Except when you cast fizz she rarely explodes.
Goblin team and endless looping? Gah! im stuck in that right now ( Screenshot by Lightshot )
You mean it’s super easy? I can tell you where the next 5 mines go on that board.
Surely you must admit that board explosion with guaranteed extra turn is bad.
And yes, on brown and yellow day all the smart kids play 3 gob munchers with a desert troll for dessert in GW.
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Yeah, years of playing made me reflexively try to complete the board. Nice to know I am not alone in that compulsion.
That’s exactly what I meant. 
Post has been updated to express my overall sentiment… better this time.
Now I want to play Minesweeper!!!
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Oh, wow. It exists natively for Windows 8+! (With weird reskinning. Ugh)
You might be surprised but I do agree, with some observations I want other people to see.
We both know you can make exactly 1 safe click on that Minesweeper board. The rules of MS Minesweeper place the mines after that click and guarantee you can’t lose on that click. From that point on, you have to use the board numbers to continue. There is a bounty on proving that you can win ANY board with just the numbers, but so far it’s unclaimed. That means Minesweeper, as we understand it, makes you guess sometimes and some amount of chance is involved.
So Minesweeper:
- Guarantees you cannot lose on the first move.
- Presents hints that allow you to find safe moves.
- Also presents states where you can only make educated guesses, and might lose due to chance.
That’s exactly how I view Gems of War, even vs. a Goblin team.
- My only guarantee is I will have at least 1 match every turn. Sometimes, this single match gives my opponent a huge advantage on their turn.
- Sometimes, I have many choices. Then it’s my job to try and figure out which one is “best” for me. Often, every move can lead to a major advantage for my opponent.
- Enemy troops can widen or narrow the definition of “major advantage”.
When I’m fighting Goblins, it’s like I’m playing Minesweeper on Hard. I expect I’m going to have to make some guesses, and each of those guesses carries a chance of risking the entire game. I’m comfortable with that, and don’t mind a game with an element of chance. Some people aren’t.
But I feel like there is absolutely no way to satisfy the people who want to remove chance from this game. The bare mechanics of a PQ-style match 3 always involve the same elements of chance. Like Minesweeper, no matter how hard you argue you’ve always got choices, I can craft a board that shows you no good choices. “Doesn’t happen a lot” is not the same thing as “never happens.”
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Also there’s some weird story behind this:
Microsoft localizes Windows for an astounding number of languages and regions. This requires being aware of, and sensitive to, more political and cultural ideals than anyone can be expected to maintain.
Minesweeper ended up being a big problem for them. There are still countries where landmines left over from old wars (or being laid from current ones) are maiming and killing people. So these countries didn’t think the game was very funny.
That’s why somewhere around the Vista timeframe, a new skin for Minesweeper that involved looking for “flowers” in a “garden” was created and used as the default in those countries. Starting in the Windows 8 timeframe, they decided to make Minesweeper a completely optional download, figuring that “you have to knowingly and willingly install it” is more defensible than “we put a skin on it”.
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Okay, that is very interesting. Thanks for telling me! You don’t happen to also know the rationale behind dropping Jezzball and Chip’s Challenge? I’m still steamed about not being able to play those…
Unfortunately, I never cared for Minesweeper. 8 year old me was a bit too challenged by the game.
31 year old me…
But they are all match 3 related. 
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That’s the thing though. GoW RNG determines the difficulty of each GW match per player. I have just as much chance of playing on Torment X one day as I do of playing on Novice the next day.
I’m okay with the Random difficulties in PvP. Keeps it less of a grind. In Guild Wars…I want the same exact difficulty for every player, and for every guild. If it’s going to be super hard then that’s fine. Just keep it consistent. Every single day.
Or at the very least… @Ozball (because we’ve discussed it before).
Have it scale in difficulty per level of the matches.
Soldier - Torment
Vanguard - Torment II
Herald - Torment III
Champion - Torment IV
Paragon - Torment V
Which is how I understand, the difficulty is supposed to scale.
I recognize the fact that people lose to Champions and Paragons all the time. I personally, never do. If I lose a battle. It’s always to a Soldier-Herald. If I’m some alone on this. Then my apologies for wasting your time with the tag. But if others experience wars pretty much the same way. Please speak up. I doubt I’m alone on this.
I love Minesweeper. AND I love GoW, but the difference is that when I blow up in Minesweeper, I am hurting nobody. Restart and blow up again. Still FUN!
When Goblins go crazy on me, in PVP, no problem. It hurts nobody but me, I am ok with this.
When Goblins go crazy on me, in GW, this is a HUGE PROBLEM. It hurts 29 other people that are trusting me to do my best. Compound that with week after week, of MY fully traited Goblin team not receiving any victories in GW defense and you begin to see the “real” issue.
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I used to do this all the time! I would speed run boards and never flag bombs because it added so much time!
Questions:
- Is this bounty real?
- How much is it?
- Are my skills still up to snuff?
(1) The Millennium Prize represents 7 problems we believe will dramatically change human knowledge if solved. One of them is called “P vs. NP” and is about determining if a certain class of problems is impossible to solve in feasible time. If we can prove that both classes of problems have feasible solutions, it’s impossible to overstate how much human progress can be made.
“Solve an arbitrary Minesweeper board” is considered unsolved at this point. You can’t prove you have an algorithm by just “playing a lot of games”. You have to prove, mathematically, that your algorithm will solve every board without guessing. So far, we have algorithms that probably work, but the only way we can test them is to try them against “every possible Minesweeper board”. That takes an infeasible (infinite) amount of time, so the problem is considered NP for “non-polynomial time”.
So the problem isn’t really “win a lot”. It’s “write a paper that has instructions that, if followed, will win every Minesweeper game ever, and prove this is the case.” We believe (for mathematically sound reasons) if we can prove ANY NP problem is equivalent to P problems, then ALL NP problems are solvable like P problems. That’s why Minesweeper is an exciting angle to try.
(2) $1 million, but if you patent/license the idea I think you could make dozens of billions of dollars. You will definitely have a page in every encyclopedia ever written.
(3) P vs. NP was first discussed in the 1950s, and to date no one has made much progress on it. It’s not for lack of trying: it’s considered a problem that if solved will have the most dramatic impact of just about any other mathematic discovery in human history. I don’t know your skill level, but often great advances in science come from people who weren’t trying to get there. If you want to take a shot, go for it.
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Very cool… and WAAAAY above my pay grade. lol
I just thought I had to film myself beating a Minesweeper board without using flags!
You know what’s really weird?
I was experimenting with soul farming, which meant I was trying out some Challenge levels. The first one in Divinion Fields has a single Goblin: Boar Rider.
I ended up picking a different challenge for my experiment because with surprising consistency, a single Boar Rider activation turned into 5 or 6 free turns for the computer. I’m not sure how. But it felt like it happened about 5 of 8 matches before I got frustrated and moved on.
One goblin.
Twitch, never give up, some days you hit home runs.
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