YMMV / Clash of Clans

• Audience-Alienating Era: The December 2015 update is one of the most negatively received update that has ever been released by Supercell. Common complaints include the severely increasing difficulty of finding loot due to shield changes, the complete and total nerf to Town Hall sniping due to them giving no shield at all along with the Personal Break Timer that punishes players just for having a successful defense.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Once you hit TH7, expect to see (or use) nothing but Dragon attacks, due to their absolute ease-of-use and consistent 2/3 star wins. And, once you hit TH11, the Electro Dragons are near-ubiquitous in regular and war attacks for much the same reasons. You can also expect people to play the same way and drop all the E-Dragons in one place and haphazardly drop spells where needed.
  • Sneaky Goblins are also incredibly popular starting from TH11 onwards, due to being insanely efficient for farming all resources, as well as their potent funneling capabilities and niche use for a near-guaranteed TH snipe via the Blimp siege weapon.
  • For war attacks, expect to see many Queen Charge-oriented attacks, the most popular being the QC LaLo. It's to the point that many war bases are built to thwart QC attacks, specifically.
• Ending Fatigue: A very common scenario one will run into is nearing the end of fully upgrading your Town Hall.... except for a few niggling things that hold you back, such as finishing all your lab upgrades only to still be working on walls or heroes. It's to the point that a very common strategy is to simply move onto the next Town Hall as it's otherwise inefficient to stick around and finish everything for completionist's sake.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Japanese-speaking part of the fanbase seems to call the Royal Champion "Roi."
  • Western players of the game has taken to calling barbarians Hulk Hogan and hog riders Mr. T due to their resemblance to said celebrities in their prime.
  • Due to their slow speed and high defense and health, some eastern players have taken to calling giants Tanks. Likewise, wizards are often shortened to just Wiz for convenience.
  • A lot of attack strategies have been nicknamed over the years, from the classic GoWiPe (Golem, Witch, Pekka) to LaLo (Lava Hounds and Balloons), to Blizzards (Blimp w/ Super Wizards) to Skelly Donut (Skeleton + Invisibility Spells).
• Game-Breaker:
  • Intentionally invoked with the limited-time Event troops, which only stick around for a month but are generally strong meta-defining units for the short time they're available to encourage players to stick around and exploit them for as long as possible.
    • Even compared to other event troops, none were so egregiously powerful as the Lavaloon, the 2023 Halloween-exclusive troop that, like its name suggests, is a powerful mix between the Lava Hound's tankiness, speed, and penchant for Air Defenses and the Balloon's massive damage, which absolutely devastated any base with barely any effort. It was to the point that high-level wars were using nothing but Lavaloon attacks until its departure.
  • The Root Rider, introduced in TH15, has quickly become the best tank in the game for a few reasons. First, it is sufficiently tanky for its relatively low housing space of 20, compared to other durable units. Secondly, and more importantly, is its ability to completely bypass and destroy walls, no longer necessitating Wall Breakers, spells or siege machines to push your army into the heart of the enemy's village. Combine with any ranged troop of your choice, such as Witches or Super Archers, and observe as your army completely decimates bases as simple as "drop every Root Rider in one place, then every other unit, and let it rip".
  • The TH16 update brought along Hero Equipment, items that alter heroes' abilities for any scenario, with most of them falling under either "generally good" or "weak outside of niche attacks". The Christmas event, however, introduced the first Epic-tier equipment for the Barbarian King, the Giant Gauntlet, which has immediately cemented itself as the de-facto BK equipment. To wit, its active ability enlargens the BK and grants him percentage-based damage reduction and AoE damage, turning him into an incredibly destructive and tanky unit capable of trashing entire areas single-handedly with the Rage Vial, or less destructive but monumentally tankier unit with the Vampstache equipment. Due to a bug, (now fixed, at this time of writing) if this is activated any time after exiting the Grand Warden's Eternal Tome, the invincibility will activate again, effectively making the BK immortal for yet another few seconds as he obliterates the base.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game is extremely popular in Southeast Asia, especially Singapore, Malaysia, and Philippines.
• Good Bad Bugs: Whenever the Miner buries itself underground, defenses continue to target them even when they burrow underground, receiving no damage in the process while the towers waste their time attacking them instead. This single-handedly caused the Miners to be incredibly overpowered as they can simply spam a whole bunch of Miners and casually destroy an opponent's base, requiring virtually no effort to do so. This eventually got fixed in October 2016 when the defenses will now appropriately retarget once the Miner buries itself underground.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • HOG RIDERRRRRRRRRR! ^Explanation The Hog Rider class started seeing a huge use in memes in 2021, particularly with their battle cry being used a lot in video edits.
  • Bathroom War Councils ^Explanation  A trend of viral videos popped up of someone in the bathroom hearing lots of noise and peeking over the wall of their stall to discover... a group of teens conducting lectures on their upcoming war attacks.
  • "Nice coc" ^Explanation  It didn't take much time for people to notice exactly what word the abbreviated title is one letter off from.
    • "Giant coc" ^Explanation  Similar to the above; here a search for one of the in-game troops leads to some unfortunate misunderstanding
  • "I know you're dealing with [personal tragedy], but if you don't attack in the Clan War, we're kicking you out." ^Explanation Clans in the game are notorious for having a Serious Business mentality, often demoting or even kicking out members of their clan for not participating in just one Clan War. Memes like to exaggerate this by depicting clan leaders as having No Sympathy, and not caring about any reason for members not participating (Like a dying family member or dealing with severe sickness).
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • All troops used in battle disappear once the battle is over, even those that did not die.
  • The Personal Break feature that is initially added by December 2015 as it basically forces the players to get booted out for 6 minutes after 3 hours of cumulative playing and only allows another 15 minutes of gameplay before they get booted out again. An added timer as well as the reduction of the personal break makes this feature manageable.
  • For a long time, the very fact that troops stored in your Clan Castle will attack immediately should the enemy come nearby was an example of this. While obviously that is the point of the Castle and can aid your defense against enemy troops, a hard-earned donated troop that you wanted to use for attack would still come out and try to defend against the enemy. In other words, if you got attacked just after you managed to receive the troop needed to commence an attack, you had to request that troop all over again. To make it even more jarring, while your heroes can be put to sleep and won't help you defend if you so choose, Supercell went years without adding a sleep function for the CC, causing many CC troops to be pointlessly killed before you could use them. Finally averted in the June 2018 update, with one of the many features added being a Clan Castle "sleep" option.
  • Legends League is this for anyone who attacks often as signing up for it limits you to only 8 attacks per day. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for how simple it is to accidentally sign up for it, if you're not careful about trophy pushing too much. Thankfully, even if you reach the trophy requirements, you still have to press a button to really sign up, and you can drop trophies by either waiting to get attacked or via revenge.
  • In the Builder Base matchmaking, you cannot start another attack until the opponent has finished their attack as well. This is annoying by itself but when you combine the fact that the Clock Tower boost used last 5-14 minutes, then if they purposely stall till three minutes are up, then you have effectively wasted a lot of those precious time that the boosts are available. This is later mitigated in the Spring 2020 update as troops no longer require time to train while the Clock Tower now boosts production and upgrade times, independent of Builder Base combat
  • Builder Base troops require that you train for up to 6 minutes (1 for each Army Camp)^note Regardless if you deploy troops or not during the attack they will be used during the battle so you have to wait for the full time for another attack while it takes at least 10 minutes for the Battle Machine to regenerate. While in Home Base that is considered fast, for Builder Base standards that is incredibly slow particularly due to the more direct PVP gameplay in this mode and the much faster pace. Basically if you want to attack immediately you have to boost using the Clock Tower, which itself has another set of problems. Averted in the Spring 2020 update, which eliminated the training times for Builder Base troops, and now the game automatically restores used Builder Base Troops after battle for further convenience.
  • Players find the fact that you can only obtain loot from three victories per day in the Builder Base matchmaking unless you pay gems to immediately get more chances for loot unnecessary and feel it just does nothing but artificially extend the time in the Builder Base.
    • Eventually, with the 2023 Builder Hall overhaul update, this was fixed and you are now freely able to earn resources well after the daily bonus, while also adding an additional builder, should you have fully unlocked OTTO. Of course, to compensate, the resource costs and times for everything have been nearly doubled, thus almost defeating the purpose.
• The Scrappy: No one likes the Goblin Builder and Goblin Researcher from the "Work For Hire" event. While a 7th builder and a 2nd lab researcher sounds like it would be a good thing, these guys charge gems per each upgrade in addition to needing the normal resources and time. The gem cost is one gem per 36 minutes of upgrading time with a minimum of ten gems, making them extremely expensive to use. The playerbase has also declared that they look ugly and have "very punchable faces." This was poked fun at by Supercell in a Reddit post about the 2023 Christmas event which introduced another more helpful goblin who was noted to be "slightly less punchable?".◊
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Town Hall 11 update didn't receive very well. Most notably, Town Hall sniping no longer provides a shield. This has killed farming bases, which were a very well-loved and often-used feature globally.
  • An update changed the Heroes' graphics from simple 2D sprites (still used by troops) to more elaborate 3D models, allowing usage (and monetization) of customizable Hero skins. While many didn't mind the change, there's still a vocal part that dislike the new models and preferred how the old sprites looked, as well as removing the subtle cosmetic changes as they get upgraded.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The Builder Base for the longest time wasn't given much attention as the period of time between one major update (Builder Hall 9) to the next (Builder Hall 10 and Rework) was from 2019 to 2023, about 4 whole years. During said period, there has not been any major updates outside of a few minor tweaks here and there. Even the fanbase agrees that not a lot of players pay attention to their builder base outside of using it to complete monthly challenges due to the lack of any unit and building variety or decorations.
  • The single-player content is fairly stark, only consisting of a campaign, with multitudes of non-replenishing and overly-cheap goblin bases, and a "Practice Mode", which helps teach players fundamentals as you unlock further Town Halls, which hasn't been updated since TH14's introduction. The latter especially can be a useful way to teach players varying attack strategies so they're not pigeonholed into using easy or brain-dead spam attacks as, otherwise, you have to watch video tutorials to learn how to best use new troops and armies.
• Unfortunate Character Design: The Root Rider has been oft-derided as looking like a lady surfing on top of a giant turd. The lvl. 2 version makes things worse as the "root" gains spikes that look more like corn sticking out of it. Fortunately, the lvl 3 version drastically changes colors to something less excrement-colored.

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