Candy Crush Saga

Discussions
Chat about Candy Crush Saga, share thoughts, news, or anything sweet!
Support
Support - Stuck or having an issue? Ask a question and get help from other players!
Contests
Enter for a chance to win Gold Bars and sweet in-game rewards in Candy Crush Saga!
Ideas
Have a sweet suggestion? Share your ideas to help improve Candy Crush Saga.
Off-Topic
This is your chill zone! Talk about anything that’s not Candy-related with other Candy players!.

Experience and analysis of All Stars 2026 stages 1- 5

This may be my last thread of analysing Candy Crush.

The story so far: My analysis of stages 1- 4 led me to the conclusion that the app manipulated time on our leaderboards.

After analysing my own accounts and many other leaderboards posted in this community I found these repeating features:

One or two players racing ahead early on, presumably using a token and then stopping or slowing down to allow others to catch up
The entire leaderboard around us slowing down or stopping altogether for long periods
Odd behaviour of opponents not seeming like real people
Those of us who themselves played a token early or crushed fast enough to keep up or overtake the early leaders had a different experience and found the leaderboards more believable.
My earlier conclusions were: The slowing down of opponents was a bespoke measure to give all players a chance to progress to the next round, aided by the multiplier tokens

My overall conclusion is this:

We were all playing against the app. The other players were real players but their progress over the round was controlled by the app. Therefore anyone thinking they were playing against an AI were essentially right: The app is run by an AI. The app controlled the leaderboards. So the other players were indirectly AI controlled. However this does not make the players themselves cheaters. All these others were players also doing their best to beat the app. Those players best at beating the app would be the winners. The final scores were all genuine and live in my view. But the path to get there was manipulated by the app.

We were all playing against the app.

We were all trying to beat a score set by the app.

Like everything in Candy Crush: All Stars 2026 has been an illusion. All of Candy Crush is an illusion. Nothing in the game is real.

If you would like some general tips on how to beat Candy Crush yourself I created this thread recently:

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/585073/tips-on-how-to-beat-candy-crush-in-2026-without-spending-money

If anyone is unhappy about what I have described above (and so you should be , I am myself livid about it and consider these manipulations both unethical and unfair) then the only means of complaint you have is contact Player Support. Here is the link:

https://soporto.king.com/?type=help_center

If enough complaints flood in maybe the use of multiplier tokens will be abandoned in future competitions, as these seem to be the reason for this mess.

Anyone thinking these findings might be something that could lead to a legal challenge: I doubt it. Everything was covered in the Terms and Conditions, both of the game and the event. Check the wording. King never claimed we were playing against real players in real time. We were tasked to "top the leaderboard".

Lessons learned in All Stars 2026:

Everything in Candy Crush is an illusion
The app controls everything

Note: I have now added a rundown of my own stage 5 experience and a plea message to @QueenB . That post may not be on the front page if a lot of people add to this thread.

To join the Conversation:

Comments

Halgma1986

Screenshot_2026-04-04-16-02-19-040_com.king.candycrushsaga.jpg

I am pretty sure that if u play whole 24 hours and u have all 6 tokens,you will be the top 10 in live final at London,what i really hope for myself is luck really bcs i have only 3 tokens left and i really hope they make groups like fair and dont put me together with many players who have all 6 tokens but i think i am not so lucky.

Nobody1

Your idea that the goal of 210,000 for all 6 tokens so perfectly matches what I saw, and might indeed mean that I made the right choice doing what I have beat myself up over, playing that token at the last minute. I was on track to hit somewhere between 209,000 and 210,000 without the token.

MannyFae

So will I. Thank you for everything you have done, I just cannot thank you enough. I truly enjoyed our time here, and I will remember it always, dear Christine.

christinewupp

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. 😊

MannyFae

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 AI took human nature into account and it took full advantage of it. It's just its task had nothing to do with player experience or fairness (I shudder every time this word is used in regard to this game). It was all about money, of course. To that end, human nature was exploited in the most ruthless way. By tampering with the leaderboards, the AI led people to believe they stood a chance, making them spend, spend, spend.

We'll soon know if the AI succeeded. If we see tokens in future leaderboard events, then this year's All Stars event was a financial success, and more people will be put through this torturous experience for someone's financial gain.

christinewupp

Yes and yes to both your questions. Stage 6 is going to be an all live contest, it cannot be anything else. So how many multipliers you have is by definition going to be what affects the outcome. It would be important to use them wisely: Play them at a point when you have easy high scoring levels ahead, ideally whilst having timed boosters from the daily stamp or other events. Play boosters liberally while the multiplier token is active and pay gold for extra moves during this time so that you can improve your score to the maximum you can achieve while the multiplier is active. Don't waste any time replaying levels or watching ads while the token is active.

christinewupp

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.

@QueenB You might want point this thread out to the team. They will know what I was writing about and what I mean by the "VCR effect" even if they have not shared this with you.They may have thought that putting the AI in charge and using the multipliers would make the event fairer. But if you look at all the posts about "bots" and "cheaters" in the community you will see that I am not the only one who has noted something wrong and who was misled by the approach used this year. It really didn't work. It was far too obvious how time was manipulated.

CaseyCrushes

Thanks for all your useful posts @christinewupp ! I agree that clearly the app controls everything and that there are AI or being shown to us at any time that you think that this will be lessened in the round six or the third round knockouts? Will these consist more of real players who will be able to see in real time?

also do you believe that the outcome of this final round will be determined purely by the number of tokens someone has given that it’s a shorter 24 hour game window or do you believe that the app might throttle people when they try to use their might level the a bit?

Comments

Halgma1986

Nobody1

MannyFae

So will I. Thank you for everything you have done, I just cannot thank you enough. I truly enjoyed our time here, and I will remember it always, dear Christine.

christinewupp

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.

MannyFae

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.

christinewupp

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

This is the first screenshot I took:

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.

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)

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)

My plea for 2026-2027 is:

Sack the AI.

Bring back real people.

CaseyCrushes