New content only available to players that don't freeze?

alextfish

For what it's worth, I very rarely encounter the freezes. Maybe one every 100 games our so. I'm missing out on Saheeli because this event is really long and I don't have time to grind out that many games, not because of freezes. (Well, okay, also because I lost a couple of games to RC or to mythic-stuffed Kiora decks, but that's not relevant to the current discussion.)

Pqmtg-

Morphis wrote:

The more I read your comments the more it looks like you just want to enforce your thinking.
How would I feel if I was gold medal and people claimed it was wind fault?

That they have EVERY REASON to complain.

What if I make to top 10 and get shaleeri and the 11th cries about it?
He has every right to do so.

It could be he got screwed more than me.
It could be I got screwed more than him and still placed higher.
It could be anything.
This does not make it necessarily fair, only fair(not even that guaranteed) over the totality of participants(for the big numbers law).
In this context It does not matter. This is a "player vs player" event. Every participant just care about his own result(and coalition but those two coincide). That's simply natural.

Even If the volatility is adjusted on the average value with peaks is NOT FAIR.
Especially For each of this peaks it is totally unfair.

Its like I don't know 10 employees...
Each should get 1000$ as salary
8 get 1000
1 gets 1500
1 gets 500.
(These 2 chosen at random)

On average they got 1000 each.
Is that fair?

Do you think the one that got 500 would not complain cause on average they got 1000 as a group?

You realise that in your case it's provable by math that it's totally fair, and that people would still complain because like you, they complain in spite of proof to the contrary? I fear the one married to his position is you.

Morphis

Pqmtg- wrote:

Morphis wrote:

The more I read your comments the more it looks like you just want to enforce your thinking.
How would I feel if I was gold medal and people claimed it was wind fault?

That they have EVERY REASON to complain.

What if I make to top 10 and get shaleeri and the 11th cries about it?
He has every right to do so.

It could be he got screwed more than me.
It could be I got screwed more than him and still placed higher.
It could be anything.
This does not make it necessarily fair, only fair(not even that guaranteed) over the totality of participants(for the big numbers law).
In this context It does not matter. This is a "player vs player" event. Every participant just care about his own result(and coalition but those two coincide). That's simply natural.

Even If the volatility is adjusted on the average value with peaks is NOT FAIR.
Especially For each of this peaks it is totally unfair.

Its like I don't know 10 employees...
Each should get 1000$ as salary
8 get 1000
1 gets 1500
1 gets 500.
(These 2 chosen at random)

On average they got 1000 each.
Is that fair?

Do you think the one that got 500 would not complain cause on average they got 1000 as a group?

You realise that in your case it's provable by math that it's totally fair, and that people would still complain because like you, they complain in spite of proof to the contrary? I fear the one married to his position is you.

Oh well if by any chance I will get robbed when walking the streets, since it could equally happen to anyone equally I won't get mad and will call it fair.
Thanks for the insight.

span_argoman

Pqmtg-, you seem to focus a bit too much on the expected value of the circumstances. While that is a good thing to bear in mind, I believe what people were trying to get at is that the bugs/freezes/unfixed cards are creating increased variance on the results. And variance is another factor which is equally important to pay attention to as expected value.

So even if bad stuff on average affect everyone equally, the actual effect will be somewhat different on each player because of the finite number of matches we play per event. And people prefer to avoid this type of variance for the same reason that some people complain about RNG in any game or gravitate towards games with minimal RNG or luck. The view is that the larger the role that variance plays in determining your final score, the less your player skill matters, because all factors have to add up to 100%.

So I think it's a fair point to try to push for the developers to fix the known issues with the game asap. Especially when some of the issues are recurring issues from when the previous sets were newly released and when some others have been discussed at length here in the official forums.

shteev

If I might be allowed to speak on behalf of Pqmtg- for a minute, I think what he's trying to do is define the word 'fair' in very absolute terms.

Say for example you were to line up all the competitors in the men's 100 meters at the Olypmics, and then you were to shoot one of them in the head randomly, that would be fair if each competitor has an equal chance of being shot, and unfair if each competitor has an unequal chance of being shot.

The unpleasantness of the whole situation has no bearing on whether it's fair or not. Maybe a term other than 'fair' is required here.

Pqmtg-

span_argoman wrote:

Pqmtg-, you seem to focus a bit too much on the expected value of the circumstances. While that is a good thing to bear in mind, I believe what people were trying to get at is that the bugs/freezes/unfixed cards are creating increased variance on the results. And variance is another factor which is equally important to pay attention to as expected value.

So even if bad stuff on average affect everyone equally, the actual effect will be somewhat different on each player because of the finite number of matches we play per event. And people prefer to avoid this type of variance for the same reason that some people complain about RNG in any game or gravitate towards games with minimal RNG or luck. The view is that the larger the role that variance plays in determining your final score, the less your player skill matters, because all factors have to add up to 100%.

So I think it's a fair point to try to push for the developers to fix the known issues with the game asap. Especially when some of the issues are recurring issues from when the previous sets were newly released and when some others have been discussed at length here in the official forums.

That's exactly what I've been saying. There is increased variance(volatility) which is bad.

But it's still fair.

Morphis

So we were discussing the whole time the real definition of the word "fair".

Well then looks like we can't expand our thinking too much...
Ok will try to explain myself better too.
This variance can usually benefit, especially for this event, the middle quality players.
The ones, to be precise, that without freezes would get near the place needed for saheeli rai but not high enough for it.
Some of them could get better result meaning they will get in range.
Some will get worse result getting lower prize than should.
For these ones, though, the loss is not as big as the gain of getting her.

So basically, for them the risk of having freezes in game is worth it.

For the ones that instead would get in top leaderboard, they can't get more than her so they only risk losing her.

Hope it's clear enough.
Calling unfair, variance, whatever, does not matter much.
I thought it was clear enough what I meant.

Pmaster47

Pqmtg- wrote:

No I'm saying complaining it puts you behind in an event is just looking for an excuse if people ahead of you deal with the chances of freezing as much as you.

Freezing is annoying and a problem in the game. The fact that the events consists of a good number of games however means that everyone eventually runs the risk of it. It is not a problem for the event placements.

There is a difference between a game bug and an event breaking bug. Don't drag a game bug in to complain about losing the event if it equally affects everyone.

This is why I asked if I was wrong about the freezing being a universal constant. Because that's the event problem.

If winning due to random happen events is counter-intuitive to your idea of a fair and balanced game, I strongly urge you to stay away from card games. Card games with puzzle quest cascade mechanic? Your head might explode. Even without the freezes and bugs.

I think your totally missing the point:

Picture a real life magic tournament. Both the draw of your deck and your opponents is random...that's all find and dandy...I assume most of us would agree this is still a fair tournament

Now picture the same real life magic tournament where a judge would randomly select one out of 10 players and force them to forfeit their match before its played. Are you honestly saying you still would consider that a fair tournament? would you knowingly enter a tournament with such a rule? Would you pay money to enter such a tournament? After all its still random and could affect any player equally?

Secondly, the freezing issue is not universal or equally distributed among players - My girlfriend freezes up at least twice as often as I do (we haven't figured out why yet but its a clear difference). I've also seen a few of the same names at the top of the leaderboards with perfect scores for several weeks now so obviously there are a few really good players who seem to avoid even a single freeze for weeks at a time. Where as my girlfriend freezes probably 1 in 20 matches. I'm freezing maybe 1 in 40 (this round more then that)

If you spread this issue out over 2 events a week over many months then yes the law of averages put manny of us on equal footing. Plus normally your talking about the difference between winning a mythic you likely already own and a rare you likely already own. Not that huge of a deal in the grand scheme if they eventually stabilize the game

But this is a SINGLE event with an EXCLUSIVE one time reward. For this one time event there will be players that get more lucky and players that get less lucky - its not going to average out over a single event (even a 3 day event)

The freezes they cant control. But they can control their policy 100%. They are knowingly providing a highly desired prize to which ever good players encounter the fewest bugs over a 3 day period and knowingly denying that prize to whichever good players encounter the most bugs during that same 3 day period.

Pmaster47

shteev wrote:

If I might be allowed to speak on behalf of Pqmtg- for a minute, I think what he's trying to do is define the word 'fair' in very absolute terms.

Say for example you were to line up all the competitors in the men's 100 meters at the Olypmics, and then you were to shoot one of them in the head randomly, that would be fair if each competitor has an equal chance of being shot, and unfair if each competitor has an unequal chance of being shot.

The unpleasantness of the whole situation has no bearing on whether it's fair or not. Maybe a term other than 'fair' is required here.

I think your trying to be too 'fair' to him. I posted this thread about the current state of this game and their policy to run a single event with an exclusive reward given the current stability of the game.

The freezes are not fairly distributed. They are not based on a system of randomly choosing amongst all players with an equal change of freezing. Some players freeze more then others - that's a fact.

Pqmtg-

Pmaster47 wrote:

Pqmtg- wrote:

I think your totally missing the point:

Firstly, the freezing issue is not universal or equally distributed among players - My girlfriend freezes up at least twice as often as I do (we haven't figured out why yet but its a clear difference). I've also seen a few of the same names at the top of the leaderboards with perfect scores for several weeks now so obviously there are a few really good players who seem to avoid even a single freeze for weeks at a time. Where as my girlfriend freezes probably 1 in 20 matches. I'm freezing maybe 1 in 40 (this round more then that)

If you scroll up far enough you'll find this whole thing started as me wondering if freezes are universal.

That's all I was wondering about before people started this whole nonsense, as if the word fair needed a definition.