You are hitting on something that has vexed me since I started playing this game avidly. I’ve complained about how the “RNG” is not random and is biased in the past and been dismissed for it but since this thread seems to have some momentum, here I go.
First, the initial screen when a match starts IS NOT RANDOM. I believe it is chosen from a pool of start screens, because the one thing that never happens AND WOULD HAPPEN is the game starts with a match. If the opening board truly were random we would have occasional matches that start with a match or even a cascade of matches. This shows they have some sort of algorithm in play initially that isn’t ‘RNG’ so much, which means that they could just get rid of the RNG entirely and instead have a drop algorithm that makes for a faster, funner game that is based on you being able to find matches rather than waiting for lucky drops.
Second, when the devs claim that they can’t do anything about it, I would like to point to Bejewelled - where EVERY DROP is not random. How do I know? Because there is never a time when the drop has zero matches. In the 10+ years I’ve played that game I have never had the board reshuffle. I have also never felt “mana screwed” playing that game, even if there was only one match on the whole board to make.
Now when we come to Gems of War, the things I’ve noticed is when I play a mana-limited team, like say a Bombot team. When I play the team, I almost NEVER get brown gems to start and any brown gems are distributed so far apart that they can’t even be manipulated into matches in 2-3 moves. Yes, maybe 1 out of 20 games with my bombot team will start with a 4-match of brown so I can win in one move… but that is so rare.
Now when I get bored of being brown mana screwed, I switch over to a mercy/gards avatar team and what happens? TONS OF BROWN GEMS. (Also, no black or yellow gems to open with mercy’s spell. I feel like I get to use mercy in the first turn maybe 15% of the time, which shows that they really do like to screw with mana dropping.)
The worst thing about this is that I know the devs play Bejewelled, it’s in Sirrian’s bio. So they KNOW it can be done but in the past when I’ve complained about this particular issue they seem to downplay it and claim I’m being too sensitive. My point is that if Bejeweled can make it ‘seem’ random but still give the player a speedy gameplay, you would think we could do the same in GoW.
My biggest beef is with sky drops. Sky drops shouldn’t happen to either the AI or the player - EVER. The reasoning behind this is that we are playing a PUZZLE GAME and not a CASINO GAME. When I win with a sky drop I never feel good about it because it’s not making me feel like I won with skill, rather I won because the RNG-zus said so. I don’t like putting my faith in the game based on RNG-zus, I would rather know that I actually have some level of skill.
The problem is that in the end game, the only way I can play and enjoy it now is if I set my defend team to 1 unit so that I am constantly matched against weaker opponents so it doesn’t matter if it takes me 10 turns to get the mana I need. Otherwise I’d have quit this game a year ago when this “RNG” issue became so bad I could only win 1 out of 10 games like Krudler is complaining here. (I agree with the devs that this isn’t a recent change Krudler is experiencing, but a string of bad luck - which - if the devs are in control of how things drop they could make ‘bad luck breakers’ so you don’t have to wait for that 1 out of 10 games where you aren’t mana screwed.)
One of the sample programs for learning android app coding was developing a simplistic match-3 game.