Can we please talk about Greg's cascades?

CheeksMagunda

So it's been talked about here and there, and I just want to bring it up somewhere as its own topic:
There is very clearly something in the code that alters the chance for cascaded matches. 
In a recent fight, Greg made a normal vertical match at the top of the board. That dropped down not one, not two, but three cascaded triplets of its own, followed by the right two gems to match the gem they kept landing on. Mathematically speaking, if there's six gem possibilities that means two of the same color in a row has a 1 in 6 chance, and three would be 1 in 36. That means two cascaded matches had a 1 in 1296 chance, and three was 1 in 46,656. Then two matching on an existing is another 1 in 36 by itself, so that entire shitshow had, statistically, a 1 in 1,679,616 chance of happening.

Yeah, I understand that it can happen. But I guarantee you this exact sequence has happened more regularly than "just here and there," so can someone please figure out what the hell is going on? 

Volrak

I haven't seen anything quite that egregious, but there've been times (both on my move and the AI's) when I wondered whether the colour of incoming gems was overly clustered.  But it's hard to be sure without a lot of data, and I don't think anyone has plans to collect that.

ElfNeedsFood

I've seen my own side get ridiculous amounts of cascades about as often as I see Greg get them, plus he skips obvious match-5's pretty frequently...  I always take a match-5 no matter what color combo and I also match the lowest best match on the screen when there's not an obvious cascade.

CheeksMagunda

Oh, don't misunderstand, I get them more frequently now too; and I agree, any sort of justifiable proof would require a dumb amount of mundane data. But I'm firmly convinced that Greg is more prone to favorable drops for whatever reason. 

jtwood

I will never be convinced the game cheats for Greg until the devs say “Yeah, the game cheats for Greg by giving him better cascades.” I have seen the game drop multiple, three-color cascades for me all the time. The odds of it seem astronomical. But it’s always seemed to go both ways. 

Maybe this thread should just be titled “Can we please talk about cascades?”

Mburn7

Yeah, I get a ton of cascades and Greg gets a ton of cascades.  The interesting thing for me is that they never seem to happen in the same game.  Maybe its selection bias here, but every game I play seems to be overtly one sided in mana gains (I mean, Greg is still a dummy.  But its a lot harder to win when he gets 30 mana every turn and I get 3)

Quantius

The forums always make me feel like I've got a special case of bad luck. Like I'm the only person who casts Hour of Promise and doesn't get a single match and then watches the AI eat the board.

This last weekend with the great tournament I lost 4 matches due to Greg just going nuts with cascades turn after turn, with a number of other matches being very close.

I end up like Mburn where I'm barely scraping by on off-color matches while Greg drops 2-3 cards per turn and I'm hoping to get lucky or drop a bomb like Killer Instinct or Urza, but taking 5 turns to cast it hurts.

Mburn7

Quantius said:

The forums always make me feel like I've got a special case of bad luck. Like I'm the only person who casts Hour of Promise and doesn't get a single match and then watches the AI eat the board.

This last weekend with the great tournament I lost 4 matches due to Greg just going nuts with cascades turn after turn, with a number of other matches being very close.

I end up like Mburn where I'm barely scraping by on off-color matches while Greg drops 2-3 cards per turn and I'm hoping to get lucky or drop a bomb like Killer Instinct or Urza, but taking 5 turns to cast it hurts.

Lol that's happened to me many times too, usually leaving my opponent with a massive cascade on board.

You are not alone.

EvilDead

I think we all remember when the AI gets lucky versus all the times we get lucky. Everyone is complaining about it and I think mob mentality abounds in this case. There are times when I get stomped by a lucky AI nonsense cascade like 3+ 5 match landfalls in a row including all the peripheral matches but there are times when the same luck comes my way.

It's human nature to remember only the bad ones I think.

Quantius

I think it has more to do with the fact that Greg is generally an idiot and the only way the AI wins against people who have been playing for a while is via nutty cascades. So the only losses come from game freezes and bad beats due to cascades, so every loss feels bad and never truly "earned".

It's why my vote will always be for nerfing Greg's ability to cascade and instead make him smart. I'd rather lose a close match due to my mistakes or because the AI pulled off some good moves than just sitting there watching the AI annihilate me.

jtwood

Quantius said:

I think it has more to do with the fact that Greg is generally an idiot and the only way the AI wins against people who have been playing for a while is via nutty cascades. So the only losses come from game freezes and bad beats due to cascades, so every loss feels bad and never truly "earned".

It's why my vote will always be for nerfing Greg's ability to cascade and instead make him smart. I'd rather lose a close match due to my mistakes or because the AI pulled off some good moves than just sitting there watching the AI annihilate me.

The last time they made Greg smart, he made better matches, giving him more mana, and people lost their flipping minds so hard that they nerfed him back to a drooling mess within days. We really just need to accept that losing is okay regardless of how it happens. Then, if there is a concern about cascades as a concept, it would be great for the devs to prove that gem generation is random and equal for both sides.

Also, they need to let Greg start first in 50% of the games. Of course, people will just complain about that, too, so I go back to saying that we need to be okay with losing. Right now, people hate losing like they were personally offended by it.

Stormcrow

You're right about the confirmation bias, EvilDead, but I think it doesn't help that cascades in the player's benefit don't usually change the outcome of the game, whereas crazy cascades in the AI's favor are probably the #1 thing that suddenly turns the outcome of a game to the AI's favor. Like if I get 50 mana in one turn...I probably just win like a turn or two faster than I would have won otherwise. I don't remember it later because it didn't have a memorable impact on the course of the game. But if the AI gets 50 mana and drops two copies of Razia in one turn (not that JUST happened to me or anything...now I have to wait 8 more hours to unlock the last Ardenvale node, argh) suddenly I go from confident victory to brutal defeat before I can do anything about it. The actual mana gains may be the same for both sides, but the cascade makes a much bigger difference to the outcome when it happens in the AI's favor, so the "bad" cascades have a much bigger emotional impact.

EvilDead

Stormcrow said:

You're right about the confirmation bias, EvilDead, but I think it doesn't help that cascades in the player's benefit don't usually change the outcome of the game, whereas crazy cascades in the AI's favor are probably the #1 thing that suddenly turns the outcome of a game to the AI's favor. Like if I get 50 mana in one turn...I probably just win like a turn or two faster than I would have won otherwise. I don't remember it later because it didn't have a memorable impact on the course of the game. But if the AI gets 50 mana and drops two copies of Razia in one turn (not that JUST happened to me or anything...now I have to wait 8 more hours to unlock the last Ardenvale node, argh) suddenly I go from confident victory to brutal defeat before I can do anything about it. The actual mana gains may be the same for both sides, but the cascade makes a much bigger difference to the outcome when it happens in the AI's favor, so the "bad" cascades have a much bigger emotional impact.

The thing is, I win and many of my coalition members win in excess of 90% of the matches played. This is in Standard Events just as much as Legacy. So while I can appreciate all the consternation, I just don't think the situation is as tilted in the AI's favor as many would describe.

When I was a new player, I was super pissed off about a lot of things. Omniscience, Blue Sun's Zenith and Prism Array being three cards that I hated to see and I lost some matches because of them. Now in Legacy events, I have those cards and damn right I play them. 

But still, my win rate is by far in excess of 90%. When I lose, sometimes it's bad luck when the AI cascades. Most of the time it's my good cards didn't get out on the board before the AI. I know for sure that some of the posters in this thread have a similar win rate so cascades are probably not the problem. New players having to make decks that do not stand up to veteran players is more the issue I imagine. Even still, we have nerds in our group that make pauper decks for events and still have really high win rates. There is also some skill, but we're not going into that here. 

Lastly, who really wants to basically win every game? I mean it's not the point of this thread but it seems like many want to win all the time. The AI is pretty stupid most of the time. I mean sure it's fun to kick some booty but if we didn't lose once in a while then would we be having as much fun? Some risk is needed or what's the point in my opinion.

CheeksMagunda

EvilDead said:

Lastly, who really wants to basically win every game? I mean it's not the point of this thread but it seems like many want to win all the time.

Everyone does want to win all the time. You don't play wanting to lose. The question I think you meant to ask is, who EXPECTS to win every time? That isn't realistic.

I freely admit that my own personal frustration stems from being a relatively new player who really just began the uphill slog against much bigger collections. Manipulating the board for an entire game only to lose when Greg finally dumps out his entire hand including Omni and BSZ is the literal worst. As mentioned above, it's really only glaring when it causes you to lose, but do me a favor - in the next event, count the number of 3+ cascades you get, against the number Greg does. I've adopted a new approach to almost every match, and that's "What can I do to limit the shenanigans the AI will inevitably pull off on his next turn?"

The entire point here has also been mentioned already, too: I wouldn't mind losing to a smart Greg. What pisses me off is losing to a digital mouthbreather simply because he has the ability to blow up the board on a whim. And if you're afraid of a smart Greg (which would be impossible to effectively code in the first place), you shouldn't be playing anything related to M:tG in the first place. 

madwren

I posit that it's more noticeable these days because we lack effective gem conversion spells, which makes it harder for us to rally from behind when an imbalancing cascade occurs and Greg dumps his hand onto the board and you're like "welp, guess I could cast a land." 

jtwood

I just started a game of CoC with back to back to back to back extra swaps that I fell into every time 
Just sayin

Mburn7

madwren said:

I posit that it's more noticeable these days because we lack effective gem conversion spells, which makes it harder for us to rally from behind when an imbalancing cascade occurs and Greg dumps his hand onto the board and you're like "welp, guess I could cast a land." 

Seriously.  3 matches in TGT I faced down a turn-1 March cast by Greg (and other stuff usually).

Two of them I was luckily able to draw a couple kill spells early and come back, but the first time I just drew 6 lands and died.  Reminds me of when I first started playing way back in the day when you saw a 6/6 spider and just quit.

Windy

I expect they gave Greg some crystal ball skills.

Seems (not all the time though) he is basing his match on calculations including all cascades with gems not on the board yet. Where a human can only take the current board into account, Greg can see the infinite gems that will enter after a match.

That's also why he sometimes does not take a 5 gem individual match, where a 3+3 match nets him more mana. Greg looks 1 match only.

But it's for sure not consistent between matches, events, time of day

Stormcrow

EvilDead said:

The thing is, I win and many of my coalition members win in excess of 90% of the matches played. This is in Standard Events just as much as Legacy. So while I can appreciate all the consternation, I just don't think the situation is as tilted in the AI's favor as many would describe.

But, that's basically the point I'm making. Any time you've got a 90%/10% split, the stuff that falls into that 10% is going to be more memorable to you, precisely because it's the exception rather than the rule.

Lastly, who really wants to basically win every game? I mean it's not the point of this thread but it seems like many want to win all the time.

I think it's interesting to compare/contrast the sentiments being expressed in this thread with the sentiments in this thread. I'm fine with not winning every match, but I will admit if my win rate starts to dip below 85-90% I get annoyed because this game is already crazy time consuming. This game can take multiple hours a day even at a 90% win rate; the worse your win rate, the more time it takes. This is why, although I'm very sympathetic to people who want a smarter Greg (or at least a smarter Greg for some events), I'd absolutely hate to see any AI improvements without them being preceded by desperately-needed gameplay-speed improvements.

madwren

CheeksMagunda said:

EvilDead said:

Lastly, who really wants to basically win every game? I mean it's not the point of this thread but it seems like many want to win all the time.

Everyone does want to win all the time. You don't play wanting to lose. The question I think you meant to ask is, who EXPECTS to win every time? That isn't realistic.

I freely admit that my own personal frustration stems from being a relatively new player who really just began the uphill slog against much bigger collections. Manipulating the board for an entire game only to lose when Greg finally dumps out his entire hand including Omni and BSZ is the literal worst. As mentioned above, it's really only glaring when it causes you to lose, but do me a favor - in the next event, count the number of 3+ cascades you get, against the number Greg does. I've adopted a new approach to almost every match, and that's "What can I do to limit the shenanigans the AI will inevitably pull off on his next turn?"

The entire point here has also been mentioned already, too: I wouldn't mind losing to a smart Greg. What pisses me off is losing to a digital mouthbreather simply because he has the ability to blow up the board on a whim. And if you're afraid of a smart Greg (which would be impossible to effectively code in the first place), you shouldn't be playing anything related to M:tG in the first place. 

I agree. People don't mind losing if they feel that they've lost to a well-constructed deck, or a clever combination of effects that are working properly/as intended. 

But people absolutely mind losing if they perceive they lost due to a bug, an exploit, a freeze/crash, or the absolute sheer madness of RNG granting the AI ten times as much mana as you in a single turn.

I've stated numerous times that the decision to have imbalanced mana gains in a game that's predicated on strategy and pacing (and largely simultaneous mana development)  was a curious one, because that problem is endemic to a lot of player frustration.  Mana cost on cards is irrelevant if it can be wiped away due to a lucky cascade.

Imagine paper Magic if you played a forest and summoned an elf, and your opponent played an island and said, "ok, tap for 10 mana."  

You: "Wait, how'd you do that?"
Opponent: "Just lucky, I guess. Anyway, drop two creatures, cast three library manipulation spells, and then cast one more to draw back to 7. Your go." 

I mean, the game would never have survived.

Now imagine that happens on the next turn as well. It doesn't matter what the actual components of the opposing deck are. It doesn't matter how it's constructed or whether it's clever. All that matters is that you're frustrated/angry/whatever.

Now, don't get me wrong--I also receive those cascades that empty my hand, and I don't think that Greg is exploting anything unfairly.  Still, that doesn't make it a good fundamental design principle. The game was flawed from the get-go. We just love it so much that we keep playing in hopes that something will change.

Narcoticsagent

I wonder if this problem could be fixed by limiting mana gains per turn? Maybe something like max gain on turn 1 is equal to highest mana bonus +5. Then the limit goes up a little each turn. Could be different for each walker.