More cascades...for the player?!

El Satanno

I swear, I think I may have crossed into the Twilight Zone. I seriously feel like I have been getting a whole hell of a lot more cascades the past week or so. I'm not talking about a happy random match dropping in after one of mine. I'm talking about the kind confirmation bias tells us constantly happens to the AI: from 0 to 50 AP in a single turn. Now, it's not an every-match kind of thing. Not even every-other-match. But I'll be damned if it doesn't feel like I get that "Oh SNAP!" look on my face on a lot more frequently. Is anyone else on this side of the border? Am I actually in Silent Hill now? Is that you, White Rabbit?

Unknown

I also feel like magnitude of cascades quite increased lately. Both for me and AI.

Unknown

It could be because IF was boosted? Cheap transformations => many cascades.

Wonko33

I swear I am getting less... here we are at an anecdotal impasse...

Unknown

Nah, sure I get one of those every blue moon, (not including the obligatory big cascade at the end of match when everyone is dead and it's pointless.)
But I swear, I feel the AI is getting them even more frequently...including more big cascades as their very first move of the match so that their second turn involves multiple special attacks.

Punisher5784

Cascades will always be an issue. I remember playing the very first Puzzle Question game on my X-Box 360. The only time you could damage the enemy with tile matches was if you matched 3 Skulls together.. well skulls would drop like crazy for the computer, like a 5 row of skulls! I doubt this is something that will ever be fixed.

tanis3303

The cascades don't really bother me, its a part of the game. What gets me is the mathematically improbable ones, which I'm seeing more and more of lately. I'm talking about when the AI makes a vertical match 4, and an ENTIRE column of reds drop down. I'm no mathematician, but that probably should not happen very often. In PvE earlier today, I saw it happen twice in the same turn. L-shaped and T-shaped 5 of a kinds have been falling magically from the sky for the AI lately as well. This is less suspect, but it still happens far too often for me to consider it "random". This week in PvP with boosted Iron Fist and the All Dark Avengers, All The Time® Hulk PvE event have highlighted the other side of it to me as well, and it seems that the player is getting the shaft. Ragnarok's Thunderclap and Daken's Chemical Reaction make a match like 75% of the time, and they only add a few tiles to the board. Meanwhile, I've cast back-to-back Iron Fist Purple dozens of times (adding FOURTEEN black tiles to the board) and had it make no matches at all. Again, not a math guy, but you don't always need math to prove you're getting the raw end of the deal...

ShadowX1984

With the slew of health boosts last month, games are longer and grindier, which gives a lot more time for improbable events to occur.

JVReal

As I thought more and more about this, I wonder if the original random tile generator that is typically used for a match 3 type game is pretty universal?

When I play bejeweled, it's one player, but you never "take turns" with the computer. So you'd have the occasional dry spell then the occasional cascade, so your overall cascade average was adequate... and if you play the 'endless' mode, the AI seems to almost read the board and throw out a match that you need, causing small cascades.

I wonder if those random generators were ever really intended for alternating turns? Perhaps its an overall average of every 33 moves that a cascade happens (just a random number)... and what if that 33rd move seems to happen mostly on the AI's turn?

I don't know, just a thought that maybe the random generator was never intended to be split into turns like this, perhaps it was always intended to be player against the board?

Deadsider

Without hard data it's just a "does it feel like something to you" which is beyond subjective no matter who comes out and says yes or no to the question.

El Satanno

I think I might have broken something posting this. The last two days, I have had the most unbelievable bad luck. Wiping 3 out of 5 matches to start Fresh Cut, wiping twice on the first node of Simulator, wiping to a team with 2* Storm on it! Yeesh.

Anyway, it might be both fun and illuminating if anyone would actually try to gather some data on it. I suppose you'd first have to decide what constitutes a cascade and pay attention as you play. A while back I tracked all the rewards I got for a month, and that was onerous enough...hmm...

Dragon_Nexus

El Satanno wrote:

I think I might have broken something posting this. The last two days, I have had the most unbelievable bad luck. Wiping 3 out of 5 matches to start Fresh Cut, wiping twice on the first node of Simulator, wiping to a team with 2* Storm on it! Yeesh.

Anyway, it might be both fun and illuminating if anyone would actually try to gather some data on it. I suppose you'd first have to decide what constitutes a cascade and pay attention as you play. A while back I tracked all the rewards I got for a month, and that was onerous enough...hmm...

Yesturday, I wiped on the third node in DDQ with a level 94 Ares, Storm and OBW at 90% health. They cascaded me to death.

Unknown

I want to say that I'm seeing a lot more enemy cascades, but I'm probably just imagining it...

But I am seeing a lot more enemy cascades.

DBC

Unknown

Even ignoring fatigue, a longer game will always be favorable to the AI because there's a roughly inverse relationship between good/bad moves. That is, if you just made a great move you usually leave your opponent with nothing interesting on his turn, and the exact opposite happens with a bad move. It's not a 100% relationship but you can think of a board only has so much cascade potential so if you just took a lot of it out, your opponent can't have much to work with. The human usually gets the first good move for starting first, but in a longer game this matters less. With longer health on everyone it is increasingly less likely that you can ride on your first good move to victory before the game goes on long enough for the AI to turn it around via luck, your mistake (fatigue is a huge factor), or simply a strong board shaking move (a move like Unstoppable Crash pretty much creates a new board and the AI gets first dibs on that).

john1620b

I think a lot of this can be explained by the fact that the AI plays better at higher levels. People expect the AI to always play the same, so when there's increased scaling, you're fighting higher level (and smarter) opponents. You don't really realize it, but it's pretty apparent when you play low-level opponents and then super-high-level opponents right after one another.

The smarter AI makes matches that cause cascades, sometimes even over going for the AP it needs. I believe this is why people say the AI gets more crazy cascades, because at higher levels, the AI is causing more cascades in general (which means it's more likely for it to get a crazy cascade).

Pylgrim

It is the nature of chance. It only theoretically evens out on an infinite run, but in the meantime having seemingly endless bouts of good/bad luck is perfectly possible. I remember 6 months ago I was in a particularly baffling bad luck string which literally had me seeing opposing cascades every single turn. It was hard not to believe something had been changed so I posted about it and obviously people that were in a bad rush of their own supported my theory. Eventually it passed and in the meantime other people having bad runs keep posting about how cascades "are worse than ever". It's usually half confirmation bias and half actually being screwed by chance.

You enjoy your good run while it lasts.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

It is the nature of chance. It only theoretically evens out on an infinite run, but in the meantime having seemingly endless bouts of good/bad luck is perfectly possible. I remember 6 months ago I was in a particularly baffling bad luck string which literally had me seeing opposing cascades every single turn. It was hard not to believe something had been changed so I posted about it and obviously people that were in a bad rush of their own supported my theory. Eventually it passed and in the meantime other people having bad runs keep posting about how cascades "are worse than ever". It's usually half confirmation bias and half actually being screwed by chance.

You enjoy your good run while it lasts.

I think that's the thing about anything involving chance. Frankly, it makes me think a lot about casinos and gambling in that way. At this point, a bunch of folks bitter about a bunch of other stuff (I can't say I'm not bitter about anything, so there's that) have something that is supposed to be "random" happening more often, and it just adds to their already bad vibe about the overall experience.

Tonight alone, I experienced two phenomenons that I hadn't previously seen:

First, I played an essential (so a looong drawn out game) wherein virtually every single turn for both the AI and I was a match 4. I ended up winning, and it was bizarre to say the least, but it was an even tit-for-tat exchange from beginning to end.

Second, I played another essential a minute ago. My whole team got wiped out, sans Thoress with 37hp. Throughout the entire game, if the AI had gotten even one cascade, there is little doubt that I would have wiped completely. They didn't, and I ultimately took down Devil Tiny Kitty with a final special following the world's tiniest (maybe three matches total) cascade on my side.

I mention these instances because in both cases, I would have assuredly thought the game was "out to get me" if things had gone even slightly differently (and they easily could have). Due to the fact that I won the first and didn't see even one cascade in the second, it seemed reasonable. If I had lost the first or gotten cascaded in the second? I likely would have added it to the list of frustrating parts of MPQ...

tl;dr: Confirmation bias can be a bugger, especially when the "evidence" [quotes intentional] starts piling up.

DBC

Unknown

It's not a confirmation bias that longer games have more cascade for the AI. You start with the observation of the world where you always go first, which means you always get the best moves if they're available on the first turn. Therefore, when games are shorter you will indeed observe a higher percentage of the best move that went your way because you the free move you get at the start of the game (AI cannot possibly respond to this no matter what) accounts for a significant portion of the total good moves. As the games take longer, your initial free move matters less and you should observe the AI having more chances to even things out. If they have a strong board shaker like Juggernaut or Ultron Fighter, you'd expect the AI to easily overtake you in terms of great moves. You're not imagining things when an Ultron Fighter is getting all those great moves, because Swarm is like two extra turns in a row every turn and you indeed get a lot of awesome moves when the AI gets an equivalent of 3 turns for every turn you take.