For one reason or another I have hardly played Candy Crush in the past two weeks. This has lead to some interesting discoveries as prize palooza shows up.
My theory is that we are each given bespoke opponents by the game to match our own activity. So having been inactive in all my accounts I should be seeing easier opponents. This always applies to my weekly contest leaderboards as well.
I now have a working theory of how King control allocation of our opponents. It's really quite simple: King's computers know if a player is stuck on a legendary level before their player cards get updated. So if they want to pick easier opponents for us they will pick players who they know are stuck mid episode.
So if we see this player in our leaderboard, for example:
we might think patrizia is a strong player. However, I noted down her level when I started the event 24 hours ago: she was on level 8456. So we know that she is struggling and has undoubtedly failed to win her current episode race and is playing very slowly. King's computer knew this when they allocated this player to my group.
I have three games which were either recently inactive or just started as new players. All three are seeing nearly only opponents similar to patrizia. They are all slow players who are stuck in a difficult episode. Like this one:
This player was at level 94 when the event started 24 hours ago. Now they are at level 97. This player was already stuck when allocated to my leaderboard: I happen to have just played level 95 myself as a newbie and it took me ten attempts to pass it, so I know that it is a level new players would get stuck on. King know this too.
Leaderboards are 100% manipulated and not random. We are allocated opponents who reflect our own playing style and ability. Everything in this game is under King's control, so don't be fooled. The only way to get back control is to understand how King manipulate these events. As things are looking right now I would suggest to everyone to stop playing, perhaps even mid episode, a couple of weeks before All Stars and then you might get easier opponents in the qualifiers.
By the way: I have multiplier tokens in all three accounts. A mix: x 10 for half an hour, x 5 for half an hour, x 5 for one hour. I don't think they make a lot of difference to qualifying as there are five places and I don't see five players using them. I will be keeping mine for the final.
