Luck Factor... Get rid of it or fix it

Bug Reports
62

I have personally thought this game to be luck all along. Don’t get me wrong, mixing and matching cards is important but at same point luck is going to win. A shooter/fighter/sports game, the list goes on and on and on. Those are skilled based games.

Gems is first of all luck, second of all knowledge. You need to get the troops before you know what to do with them.

The mechanics behind a match 3 puzzler, or even Tetris, or anything in this family HAVE to be RNG. Where there is RNG, there is luck. Speaking from a coding perspective, you can turn that luck to the player, or the AI. Some game, I get destroyed. I mean, 2 turns and my team is wiped out. That’s shitty.

Most games, I take pleasure in watching my spell decimate a well put together team just because the RNG decided that it wants to let me match 4 yellows on top of 12 rows of skulls that magically explode to give me 8 green and 10 more blue… a bit of an exaggeration, but you see my point.

Any game that relies on RNG, ANY game, is not going to be skill based. Gems of War is not a skill based, competitive game. Guild Wars is knowledge plus RNG. Point blank. If you make every single move correctly and the AI does one match that cascades into your team getting wiped, that is RNG. That has happened to everybody who plays this game, from level 1, to the max level that a player has achieved.

Wanting a “better game” and a “skill based” game are two different things. If you want to play a skill based game, get one. There are free ones available as well. This isn’t it, and will never be it. And it doesn’t HAVE to be it. It isn’t made for that. If you want to play a “better game”, get a different one, because from the perspective of AI and RNG, this game is doing what it is designed to do.

2 Likes
63

You completely miss the point, noone wants GoW to be devoid of rng, we understand the concept of the game.
But if you are a veteran you will have noticed a much more streakier nature in the random occurences in the game since the unity switch.
Before that the rng was much more predictable, the outcomes much less erratic and drastic. Gem spawn and refresh was much easier to anticipate.
For example <8 gem spawners overwhelmingly missed 4-matches while spawners of >9 had a high chance of hitting 4-matches, especially on prepared boards. My guess is this was due to algorithms that were in place for spawns and refreshs that actually prevented pure rng from happening and made these occurences much less streaky than we experience them now.
When i started the game years back, you could play pvp with the holy trinity team of Valkyrie, Alchemist, Banshee +x against enemy teams of much higher lvl players with easily twice the stats and individually much stronger troops due to their rarity, and still succeed with a patient and tactical playstyle winning far above 90% of your games. Today such a team would just get destroyed every other game by some absurd cascade BS happening when faced with such superior opponent troops.

3 Likes
64

A predictable RNG is not a very good RNG. In fact, most scientific definitions suggest “predictability” causes failure of randomness tests.

65

Maybe it’s just a result of learning to play on the Unity version, but I don’t have that problem.

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110 is a nice streak for me, but I’m more likely to have my streak broken by a win counting as a loss or my flaky PS4 crashing than by RNG.

1 Like
66

I was thinking that too. Coming up on my 2 years in guild on ps4, I have noticed no difference at all since the start. Just new cards.

We always knew things would be different once everyone had the unity ai. I’m right behind you @stan with my win streak but if only I could quit doing daily’s in pvp.

67

I also don’t have problems winning games, people keep missing the point…

Console players have played on unity much longer than the PC crowd and there has always been a disconnect between the two when it came to the perception of random cascades(remember the good old Justice/Mab conversations back then).

1 Like
68

Yeah. Biting off more than I can chew with a daily team or forgetting to switch from my explore teams are good streak-breakers too.

69

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Losing happens, just learn to accept it. :joy::rofl:

1 Like
70

I’m not missing your point. I’ve been having this same discussion for 2 years. First with console players and now with everyone. I acknowledge it is more streaky on Unity than it was for you on Adobe, but people often seem to overstate the difference.

71

I meant missing the point when you assumed my problem was losing or not winning enough, which it isn’t.
Or how else should i understand your response with showing your winrate and telling me you don’t have that problem?

72

I agree about them not knowing exactly how their AI reacts. I mean the play no where near enough to get a really good feel on it, and they will never be able to which is fine. I think they all do a great job, but sometimes do not have enough time to really test things. You can tell by watching some of the videos.

73

I use looping teams to beat meta defense teams all the time and that is a big part of my win ratio.

Naturally, I don’t use the same teams I used 2 years ago.

74

Again completely ignoring the premise of a massively under-stated team consisting only of rare troops and no legendaries against teams of twice or more the stats with much more powerfull spells.

75

I couldn’t care less about the AI behavior on PVP. The problem lies with Raid and Invasion where the troops stats are insanely higher than ours, this is where the Cascades hurts…

There is no way Zuul Goth should be able to instant kill three troops in 3 straight turn sure to Marilith exploding the whole board…

The troops that destroy or explore gems based on Magi should have their magic reduced so they don’t refill the boss from 0 to 32 mana in one go…

76

I guess I missed your point then. I apologize.

77

No need for apologies, i am just struggling to bring my point across.

78

I understand your point perfectly, you may be missing mine.

Predictable and RNG do not go together. Random Number Generator is just that, random. If you can predict it, it becomes a skill based game “maybe here, maybe there”. You can anticipate RNG, but you can not predict it. The fact that since whenever you say you can’t anticipate it, simply means it is working as intended.

It is geared towards players, as stated by the devs. I believe that from what I have seen before this update, and after it. Again, “predictable” RNG is a sign of it not working correctly, because something random should not be anticipated. Guessing, which is all you can do in this game, and wrong has nothing to do with any tweak or update, but has everything to do with R in the “RNG”.

79

That is all fair and you can repeat that as often as you like, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is how the game used to be once on PC, whether you think it goes together or not.

Now you can like the current more chaotic iteration of the game over a more reliable one as it used to be, that is completely fine, your preference is as good as mine which happens to be the opposite, but saying predictabilty and rng don’t ever go together at all is ignoring the past of this game on PC.

80

I am not seeing, nor did I ever see what you have. Which is fine. I’ve watched it closely and genuinely do not see what you’re talking about, it seems the same to me.

I’m not calling you a liar or telling you you’re wrong, but I will stick with what I’ve said as I do not believe my experience to be different than what I’ve stated.

I agree to disagree and hope we can both find enjoyment in this game, however the mechanics end up ironing out.

81

A proper reflection of win loss ratio :wink:

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1 Like