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Valentine Cake Finals analysis

We are only halfway through the event but I can already draw my conclusions:

We are playing a bespoke leaderboard with others who are not seeing us in their games
Beware of when to play your multiplier tokens
When you join makes little difference: the way the game allocates other players now means that "CEES" is as good as "CLES": If you join early or join late is much of a muchness. What matters is who King's computers place on your board with you
Play one new level to enter the contest. Play slowly and wait for your leaderboard to fill up. There should be 70 players per leaderboard. Do not play your multiplier tokens until your leaderboard is full.

How do I know this? Well, because Cornflower made the mistake of going all out while there were only six players on the leaderboard. This is the standing two episodes later:

Screenshot 2026-02-14 at 19.07.59.jpeg

I went all out with my daily stamp plus a 10 multiplier token while only seeing 6 players on my leaderboard. In 2025 this kind of strategy would have worked and anyone coming after me would have posted here and complained about joining a leaderboard with the leaders already way ahead. We don't see such posts now and this is why: King pick players for us to match our own play. And the others don't even see us or play against us. So they added a player to my board who was also going out full throttle, like myself ! Unfortunately I played one of my multiplier tokens in the knockouts (I had five accounts to get through to the finals, so was pressed for time) and ABIR obviously had all three. He played them putting me out of reach and now no longer needs to play. Not much of a competition!

The standings this morning:

Screenshot 2026-02-15 at 10.12.33.jpeg

So do NOT use this method if you are yet to join.

My other four accounts are all finding it easy using a different strategy: I played a few levels, mostly to get past the annoying animations near the beginning of each episode, before playing any multiplier token. By the time I played my multiplier token the app had already chosen my opponents and at the present time, halfway through the finals, they all seem easy to beat.

But we'll see. There might be someone out in those leaderboards who will play their multipliers late. I'll keep you posted.

Welcome! 👋

Sign in or create an account to join the fun.

Comments

Yes, I should have figured it out I guess. You're right about the language thing. Sorry you'll miss out on All Stars.

If I live in the USA, this means I have to use English daily, I think my English would be as best as you😂

And I have been rooting for you😝

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3482168#Comment_3482168

Oh, I thought you were from the US. Sorry about that. Then that's one strong competitor less to worry about…. only about a million left.

Ah yes, that's 10 seconds, I didn't notice. I did also use the tokens as timers as that comes in very useful, but I use a stop watch normally. So do I make it 4,828 per half hour, and then that would be 9,656 per hour? Did you start with a score of zero before playing the token? I think you need to play one level to enter the contest. I guess it's all about skipping the animations. I wonder if King will fix that glitch before All Stars. I does seem to add unfairness to the competition. It is possible that you would be disqualified with a score like this because King's computers have undoubtedly calculated what scores are possible in normal play. With the new system of jelly fish controlling the possible scores King's bots would spot outliers more easily than last year.

Have you ever watch the timer after activated your token? 🤔

This is not 10 minutes left, it’s 10 seconds left, it’s insufficient to upload another one, so it was used up. A token has 30 minutes, so you could double it. This is X30 token, so you could divide them by 30.

Or you could use my final results to minus this score and then divided by 17 minutes. Because I have to finish my episode

What is your hourly rate? I don't see that from your screenshot. According to that you have played 20 minutes of your 30x multiplier token, but there is no data on what your score was prior to the multiplier. How many episodes did you play to achieve this score?

This is a serious question to anyone: Can any of you achieve a better score than 6,800 per hour? Have King set this limit or are higher scores still physically possible?

A photo reply to a serious question.

Without pop-ups, any flying objects by just One 30-minute X30 token. But I have watched two ads after each episode 😅

None of my other accounts are seeing any players around level 1000. I think King are keeping these players off others' leaderboards

Perhaps those players around level 1000 love using CLES as well.😂

They all gathered in my leaderboard. Except the example I mentioned here before, so I may mislead by my observation if I didn’t see yours 😅

No.2:

He is level 366 after this event.

No.3:

He is stuck 😔

No.4:

No.5:

The lowest one and she gets rewards from each round👍

Thank you. Congratulations on your quadruple win, it's insane!

Congratulations on your win and also on getting a challenging board with a sprint finish. A good strategy then.

I joined with 3 hours and a half left on the clock, and was placed 50th on the board with the top player having 11k points. I played one token and stopped.

After checking the board with an hour left, I discovered that my opponent was playing and leading by a couple thousand points. I played for an hour using both remaining tokens. The player in third position was also playing.

So I finally had a morning sprint and also made some easy gold, but I found the overall experience of playing with tokens to be underwhelming. If the tokens were supposed to heat up the competition, the idea seems to not be working very well, based on what I witnessed during three rounds. Agree with those who feel that playing these new leaderboards is not as enjoyable as it used to be.

Here are my five finals leaderboards. I'm showing the standing just before finishing because it shows when players last were active.

The above leaderboard had the 30x multiplier, which is why the top scores are so high. Those players still had at least one multiplier left to use. Once you get to 10th place the difference disappears compared to my other leaderboards. So only about five or six players on this leaderboard had kept one of their tokens for the final!

The above three leaderboards all had the 10x multiplier. I noted huge differences in the quality/scores of the opponents between these three leaderboards, all the way down to players in the lower ranges. The middle flower, Dahlia, had by far a harder board: the player in 40th place scored 5214 points, in Allium's game (just above it) the 40th player scored just 1993. All accounts started during the first few hours of play. I am not sure what caused the differences unless maybe it's because of overall activity of the account in the weeks leading up to the event. It might be random test groups.

This one above is the new player who started playing one month ago. Nasturtium had the easiest opponents throughout the competition and had the x5 multiplier tokens.

All five of my accounts had an easy ride: I played my usual strategy, with the multiplier tokens there was no need to speed crush at all and all accounts made more gold than they spent, while playing this competition! This does not include the eventual winnings, I just made a gold profit from the episode races alone. This is in sharp contrast to previous leaderboards events using the old system of opponents who used to compete against us. Surely this must mean that this system is failing to make as much money for King? Most of the players in the lower rankings had obviously given up and even in the finals boards I saw very few players with a significant win streak.

I think this new system is a bad idea all around.

The sixth stamp wasn't the issue. Three of my other games also got their sixth stamp at the time of joining the event. Don't forget I have good time control and know how to play this game @michimune. I just tried a different strategy with Cornflower to see if that would work: It didn't. My aim is to test, not to win!

Agree, agree, agree! Both with your analysis of King's motive and the enjoyment of the format. I hate it. It just takes the fun out live leaderboards for me.

King has two objectives with this event:

To make all players believe they can currently win the All-Stars; and
To test the functionality of these undesirable tokens.

Strangely, only my test account had this event, and simply logging in 12 hours beforehand and using 2 tokens was enough to get me into 1st place. I ended up using the 3rd token, but I don't think it would have been necessary, since I had 22k before using it.

It's not fun playing tournaments in this format.

Cornflower made the mistake of going all out while there were only six players on the leaderboard.

If I were Cornflower, I would OFFLINE passing the first new level in an episode and then close and reopen the game online. This would not get the sixth stamp but I could enter into the leaderboard and wait for other bespoke opponents.

Daily Stamp is an online event.

If a player passes not more than 4 new levels offline, she would not be disqualified from an Episode Race.

No.2 has 50 gold bars and No.3 has 10 gold bars😁😁

Just joining into the Finals😆

CLES vs CEES🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

This leaderboard has opened over ONE hour, but only has 16 players so far🤭

Perhaps I don’t need to use any tokens, CLES is awesome!😂🤣

Only three players are playing.

Spotlight on the now playing No.15 yana

She is a finalist by passing very few levels in the last 2 rounds, she is using CLES as well😂🤣

I think she loves tokens, this strategic item can help her earn rewards in last two rounds easily, passes less levels than other EVENTS to get rewards

I have seen a few new players like this as well on my leaderboards. Most of them have overdone it in the earlier rounds and they've spent their tokens and are getting stuck now. In fact I've also seen a player stuck at level 514. It must be a hard one.

I don't think anyone is seeing my Nasturtium game in their own game. None of my other accounts are seeing any players around level 1000. I think King are keeping these players off others' leaderboards

The No.1 is a tough one as he is wearing a headphone😂

The player card of No.2:

She is a new account and late entry in the first round, but she is stuck in the Machine Meltdown 🫣

Level 514 at this moment

In addition to my previous post I have played one token to speed crush for half an hour and got exactly the same result in my game at level 4600 as I got in my game at level 1000: 6,800 purple/hour. They sure have made this game so uniform it's painful!

This is a serious question to anyone: Can any of you achieve a better score than 6,800 per hour? Have King set this limit or are higher scores still physically possible? I am sure I'm not the fastest crusher around, but it worries me that I keep getting almost exactly the same results regardless of my overall strategy (boosters or no boosters, different level ranges).

That's the third complaint this weekend that I read about a post having gone for approval. And yet someone posted today using both a rude name and using a rude swear word and their post was not held up! I think the system is broken.

Oh! My post is approving 😔

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3480775#Comment_3480775

That's interesting @Jejsta123, thanks for sharing. I am also testing my best strategy and timing myself. Here is what I have found with my new account, which is less than one month old:

I managed to get to the finals with three x 5 tokens, playing lots of episodes and landing just outside level 1000 for the finals. Yesterday I started and played one token, had my 6th daily stamp to help with some timed UFOs as well. This was the standing at the beginning of my sprint:

I played both my remaining tokens and this is the result after my sprint:

I played around four episodes, managed to play one episode in about 15 minutes.

These are the stats:

Points scored in the sprint: 16,330 in first half hour, 16,860 in second half hour. So pretty even! That is despite having level 1000 which gave me over 2500 points (507 purple for the one level) for just one level. Clearly the episodes are now designed in a way to even out such high scoring levels either by making those levels play out more slowly or by reducing the purple count around them.

Dividing my total score for the hour (33,190) by the multiplier I used (x5) I achieved an hourly score of 6,638 purple. This is as good if not better than what I could achieve at the higher levels (4000-9000). In old terms this would equate to a 2025 All Stars rate of about 200,000/h. (when we had the 30x multiplier). This makes me think that maybe I'd like to play these boring but predictable levels for All Stars. These A(I) written levels are very easy to judge, so take a lot less concentration to play effectively. And as is visible here, I made a handsome gold profit even though I spent some gold on extra moves and one set of timed starting boosters.

Anyone thinking that if someone saw me charge ahead like this in their games they'd be pretty upset, think again: I don't think anyone is seeing my Nasturtium game in their own game. None of my other accounts are seeing any players around level 1000. I think King are keeping these players off others' leaderboards so that there won't be any complaints to deal with and that way everyone is happy and thinks they are getting a fair chance.

Also, I'm using this contest to try different strategies for the All Stars to see if I can increase my ability to score purple candies not necessarily needing to win. I've only played 3 episodes. I'm in second with 12626, the leader has 17311. Haven't playing since last night around 9pm est,

Interesting. BTW I only have 5x multipliers in my game

Comments

Yes, I should have figured it out I guess. You're right about the language thing. Sorry you'll miss out on All Stars.

If I live in the USA, this means I have to use English daily, I think my English would be as best as you😂

And I have been rooting for you😝

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3482168#Comment_3482168

Oh, I thought you were from the US. Sorry about that. Then that's one strong competitor less to worry about…. only about a million left.

Ah yes, that's 10 seconds, I didn't notice. I did also use the tokens as timers as that comes in very useful, but I use a stop watch normally. So do I make it 4,828 per half hour, and then that would be 9,656 per hour? Did you start with a score of zero before playing the token? I think you need to play one level to enter the contest. I guess it's all about skipping the animations. I wonder if King will fix that glitch before All Stars. I does seem to add unfairness to the competition. It is possible that you would be disqualified with a score like this because King's computers have undoubtedly calculated what scores are possible in normal play. With the new system of jelly fish controlling the possible scores King's bots would spot outliers more easily than last year.

Have you ever watch the timer after activated your token? 🤔

This is not 10 minutes left, it’s 10 seconds left, it’s insufficient to upload another one, so it was used up. A token has 30 minutes, so you could double it. This is X30 token, so you could divide them by 30.

Or you could use my final results to minus this score and then divided by 17 minutes. Because I have to finish my episode

What is your hourly rate? I don't see that from your screenshot. According to that you have played 20 minutes of your 30x multiplier token, but there is no data on what your score was prior to the multiplier. How many episodes did you play to achieve this score?

This is a serious question to anyone: Can any of you achieve a better score than 6,800 per hour? Have King set this limit or are higher scores still physically possible?

A photo reply to a serious question.

Without pop-ups, any flying objects by just One 30-minute X30 token. But I have watched two ads after each episode 😅

None of my other accounts are seeing any players around level 1000. I think King are keeping these players off others' leaderboards

Perhaps those players around level 1000 love using CLES as well.😂

They all gathered in my leaderboard. Except the example I mentioned here before, so I may mislead by my observation if I didn’t see yours 😅

No.2:

He is level 366 after this event.

No.3:

He is stuck 😔

No.4:

No.5:

The lowest one and she gets rewards from each round👍

Thank you. Congratulations on your quadruple win, it's insane!

Congratulations on your win and also on getting a challenging board with a sprint finish. A good strategy then.

I joined with 3 hours and a half left on the clock, and was placed 50th on the board with the top player having 11k points. I played one token and stopped.

After checking the board with an hour left, I discovered that my opponent was playing and leading by a couple thousand points. I played for an hour using both remaining tokens. The player in third position was also playing.

So I finally had a morning sprint and also made some easy gold, but I found the overall experience of playing with tokens to be underwhelming. If the tokens were supposed to heat up the competition, the idea seems to not be working very well, based on what I witnessed during three rounds. Agree with those who feel that playing these new leaderboards is not as enjoyable as it used to be.

Here are my five finals leaderboards. I'm showing the standing just before finishing because it shows when players last were active.

The above leaderboard had the 30x multiplier, which is why the top scores are so high. Those players still had at least one multiplier left to use. Once you get to 10th place the difference disappears compared to my other leaderboards. So only about five or six players on this leaderboard had kept one of their tokens for the final!

The above three leaderboards all had the 10x multiplier. I noted huge differences in the quality/scores of the opponents between these three leaderboards, all the way down to players in the lower ranges. The middle flower, Dahlia, had by far a harder board: the player in 40th place scored 5214 points, in Allium's game (just above it) the 40th player scored just 1993. All accounts started during the first few hours of play. I am not sure what caused the differences unless maybe it's because of overall activity of the account in the weeks leading up to the event. It might be random test groups.

This one above is the new player who started playing one month ago. Nasturtium had the easiest opponents throughout the competition and had the x5 multiplier tokens.

All five of my accounts had an easy ride: I played my usual strategy, with the multiplier tokens there was no need to speed crush at all and all accounts made more gold than they spent, while playing this competition! This does not include the eventual winnings, I just made a gold profit from the episode races alone. This is in sharp contrast to previous leaderboards events using the old system of opponents who used to compete against us. Surely this must mean that this system is failing to make as much money for King? Most of the players in the lower rankings had obviously given up and even in the finals boards I saw very few players with a significant win streak.

I think this new system is a bad idea all around.

The sixth stamp wasn't the issue. Three of my other games also got their sixth stamp at the time of joining the event. Don't forget I have good time control and know how to play this game @michimune. I just tried a different strategy with Cornflower to see if that would work: It didn't. My aim is to test, not to win!

Agree, agree, agree! Both with your analysis of King's motive and the enjoyment of the format. I hate it. It just takes the fun out live leaderboards for me.

King has two objectives with this event:

To make all players believe they can currently win the All-Stars; and
To test the functionality of these undesirable tokens.

Strangely, only my test account had this event, and simply logging in 12 hours beforehand and using 2 tokens was enough to get me into 1st place. I ended up using the 3rd token, but I don't think it would have been necessary, since I had 22k before using it.

It's not fun playing tournaments in this format.

Cornflower made the mistake of going all out while there were only six players on the leaderboard.

If I were Cornflower, I would OFFLINE passing the first new level in an episode and then close and reopen the game online. This would not get the sixth stamp but I could enter into the leaderboard and wait for other bespoke opponents.

Daily Stamp is an online event.

If a player passes not more than 4 new levels offline, she would not be disqualified from an Episode Race.

No.2 has 50 gold bars and No.3 has 10 gold bars😁😁

Just joining into the Finals😆

CLES vs CEES🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

This leaderboard has opened over ONE hour, but only has 16 players so far🤭

Perhaps I don’t need to use any tokens, CLES is awesome!😂🤣

Only three players are playing.

Spotlight on the now playing No.15 yana

She is a finalist by passing very few levels in the last 2 rounds, she is using CLES as well😂🤣

I think she loves tokens, this strategic item can help her earn rewards in last two rounds easily, passes less levels than other EVENTS to get rewards

I have seen a few new players like this as well on my leaderboards. Most of them have overdone it in the earlier rounds and they've spent their tokens and are getting stuck now. In fact I've also seen a player stuck at level 514. It must be a hard one.

I don't think anyone is seeing my Nasturtium game in their own game. None of my other accounts are seeing any players around level 1000. I think King are keeping these players off others' leaderboards

The No.1 is a tough one as he is wearing a headphone😂

The player card of No.2:

She is a new account and late entry in the first round, but she is stuck in the Machine Meltdown 🫣

Level 514 at this moment

In addition to my previous post I have played one token to speed crush for half an hour and got exactly the same result in my game at level 4600 as I got in my game at level 1000: 6,800 purple/hour. They sure have made this game so uniform it's painful!

This is a serious question to anyone: Can any of you achieve a better score than 6,800 per hour? Have King set this limit or are higher scores still physically possible? I am sure I'm not the fastest crusher around, but it worries me that I keep getting almost exactly the same results regardless of my overall strategy (boosters or no boosters, different level ranges).

That's the third complaint this weekend that I read about a post having gone for approval. And yet someone posted today using both a rude name and using a rude swear word and their post was not held up! I think the system is broken.

Oh! My post is approving 😔

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3480775#Comment_3480775

That's interesting @Jejsta123, thanks for sharing. I am also testing my best strategy and timing myself. Here is what I have found with my new account, which is less than one month old:

I managed to get to the finals with three x 5 tokens, playing lots of episodes and landing just outside level 1000 for the finals. Yesterday I started and played one token, had my 6th daily stamp to help with some timed UFOs as well. This was the standing at the beginning of my sprint:

I played both my remaining tokens and this is the result after my sprint:

I played around four episodes, managed to play one episode in about 15 minutes.

These are the stats:

Points scored in the sprint: 16,330 in first half hour, 16,860 in second half hour. So pretty even! That is despite having level 1000 which gave me over 2500 points (507 purple for the one level) for just one level. Clearly the episodes are now designed in a way to even out such high scoring levels either by making those levels play out more slowly or by reducing the purple count around them.

Dividing my total score for the hour (33,190) by the multiplier I used (x5) I achieved an hourly score of 6,638 purple. This is as good if not better than what I could achieve at the higher levels (4000-9000). In old terms this would equate to a 2025 All Stars rate of about 200,000/h. (when we had the 30x multiplier). This makes me think that maybe I'd like to play these boring but predictable levels for All Stars. These A(I) written levels are very easy to judge, so take a lot less concentration to play effectively. And as is visible here, I made a handsome gold profit even though I spent some gold on extra moves and one set of timed starting boosters.

Anyone thinking that if someone saw me charge ahead like this in their games they'd be pretty upset, think again: I don't think anyone is seeing my Nasturtium game in their own game. None of my other accounts are seeing any players around level 1000. I think King are keeping these players off others' leaderboards so that there won't be any complaints to deal with and that way everyone is happy and thinks they are getting a fair chance.

Also, I'm using this contest to try different strategies for the All Stars to see if I can increase my ability to score purple candies not necessarily needing to win. I've only played 3 episodes. I'm in second with 12626, the leader has 17311. Haven't playing since last night around 9pm est,

Interesting. BTW I only have 5x multipliers in my game

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