environment would spell the end of player controlled units in no time at all. The amount of damage that is increasingly demanded to keep up with the challenge and difficulty of single player would not translate well in a PvP environment. This is an attempt to "balance" the rangers to make the PvP experience smoother and more worthwhile. Everyone will have their own opinions about whether this is helping. 

My biggest problem with Line Rangers with regard to these modifiers is the fact that players have gotten NO NOTICE about their existence nor the changing of these values on a near-weekly basis. This is something I criticized in my survey to the developers. They change stats without telling us. They change stage environment and enemy formation without so much as a warning. And they created and tweak these attack rate modifiers without any indication. We're left to wonder week after week why our fine team last week sucks this week. Or why our good tank yesterday is getting fried today. I understand that Team Battle is new and the game still needs tweaking. But the players should not get penalized for the mistakes and trials of the developer. At least give us the opportunity to properly adjust.

If anyone out there in LINE world is reading, my greatest plea would be to give us notices when significant changes like this are pushed out. Please?

And finally, I want to emphasize that the above stats are a snapshot of the PvP environment as of July 14 afternoon in Taiwan time. These numbers may not apply for tomorrow or the week after. And I wouldn't expect for the authors of the article to continually update the modifier numbers, either. It really changes too often to keep up-to-date 100%. But the point is, we know that our team composition needs to take into account for this kind of a parameter. This week, if you have the super good single target attack rangers on your team, you're probably kicking butt all over the place on the ladder ranking. Next week, it might not feel as great.

By the way, this does not mean that there is no place for splash rangers. You shouldn't just cross splash rangers off your team. Their potential damage is still huge when the enemy stacks up a bunch of rangers together. What this deters is having a whole 5-man team of splash rangers. That comp might not be a very effective team at the moment.

It's also possible that they tweak other stuff, like how much HP rangers have. We don't know if they've ever touched that stat in the past or if they will in the future. Sometimes you just have to go by feel of how your team is performing, and adjust accordingly.

Edit: This is more of an afterthought but... I just realized that I should feel kind of cheated by these modifiers. I spun the Gacha a lot over the last few months for splash rangers like SoCo, KSM and Ola Brown. Especially Ola Brown because he came around right as Team Battle was introduced, I wanted him badly! And I'm sure a lot of you were spinning for a chance at Susu recently. They're all splash rangers and they were promoted as the most powerful rangers in the game. And yet we just found out that splash rangers are performing at a mere 15% of their normal power in PvP. Anyone else feel like they've been played for a fool? HMMM...

Gacha Probabilities - June 30 - July 3

The results are in from the June 30 - July 3 Double 5-star Chance Gacha Event! If you participated, thank you for contributing to the survey (created by 小為) to provide the Line Rangers player community with helpful information.

The Results

Our friends at LINE Rangers 台灣社團 have concluded their survey once the event finished and they were able to collect 329 sets of data from participants, a total of 3449 results (raw data is here) from Gacha. Results were:

• 3★%: 1008 (29.23%)
• 4★%: 1001 (29.02%)
• 5★%: 1440 (41.75%)

This 5 star result is very similar to what the previous results were from their mid-June study which were:

• 3★%: 30.56%
• 4★%: 21.55%
• 5★%: 47.89%

The Analysis

Authors 小為 and 楊濟安 of LINE Rangers 台灣社團 posted this new article about their findings with some more information and analysis on the numbers. Contained within this box is their article interpreted in English. 

The results being 3★ 29%, 4★ 29% and 5★ 42%, by lumping the 3★ and 4★ odds together (an average together of 58% of the samples), we can say that the Gacha is only slightly biased towards 3 and 4★.

Now let's move on to some more in-depth useful information. 

1. How many times do you need to play to receive one super ranger? 

  - The authors defined super ranger as one of the ten 5★ rangers that everyone typically wants to get: KSM, Susu, Cherina, Luis, Hitman, Prince James, Dwight, Dumpy, Dancer King Boss (DKB), Hip Hop Brown. There are a total of 24 5★ rangers on the roster now (Ola is no longer obtainable). Let us assume that the odds of each ranger are the same within their star grade. The chance of you receiving one of these shiny 10 rangers is 10/24 * 41.75% = 17.40% during the event. You'll need 100/17.40=5.75 spins of the Gacha on average before you can expect to receive one of the 10 super desirable rangers. 

2. How much do I need to spend on average to get a level 80 Susu?

  - For this question, we're going to have to assume again that the chances to receive each of the 5-star rangers are equal.

   Susu is 1 out of 24 of the available 5★ rangers. Multiply 1/24 by our 41.75% to obtain 5★ and you'll get a 1.74% to receive Susu, which will take approximately 57.5 Gacha spins for 1 Susu. You need 5 Susus to max out so that means you actually need about 287.5 spins.

    Well, 287.5 spins means you have to play the 5+1 48 times (4800 rubies). I don't know how much they charge all the other regions in the world but in US Dollars on the Android Google Play market during the Ruby Event we can get 494 rubies for roughly $49. In order to get 4800 rubies, we'd have to buy almost 10 packs, which costs $491 USD! It's possible that you get unlucky and have to spend more, but there are those who scored Susu on their first few spins. The average is simply for illustrative purposes.

    That said, I sincerely hope that if you were aiming to get Susu, that you did all your Gachas during this past event because if you don't do it during the double chance event, chances are you'll end up spending a great deal more money. But then again, these are averages based on some reality, some assumption, so take it all with a grain of salt.

3. Should I spin with 20 rubies or 100 rubies? 

   - This is a popular question and to answer it, we won't talk about the part that luck plays, we will only discuss probabilities. 
    This question involves the concept of independent events. If we assume that the 6 results from playing 100 rubies are each independent events, this means that one spin of the Gacha has no bearing on the result of the next spin of the Gacha. The authors believe that the 6 results from 100 rubies Gacha are independent events because a lot of people reported getting four 4-stars and one 5-star, or three 5-stars and three 4-stars. This kind of result would not be possible if the game developer had set the 100 rubies Gacha to be dependent events. For instance, if we believe the Gacha is set up to predetermined dependent results, then we should often get results of three 3-stars, two 4-stars and one 5-star, with some variability but not to the extreme of some people getting four or five 4-star rangers in one shot of 100 rubies. So if we assume that both the 100 rubies and the 20 rubies Gacha are independent events then we can use the July results of 41.75% to do some calculations.

For this example, we'll just assume that the chance of you receiving the ranger you want is 1 out of 100 for sake of illustration. 

    - If you used 20 rubies x5, the chance of you getting the ranger is 5%. 

    - If you used 100 rubies, the chance of  you getting the ranger is 6%. 

Based on 41.75% chance to get a 5-star ranger, we have a 17.54% of getting one of the desirable super rangers. 

    - If you use 20 rubies five times to spin 5 times you will average only 0.877 desirable rangers (which is to say playing 5 times can possibly yield you zero desirable rangers). 

    - If you use 100 rubies once to spin 6 times, you will average 1.05 desirable rangers (which is to say you'll get at least 1 desirable ranger on average in the bundle of 6).

    The difference is slight, but it lies in the fact that 100 rubies gives you that one extra spin. Remember the answer we got to question 1 above: you need to spin 5.75 times on average before you can expect to get a desirable ranger. Playing 100 rubies puts you inside the chance to get one since you are spinning 6 times. In this light, playing the 100 rubies game is relatively better. This was deduced based on the information that was collected from the data set. Of course, your personal experience may deviate from this because this is the "average."

4. Should I spin while there is no double chance event?

The short answer is no, of course not. Here's why:

   - Since we have a 41.75% to get a 5★ ranger during the double chance event, then it goes to reason that without the event, our chances are roughly 20.88%. 

Our chances to get a desirable super ranger: 

   - With double chance event is 17.4%, averaging 5.75 spins to get 1 ranger

   - Without double chance event is 8.7%, averaging 11.5 spins to get 1 ranger

This makes it pretty obvious that during the double chance event your odds of getting something good are much higher. The authors recommend, as I also do, please resist the urge to scratch the itch while there is no double chance event going on! For if you do, you're very likely going to spend some time with this guy.

Go away, Pew. We still do not love you.

Concluding Thoughts

I've stated this before and I think it is important to repeat this: The 41.75% number was an average from a vast pool of results. It is possible that you played and rolled on some very different results than the average. And surely you have seen on the internet instances where people have rolled insanely good results. But this is why this is the average. 

The other consideration that often makes players sad after playing Gacha is the fact that your personal set of "desirable" rangers may be a lot smaller than than 17.4%. Maybe all you want are Susu, Hitman and Cherina. In that case, you're rolling on much smaller chance and the chances of you getting something you don't want are much, much higher. 

Astute players will notice that supposing 5 star chance remains the same in the future, as long as LINE continues to release more new rangers, the chances of us getting each ranger will be lessened each time. This is made especially clear when you compare the difference in the odds of Susu (1.74%) and last month's Ola Brown (2.39%) which translated to an average difference of $148. This really does put players who have been playing for a long time in a worsening situation. For instance, myself, I have almost all of the rangers on the roster (not all are masters) and the ones I still need are just a tiny percentage. The chances of me getting what I want keeps diminishing. It's a tough situation, but I can understand that as a game maker, they need to keep pushing out newer, better, shinier products for people to want to buy. For me, the breaking point is near, but for many others, there's still plenty of incentive to buy in. 

Last but not least, a special thanks to 小為 for pooling all this information for us to share.