These AI conspiracy theories are amusing.
Why don’t we focus on something we know is actually a problem… like “difficulty” in this game simply meaning beefed up enemies that take 45 years to kill and kill you in one hit.
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That would be derailing the thread, so you should start your own thread pertaining to that topic.
What should I title it? Opponent scaling makes AI too good? AI= opponents. AI difficulty is the topic. 
Well, the AI of our opponents is a bit different from the level of the troops said “AI” use. So, I would’ve interpreted it a bit differently from one another. AI is how the Bot Players play, the troops are the tools they use.
If you would actually like to generate a thread on the matter, I’d probably go with something like “AI Difficulty Just Means Higher Stats” or something along that lines. I dunno’ I’m going on very little sleep atm, so not feeling too creative. 
That seems like too much work when I can just post it here since it is a nearly identical topic. It doesn’t matter anyways. Devs only listen to wallets and whiners, and while I certainly whine a lot, I apparently don’t whine about the right stuff.
Now pardon me while I go make a nerf Firebomb thread. Given enough support, they’ll somehow gut the thing that already kills itself.
Then you’ll be most pleasantly thrilled to know that troops like Firebomb and Sunbird are almost effectively useless in the Underworld. To be honest, Delving was designed in a way that makes all the quick cheese methods used in the Overworld next to pointless to use.
I mean… you can try, but um… good luck with that strategy. Seriously.
Oh. In that case they probably will leave it alone. After all, they need to focus on troops that are useful for the latest feature they came up with, delve.
I do regret using “AI” in the title instead of “RNG” but alas.
There were some troubles with the C# pRNG in the past, or I feel like I saw some honest discussion about them. I can’t find sources on that so maybe I just misinterpreted some threads somewhere. The articles I remember are from like, 7 years ago so whatever. That there aren’t a lot of easily-reachable articles about it tells me it’s probably not a big problem.
But at least one game I’ve played implemented their own Mersenne Twister because players, clever devils that they are, sorted out just enough of the game’s pRNG to deduce what the seeds would be at particular instants and thus predict the outcomes of random events.
But I still think ultimately I’d just be happier in a game without free turns. Then I’d be forced to rely on planning and strategy instead of winning all of my GW matches in 2 turns today because of cascades. The pendulum swung my way this time. I didn’t play any PvP matches to see if I’d have to wait 10 minutes for Goblins to take a turn. That’s one guaranteed probability: you can’t have bad luck if you don’t play.
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I think it’d be an interesting game mode to play without Extra Turns (or at least, no Extra Turns on 4+ matches). It would greatly change the relative worth of some of the most effective troops, however, so it’d have to be a new mode.
But hey, a new mode where previously “useless” troops become more useful? That’s a great way to inject some value into the giant stock of unused cards…
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Should probably be based out of Glacial Peaks.
Yeah, far more important to good enjoyable gameplay than strict “fairness” is game-feel. People can say all day long that it’s only cognitive bias that makes it feel like the AI is insanely lucky, but the AI still FEELS extremely lucky.
When you get down to it, who are you REALLY fighting when you play the game? You aren’t really fighting other players. You’re fighting a cold, unfeeling AI. The idea of being “fair” to the AI, when it makes the game more frustrating to the player to do so is really kind of ridiculous.
I don’t think free turns are entirely bad, as it can feel good to use board-knowledge and spells to earn free turns. But when Jarl just spams one spell endlessly and gets unlimited free turns, Fizzbang and Nobend take turns casting and exploding forever, or Infernal King happened to read the definition of immortal and give it a serious go, it honestly feels like being robbed.
Why? Because the AI didn’t EARN any of those things. When you are out-played by a superior strategy, it can at least feel like you’ve learned something from the experience, and might either try adapting the new techniques you saw into your own strategy, or build your own counter-strategy.
When you are out-lucked though? It feels like there was nothing you could have done to win. It’s a total cop-out, where an inferior team or strategy is just handed a win because an unstoppable force of nature just eradicates your team on the enemy’s behalf.
Showing us that the numbers eventually balance out will not solve the problem that the game feels rigged. The only way to really get rid of that feeling will be to find some way to prevent luck from being so egregious in the instances where it occurs. It might be “fair” for the AI to get a 15+ cascade, then loop the player to death on it’s first turn of the match, but it will never FEEL fair.
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Yeah this is a good statement of what I mean.
The effects on my emotions are lopsided. I don’t care about my own free turns, but I really hate CPU free turns. I am perfectly willing to have my own teams “nerfed” if it means I have fewer games that go:
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
SKULL MATCH, YOUR TURN
3 MATCH
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
NOBEND EXPLODES
FIZZBANG EXPLODES
SKULL MATCH
SKULL MATCH
SKULL MATCH
SKULL MATCH
SKULL MATCH
YOU LOSE
Think it doesn’t happen often? Hand out a mythic ingot every time it happens, then. I’ll never get one, right?
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Nobend and Fizzbang just loop like that, they do it for you too, no particular luck involved there. It is just their design with a high chance for the explode of 50%/33% and their low manacost filling them so quickly with auto-extraturn, often both with just one explode spell so that you don’t really reckognize when they don’t roll the explode now and then as that won’t break their chain due to the other exploder being filled beforehand already.
I totally get that it feels bad, it does for me too, but it works like that for you and the AI, so what would you propose to fix it? Handicap the AI even more, with all the advantages we already have over it? Or prevent extraturns for both sides period? 'Cause i don’t see another way to prevent that from Happening(other than more sensible troop design in this case).
In the history of my goblin team use, I can remember getting a Fizzbang/Nobend loop going maybe once. I particularly don’t like using Goblins because it never works out for me like it does to the CPU. I would put $10 on the table if I used a Goblins team for a week, I’d see an 8-turn loop maybe once, but I’d see at least ten CPU opponents pull that off in the same period.
I know I didn’t stutter because it’s letters. It feels worse that the CPU gets free turns than the feeling I get when I get one. Because of that, yes, I’d like to take away “all the advantages” the CPU has left. PvP is just a slower Explore at this point, and from what I see of high-bracket GW there’s very little defense strategy. We’re here to grind and pass time.
The only way to get the “super fair tournament-worthy play” that people seem to believe we have is to burn it down and start over. You can’t have “fair, strategy-based play” with uncapped free turns. Sorry.
I think that is a little uncalled for, i read what you wrote and agreed it feels the same for me, i merely mentioned the AI being on equal footing here just to make the point of whatever fix we deploy to fix that issue would have to be one that disadvantages the AI directly or make the game utterly boring.
But you answered my question with the rest of your post and i can now just disagree with you about the solution, i don’t want the AI being crippled even more.
Side note for how this works:
I just played a kickass GW match and was really proud. I actually got 6 free turns off of one move. But then the servers went down, I had to restart my game, and I was assigned a loss. That reminded me how “equal footing” I am with the CPU: if anything at all goes wrong in the game, the CPU wins. That’s how free turns work, too.
Absolutely nothing that will happen in Gems of War today will make up for that. I’m going play Hyrule Warriors instead.
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It boils down to this:
I’m in favor to balance out changes for the game mechanics in general, which means nerfs and buffs, usually nerfs because troops are not reworked at a reasonable speed.
Making this game easier, will inevitably be the end of it.
Unfortunelly it’s how it must work, otherwise players would cut their own connection on purppose to avoid losses. The rules and laws can sometimes annoy us, but they are there to avoid worse scenarios. Have fun with your other game, the serves are really messesd up today and nothing good will como out of it…
Yet in June 2017 when Unity came to PC the AI was “adjusted” to be “more fair” because “luck was too biased in the player’s favor”. The AI was tinkered with then. I believe the devs when they say it hasn’t been adjusted recently, but at the launch of Unity on PC they were up front about saying it was adjusted.
For me it boils down to the basics of winning feels good, losing feels bad, losing when I make a mistake presents a learning opportunity to improve my play and doesn’t feel as bad, and losing because the AI decided I’ve won too much and I need a stomping to keep my win rate in check makes me rage because there’s absolutely nothing I could have done skill-wise to prevent the loss.
Exactly this.
This too.
Agreed.
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Yeah I saw you post “STFU and go play another game” and I tell you what:
From now on if you complain about a game mechanic, I’m going to remind you Candy Crush is there, waiting for you. The game is perfect, as-is, and if you’d like I can relentlessly remind you of this on your travels. I can even put a 
on the end so I can pretend I mean it in jest.
Or you can remove that non-argument from your repertoire. It doesn’t do anything to invalidate my points, or that in general everyone gets agitated when the CPU is lucky. You don’t get to tell me not to speak, cupcake. I don’t either, but I can suggest you stick to saying things that actually matter.
It comes down to this: luck is in the hands of the developers. There are plenty of games where luck is rigged in the players’ favor, especially when it means making sure “bad luck” experiences aren’t both catastrophic and demoralizing. There are other games that play the rules lawyer and faithfully let luck do what it pleases. Two ends of the spectrum:
- In the most recent DOOM, the game is rigged to reduce the damage you take when health is low and occasionally ignore lethal hits. This means if you get into very dangerous scenarios, you are more likely to survive but get beaten up badly. It turns out players get more excited about “barely surviving” than “reloading the save until I win”, and rigging the game in their favor means the developers can make more brutal encounters and have happier players.
- Dark Souls doesn’t give a shit and if you have 45 HP and take 44.0000001 damage you are dead. That’s > 45 so it may as well be 45, right? Eat it. Dark Souls is hard.
If we’re going to argue Gems should be on the Dark Souls side of the spectrum, we’ve got a very large amount of rebalancing to do. We need like, Smash Bros. rules: no gem masteries, no free turns, no exploders, no generators, no troops with abilities that target at random. Those are all “luck”, and luck isn’t allowed in a rules lawyer wet dream.
I want GoW to be more Mario Kart than Forza. If I wanted “fair” to mean “sometimes other people get more than you” I’d get a second job instead of spending 10+ hours on a video game weekly.
The problem is not with the AI getting turns. The problem is with the AI getting ALL the turns. It’s gotten to the point where there are just so many team combinations that can maximize and exploit the game’s luck-heavy features to create unwinnable scenarios, that it’s ridiculous.
The biggest problem is, these luck-based teams do not work for the player. It’s not like the teams are strategically GOOD. If you use them as your attacking team, you’ll be sorely disappointed to find your win rate tanking all the way down to 10-15%. Objectively speaking, they are BAD teams. BUT when the stars align, these teams become absolutely unbeatable, making the match a frustrating waste of time.
I would honestly rather lose a fight to a divine team that actually fights based on good team composition (even if they are OP) than lose a fight where I only got to take one turn then spent five minutes waiting for the match to end because the AI gets a free turn every turn.