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Turn the dials

Change Match Siege's balance numbers and play with them right here. The thing a maker most wants to know is whether a number is right, and that is exactly the thing they can see least.

Lower means blight comes more often. At 4 seconds there is no time to answer it; past 25 it stops reading as a threat.

How long you have to include the marked cell in a match. Below one second it becomes a reflex game; above five almost everything is blockable.

How often events like surges, relics and frenzies fire. Under ten seconds the banners cover the screen; over 45 you might see one or two in a whole run.

URL:

One rule

Runs with the dials moved do not go to the leaderboard. Mixed in with default runs, the board would stop meaning anything. That decision is made inside the game rather than on this page, because anyone can edit a URL.

The ranges are clamped again inside the game. An interval of zero would not be a game, it would be a still image.

What to look for

Move one number and the others move with it. A long telegraph means almost everything is blockable, and then time — not blight — becomes the real opponent. Tighten the interval and there is no room to build specials, so there is nothing to answer with.

The defaults are 13, 2.4 and 25 seconds. How they were arrived at is in the dev log, in Korean.

Why only three dials

There are dozens of tunable numbers inside the game and only three are exposed here. The test was: it has to be a number I cannot settle alone (candy size I can just look at and decide); the effect has to be visible within a single run (a number that only shows itself over ten runs teaches nothing here); and a silly value has to leave the game still playable.

That all three turned out to be time is not a coincidence: in this game difficulty mostly comes from how often something arrives and whether there is room to answer it.

Three combinations worth trying

  • Reflex run — blight 6s, telegraph 1s. You can still block, but there is no time to look. It shows where the game stops being planning and turns into reaction.
  • Against the clock — blight 25s, telegraph 5s. Almost everything is blockable, so the only opponent left is time, and the run becomes purely about scoring.
  • Events in charge — event interval 10s. Banners never stop. It looks fun for a minute, and then you can no longer tell what actually killed you. That is why the default sits at 25.

Tell me what you find

A maker only ever sees the difficulty their own hands are tuned to. I have played this hundreds of times, so what feels right to me cannot be what feels right on a first run. If a setting felt good, tell me and it goes into the next pass. Where runs actually end is published on the play stats page.

Set the values on the left and press play; it runs here. Nothing downloads until you do.