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Goodness no @teenybee , that would never be a reason to drive me away.

I am through with the game and don't enjoy what the AI has done to Candy Crush. Also I feel I have become addicted to the community and spend too much time here. I need to do other things with my life. So I will try "Cold Turkey" as they say after All Stars and then you might see me back if there's still something interesting going on. It's spring time now, so time to look after my real flowers.

Thank you. Of course you are correct in this analysis but I am always pretending to give King the benefit of a doubt. You are undoubtedly right, and I do know this.

There is no way I will participate in another leaderboard event that includes tokens. So I guess our days of analysing leaderboards must come to an end now. I can't see myself playing the game much now either.

So once again thank you for all the fun time, the statistics and analyses and all the help you have given me to understand the game better. It's been such fun @MannyFae. I will remember it fondly always. 😊

Here is a rundown of my own experience through stage 5.

I started off on the first day, about four hours into the round. I failed to take a screenshot of the leaderboard, but as expected there were some players who had apparently played a token in the lead. This was the same as always and by understanding the mechanics and manipulations of the app and knowing my own crushing speed I was confident I might have a chance to save all my tokens into the sixth stage. This was my aim: Do not under any circumstance use a token.

This is the first screenshot I took:

This was taken after I had played non-stop for 12 hours over the first night of the round, because there was a huge lead of three or four tokens to make up. Each token is equivalent to ten episodes played normally, assuming that our opponents play at a rate of one episode per half hour. So to reach this score of 80,000 I would have had to crush for eight hours at a rate of 10,000 blue per hour. This is the maximum rate of scoring the app allows anyone. I played more slowly and so it took me 11 hours.

Now I did go into the lead and achieved the "task" set for the first 24 hours the app went into slow motion. Here some screenshots illustrating what happened during Good Friday. I know that a lot of other players experienced a similar slowing down of play (ignore me, just look at everyone else):

As you can see from these leaderboards Amberosia and Keila "played" during these hours (so if they were real players in real time they were not in fact in bed sleeping but logged into their games) but made no progress. This is quite obviously a leaderboard artificially put into slow motion by the computer running the programme at King's server. It affected all players and the entire leaderboard of all 49 players, including those at the bottom. The only player actively scoring any number of blues for the entire day was myself.

This unfortunately discouraged me from playing, when I should have done: I noted the other players did not play at all. If I started to play someone followed, so the assumption was that it's best not to keep crushing. But this turned out to be a mistake. The overall programme and task remained 10,000 blue/hour for eight hours each day, so by following the slow pace of the app I lost valuable crushing time I had to make up during the night.

I was just about to go to bed thinking I could do it by crushing all out the next morning (being in the UK I would have six hours from 8am to 2pm to crush on Saturday) when I just logged back into the app and saw this:

This sudden burst of activity sent absolute alarm bells ringing, and it did so because I now realised I had seen a "VCR effect", an artificially slowed down board all of Good Friday and that this was it: The AI had let all the players loose and was bringing the entire leaderboard back to real time by putting the VCR on a fast forward setting. I was fuming at having been manipulated like this into a false belief that the task for my group was lower than in other leaderboards. During the day I had taken time off to look at community posts and had seen that some leaderboards had already gone up above 200,000. Suddenly at the above point I realised that this could also be the task for my group: This was the second final knockout round after all and had to be fair to all, so no more bespoke easy opponents!

So the only way to definitely win this might be to keep crushing until I reach 240K. That was impossible for me to do already. I had wasted too much time during the day.

There was only one choice for me: Stay up all night and crush my heart out and hope for some luck.

I failed to take more screenshots during the night, but I continued with a non-stop crushing effort at my best speed to try reach as close to 210,000 as I could. I calculated that a player could reach 210,000 with six tokens, which I now thought would probably be the target I would have to beat. So I ignored the other players from now on and tried to reach that score, and only took a few screenshots: First it was Amberosia to reach 150K and as soon as I managed to reach that score and overtake her Keila played a token:

Using a token would be a failure for me. I had five hours to reach and overtake Keila. I was confident that I was capable of reaching this score in about three hours, but had Keila continued to play at this point and then played a sixth token it would have been game over for me. So I was lucky, because at this point the leaderboard was probably back to real time and we were now on a live setting. I believe Keila, being in Brazil, had gone to bed after playing her last token hoping it would be enough. Sadly for her it was not.

This was the point at which I overtook her. Now I had one and a half hours left and this is why I hate those tokens so much: After all this mega effort I could have normally, like in 2025, have slowed down the pace now and watched to see if there would be a response. But I had no choice but to keep crushing my heart out (and spending gold bars in the process) just in case Keila did have a sixth token to play in the last half hour: I had to reach a position 20,000 points ahead of her with half an hour left on the clock, which with my best efforts I was unable to do:

These multiplier tokens have made the entire All Stars experience hell. It was torture and it was inhumane. When setting the parameters for the task to be achieved the AI did not take human nature into account. Events like this should not be run by an AI.

The app failed miserably to make this a fair tournament, if that was at any point intended. By applying the VCR slow down on Good Friday it misled players into a false hope and belief that they could win the round. Even I was fooled and I was the one who had discovered and established the VCR theory. How could I be so stupid not to have realised! I was fooled into not following my own advice, and it forced me to play through two nights. Well, it was a good practice for the final round. This round - stage 5 - was in my opinion harder and more stressful than stage 6 will be.

Because in stage 6 the strategy will be straightforward and simple:

• Crush your heart out as fast as you can for 24 hours,
• Play your tokens as any time you see fit, when really doesn't matter.
• The fastest players will win.
• Ignore the opponents (very important! Looking any player cards wastes crushing time)

By my calculations the fastest possible speed is 10,000 blue per hour (without tokens). I actually believe that King have spent the last twelve months making sure this is the case: They have brought in the AI to write new levels, changed and swapped levels and removed levels that did not conform to the standard, and devised a means to control the outcome of each level for all players: The new revamped jelly fish. They have changed from purple to blue for this reason also, and brought in the "only new levels count" change for 2026. Lastly King brought in the 1000 blue limit per level. Even this fits in with the 10,000/h calculation: Anyone spending tokens on specific levels that can be milked or exploited would score exactly 10,000 per hour if using a token on such a level.

As a result: With six multiplier tokens a score of 510,000 is humanly possible. Any score above that would not pass the vetting process. Please don't complain about "cheaters" in the final round if you see players achieve such high scores. There were 15 million contestants. Out of so many there will be a few who have worked all year to refine their methods in order to reach top speeds. It's to be expected. It does sadly mean that players without tokens will not now have a chance of winning the final stage.

Yep, I've seen through it all now. I'm happy to retire from my testing and analysing obsession now. (Sorry @michimune , but no more new threads)

Whether I get to the live finals in London does not really matter much to me now so I am determined to both give it my all and enjoy round 6. I have reached my Candy Crush ambition: I have figured out how the app works and how the AI does it. It's not because I am clever. It's because the AI is stupid.

My plea for 2026-2027 is:

Sack the AI.

Bring back real people.