Computer cheating must stop

Unknown

Some of you will know what a pool shark is. In the game of pool or billiards, people bet on their own victories. You put money down on the game, and the winner takes it. You'd never bet against an expert, so some experts will deliberately lose to give you a false sense of confidence before putting a lot of money down on "one more game." It is at this point that you see what a real game of pool looks like. You get destroyed and your opponent gets your money. That's a pool shark, and that's how I feel this game is playing me. I spend time trying to get that next rank, that next reward, and when I'm almost there, my next game (which, the pattern shows, I should easily win) somehow goes the computer's way. All the blocks fall correctly so that I never stand a chance.

When will D3 come to understand the thing that all other game companies understand: we will not play against a cheating computer. Imagine if you were playing a board game against a friend, and you didn't know the rules. He keeps changing the rules in his own favor. How long would you stand for that? Games only work when there's trust in the rules. This game is gaming us, and we are falling for it.

I've just realized, this game charges money for more continues. They're deliberately trying to cheat us into buying more HP for more health packs. So what's the point of this forum? They don't actually care if we notice this exploit. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

over_clocked

I've had boards where I could start crushing the AI within 2-3 turns or never let them make a single turn, more than the AI could do the same to me (discounting the attacker's first turn), but I'm not cheating

Unknown

Yeah, the ai cheats. No one can convince me otherwise. The ai gets exactly the color cascades it needs in larger quantities than real people do. Is someone gonna try to say its a coincidence that every ai obw gets tons purple match 3s fall from above the board? They don't even need the required ap for abilities half the time. And they cheat in every way possible when it comes to TUs.

Unknown

The issue with AI in this game is that people fail to grasp two things:

1. The AI is very good, while the average player is very bad.
2. Player always going first is an incredible advantage (and boosts is like taking an extra 2-8 turns before the other guy does).

The player is given insane advantages to make up the rather huge difference in the ability of the average player to the computer AI, but occasionally not even that is enough. The AI is also purposely programmed to not understand what any of its moves do. That is, if there is a 5r move that kills everyone, and a 6r move that does 1 damage, the AI will always pick the 6r move when it has 6 or more red AP even though this decision makes no sense whatsoever, because it has no idea what its moves do.

If this game is played in a neutral way, which would mean no boosts and who goes first would be determined by random, and the AI has some vague idea of what the moves are, you'd end up with players getting spanked most of the time but that wouldn't be a very fun game. In a game like this, going first trumps perfect play simply because the guy goes first often can force the other player to never have any good moves, but if you didn't make good use of your first move advantage then things can get nasty very fast.

GrumpySmurf1002

These threads remind me of the online poker boom and the bad beat threads. "Game must be rigged, I saw something outside of normal probability."

When you run millions of iterations of a game, things like consecutive games with horrific cascades will happen to an individual player occasionally. I've had the computer get on cascade binges. I've also beaten maxed 2* teams on the 2nd turn. Play long enough, you'll see plenty of garbage at both ends of the spectrum.

Zen808

Vertigozooropa wrote:

When will D3 come to understand the thing that all other game companies understand: we will not play against a cheating computer.

Never played a sports video game before, have we?

Unknown

or mario cart

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

or mario cart

Oh, God, I give up, you win. I could fill pages with how bad Mario kart cheats. Mpq doesn't compare.

Xiltyn

Typhon13 wrote:

Cryptobrancus wrote:

or mario cart

Oh, God, I give up, you win. I could fill pages with how bad Mario kart cheats. Mpq doesn't compare.

For words that still give people nightmares: Rainbow Road + Blue Shell

Unknown

It is generally believed that a game where both sides plays by the same rules/resources, the person going first will at least never lose. For example it is proveable that the person going first in checkers will always win if he never made a mistake. It is believed that you can always force at least a draw if you go first in chess with perfect playing. The simpler the game, the bigger the first move advantage because it is easier to play perfectly on a simple game compared to a complicated one. While MPQ has some randomness involved mostly in the new tile placement, 'hope something good drops' is hardly a reliable strategy, and it is arguably not any more complicated than checkers. While the move space appears to be large, in checkers you can't collect 5 blue AP and have a 99.9% chance of winning with Magnetic Field.

But the corollary of this is that if you ever relinquish your first move advantage, the computer plays far closer to perfect in terms of matching ability than a human can do and they'll mercilessly beat you down with their superior matching ability. The vast majority of the 'computer insane cascade' is really because you made a very bad move that handed the computer at least a match 4 if not better, or that you made a very dangerous move like matching the X column in a RRXRR (it is twice as likely R drops above or below the RRXRR row versus on the RRXRR row, which hands the computer an instant match 5). The computer is very relentless whenever you hand them the first move advantage back. This is why you should match near the top of the board when you cannot reasonably figure out the state of the board, because matches at the top of the board have almost no chance of handing the first move advantage back to the computer due to how little board shakeup it creates. And no, you can't just not make the bad moves, because that'd make this already grindy game way too long if you really analyzed every possible move in depth, and in general you'd lose far more points than you can possibly gain in the time it took for you to thoroughly analyze the board.

Unknown

? I don't understand how the computer cheats. I'm pretty sure that people who have played this game see the following basic pattern in the AI matching pattern:
Find the first move after sorting the moves:
1. 5 in a line, 4, 3
2. sub ranking by color needed for an ability, so environmental tiles are included, otherwise by dmg
3. if multiple same matches with the same color, pick ones that do not clear own tiles, eg if there's 2 different match-3 red moves, and AI has a countdown on one of them, it will pick the move that doesn't clear it's own tile.
4. Bottom move? (not sure if this is actually in the AI)

Note, the AI will never create a 5 not in a line on any move unless it is a double match because they will automatically go for the 4 line clear.

I'm not sure exactly of the AP ability use pattern, but if there are 2 characters with abilities on the same colour, I find the AI tends to use it against your weak characters, or if you start attacking one of those characters.

If anything, the AI is purposefully dumb.

However, I do play this game more slow and relaxed, having given up on top 10 since season 2.

Unknown

Ares + a goon that gives green AP per turn is scary... He kept using Onslaught instead of the goon casting green AP countdowns.

Unknown

Yeah, sometimes the AI gets incredibly lucky. Sometimes it may even do something impossible (I swear it used 4 TUs against me i the same match yesterday, seriously!), for whatever technical reason, I'm no programmer. And I get that it annoys the kitten out of you, because that's how I feel.
But it can also be totally stupid (as plenty of others have mentioned already), and it will nor target one character at a time, but give you the advantage of just targeting the one that just made a match, letting your characters all survive longer and therefore allowing you to use their abilities longer. That's a huge advantage we have.
Now be honest, haven't you had lucky cascades before? I sure had them, and they were awesome.

Unknown

I try to remember to be grateful for every miracle cascade I get (got a fantastic one on the first turn in PvP once, knocked out two of the seed team's characters and then I got a second move) and I try to keep my confirmation bias in check.

However, it's insanely frustrating the number of time an enemy Ragnarok has used his Godlike Power and 4-in-a-row falls down the centre of the board, or (in my last battle) produced a 6-in-a-row near the bottom of the board, or the AI makes a simple move near the top of the board and the new tiles make a 4-in-a-row or 5-inverted-L for the other team.

Sometimes it really feels like the AI is making moves using the knowledge of what tiles are going to fall (like playing Tetris where the AI can see the next three pieces and plan accordingly, but you can't).

El_Dude

The brain is wired to recognize and retain memory of negative outcomes over positive outcomes.

That said, pretty much every time I drop a countdown tile the winds change immediately and the ai team is going to get the tiles it needs to clear my countdown attack. Blind cascade after blind cascade. That to me is the cheating this game does. It's right up there with the worst offenders like Madden and other EA games. Game developers feel some misplaced need to manufacture drama that should not exist.

Up by four TDs? No problem. Now your RBs fumble every time they touch the ball and your WRs can no longer catch. Aren't you having fun now?!?

The board's all green, purple and yellow but you just laid down Hawkeye's blue Electric Arrow. Watch as the ai team chains a 4x blind cascade that adds the needed blue tiles to the board. Watch as it happens four times in a single match. Yeee fun!

It's not fun. It's inherently unfair. I stopped playing sports games years ago because of that garbage. It diminishes all of gaming.