Stormcrow said: Oh there was an obnoxious bug for a little while in the early days (I wanna say around when Oath of the Gatewatch dropped?) where we were all (or a lot of us, I don't remember exactly) totally locked out of Story Mode for like a week. That was an odd one. Pretty sure there have been bugs with purchasing planeswalkers too, though understandably bugs with purchasing anything tend to be fixed very quickly. (Unlike Prickleboar....man I'm still mad about that, that bug totally ruined my first red deck ever...*shakes fist*) Anyways, the specifics aren't really the point: the point is, nothing about the game that we can observe suggests there are bug-free parts of the game we can't observe. It just adds to the extra-ordinariness of your extraordinary claims. And you know what they say about extraordinary claims.I will add that I think making broken cards harder to draw is a good way to introduce massive bug and lots of player frustration. For one thing, there have been previous issues (and may be again!) with getting the deck's first 40 cards to actually be 4 of each card. For another thing, people who build decks around a single broken card usually aren't silly enough to wait to actually draw it. At least not without enough card-draw in the deck to blow right past any weighting mechanism. I, for one, learned long ago with paper cards that MtG would not be kind to me if I made decks that assumed I wouldn't be unlucky.
babar3355 said: FindingHeart8 said: I agree with what Bil and Barbar said above me. I'd also like to add another drawback to Starfield...not only is it slow, but in the weighted card draws it's an easy draw, which is bad when you only need one. I've lost count of the number of times my opening hand has been 3 starfields, which can cost you the game if your opponent is playing a fast deck. I honestly can't wait to River's Rebuke a Starfield Lock
FindingHeart8 said: I agree with what Bil and Barbar said above me. I'd also like to add another drawback to Starfield...not only is it slow, but in the weighted card draws it's an easy draw, which is bad when you only need one. I've lost count of the number of times my opening hand has been 3 starfields, which can cost you the game if your opponent is playing a fast deck.
FindingHeart8 said: Volrak, you have less than 100 different players who have made posts on your database (69 to be exact as of today), and less than 40% are players posting more than just a couple of inserts. So, yes, any player who consistently reports inaccurate data to your spreadsheet could significantly alter the results. I'm sorry, but this database is more a sample population of the mtg community, not its representation.
khurram said: Starfield is fine as it is. It's been around since the start and people have survived. It can easily be dealt with, but suddenly it needs the new tinykitty self-destruct feature? (which is hugely unpopular btw)If it self destructs it is not worth the investment of all that Mana you need to cast it and the other supports. It can't be compared to an imaginary version of Whir that doesn't exist, in order to make an argument about nerfing it.But yeah let's just nerf any card that may give you even a least bit of challenge while facing the AI, and turn this game into candy crush.
bken1234 said: babar3355 said: FindingHeart8 said: I agree with what Bil and Barbar said above me. I'd also like to add another drawback to Starfield...not only is it slow, but in the weighted card draws it's an easy draw, which is bad when you only need one. I've lost count of the number of times my opening hand has been 3 starfields, which can cost you the game if your opponent is playing a fast deck. I honestly can't wait to River's Rebuke a Starfield Lock My Starfield lock got RR-ed yesterday -- I had another one loaded in my hand -- it was nice to see all of my supports come back in the next 4 turns -- including Starfield reinforcing itself.
Volrak said: FindingHeart8 said: Volrak, you have less than 100 different players who have made posts on your database (69 to be exact as of today), and less than 40% are players posting more than just a couple of inserts. So, yes, any player who consistently reports inaccurate data to your spreadsheet could significantly alter the results. I'm sorry, but this database is more a sample population of the mtg community, not its representation. So, to summarise, there's never been any evidence of tampering, and if there ever was, there are ways we can check for it, only there's a cunning cabal with no known motive who've made it their life's work to corrupt statistical experiments, and whose members include many well-known mtgpq players, such that more than half of the 50,000 cards entered into the database are dodgy, so we can't check for it after all.Well, it's clearly time that the rest of this community who *aren't* members of the Spreadsheet Bandits to come together and fight bad data with good data! Their paltry 25k dodgy cards will soon wither before the combined might of our flood of unbiased data, and become an insignificant rounding error in the many fruitful analyses yet to come. Will you help us out?(Edit - sorry if this appears snarky, but in all seriousness, there appears to be no other logical interpretation of your concerns as I explained previously, and again in all seriousness, that interpretation, bizarre though it may seem, cannot be irrefutably disproven. Finally, still in seriousness, for all except those who disbelieve the possibility of honesty in scientific endeavour in principle, more data is indeed a remedy should such a scenario eventuate in a realm outside of fantasy.)
babar3355 said: Surely you can understand how publicly calling into question the quality of someone else's research and database will elicit a defensive reaction @FindingHeart8 . Especially, one in which they have spent countless hours managing with little to no personal reward. We all understand you have concerns. No one is asking you to rely on the information.Can we just move on with the conversation about why the community is generally disappointed with the Ixalan set and specifically with the Elite cards.
FindingHeart8 said: As your database develops further with more users (and I hope it does!), I'll be more reluctant to question it. But at it's current size of a mere 3.5 coalitions of variety in inputs, it's too early for me to swallow as unquestionable fact.
babar3355 said:Can we just move on with the conversation about why the community is generally disappointed with the Ixalan set and specifically with the Elite cards.
I think events which strongly encourage all-new decks focusing on XLN tribes or mechanics will help, because it'll be a way to have fun with the new set that doesn't depend solely on comparing like-for-like with previous sets. And possible formats which could be added in the future like drafting would really give us reasons to play with the new cards and see how they work together
khurram said: I think events which strongly encourage all-new decks focusing on XLN tribes or mechanics will help, because it'll be a way to have fun with the new set that doesn't depend solely on comparing like-for-like with previous sets. And possible formats which could be added in the future like drafting would really give us reasons to play with the new cards and see how they work together The new big event is out, I am curious to think how many people think it actually encourages new decks focused on XLN tribes. For me it doesn't.Are people having fun with the new set while playing Race for Orazca?PS: Perhaps this should be a poll.
FindingHeart8 said:Your database may consist of a lot of inputs, but not a lot of different users (69 total) who input the information. One of the users is responsible for over 20% of the information you have. If you tried to get conclusions based solely off this database published as a representation of the entire community, it would not be deemed credible by most scholarly sources because of the inability to account for accurate inputs beyond being a deviation off and the imbalance on the results favoring multiple inputs of the same user vs. inputs from all users.
span_argoman said: FindingHeart8 said:Your database may consist of a lot of inputs, but not a lot of different users (69 total) who input the information. One of the users is responsible for over 20% of the information you have. If you tried to get conclusions based solely off this database published as a representation of the entire community, it would not be deemed credible by most scholarly sources because of the inability to account for accurate inputs beyond being a deviation off and the imbalance on the results favoring multiple inputs of the same user vs. inputs from all users. As the user submitting the ~18% of the data on that spreadsheet that @Volrak and @octal9 have built, I'd just like to say that my methodology for recording card pack data is that I record down all card drops except Free Boosters, Basic Boosters and Elite Packs. I don't see how there can be bias if I'm submitting everything but I'm always up to hear about how to improve the quality of the data collected.
Volrak said: FindingHeart8 said: As your database develops further with more users (and I hope it does!), I'll be more reluctant to question it. But at it's current size of a mere 3.5 coalitions of variety in inputs, it's too early for me to swallow as unquestionable fact. Again, while many results are strongly supported, I've never presented them as unquestionable fact.There might be two things being conflated here. One is the possibility that the true drop chances aren't the same for different players. Stats using combined data from all players generally assume they are. Although basic checks (and Occam's Razor) support that idea, if you were to suggest that that hasn't been proven, you'd be right. A second thing is the possibility that large-scale contributors are submitting fraudulent data. Having spoken to most such people and seeing first-hand the care and effort they've taken to get it right, I think it's ridiculous and borderline insulting to the great community we have (there are actually 85 contributors to date). I hope that explains where I'm coming from.
FindingHeart8 said: ~18%? Did you only post that to dispute my over 20% claim?
How did you get 85?
During my career, I've had to inform researchers whether their experiments were statistically acceptable
Volrak said: FindingHeart8 said: ~18%? Did you only post that to dispute my over 20% claim? You're confusing rows in a sheet with data points. Span's entered 9601 out of 53266 cards: 18.02%. Span's point was to give you an opportunity to provide a practical suggestion.How did you get 85? Card data used for analyses resides on multiple tabs, not just the main "Data" tab.During my career, I've had to inform researchers whether their experiments were statistically acceptable In general, critique is very welcome. I can't speak to your career's work, but I've critiqued your present critique via PM.