Enough is Enough. Don't Release v3.3 Until

Gameplay Chat (PC/Mobile)
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Devs - please listen, because Enough Is Enough !

Early last week a top level player (1100 + ) quit our guild at zero notice, citing his reason as being that he was sick of RNG making the game unplayable. Maybe it was a fit of pique - maybe not. People don’t do that sort of thing unless there’s a fire where the smoke is.

I’m a similar level. I happened to be paragon in GW this week, and I came up against a TDS in the opposing paragon’s team. I got to the stage where I had 4 almost undamaged troops left, and I had only paragon’s TDS to kill. It had just 4 lives left. Yes - you all know what happened. It resurrected. Not just once, but 3 times. A paltry number compared with what has been reported dozens of times before by many of us, and experienced by me before. However, I was also generating an ice storm with Skadi. The opposing TDS seemed unconcerned by all the blue gems that should have been there, and filled practically every time it cast, with purple and red, of course. I didn’t see any of the blue gems that the ice storm should have dropped. TDS filled, cast, filled cast etc…It all happened so fast, that I lost 2 of my previously unmolested troops and came close to losing the game.

Oh? So here comes another moan about TDS? No, it’s not about TDS…please read on…

Also in my guild, a player who is better than me met up with the same paragon I did. He lost. The opposing TDS in his case regenerated and loop filled 8 times, eventually taking his overwhelmingly winning team down to zero. His comments on our guild Discord :“… now I remember why I came close to walking away from the game couple times…”

A third player in our guild also lost to the same Paragon, again because of a resurrecting TDS.

Oh ! So it IS a moan about TDS after all? …NO!!! it’s NOT…look deeper, please…Please

If you review your own video prelude introducing upcoming v 3.3 features which was at Discord (but is no longer) during that you admit that “Everyone has been frustrated by TDS resurrecting multiple times”

So what are you doing about it? You’re taking away TDS’s resurrect !! That doesn’t address the problem, devs. This problem has NOTHING to do with TDS ! Don’t blame TDS; it’s not his fault that 8 resurrects happen with a theoretical probability of such a thing occurring being less than 1 in 1/4 million times (yet actually happens often). Blame the RNG! That’s the source of the problem . It needs fixing. If you just take it away from TDS, the flawed RNG will just be there for other troops, and frustration with the game will continue - and people will leave the game because they will have had enough of it.

I know you’re working hard on release 3.3, and many of the changes will be cosmetic as well as functional. And I know your hearts are in making this a better game for us all. But without a doubt the biggest frustration ever voiced in these forums is about RNG - sometimes warranted, often not. But - in my opinion it DOES need reviewing, and it DOES need fixing before we have released lots more pretty things papering over a flawed RNG.

Oh - and when you’ve fixed the RNG, if any troop has a probability of resurrecting - maximise the number of times it can do it. If TDS had only been able to resurrect (say) twice, we could all live with that, and we’d all be a lot less frustrated.

Just my two cents’ worth. Please take note of what I have said though, because you’re losing more than 2 cents from people quitting the game because of this.

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My comments have nothing to do with TDS. You’ve missed the point

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Nevermind i missinderstood i thought you were saying it only had 4 lives (resurection) remaining, my bad

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Eh, RNG works in my favour as often as it doesn’t.

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Bias is a keyword here. We’ve all had those games where goblins destroyed your team on turn 1. Where opponent trolls makes 5 matches with just a few gems to begin with. Where ragnagord keeps gaining extra turns charging famine. It happens. And we all get mad when it does.
If it didn’t happen we’d all go 30/0 each week. And we’d be bored to hell by guild wars.

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TDS is losing resurrect because it never should have had it. They copy pasted Infernal King’s trait because the original one they put on TDS didn’t work properly, and on further review, wasn’t something a lot of people would want even if it was working properly. It only took them 17 months to give him a proper unique trait. I have no idea why they cited people getting frustrated by the RNG as the reason for this change other than it might have been contributory to actually taking the time to address a long standing issue. It does frustrate me when I see developers use these easily scapegoated things as reason for a change happening when clearly there are other factors at play (like the whole “tasks needed to be nerfed because 4x speed exists” thing) but in reality they have no obligation to explain their reasoning, other than it might irritate some people, and an easily digestible reason is usually the best way to get people to move on. Note that Infernal King has the same trait, and he can be reliably summoned, but they are keeping his exactly how it is now and nobody cares.

As for battle RNG, its been that way for a long, long time now, and its not changing. They’ve already done several nerfs to specific troops and entire long standing game mechanics because of stuff inadvertently introduced by Unity, so that is the path that we are likely to continue down. I’d actually probably have a hard time playing for a while if they turned around and decided to fix blob matches and cascade issues at this point because it has been “how the game works” for so long that battles would seem to go by in slow motion, and I know some people would just quit outright.

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They are not the same where it really matters.

  1. No one ever complains about offensive troops, ONLY defend.
  2. IK is a Transformer, the AI is highly incompetent when using that type of ability.
  3. TDS is a Exploder, the AI is equal to the player when using the ability.

“IF” IK was giving explode instead, i am certain that you could just do a find and replace on TDS with IK as the same suff would be posted all over again.

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All the respondents here have completely missed the point of what I am saying. It has nothing whatsoever to do with TDS. TDS’s resurrections are so imbecilic, that they are effectively mathematically impossible. I couldn’t care less about TDS in the big picture. I am not “complaining” about TDS - or any other specific troop for that matter.The devs have said that to fix that “frustrating occurrence”, they will nerf TDS’s resurrect trait. They admitted themselves that “it is very frustrating” . So - all they are doing is changing TDS. That does NOT alter the underlying problem - which is that the RNG is not random. Or - if it is - it is completely flawed and does not generate the random numbers it should be generating, in a random fashion. The "randomness’ is skewed. Something that has only a 1 in 4 chance of happening should not happen 3/4 of the time. But it does. Not just once, or twice (dare I say …randomly…)…but 7 or 8 times consecutively. It’s just complete nonsense mathematically. If it happened once, we’d all say in shock and awe what an amazing thing has just happened. but this isn’t a “one off”; it happens time, and time again - endlessly it seems.

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Killed many hundreds of TDS not reviving once. Had few occurrences were it happened multiple times consecutively, never anything close to as crazy as 8 times and honestly i am always sceptical when reading about something like that.
Now i can’t vouch for TDS rng being exactly as stated but it seems fine to me.

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Is there any other event in GoW that is not random and independent, I am not aware of it. I’ve checked TDS and it has some weird glitch or otherwise unknown problem that indicates that TDS resurrection is not really random and independent. All other things seem to be working more or less randomly.

I’m currently in the process of testing so-called “bad starting board” thing and preliminary results actually suggest that it is more or less random on a first glance. I have yet to finish the calculations though since the underlying statistics is extremely complex but once I’m done with it, I’ll post the results hopefully within a week or so.

So, to be honest, I have no idea what are you talking about and what you imply by saying that developers should fix the pRNG. It is a normal pRNG which is working more or less as intended. It is essentially untamed and unadjusted with very slight inconsequential tweaks that really have little or no impact.

The pRNG used by itself is not very streaky and not really skewed statistically speaking, it passes most of randomness tests and is cheap and reliable industry standard.

There might be some bugs or coding errors that make things that should be random to happen non-randomly. As players, we can help developers to find these things so that they can be fixed. If you think that something is not working right, let’s test it and report what we find.

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I’d still like to know how famine can fill to full mana from one Tds or ragnagord cast virtually every single time, AND get an extra turn after the explosion too. I’m still convinced that the ai gets more mana from explosions.

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Imagine

Rag
Infernus
Famine
Divine ish

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Fully agree with what you have observed. It is not a bad RNG in that the numbers appear pseudo random as they should. There are however unlikely sequences which appear way too often than they should ( e.g TDS resurrecting 3x or more in a row). This suggest that it is not a RNG problem but a coding bug. These bug also appears to be localized to specific troops. For example, Infernal King has a similar resurrection trait. There is however no record of him resurrecting as many times in a game as TDS. If it is indeed an RNG problem, we should be seeing similar complaints about Infernal King and calls for his resurrection trait to be nerfed.

Another candidate for investigation is Princess Fizzbang. Has anyone observed that before she gets her first explosion, the chance that the cast will be an explosion seems quite fixed? However once she gets going, the probability that her next cast will be explosion almost seems to increase.

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It is a pity that almost everyone has latched on to TDS resurrections - which I only mentioned as an example - but have somewhat missed the entire point of what I have been saying. I don’t care about TDS per se; I also don’t care about Fizzbang (though I do agree with @aurvandil 's observation that it seems to fill more often than doing anything else, but to be accurate - the trait only says “either, or”; it doesn’t say whether those probabilities are equally spread.

My comments have all been made to point out that the randomness of the RNG is not accurate - in fact it’s very inaccurate by observation, and hundreds of comments here in various forum topics. The mathematical probability of what happens simply does not fit with what should happen, @akots suggests otherwise, even going so far as to say that the distribution is not skewed. I wonder what evidence (s)he has to prove that, because what seems to happen in practice tends to suggest otherwise.

As for the comment that “There might be some bugs or coding errors that make things that should be random to happen non-randomly. As players, we can help developers to find these things so that they can be fixed. If you think that something is not working right, let’s test it and report what we find.” …my response to that is simply …“Precisely” !!

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Finally, as to the comment that we only complain about defense drops, and never about attack drops, I copy verbatim a comment made yesterday in our Discord: “…I’ve had so many unbelievable 4-5 matches and lucky skydrops today, that I doubted on programmers ability to create a believable algorithm.” It DOES work both ways. I accept that. The whole point is - it simply shouldn’t happen. Randomness is randomness, and when something that should only happen 1/250,000 time (ie - practically never) actually happens often, then it needs to be looked at closely to find out why.

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So lets discuss a little…and lets say you and a few others is right about that the CPU is luckier with some of the troop spells to give CPU a tiny advantage over Human.
Any change to the troops you have listed above will automatically destroy the game, because as Human is always starting out every game, CPU needs to have a higher luck factor to compensate. Why does CPU need some advantages over Human? Because win rate for Human is already far too great, generally for mid, but especially endgame players. There would not be much of a game if CPU had zero advantages over Human. In fact I do prefer to start every match, rather than be a little luckier with some of my troops spells. And hey, we even get lucky with spells/cascades a lot of times too as well as starting out, not bad?

Be grateful that the game makes you lose a few matches, no matter how ugly it is. And last, our defense teams in Guild Wars, says it all, how easily Human drive over them, and how hard it is to get even 1 defense win during some days. This must not be any worse than it currently is.

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I don’t know who you are replying to @Eika , but I haven’t listed any troops above. My remarks are not about troops, and never have been. They are about the poor randomness of the Random Number Generator

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As you can see above, that have already been replied to by me. I am clearly replying to you, but thanks for the knock off.

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No knock off @Eika so please don’t be offended . Just please tell me which troops you think I listed?

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You clearly was frustrated the other day because of TDS that was re-spawning a lot of times in Guild Wars. There is other troops as well that the CPU plays pretty well as Devour troops like Kraken, Kerberos and Goblins, generally Nobend Brothers and Fizzbang. No you did not mention any of those, but Ive seen many have had the same experience with those troops, very high devour chance as well as goblins very often explodes for CPU only. So its not only about TDS, but a handful of troops its been talking about. I already explained to you why it might be like this above, and why CPU might need this advantage. If your and other experiences from the past is the same. I have no data.