How much of the AI cheating is the norm?

The AI used to be subtle when cheating. I would occasionally be railroaded into having only one move that was detrimental to my troops or the gem drops would favor the AI over me. Recently, however, the AI has become much more blatant in regards to cheating. I would be denied an extra move when matching 4 gems or the AI would give itself an extra turn even though it only matched 3 gems. This is in addition to its subtle manipulation of the board.

Is this the norm in other consoles or is this a bug on the Switch version?

We have the same issue on mobile/PC. It’s worse after 4.3 patch.

Were any of your troops frozen when you were denied the extra turn? The freeze mechanics aren’t obvious or intuitive.

I don’t recall specifically if a troop was frozen when I was denied an extra turn. I checked all the hero’s and troop traits, talents, and spell abilities whenever this occurred though. However, I will keep this in mind next time it happens

Accusations of the AI cheating are older than me. I don’t need two hooves to count how many times someone has backed it up with video.

Your switch has a button that saves the last 30 seconds of video. So do all the other consoles. Despite that, nobody ever seems to remember to push the button to show off the bug.

“The gems didn’t fall my way” isn’t really a bug or provably cheating. Statistically it should happen sometimes. If a lot of payers play, there’s going to be at least one loser that day.

Buuuut… some of the behavior you described like losing extra turns sounds like old bugs. The Switch is old code, and there’s no information about if it’ll ever be updated. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out GoW Lite still has old bugs.

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Xbox One player here…

The AI taking extra turns (it shouldn’t get - like on match 3s) or taking your turn on a match 4,5 don’t happen every match, but they are not exactly rare. It seems like this happens more in Events (Raids, Bounties, etc.). Of course those are much longer matches than the quick Explore battles. It has gotten a little harder to see with gems flying over the place (annoying exploders and converters).

There are some other “Cheating” things that are annoying to me - match 4 (or 3), get 2 mana (no Jinx trait), AI taking back-to-back skill usage turns with no match 4 (non-Goblin edition), etc.

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Tbh never seen ai get extra turns out of the blue with a 3 match only that didnt started a cascade, however, now that am using Ropedart only in pvp seen that the freeze/extra turn things work kinda lame.

I mean, had times where for example my hero was frozen (third slot) and on starting board there was 4/5 matches i could make with the rabid wabbit, using it tho sometimes i still got extra turn if AFTER the yellow matches (during which you heard the sound of the “denied extra turn”) i got another 4/5 match that wasnt either blue or yellow.

What really kinda piss me off mostly are those forced losses (but after all there’s that “system who will stop you or the ai to be too much lucky” and indeed right now win rate is still above 95%), 1 example can be this pvp match (in which i was using basically same team and there was 0 4/5 matches possible for wabbit, i made a 3 match on the top to modify the board the less possible and, look at the coincidence, from those 3 gems removed from above dropped exactly what was needed for ai to have a 7 gem L shaped match, then that how it was after ai first turn):

Or even better last GW where i lost 1 match only vs who? some opsupepro paragon? a great champion? not really the very first match of blue day vs a soldier with 1,5K+ less team score tham me but that had a mana blocked AW on last spot filling and casting each 2 turns (making jar worthless as bonus) and let me see, 4/5 bandits, 1 webspinner, 2 sister of shadows while my frostmage didnt frozen any of them whole match lol.

If you believe in “forced losses”, here’s what you need to do to make the game more fair.

Next time you make a move and it cascades more than 3 or 4 times: retreat. Next time your team makes some series of moves that kills 2 or more AI opponents over 3+ free turns: retreat. You are gaining your wins via unfair tactics. Stop using that team, forever. That way you will be bound by the same rules you’d like the AI to be bound.

It is a frustrating situation and I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel bad about it. But the culprit here is luck. Yes, sure, you saw something extraordinary happen more often than probability says. When 10,000 people play a match, “1 in 100,000” becomes 10%. Imagine that. It tends to mean since thousands of players are playing thousands of matches, every week we see someone who got hit by a 1 in 10,000,000 event.

The only way the devs might “fix” it is the mode I’ve been wanting to try for a few years: “No free turns”.

Part of the forced loss i care about was also 10+ casts and not once the 25% chance of fmage kicked in (my qaswell be if it did ai recovered at soon turn passed, but pretty sure was the first, said something about tht crap even in psn) i wonder what’s the chance of something like that happen, isnt just about extra turns but usually a sum of lot of things, like, ok, my surge chance is a crappy low 63% but i get 1 surge in about 10 matches? while traits dont work? and ai fill whole teams out of the blue? all at same time, just lol.

Oh wait is rng.

Beside yes, we dont notice when it happen to us bla bla, head that crap often, maybe had some meaning when 1 year ago i was just using exploders now with converters i can actually say i do notice and notice that the cascades i get are nowhere near the one ai get, actually for that i swapped to converters (oh and like in the case of good loopers like ishi and qquin am not even using those stupid classes like titan fmage and tidecaller that explode on 4/5 matches and just add randomness), to not let ai get any turn/as few turns i can give it.

1 of the reason i stopped use famine was right that got tired of seeing craps (aka mythic that need 24 mana or so) fill and cast right away the turn after i just casted her/him/it.

And well there’'s an insanely huge difference betwhen an ai used team and a player one, i doubt there’s many players that always use the wabbit (or 99,5% of the time) even if that mean not making even a 3 match but give a rdy to make 5 match to opponent like ai pretty much always does, so it’s only logical if you win over and over (especially using what’s prolly the strongest attack team right now).

Gotta say i got maybe my guilt on that gw loss, that day before going gw didnt gone pvp to get butchered coutless times, something i did all other days lol.

Jinx has nothing to do with lower mana gain as it only halves the rate of mana surges.
Also due to an odd mechanism you never get a surge for 4 matches.
This could be due to banner or disease which is quite prominant these days as a lot of players use plaguelord on their defense.

I agree with 3 match extra turns from the AI though as i experienced this even this morning in the class event.
It seems to trigger more often when the AI does a double 3 match from observation but this would need clarity from other players as i have no tools or tech savvy enough to take videos on my tablet.

If you really believe the AI is tuned to cheat the player in a game where players have 80%+ win rates, you may want to reconsider if this is the game for you.

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A 25% event has a 5% chance to fail 10 times in a row. That means that if just 20 people play a single match each, one of them will probably see it fail 10 times in a row. You’re basically repeating @Slypenslyde’s point back to us: these things are way more common than you realize.

There is no conspiracy. It’s not rigged. It’s not a “forced loss”. You just plain old lost a match.

When the ai wins trough bugs, then its senseless…
Extraturn after 3match, steal my turn after a 4/5match, give me 2 mana instead of 3, drop no gems from an active storm, anti-storms, skullstorm out of nowhere, etc

You can say it 1million times that the ai doesn’t “cheat”, that make it not more unrealistic… Enough people see the same shit happens, so it might be real. Even videos exists…
Or we are all liar? I don’t think so…

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I don’t think bugged coding is cheating as such but whatever you want to call it, it’s a bitter pill to swallow. Losing extra turns and everything else thats been described is a code issue, but when AI refuses a quad match for example, only for the resultant cascade to show you the reason why, then something very peculiar is going on. I can’t predict what will drop into the board when I make a move (although storms can sometimes give a slight hint), and I don’t think the AI should have this psychic ability either. That’s just unfair and insults the credibility of the game.

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