Will All Stars be fair in 2025?

In addition to point 3 above: There is another way how King can control our chances of winning by the events they place into our games:

I have run the following test: I played episode levels 2346-2360 at my best speed using boosters and super colour bomb. I used a stopwatch to time how long it took me from the "play" button to the "tap to skip" button. The whole episode took me 7 minutes. My best time including all the animations in between "tap to skip" and "play" had been 13 minutes. This shows that King can control to a significant degree how fast we can play and therefore how fast players can score by the events and animations they place into our games. Again, this is theoretical and I have no way of knowing if they actually do this. But they certainly can, just by tweaking our events.

Right folks, I feel the end is nigh.

Firstly I would like to apologise to all my friends who are not seeing the All Stars event. It is quite possible that I am to blame for this. King monitor this community and undoubtedly I am on their radar and have been all through 2024 since the last All Stars. My analyses and recommendations have not gone unnoticed and I suspect that they have played a part in the way that many of my friends and many of the best players are not seeing the All Stars event this week.

It may be a coincidence of course but this much seems to be likely:

King are excluding players who they think may stand a chance of winning or whom they suspect of having cheated. I know for a fact with 100% certainty that in the case of my Cornflower game they were mistaken if they assumed the account had used cheats or taken advantage of glitches. Therefore I assume that many other innocent and honest players have been excluded simply on these grounds:

1. They are surviving at the end of the map and not spending a fortune. King believe this is not possible by the way their algorithsm work so they assume that players who are gaining gold without spending money must be using glitches as "not intended by the game". My Poppy account is one of these. It has gone from around 40 gold to over 2000 in the past months. This probably raises a few red flags at King's, and to be honest, quite rightly so in the case of Poppy. There are however definitely ways for non cheaters to survive at the end of the map such as watching lots of ads. If the merging of new player accounts with an existing account is now deemed "unfair play" even though previously there was no such rule then this would exclude a lot of end of map players by default. A lot hinges on what King define as "unfair play" and they don't even share their definition with us nor do they state clearly what they mean by this.

2.They have a lot of gold bars saved in their accounts and making more gold without spending money . This is where Cornflower got caught up in the unfair exclusion system.

Too many of my community friends @MannyFae, @Colleen Companion Welsh, @Carol-38, @cookiemae, and those who have joined in my threads and analyses like @Nobody1 and @GiggzZz have fallen foul of one or the other of those two apparent exclusion criteria. I am not sure if I want to compete in a competition where the best players are excluded. What seems to be the point? Playing against a bunch of newcomers to the game with a stash of gold bars seems unfair in the light of this, no matter how honestly the gold was earned and saved up. If I spend my gold bars to compete then the other players will have to spend cash to keep up and I am not sure if my ethics will allow me to do this.

Before it's even started this whole tournament seems doomed to be unfair.

My declaration is: Cornflower made gold by playing slowly, carefully and taking advantage of all the events in the game plus some rewards gained from this community (600 gold came from the Help a Newbie thread, which was one reason I contacted QueenB about it. King's exclusion bots may not have taken money earned from the community into their calculations). Cornflower also made gold through the gold chocolate box, which can be filled by using UFOs from adverts which show up if we fail old levels. The gold chocolate box is infinite with no time delay, so in theory I would have been able to amass much more gold than I have, if I could have been bothered to just concentrate on this one account and watch loads of adverts. I don't consider this method a glitch or unfair play. If King wanted players to not gain gold from the chocolate box this way they should put in a time delay or remove the ability to pass older levels with ads (I can't see the point of this for any player). I don't think King track how many adverts we watch nor how many boosters we have in our accounts. I don't think they can.

We should all have spent our gold and filled up our coffers with boosters instead. Some players may have done this and they will probably win the tournament that way. I wish I'd have foreseen this and advised accordingly. So lastly I am sorry to have posted all this nonsense advice about how to make gold and saving up for the "Big One".

Here is my starting point.

Two devices above are iPad and iPhone. (The timed boosters are from opening the game just now and the daily treat machine firing off)

@QueenB , @PummyRaj

Hi guys, since my last post we have now had an official reply from Admin. Check out the post by Snowrider here:

I am really not sure now if I want to participate here or not. Clearly the King bots did consider my own Cornflower inventory to be "suspicious" until QueenB intervened. I am pretty outraged at the exclusion criteria no 2:

1️⃣ Test Groups – Even if you're in an eligible country, some players may not be included due to testing limitations.
2️⃣ Account Inventory – To prevent unfair play, the system may block accounts flagged as potentially suspicious based on inventory activity.
3️⃣ Using a VPN – If you're connected to a VPN, it might interfere with event eligibility.
4️⃣ Device Time Settings – Changing your device's time settings to a date outside of the tournament period can also cause issues.

I might have been wrong in my assumption that King use our gold balance rather than our inventories to judge who is "suspicious". Clearly they know and use both! So the recent change you noted to how boosters get added to our inventories was real @MannyFae and was part of King's control systems. They do keep track of our boosters through their Big Brother cookies now. Whether I bother to compete in this tournament or not, one thing is for sure: I won't be playing any Candy Crush after All Stars is over.