RNG is supposed to mean - Random Number Generator, not Rigged Need Goodluck

[awryan]

You seriously ruin what Guild Wars could be by “trying to make it more challenging”. This isn’t strategy based. It’s poker.
Starting board for a guildie

5 gold is from Thief class. Pretend that he or she used Frost mage and it targetted the other FM or Tai Pan.
True RNG shouldn’t care what troops you use. This is not a coincidence. This is not bad luck. It’s the AI making a board in favor of the AI. I’ve saw it happen too many times during Guild Wars not to throw the flag.
Separate servers from PvP so I don’t care how many times it happens in PvP.
If you’re going to continue to favor the defenses then at least remove the color bonuses from GW. That way the player can come into the gun fight with both hands. Rather than one hand with a knife, and the other tied behind their backs.

[Slypenslyde]

Hey man I had this day the last 2 days this week, including my first 2-3 in well, ever.

To date, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Gimlet cast for a 4-match on my turn. I even had teams that could convert 3 different ways and somehow managed to go 4 turns with no favorable lineup.

Today was really different, I went 5-0 even though I had some pretty foul luck with my mana converters. I beat exactly the team you’re facing and I can tell you Thief was a bad choice, and there’s a really good counter to Frostmage on Yellow day. I know you like puzzles, so chew on it for a bit. When a guildmate showed me the team I used I thought it was a little weak, but it turns out its weakness is its strength.

That said, none of my adjustments would’ve mattered in your situation. If you had to pass that board to that team, I know exactly how Turn 2 went and it probably ended with at least 2 of your troops dead.

That hurts bad when it happens in GW, which is why we notice bad luck the most there. I kind of wish we played more than 5 matches, or if the tiers were “win 2/3 to progress”, or anything else that helps smooth out the problems inherent in what happens some % of the time that sounds smaller than it is

[RedRoseWarrior]

You just gotta find the right team that works against those meta teams aka strategy

[awryan]

@RedRoseWarrior

You just gotta find the right team that works against those meta teams aka strategy

Educate me on a great yellow team that can over come a board that allows the AI to get guaranteed moves.

[RedRoseWarrior]

I’ll throw some teams together see what would work and when I find one I’ll let you know.

[shadyady360]

I don’t think strategy is the issue that is being raised here, awryan and his guild are experienced players and like myself will have various teams with strategies to beat different defence teams. The issue here is Tai-Pan starts empowered and converts brown gems to red, and if you look at the photo of the starting board then there seems no way to avoid the opponent getting an automatic minimum 4 gem red match. That means Yao Guai and probably Titania mana full straight away, and goodbye to at least your first 2 troops.

[R.J.S]

Surely the whole point is if the game was rigged specifically in any way you’d be able to reproduce the results consistently. Shit luck is shit luck. I’m sure when the board falls in your favour you don’t feel sorry for the AI.

[TheIdleOne]

@awryan

Educate me on a great yellow team that can over come a board that allows the AI to get guaranteed moves.

I still agree with you and there needs to be a way to not start with these boards.

Astral Spirit to remove Brown would have been the best bet there on Yellow day, not that you would have known going in how bad that board would be. (better chance for the extra turn on Red with the Red Storm unless you had a red troop that was frozen in which case gg.)

Depends on the board state, sometimes removing Red would be preferred.

As for actually playing that, 3 brown on the right side of the board moving the Brown to the skull would domino that full right side to get at least 3 3 red matches and a small prayer for an extra turn, unless your Red (if you had one) was Frozen.

[Slypenslyde]

Yeah my sleepy brain had trouble at first but AWR doesn’t mean “teach me how to build a good yellow team” here, he’s pointing out if your opponent’s first turn looks like his screenshot, even a perfect yellow team is going to get hosed. Your win at that point depends on luck.

This tension shows up every GW. It’s the only mode where you must maintain a 100% win rate or take a big ego hit.

95% is demonstrably possible in PvP. That has no team restrictions and the stats are slightly different. In GW we have a fairly strict color restriction and that means some tools to deal with dumb luck are not available.

I wish I could see more individual statistics about GW. For PvP, I can look at the leaderboard and figure out what win rates are possible. For GW, I only get to look at 30 data points weekly. So I don’t have a feeling for if 85% or 90% is a more reasonable assumption. But losing 5-10% of your win rate is something you can feel, especially when you’re trying for an “impossible” 100%.

It keeps happening to AWR too. I feel you, man. Ask my guildmates how I feel about Mercy and Gimlet. They’ll probably tell you I describe their abilities as, “Give your opponent 20 mana and 4 free moves.”

[R.J.S]

It keeps happening to AWR too. I feel you, man. Ask my guildmates how I feel about Mercy and Gimlet. They’ll probably tell you I describe their abilities as, “Give your opponent 20 mana and 4 free moves.”

What is the problem though? AWR is suggesting the game is favouring giving boards that work for the two cards mentioned rather than the boards being random. Do we have actual proof that is happening? Or is it more likely that in the randomness of all the board configurations and with a deck with two start with full mana cards that transform there is often going to boards that happen to suit that kind of deck.

What it sounds like is you both hate playing against this deck, which is fair enough since the mechanics are incredibly frustrating. However as I stated before when you play your own decks that have some looping mechanic in them that allows you to blow away an opponent before they can even defend I doubt you call out that the board or game is BS. Is it not the same level of RNG there? If you say you can maintain a 95% win rate doesn’t that suggest the RNG, if it is rigged, falls on your side more than not?

[AMT]

Agreed: strategy required to face this potential initial board, unless we’re willing to wing it.

Astral Spirit would have been auto-include if I had faced any pesky Tai Pan during yellow day.

[Thevc]

Seems to be a few boards like that this week; way more than I’ve previously seen in wars and results have suffered. Fully empowered troops can spell instant defeat, but they seem to be the big thing lately and more and more of them are turning up. Boards like this are just sickening, and leave you feeling like you’ve let your guildmates down with a 3/2, when there was absolutely nothing you could do.

[awryan]

@Thevc

Seems to be a few boards like that this week; way more than I’ve previously seen in wars and results have suffered. Fully empowered troops can spell instant defeat, but they seem to be the big thing lately and more and more of them are turning up. Boards like this are just sickening, and leave you feeling like you’ve let your guildmates down with a 3/2, when there was absolutely nothing you could do.

Different servers. But the reverse is what I’ve observed in PvP where I get 10 points a trophy.
I try to use Empowers. The boards rarely go towards what would favor me and the Cascades don’t seem to help either.
for sure. But someone above me is right. I don’t have much of a case without proof. Despite the ability to get proof that supports or squashes my theory of intentionally difficult starting boards being impossible to acquire.
I think I’d have an easier time getting an atheist to believe in God than getting to devs to admit they’ve messed with the AI or the RNG since 2014.

[Thevc]

I also use empowered troops in some fights but I’ve noticed consistent lack of alignment opportunities when running my favoured converter teams, even after smashing the board with an active storm to get only 2 storm gems on the entire cascade! I had never previously lost a B1 fight with 2 of these teams but this week has changed all that. It could be just bad luck but if my yellow board control team experiences similar misfortune, it will strongly suggest that something has changed. Maybe coding should make starting boards as even as possible, ie an even distribution of mana when the game loads. My leprechaun had 1 green gem to play with yesterday whilst spirit fox was sitting on the opposition with 2 guaranteed quad matches on casting whether I casted leprechaun or not. I then got skulled mental and had 1 troop left at the start of my 2nd turn lol. Something just seems different.

[Slypenslyde]

@R.J.S

What it sounds like is you both hate playing against this deck

I won’t speak for AWR but it’s not specific to the opponent.

What I’m specifically complaining about is if I play a Mercy team, yellow and purple simply never line up for me. I’m pretty sure in the history of the game I’ve never seen it happen for Gimlet. For some reason, Ishbaala and Qilin work fine, and Moon Rabbit occasionally.

The reason this bugs me is most success in this game relies heavily on a fast mana start, and nothing’s faster than an Empowered converter. The situation AWR got himself into looks like what happens when you take a gamble on a dodgy-looking cast and the cascades go wrong for you. Happens to me occasionally. With respect to this:

@R.J.S

If you say you can maintain a 95% win rate doesn’t that suggest the RNG, if it is rigged, falls on your side more than not?

In PvP, sure. I get to play 100+ games per week and that means if I see even 10 really bad games, they’re drowned out by the good games or at least the constant stream of not-notable games.

In GW, I get to play 30 matches per month. So if 5 of them go bad for me as they did so far this week, that’s 16% of my matches that I had no chance of winning. “5 unlucky matches out of 30” isn’t exactly an uncommon streak if I consider “all 10k matches I’ve ever played”. It is, as you said, balanced out by streaks where I get 5 really lucky matches out of 30.

But in PvP, the stakes are low. 5 losses don’t really matter in the big picture. In GW, it’s very different. 1 loss can be brutal. So when you run into 5 bad-luck matches within your first 10, it really sours your perception the rest of the week.

You’re being logical and valid and correct, but you’re talking to emotional people. No matter how many times you say, “Bad luck is all in your mind, use Vulcan logic and you’ll always be happy!” I’m still going to be angry and sour about the bad luck, plus probably bitter and sour because your logical advice boils down to “suck it up” whether that’s the intent or not.

I agree with your logic, but I’m being irrational right now and it’d honestly be a lot nicer to say, “Yeah man, I had a terrible GW week like this once too, I dang near threw my phone in the trash. Luck ain’t always a lady, is she?”

[R.J.S]

Got you man, I tell my phone it’s an f-ing cheat all the time so I get how the emotional response definitely needs an outlet.I guess the title of the thread itself is what I was going against, rigged is a very very strong word.

[Slypenslyde]

Yeah the thing going on here is GW feels so important it makes 1 match worth of bad luck feel like 10 in PvP. This is probably why people get so mad at Delves: they only get to try 3 times per day and if you look at the level 500 teams it’s easy to surmise “luck is the only way to win”. If they could try 50 times/day I’m sure they’d just grind it out. But when luck’s the reason you are stuck doing the same thing every day for 3 months, it feels bad.

Imagine if Raid/Invasion were set up so for every 10 losses, the highest available reward Portal were closed and made impossible for your guild to open. That’s how GW works for the upper brackets. If you lose, you might just be the reason your guild loses a lot of resources for that month and has to fight just for the right to get them back next month. That’s GW.

I bet a lot of players don’t see it that way because the reward tiers are so messed up and tilted towards JUST the higher brackets. For them, the bracket’s just a number. I get that part, but it doesn’t invalidate the problem!

[akots]

@R.J.S

AWR is suggesting the game is favouring giving boards that work for the two cards mentioned rather than the boards being random. Do we have actual proof that is happening? Or is it more likely that in the randomness of all the board configurations and with a deck with two start with full mana cards that transform there is often going to boards that happen to suit that kind of deck.

Some time ago, I have tried to test whether the starting board is actually random. I did gather some data that included 100 explore boards. The boards were relatively random although they did not strictly pass the randomness test due to insufficient number of observations. Therefore, I have never posted or discussed the results. Also, of note, there were no correlations with the opponent colors or my team colors whatsoever although again, it did not strictly pass the test due to small sample size. As the data collection is pretty tedious, I never found time to get back to the testing. And I honestly think it is not really worth the effort as it were almost completely random.

Now, if somebody would like to collect the data, I can then run a simulation and tests as this is the easiest part. There are a few conditions that should be strictly followed during data collection to make sure the test is not skewed by anything important. It can be done in PvP or explore or any other mode depending on the purpose.

1. At least 150 and better 200 boards should be sequentially recorded with numbers of each color in a spreadsheet for each board in the sequence. Can be done with anything, like Alchemist or Apothecary, for example.
2. You cannot do anything else and have to immediately retreat. Cannot make any moves, check the tribute, change your team, go out of PvP/explore menu, etc. You have to start the match and record the data and this is it.
3. It has to be done in a single uninterrupted session, so quite a long and tedious haul of at least an hour to hour and a half.
4. To investigate where there is a correlation between the board and colors of the opponent, you can record these for each board. It is quite interesting to investigate. It is possible to even record specific cards but it might require more boards and longer test.
5. Make sure to use the same team and record the team colors as well.
6. Upload the spreadsheet and pm me here on the forum and I will try to calculate the results within 1-2 days.

[RedRoseWarrior]

This team is great against those teams

[Maxx]

That’s not usable in GW and even if it was it would lose as quick as any other team. Just look at the screen shot. Tai-pan would cast and fill Yao Guai then Yao would probably fill again and cast again to kill the first 2 troops. You can’t build a team to beat that.

This is exactly why I don’t touch GW or PvP on my main account.