I’ve reported this to the team because it seems a bit mean to have a 20+ tile dead end. Also we should have some code to stop things getting too crazy like this already so it does seem possibly bugged - I’ll get more details.
It’s impressive honestly the stuff you folks achieve working out the logic behind how the map is setup but this is currently a problem for every person in the game and the optimal strategy is only available to super engaged members of the community or those in the know.
There’ll still always be an optimal strategy which people can search the community for info on but it won’t penalise players so much for not going looking for that info as right now it’s pretty rough for them.
It’s not that I want to sabotage your work or make things harder for you, I know you’ll work out the optimal strategy quickly again after any changes are made, but also it means the 10s of thousands of players who don’t know about the strategy won’t be punished for not knowing it exists or where to find it.
In game design it’s best to make things obvious and fair for people just playing and strategies and guides are the cherry ontop for more engaged community members or hardcore players.
Either way, I don’t have word back from the team yet but if anything changes I will do my best to share details with you if I’m able to so that you can adjust your strategy easier without having to collect data from trying things out for yourselves.
This is going slightly off topic for this thread but:
Agreed about the World Event scoring descriptions.
And some of the other things like the medal and other reward drop rates.
For the Vault weekends that’s one of those things where you’re not affected if you just play the game, you’ll encounter gnomes during your play time or you won’t regardless of their appearance rate. It’s just bonus rewards for spending time in game. We could mention something like “double or triple chance to encounter gnomes because of the Vault Event” (I don’t know the actual bonus chance off the top of my head) without mentioning the base percentages etc.
What I meant is that you shouldn’t be at a significant disadvantage if you don’t leave the game to find additional information and that definitely currently applies to Underspire and World Events.
The Reward drop chances would just bring things in line with ie the chest drop rates and such being visible in game so it’s also not in the same vein of things as WE and Underspire.
I’m still catching up in here but the information as promised:
From reset today, dead ends in Underspire will not be longer than 6 tiles.
This is the way it was always intended to work - there was a bug which meant that a dead end could try to fill the entire map.
There are changes coming to Underspire in a future update which will see this number changed again - the details will be in the patch notes for the update those changes are in.
I know everyone is discussing CX finding game guides being bad for players - but for the record - I informed the team of the bug with dead ends, it wasn’t functioning how it was intended to and as such I was putting the needs of the many infront of the few as if you end up down a never ending dead end it really sucks.
I stand by what I said that the guides are really cool and this example from @Shadowfeld is one of them. Love it - on the team here we all know this information exists about the Underspire and which paths to take to avoid dead ends where the bosses are etc etc. But knowing all the information you’ve worked out the only thing we ever discussed or considered changing was the bug to the dead ends - not the other things you worked out. I promise if anyone had considered more than that I woulda fought them 
We’re honestly not out here trying to give you folks a hard time, we haven’t gone and re-arranged the entire map generation for the Underspire like some maniacal corporate figures with cats in our laps - although if you saw our meeting room layout you’d probably understand why we joke about getting Sirrian a cat just for our conference calls.
We have only fixed the bug so that if anyone finds themselves in a dead end they’re not spending thousands of Gems and a bunch of real money to try to find their way out of it. If we were really nefarious we would have left it in and taken their money 
it would have meant we also wouldn’t have needed to spend the time or money fixing it.
For people who do work out how it’s coded so they can min-max it KUDOS seriously, you deserve the benefits that gives you. However, I don’t think the game should be so complicated that you need to reverse engineer the procedural generation rules to play it without spending all your premium currency and money - and there’s definitely other areas of the game that could use some improving on this front - no denying that cough World Events cough
If there are other changes I will be just as surprised as you so god I hope not.
I was told the issue was as simple as that one liner I posted - dead ends would try to fill the map - they are now restricted to no longer than 6 tiles.
As always, we will be keeping an eye out for any issues once we have the whole playerbase’s eyeballs on it, thousands of heads are better than 1 or however that saying goes.
I’m checking with the team if the fix took longer to push out than thought to see if it possibly hit the live game after weekly reset which would explain why it didn’t work.
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