I don’t really think it cheats, but I can see how people would think that. Recall bias is something we have discussed quite a bit on this board (love this community!). On top of recall bias is the human brain’s need to make order out of chaos. Our brains don’t like randomness, so we look for reasons why things happen even when those things are actually quite random.
When the computer makes really dumb moves that make no sense and then lucks into a cascade our brains kick in and immediately start looking for reasons why it happened that way. This effort is then magnified and rebounded by recall bias making us believe it “always” does that. The most ordered and logical reason is “the game knew the gems were going to fall that way, that is why it made that move”. Starting with this hypothesis, our brain serves up every time that happened in the past and we got burned by it. This provides the evidence needed to convince ourselves not only is our supposition correct, but that it is reliable. “The computer always cheats and plays with the gems off the board.” In reality, the computer really made a random move that worked out for it. It makes many many more random moves that do nothing for it. Recall bias is what keeps us from remembering those times it doesn’t work without a lot of effort.
Stacked on top of this, is a tendency for our brains to filter out memories where we don’t feel very good about things. So even when we win after watching the computer mess up a game winning move, we forget about it, because knowing we won on a technicality goes in most people’s “bad” bucket. Basically we don’t feel good about the “free” win and thus we forget about it.
All this stacks together to produce a general bad experience and encourage accusations of the AI cheating. That is why I like the PC/mobile AI so much. I can pretty much call its moves before it makes them. Every now and then 3 gem matches do crazy stuff, but it is easier to remember all the wins because I know the AI fought to the best of its (limited) capability. It never passes up a “good” move to score some unforeseeable benefit so it feels a lot less like it is cheating.
I probably geeked out a little excessively on that, but there you go!
…our understanding was that there is no difference between the console build/AI and the iOS build/AI, except that the console is a patch/version or two behind the older iOS game…
It isn’t just a patch version thing unfortunately. I know they keep saying they are going to sync them up (version wise), but then they make moves to make that less likely. There are features in play on the console that we don’t have on the mobile (tasks and UI differences for starters). And the most recent patch added yet another one (arena weapon choices). On top of that they patched in part of 107 (namely troop management) as well. It is a mess, and making it really hard to keep helping peeps between the versions.
I’m actually a 3rd year clinical medical student in the United States, doing my hospital rotations (clerkship) on the road to getting my doctor of medicine (M.D.)–so I’m very familiar with what recall bias is. I’m telling you, flat out, I know what I’ve been experiencing. Moreover, since my last posts earlier today, I was shocked that the AI didn’t take a match 4 skulls!!–but still wiped the floor with me with cascades. It may be a bit in our heads, but in the same breath it has to be said that there is a veritable possibility that something is awry.
Based on my experience and what you are noting as well, I think the combo breaker code isn’t enabled on the console version. In the PC / Mobile version on normal difficulty the AI is actually shackled from getting the kind of cascades you are noting. In a nutshell if the AI is going bonkers with cascades the game actually starts changing dropped gems to stop it. There is a much more in depth discussion somewhere on the boards, but that is the gist.
The more I see and hear, the more I think the AI on the console is a completely different version than the AI on the PC / Mobile version. And that is a really sad shame, because it is pretty much inferior in strategy and inferior in player friendliness. Hopefully they can do something about that relatively quickly.
I linked you the guide because you mentioned having trouble getting team synergy to work. That guide has a lot of really good points on choosing synergistic teams. Like I noted, I pretty much played arena exclusively from the point I started playing. I would rank to 1 each week, but other than that it was all arena. That only changed in 107 when they broke the arena for a time and when they made it all about gold so the arena became largely useless. A bad run was where I went 8-1 or it took longer than 45 minutes to do a run. Just because you have played a lot doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from it, especially since it actually addresses a concern you raised. Up to you whether it is worth your time for a skim though.