I would agree except i remember when things like that do happen…
This is something i hadnt thought of before now. So what you are saying if i understand correctly is that for some people if they fight 1 battle out of 50 that they only get one turn before being looped to death by goblins for example they feel like it is every battle and then the hyperbole kicks in and they then announce to the world that all they do is watch as the AI wipes the floor with them and other people have it happen 5 times out of 50 and it doesn’t even faze them?
I am no fool. I had a battle today where it fealt as though the game had decided from jump that i was destined to lose… The enemy team had 2 TDS and i you not each one of them resurrected 3 or 4 times before i finally lost. But that was 1 of the 40 battles i fought today. One loss like that doesn’t prompt me to come round and proclaim the futility of battling TDS…
Am i happier than most ppl here? Probably. If that is what makes me a fool then so be it. I would rather be a “happy fool” than a “miserable whiner”
And for the record i am not calling anyone anything. I am painting with a broad brush as they say…
Yes, that is exactly what I mean. Some people look at a few losses (especially back-to-back) and see it as a failing; some see it as “part of the game.” As usual, the pendulum swings both ways, and not at an even cadence (such is the nature of RNG). People tolerate these fluctuations according to their temperament. I’d argue that folks prone to frustration are also the ones most likely to come here to vent, which is why you always find yourself outnumbered.
Related, and as an aside: Humans are vain creatures, in aggregate. In a hybrid luck/skill game like this, we have a tendency to proscribe victory to personal skill (“I played that game perfectly — smoked ‘em!”) and loss to luck (“I didn’t even get a turn for the second half…c’mon!”). The reality is somewhere in between. We just take credit for those times that the wind was blowing into our sails. This leaves an impression that the die rolls are against us — since we really only ever can lose to Luck.
I’ve been reaching my “threshold” everytime i take a new build, with no gem spawner/converter/transformer, into PVP and the battle is… brutal against my team… And i need to hug them, and say it’s not their fault, and everything will be okay because i’ll never do that again…
But i would be the first to attribute 80% of my losses (not counting those caused by game crash or phone call) to myself making a mistake. I have said so many times.
To share a personal experience: I am skilled player with plenty of experience, for frame of reference. I decided to build some nostalgic decks from a convo in another thread.
Putting those teams up against the current meta, Goblins, Troll/Kraken, and even some TDS/Krys decks that NEVER give me trouble I saw the AI getting ridiculous cascades and just running away with the games. This had zero to do with skill, I made the right moves but the ai received sky drops that were favorable and completely out of my control.
I had to take a breather and pull up my old faithful Gard Team to stomp some baddies to balance out my recall bias!!
It’s not recall bias per say when most pvp teams have these ridicuous mab/kraken teams,
that wipe you out with 1 ‘turn’ after minutes on end of you building up your guys.
couple of points here -
first, the fact that so many players have been noticing this ‘all the sudden’ means there’s a chance something fishy is going on, since after playing for 2+ years it all the sudden becomes noticed by a bunch of people means the ‘recall bias’ isn’t relevant, or we would’ve been complaining years ago.
Something’s happened of late and many people are noticing.
If this wasn’t bad enough, point 2…
Game devs have been ‘proven’ to have finaggled programming code to screw over players… (was in an actual forum in a card game where someone (along with others) noticed the chest loot rates all the sudden seemed to have changed.
Most brushed it off but this guy bought so many chests he was able to work out the loot tables and mathematically proved it was a different rate than what it was supposed to have been.
Others scoffed, mocked, though many agreed something was ‘off’ in the game.
What happened? A bunch of other players decided to check up on the guys results, bought a ton of chests, and mathematically came up with the same results - the loot rates were different than what was stated by the devs.
You know what? The Devs actually came out and admitted they -did- change the rates, effectively proving they did change it to cheat the players.
Final (crazy) point, I read in steam just last night, that the devs in GoW admitted to ‘tweaking’ the gem drop rate for the AI.
Uhhh…
Is it just me or isn’t that a big deal?
I have no idea where the devs admitted this but the steam reviewer was a long time player and stated that clearly, I’ll leave it up to you forum ‘pros’ to find that statement,
I need to make another post to drive home this general statement,
this ‘AI’ favouring is Not just ‘recall bias’ because it seems to have been happening somewhat recently, and many people have been noticing.
The grounding factor is that most people were happy to play for years and had no complaints, but now those -same people- (if they haven’t left the game already at this point) are stating what others are noticing, something’s ‘up’ because it all the sudden doesn’t seem to be playing out like it should.
AGAIN, skip the ‘recall bias’ premise we all get it, but that’s not what’s being talked about here, the issue is it’s a noticable ‘shift’ in how the games been working from the years before.
My own example is I used to use Jarl, anointed, etc basically a bunch of troops that had total synergism to constantly ‘4-match’ when possible.
I used that team for over a year no problems, colour-cycling for almost constant turns which meant I was able to ‘wear down’ teams and eventually beat them.
Without getting into the ridiculousness of ‘Mabs and Krakens’ (that wipe you out in a few turns), what’s noticable is I’m – No Longer Able to ‘Match-4s’ – as I used to, but meanwhile, all the sudden AI’s getting tons of match-4s out of nowhere.
If readers aren’t clear – I’m saying MY OWN ‘match-4s’ have seemingly ‘disappeared’, whereas the ‘match-4s’ for the AI has seemingly doubled, tripled even quadrupled.
It’s not about ‘I’m sad because I’m losing’, it’s about seeing how your own teams that rely on match-4s to win all the sudden aren’t making them like they used to.
There’s a big difference there, and in case it is ‘just my imagination’, I’d refer you to my prior post about devs actually having been ‘caught’ cheating in algorithms, never mind that in GoW itself a dev has stated they ‘tweaked’ the gem drop rates for the AI.
If anyone has ‘anything’ to say (as an ‘attack’ to this post) regarding that, rest assured I’m not answering as at this point it should be clear players need to double-check what the devs (meaning get to the bottom of the dev post themselves admitting they ‘tweaked’ something) are doing to verify the game is still being played (programmed) ‘properly’.
I’ve been a member of this forum for over two years now. This complaint (AI bias) has been around since time immemorial. In fact, when cavemen enjoyed the very first game of match-three-stones in their cave holes, I have it on good record that that Oona told Boona, “guh gruh oopama,” which translates to English as roughly, “That AI is getting unfair drops — and it kicked my dinosaur, too!”
Felt the same, but i’m more inclined to believe that there are so many troops that can manipulate the board, in PVP, that it’s simply mandatory to rely on certain combos and “combo breakers” such as Mana Drain or Mab. We need to loop/control before being looped/controled.
Not when steam is full of people mentioning how ‘all the sudden recently’ they’re noticing it too.
‘On Record’ is the guy in the aforementioned post regarding chest drops, let’s not bring ‘belief’ systems into this regarding people’s opinion on recall bias, and look at the fact that game devs change things around to what they want.
And someone stated a dev admitted tweaking the gem drop rate for the AI.
Cave-men realized early on stealth and surprise were one of the main factors of being able to hunt down your prey.
In the battle between players and devs devs are the only ones able to use stealth and smoke-screens regarding what they do.
(that means we’re at mercy for whatever they implement, and history has already ‘proved’ tweaking of game code for the benefit of profit-making. )
Not sure what else to say but until someone brings up the actual statements (as stated by a reviewer on steam) that they have in fact tweaked the AI gem drop rates, then this thread has become about ‘beliefs’ and should be closed down.
Nobody is stopping you from collecting statistics and reporting your findings. I’m sure they’ll be quite illuminating. In the meantime, the plural of “anecdote” steadfastly refuses to become “data.” Good luck!
Obviously that wouldn’t be the quote as the reviewer was mentioning something along the lines of " the game gets ‘stupid-AI luck’ all the sudden when it’s losing a match and wipes out your team instantly "
then further goes on to say that he did read the Devs tweaked the AI.
It’s interesting to note that by simply reading that, that it can be ‘construed’ to continue on like this -
" It’s Salty with your daily reminder that the AI doesn’t cheat against the player. In fact, at lower levels, it cheats in favour of the player.
Therefore, at higher levels, it would cheat in favour of the AI - BIG Smile! - "
actually seems obvious now, since we’re forced to fighting people 100s of levels above us, equal or much higher are our only choices.
In fact I think you just spelled out how it works, they probably ‘tweak’ both lower and higher based on levels, but since you’re forced into only higher levels at pvp then it all makes sense.
(that you would get your a-- kicked when facing those ‘500 levels’ higher than you)
That is a problem more related to Collectible Card Games (CCGs) it comes to a point where there is so much stuff together that anyone can suddenly find a nasty combination. The solution usually is removing/rotating some cards in order to keep things under control. In Magic the Gathering (MTG) there are formats where you can or can’t use some collections. Heartstone recently did the same.
If, and that’s a big IF just be clear, it could be applied to GoW i believe (just my hypothesis) we could see some improvements.
The reality is there -are- overpowered cards, but it’s kinda obvious they shouldn’t have been put in the first place.
They do though to create that ‘drive’ for people to spend money for gems etc to ‘win’ etc…
The problem can almost single-handedly be seen coming down to mab and kraken (and maybe one or two other cards). As you and others noticed, it’s that they ‘break’ the game.
Their ‘benefits’ come from having benefits that the game doesn’t actually normally have anything to counter with.
Or at having such a massive ‘differential’ between most other cards countering becomes impractical.
For example, mab’s ‘burn’ could only be countered by being able to ‘dump’ your mana. If you could, mab would be much easier to deal with.
But since you can’t, she all the sudden dominates the game with ridiculous ‘accruing’ mana burn damage and being able to freeze everyone constantly etc.
Adding cards like that destroy a games fundamentals and there’s been so many games that have gone through this there’s no excuse from a devs standpoint, unless the devs knew ahead of time they would be going the route of ‘quick money-low retention’ in the game.
It’s become painful to play the game now (past the ‘questing’ etc), and apart from the people that just hang around for casual chat and/or doing anything to win, most other players are not liking the game anymore (or left already).
you not each one of them resurrected 3 or 4 times before i finally lost. But that was 1 of the 40 battles i fought today. One loss like that doesn’t prompt me to come round and proclaim the futility of battling TDS…
