Basic Introduction to Merging

Merging is a way to increase the statistics and change the zodiac of a monster you value. Many players use it to increase the statistics of an event monster (by merging with a reward monster), or to correct a non-PE monster. Merging requires two maxed monsters of the same rarity and evolution level. Monster A is the monster you want to keep, but you want to change its statistics and zodiac. Monster B is the monster whose statistics and zodiac you want to transfer. This monster is destroyed in the merging process. If both monsters are reward monsters, then the final merged version of Monster A will gain the best of both monsters r-boost points. For example, if Monster A has 1/3/5 and Monster B has 2/1/6, then the final merged Monster A will have 2/3/6. While merging is open, you will be able to merge one monster per day, refreshed each reset. Merging Costs Super: 50k stones, 4 super crystals Ultra: 75k stones, 2 ultra crystals, 2 super crystals Epic: 100k stones, 2 epic crystals, 2 ultra crystals. (Crystals can all be level 1, no need to max them) Best merging results are achieved when your monster is at its highest evolution level. If you choose to merge first and then evolve/sevo, its final statistics won't be as high as merging after that evolution. To merge your monsters, use the Facebook login at support.pennypop.com and then select merging from the top menu. You will be asked to select Monster A and B from your inventory. It can help to rename your monsters first so you can easily identify them here. If your monsters aren't shown as options for merging, check that they are maxed first. Questions and Answers... Do actives and passives change? No, Monster A retains its original active and passive. What happens if Monster B has bound equipment? Merging completely ignores the bound equipment and it will be destroyed in the merging process too. Can I keep Monster A's zodiac? No. However, by choosing a monster with the same zodiac for Monster B, the final merged Monster A will also have the same zodiac. If Monster A is an event monster and Monster B is r-boosted, will the event monster gain those r-boost points? No, event monsters can't be r-boosted.

How do Dual Element Monsters work?

Dual element monsters have a primary element (shown first) and a secondary element (shown second). I'll be using a wind/water monster in this example.

The active of a dual element boss is always in the primary element. For a wind/water monster with snipe, the snipe will always be wind. If it had swap, then all hearts will turn into wind gems.

The difference with the monster comes from gem matching. It's possible to have gems both in the primary and the secondary element causing your dual monster to attack, and their combined damage will show in the numbers that overlay on your monster. The combo bonus will then be added to that number.

Note that there is a visual glitch here in that the color of the damage will be that of the last primary/secondary gem matched. Ignore this - the game is calculating the right things! When your attack is shown to be hitting an enemy, any elemental bonus from either the primary or secondary components will be added into the number displayed on your screen. Again, ignore the color shown, as the numbers will be correct with any bonus applied to the right gem matches.

For example, if you have two 3 gem wind matches and one 3 gem water match in a single turn, and your attack hits a fire monster... the numbers shown post-attack will include an element bonus for the water gem match only. If this attack was to hit a rock monster instead, the two wind matches will gain an element bonus but the water match won't.

MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 13th February, 2019

Presenters: MastaDon (MD) and WrkshpWarrior (WW)

Next events: Valentine's Raid, then Battle Royale

Valentine's raid - Laboratory of Love, believed by MD to be rock.  When BC repeats an old event, then they need to use the element of the boss that was used back then, so it's rock again.  The element of the bosses used to be determined by art, and it's been caused by the weird rotation that was started a long time ago to correct balances.  It used to work well but since BC has started reusing old events, then the order of the elements can be in a strange order instead of a balanced rotation.  Only two sets of past Valentine's event monsters will have a bonus active, to reduce the number of monsters being sold before predictable events.  (CNY event monster trading was significantly higher than regular trading for full event teams).  Valentine's tokens will start dropping during the event and will keep going until the end of the month.  You can probably guess which event monsters will have their bonus based on the boss being rock.

Not receiving game notifications?  MD suggests a reinstall of your game.

A full audit of every reward monster is underway in the game, so that MD knows when they were first given out and which ones don't have second evolutions.

All events are currently aimed to be 5 days long, except where holidays timed with the ending of an event.

Pictures are now on the trading website.  Time was allocated for this and they had it done with this week's update.

Single element reward monsters are possible for the next update. Sometimes there is a delay for art though as they may be working on something else.  Art knows that BC wants some single elements.

Can female avatars receive crowns? Art likes to differentiate things and seem to dislike giving the same items to both gender avatars. MD will talk to art to make the representation solid.

Yes, support tickets can currently be sent with anyone's IGN. MD will remind BC that they need to work on this.

Ironlords being too strong with their event bonus compared to the event monsters active in raids?  MD will look into balancing this.

CS being extended another day? MD wasn't impressed to be told about this on the Monday himself.

Crafting new equipment?  Soon is relevant. Not as soon as MD would like. He's trying to get it as soon as possible. It's based on BC's production pipeline. They need to prioritize what BC needs done first, but too many things need to be done "soon".  Things that involve art like monsters get the priority.

Expand the tiers on the leader board? MD dislikes where leader boards are at where they are now. MD can't make them better without upsetting lots of people.  He should be reducing the tiers of the leader boards due to the player base, but he doesn't want to do that.  They definitely won't be expanded.

Wedding themed avatar costumes?  MD will suggest this to art.

Not getting avatar spins?  Don't worry, these will accumulate and you'll soon be like the players who have all the items and can't use the spins.

Hacker videos?  BC looks at these videos and try to work out how they do what they show themselves doing.  Often these players are banned several weeks later.  They want you to buy their tools, or download them in exchange for your personal information. They won't tell you that their account was banned two weeks later.

Can we adjust the bonus on event monsters?  BC is looking at lowering the bonuses in the future, but they're aware this may upset players with event teams.  The gap between event monsters and normal is too big. It makes competing for new players too difficult to compete, and devalues mythics and legendaries.  The gap is large because of both the event bonus, but also about 20% comes from merging.  The event bonus is the primary problem here.  But BC doesn't want to badly affect the event teams that veterans have worked on.

Elements of event mobs in CT was terrible?  Good feedback, thank you.

In a perfect world, MD would like the pieces of a costume to be won in different ways, with only one rare piece available for top tiers.  The others would be obtained in other ways.

R Monsters in U-spins?  BC's grabs are programmed under an archaic method which makes it difficult to include reward monsters.  MD wants the ability to stick all monsters in the grabs: event, reward and normal monsters.  Right now it can't be done, but it's been slated for later down the road.  Right now, MastaDon currently needs to select reward monsters individually and then there is a limit on how many can be added.  This is why there are usually only 5.

BC telling players ahead of time which raid monsters will have a bonus leads to weird trading before an event, and BC doesn't know which trades are legitimate and which ones are for monsters bought for money.

Leader boards were shown for CT and CS.

PvP was promised for this stream, but Wrkshp Warrior says he's a terrible liar and doesn't have the game installed on the stream device for today. He promises double PvP next stream.

Season's were one of the most horrible things that BC ever did. These won't be coming back. This leader board system only rewarded the best players to help them become better.  The top people ended up getting an enormous amount of stuff while players at the bottom received almost nothing.  Season benchmarks have been considered though.

Troop Wars?  Since Coliseum had such bad participation, BC is reluctant to run Troop Wars since it tends to also have poor participation.  Troop Wars won't be back in the near future.

Event monsters taken out of trader?  Some players may want to trade away monsters used in raid events instead of holding onto them for the past year.  MD will consider increasing the type of trade monsters so that it's more balanced and not so many offers for event monsters come up.

Having more than one account in BC is fine. You're not giving yourself a competitive advantage but are hopefully having more fun in the game. This is within reason though.  Having 400 alt events isn't okay, for example.    Trading between alt accounts is also okay.  MD's issue comes when people use programs to create dozens upon dozens of accounts.  That's where he starts to draw the line.

Why are tier 1 individual tiers rewarded with so many monsters?  This is caused by inflation over the years.  BC needs to have the large number of monsters to encourage players to fight for first position. MD admits that the number of monsters in the leader boards are now ludicrous and way too many monsters are given out.  BC would need to find another thing to put into leader boards to have players fight as hard, in order to reduce the number of monsters given out.

PvP fixes?  Low priority right now for BC.

BC Live finished without a code being released, but one was quickly added to the comments after the stream.

Celestial Tower Floors

MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live report - January 20th, 2019

Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior (WW) & MastaDon (MD)

Next events:  Crystal Siege (with merging and traders) then Celestial Towers.

MD has seen a picture of the CT boss, but he hasn't checked to see his element. The boss looks "kind of fire".  MD can't remember though.  There seems to be some fire and rock and ice in the picture.  MD can't tell.  He's a giant boar looking guy.  He doesn't look like a leaf boss, but it could be any of the other elements.  BC is still testing the event currently.  The previous Chinese New Year's CT event monsters will be active. (For valentines raid, it will be the past valentines event monsters)

Valentine's raid event may be after CT if everything is ready by then.

Merging and Traders will be on for CS.  There is a chance that merging and traders might stick around for a few events as the lunar new year and Valentines are huge around the world. Valentine's will likely have a special kind of grab, like all the other major holiday events.

Will BC start giving us 20 energy per BC Live each week?  No, it won't be raised above 10 energy and we should blame Yulun for that as she's in charge of codes.

Can 2 Leader boards be shown on streams?  No, this won't be happening. One leader board gets shown on the stream and the other should be posted on Facebook after that event.

Barrier in prizes?  MD will try to remember this.

Arts and animation were out for a period during the holidays, so for now updates will only be for monsters.  For the new zone, the zones and their quests and the raid parts have been planned out, but everyone needs to be back from vacation before work can start on this.

Pictures on Trading Website?  This has been shipped over to the server guys, as the previous people couldn't do these changes.  It will be done with the next update.  Yes, they are working on this.

Single element reward monsters may be added into the mix in future reward monster prizes, but it won't be in this current batch of events.

Why didn't we earn trophies for farming in Sanctiflyer?  MD thinks that there might have been a problem with farming during Sanctiflyer.

PvP?  This cuts into their workflows, and so it needs to be organized into their pipelines.  No fixes for PvP are being worked on currently as priorities are elsewhere.

Android Dominion Tower Bug - this is a device sided fix as it's something to do with how android processes numbers.

BC has a small team and is a very small company, aiming to grow slowly. Any money that comes in goes to staff and growing slowly.  Fewer people, work more efficiently and scale up.  This does create a slower growth to the company.

New event?  BC won't be working on a new event currently. After they get new monsters in, they want to work on a new story zone and a new raid zone. The raid zone will allow for better crafting of equipment.

Troop prizes for PvP?  No, one strong PvP player would carry their troop so this won't happen.

BC doesn't like certain aspects of the existence of event monsters, but changing it is now too high risk, especially after players have spent so much to gather these mobs.

Leader boards were shown for Dominion FFA and Sanctiflyer.

Second Sevo for Starclaw?  MD will find out if they have one.  Sometimes they have become lost between art and animation though.  MD will double check.

Dual elements on raid bosses won't happen as the potential for bugs is absurd.

Next update will have the CT new stuff and possibly some new second evolutions but it depends on what is finished from animation and tested on time.  Unfortunately holidays have caused delays with new content.

Reroll for only actives or passives?  Not likely. The more important reroll option is zodiac rerolls.

The new story zone  will have a raid zone that will drop items that allow players to craft the higher level (bound) equipment, but this is all part of what they're working on and won't be in the next update.

Avatar spins?  BC wants to separate out the costumes into individual pieces and put all of these into the spins so that they can be won over time.  There would also be boxes of stones that would give players with all avatar items a reason to keep spinning.

Yes, WW has spent all of January practicing PvP. Next BC Live he will start playing against us.

Equipment?  MD wanted to give bound equipment to the older mobs to catch them up with the newer higher powered monsters. This wasn't popular with players to receive the older monsters.  BC is still debating more of a rebalancing of stats. For example, there could be a range of stats for each monster so that there wasn't ever a definite "best" monster for each rarity.  Merging has kind of already solved this though.  Some of MD's favourite monsters are from 2 years ago, but he can't really use them as they're not strong enough.  They would like to rebalance the monsters, but without penalizing those who already have good monsters.

Lots of time is spent on animation. Even adding small vanity items to monsters is a nightmare scenario for development.  So much time would be spent making a t-shirt look right on all the monsters that there would be no sense putting that time into something so small.

Yes, CT was originally planned to time in with the Chinese New Year, but it wasn't quite ready in time, so Crystal Siege is coming in first.

BC tries to mix up the passives so that players can level their passives.  Most people are only aiming for one active each event, and the others are usually considered to be feeders anyway.

New actives and passives will not happen anytime soon. There is usually a backlash for these. For players to be interested, they need to be powerful, but players would prefer their teams to still be relevant.  Players can submit new ideas for this, but most would require rebuilding how actives and passives work, so BC is unlikely to do this.

The percentage chances of passives won't be changed as BC gives out so many monsters in the event prizes to help us do this.

Raid bosses are set so that they aren't too hard or to easy.  If bosses are set too hard then participation drops dramatically.  World Bosses are a good solution as players will eventually reach the right difficulty for them. 

Statistically, no, you're unlikely to ever land on a lucky tier. They're so hard to get.

Cool Luke Chart

The chart below was correct on the 20th of December, 2017, when it was posted by Yulun on Battle Camp Global. If anyone notices any changes, please let me know. :)

Sanctiflyer Raid Health Chart Update

The multiplier on the boss health has increased from 1.25x to 1.3x this Sanctiflyer.

MiriamRowan's BC Live Unofficial Report - 16th January, 2019

Presenters: Masta Don and Wrkshp Warrior

Next events: Dominion FFA then Sanctiflyer

Merging and traders will be back for Dominion FFA.  One of the reward actives will be crush, and definitely not deadshot this Dominion FFA.

MastaDon can't deny that they went a bit "scorched earth" for rather minor offenses, but he'll let us know more later in the stream.

BC looked at every person who was banned, regardless of whether they'd sent in a request. As Masta Don looked through all these people, he started to feel bad. Especially when he saw the names associated with the accounts, instead of just numbers. Some of the people were banned for relatively minor instances for hacking. For example, if someone used to hack so that they could farm insanely quickly, then this isn't the same as spinning the grab a thousand times without spending.  Neither is okay though.  Because some players have used them for so long, so was banning them without a warning fair?  Auto-farming isn't good, for example,  but it's not as bad as other forms of hacking. So BC is allowing these players back, but if they do this again then that will be treated as their second strike and they'll then be banned.  As an example, most players know about the refund thing they can do every hour.  Players shouldn't be doing this, but Masta Don doesn't really care.  BC will consider the degrees of wrongness, instead of being black and white on bans.  Stuff that is game breaking, will be banned.  People who are using a quality of life thing, won't be treated the same, as long as it's not ruining the game or affecting others then it will be a warnable offense for the first time.  After that warning though, they'll be banned if they continue to use these "quality of life" hacks.  (It wasn't refunds/backouts that caused bans, but it happens constantly when people don't like the match they're on. The banned issues are much worse than this).  BC unbanned a bunch of players. They prefer that no one hacks, but they'll treat lesser offenses in a more minor way.  Generally all players know what they did was wrong, they just didn't know it was a bannable thing to be doing. A member of management will check the degrees of offenses before players are banned from here on.  Note that everyone who had been banned definitely had been doing what they did on purpose, it's just a matter of degrees of how bad they were.

No update on Damage Cap. Server did make some changes recently to help with mythics, but MD is not sure if it will have fixed everything.

BC won't be increasing the maximum number of gifts in the inbox.  It's too much of a load for server to store more gifts.

Support will also be looking at older bans. 

Holiday events are usually reused, unless they were ugly monsters. CT will be Chinese New Year.  It will come up around the same time as the lunar year.

BC is looking at the overall balance of the game to keep both long time spenders happy, as well as giving new players an opportunity to repeat.

Dominion tower android cap - this is device specific, and getting time for the android guys to look at this is difficult.

BC will look at the event monster buffs. The purpose of the event monsters is so that beginners can spin these monsters and compete immediately.  This is a fundamental design flaw in the game. 

Leader boards were shown.  2nd and 3rd troops were not read out loud due to a warning from Masta Don.

Reward monsters not having the right number of jewel slots. This is a quality of life thing so it's a low priority compared to hack detection.

Team Brawl was delayed in this past event rotation. It's still not a popular event.  BC is evalutating whether there is something that BC can change about TB, but for now it will not run for a few months.

There will likely be something special with Valentine's events spins, as well as general grabs, during that event.

BC is trying to advertise for more players. They're trying to make getting into the game and ramping up more appealing, without encouraging more players to start alts.

Evolved rewards won't happen very often as this takes away some of the fun for players.

Troop Wars won't be in the rotation very soon.

Another update will be coming soon, before Chinese New Year.  This won't include much of what Masta Don has talked about in the past due to holidays and staff being on vacations.  Crafting of equipment and a new raid zone (similar to Lost Temple) will hopefully come out with the following update.

Coliseum has been "taken out back and buried". It will pretty much never happen again.  Masta Don is curious about having an event where the bosses become progressively harder (this is just an idea though and not something planned on happening), but Coliseum will not happen again.

No, Masta Don won't be removing level 1 jewels from benchmark prizes.

Doing new events is extremely time intensive and takes both design, client, server, and art teams.  A new progression raid zone and improving the damage cap would be a bigger priority, along with increasing the content in the game.

League events will not be coming back. They can't be run at the same time as PvP, and taking PvP away from those who love PvP just feels wrong.  Leagues still do function in the programming, they're just not going to be active in the foreseeable future.

Masta Don has yelled at the person who is responsible for updating the trading pictures and they should be working on that this week.

Crafting bound/new equipment.  Masta Don is planning on getting the new raid area in, and those might drop items to allow crafting to occur.

Rewards in event goals can cause bugs, where players don't receive their items (such as specials). VIP points haven't ever had this problem, so that's why they're being used so often currently.

Sacrifice glitch will be fixed when BC spends some meaningful time on pvp, which is an intentional non-answer.