I don’t complete a lot of the tournaments to the last day and I certainly do not rebuy back in these days. However, I don’t blame a lack of randomness for this. I remember a while back that SG extended the tournaments an extra day while keeping the number of strikes against you the same. If you want to point to a money-grab in this feature through forcing more re-buys, then that’s definitely the one to focus on (but it happened so long ago).
FWIW, the link Petri posted there no longer works, but this one does:
I’m telling you that I disagree that the boards are not random. Randomness means you will have extremely good boards and extremely bad boards.
What I’m saying is that when they extended tournaments by an extra day, that meant players would have a greater chance of getting enough bad boards to be knocked out of the tournament before the tournament concluded. No board manipulation necessary. I added my generic personal performances to demonstrate that I’m not a top player and refuse to buy back in for 75 gems.
I think a valuable piece of evidence against rigged boards was Beta Board-Gate. In that beta, it came to light that the seeding for the initial boards in beta was replicated exactly as the live game. Folks in beta posted videos and screenshots showing that the initial board was the same as in the live game; a preview of your boards, you could say. It worked like this:
Choose a mono-red team in beta, go into a raid/tournament/titan hit
Look at the tiles within the first couple of moves. Note that many of the tiles are purple.
Go to the live game.
Take a mono-purple team to the raid/tournament/titan hit.
Find the exact same board and initial replacement tiles
Dominate.
This was fixed within a day of that post, if I remember correctly. However, it proved to me that your initial board and first few tile replacements are independent of team selection.
I agree that you have some valid reasons for anti-SG sentiment (like pulls). The boards being rigged against your team is not one of them.
The device generates the set of boards you are going to receive. For example, upon opening the app, the device may:
Looks up the pRNG seed
Generates the next 50 initial boards based on that pRNG seed.
You pick your team and raid. It serves board 1.
You use the same team on raid 2. It serves board 2.
You change your team on raid 3. It serves board 3.
I don’t know the numbers or the exact routines, but that’s how it generally seemed to work. When it was tested (while compromised in beta), the player could switch back in forth for multiple raids to preview the next board. Since the player knew the board being served next, the player could pick a team to take advantage of that board in the live game.
If the board were determined by team makeup, then the player would have:
Seen a great board (for purple as an example) in beta when taking a yellow team
Brought a purple team in the live game
Seen a great board for yellow instead.
But that’s not what happened. Folks demonstrated how you could look at the board in beta and go to the live game and get the same board, regardless of how you chose your team.
Not sure how else this could have happened. (Once again, these are from a year ago and was fixed within a day)
Beta(left), Live(right):
Looks to me like your team selection has zero effect. That’s why I believe this incident does qualify as proof. (Note the player in question fled the raid in the live version, so there were no ill-effects; it was done as a test)
No worries on the derailment; I figured attempts at debunking myths are worth going a bit off-topic for.
And I’m telling you that 4 strait fights without blue tiles is not random. I’ve seen this multiple times in the last 12-18 month. ESPECIALLY in raid tournaments.
If you honestly think the system doesn’t read your team going into a fight then your head is further in the sand than I expected.
It’s also interesting to note how often this happens on titans as well. Green titan and suddenly red tiles become more scarce. But no no no, it all completely random.
Been playing the game almost from the beginning. Level 89. My credentials are established and so is my roster. But even more so I pick up on trends. Watch your raid tournament boards. Day 1 you might go 5-0 or 4-1. Same for day 2. But day 3,4, and 5 it’s a cluster f*** most of the time. Wonder why that is? Couldn’t be the push for rebuys. No, the money hungry devs wouldn’t do anything like that. They only do it in every other aspect of the game. But not with boards. Nah.
And the blatant absurdity doesn’t astound me at all.
Credentials for complaining and putting down other members of the forum when they disagree with you, yes
Yes, because the more you win the tougher the teams you are matched with. Just as with raids, raid tournies have a natural way of balancing out that doesn’t have anything to do with boards at all.
I have won 17 of my last raids in a row using a 3-1-1 team. I calculated that to do this I had to have had at least 300 but probably 350+ purple tiles (my stack color) drop for me. That just wouldn’t be possible with any kind of negative board manipulation.
This is something we can both agree upon, but with vastly different meanings of who the implied subject of the statement is.
SG does want your money. They value money over time spent in game by an order of magnitude. They design features to make more money. My over-arching point in this post is that it isn’t necessary for them to manipulate the boards in order to get people to buy more of their digital products. I think I’ve shown that they don’t.
And this is exactly why you lose more later in the tournament:
Though, technically from the change log, it only appears that on 30 Apr 2019:
The difficulty of the opponents reduced slightly in the beginning of tournaments.
How do you know the tiles are skewed based on your team and not based on the defending team? If it’s a green titan maybe it’s programmed not to give red tiles rather than looking at your team to determine what tiles to assign.
You think there is a difference in “need to” and “do” when it comes to this game and $ grabs?
And no, you haven’t shown anything. You have a different opinion, and that’s fine. But there is no absolute “proof” either way. But if the veil were torn off of this one in particular, I don’t think most of the player community would be able to comprehend just how much info is run through in the split second before the board appears.
For me it’s more a problem of game balance - for playing rainbow teams you must have very wide roster of paid heroes. If you are not a “whale” - game forcing you to use combinations (mono, 4+1,3+2 and etc), but in this case your dependence on board very hign
HappyHippo, seriously? That’s why Zynga considers it it’s bestselling game. I doubt they’d do it if you were right. you can find this info on the net. just Google.
Homoclese, you are 100& right, of course. Problem is you are arguing facts with folks who have created a fantasy where SG manipulates the boards they can’t win. That would be completely pointless and so far I haven’t found a single person who gave me a reasonable answer as to why SG would interfere with boards. Thanks again for your many excellent posts.
Here is my take on the bad board conspiracy theory. SG would not spend one red cent developing code that does not improve its bottom line. Bad boards do not make people spend more, they make people frustrated and probably spend less.
Making tile drops completely random is a cheaper solution to code than making tiles appear based on any specific criteria. And completely random means that some people will have long stretches of very bad luck. That’s how a normal distribution works.
Full disclosure I have long accused a certain software company in Redmond of making changes just to mess with us. “Hey let’s rearrange all the menus so no one can find anything, it will disguise the fact that this huge new update doesn’t actually improve capability…”