@cognitive wrote:
Jester, I’m afraid we will disagree here. I have 32 years experience as a software developer, anything from mainframes to Android.
Then we’re speaking as peers, though with an experience gap. I’ve been developing software since 1977. 32 or 40 years, makes little difference. :)
The mystery points brigade is simply shorthand for badly designed points awarding based on percentage of destruction. I can understand 3-4M from a single bird, I do it too. But to string several of these in a row, always towards the end of the game, and always when you start with 1M per bird is a bit difficult to understand.
I still think this is selection bias. I have *never* experienced this, with one exception: Those very rare cases where I run out of birds before the opponent does. In this case, he races through his remaining birds, and can easily rack up lots of points. I doubt you’re mistaking this for your MPB, though — it’s pretty obvious when that happens that it is multiple birds.
Tower probabilities? My first job was a statistical analysis programmer, and I’m married to a statistician. My current job involves lots of data analysis. Tower odds are simply not 25% per card. Not at 4th, 9th, 14th, etc levels at least, and getting worse as you go up.
Cool. I worked for 12 years at PokerStars.com in statistical analysis, catching cheaters and bots through heuristics, designing much of the software used to do so. I also spent time answering hundreds of customer Emails about suspected non-randomness, and always (without exception) was able to provide a statistical retort based in fact, demonstrating complete randomness.
Care to make a “gentleman’s bet”? I don’t know if you have access to enough gems to do it, but I do. Climb the tower to the top a statistically significant number of times, and record the specific levels you get pigs. Ensure that you, the user, selects randomly in one of two ways (or preferably both, comparing the two): Always choose the same card, or rotate in order (4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1, etc).
I would wager you’ll find the distribution of pigs on every floor where pigs are possible to be within 1.5 sigmas.
Since the tower can only be climbed once daily, it will take some time to build up a reliable data set, but I’m confident it will quickly converge to the norm.
Is it wrong to say that points are easy to get early in the game for you but then as the game progresses points are harder to come by? The destructometer is simply not linear.
Who told you it was supposed to be? Of *course* it isn’t linear. Both the meter itself, and the points values at which extra birds are awarded, appear to be logarithmic. Points are no more difficult to come by on later levels of an arena match than on earlier ones. Filling the bar to get that next bird, though? Yes, and clearly (and wisely) by design.
I just started a match, and I’m going to note the approximate values.
Before first free bird: 0 points, 0 meter, full 9 card backlog
Throw 1, Bomb. Cleared level. Free bird at 4.6 million, total score 5.7 million, bar 2/3 full.
Throw 2, Silver, cleared TINY level. Free bird at 8 million, total score 10.4 million, bar 15% full. Still full deck.
Throw 3, Red. Left one bird, free bird at 14.6 million, total score now 15.2 million, meter nearly empty. Still full deck.
Throw 4, Matilda, egged the last bird. 15.6 million. Meter didn’t move. 8 cards, opponent has 9.9 million and 3 behind.
Throw 5, Terence. Strike. 20.7 million. Meter at maybe 40%. Opponent at 12 million. I have a 5 card edge on them as well. (See what I mean by “I rarely lose?” This is typical.)
Throw 6, tough choice. *NO* chance of a strike, unless I use the Eagle (others are blizzard and popper)…. but it’s a room propped up by balloon wedges, so Eagle won’t score highly. I’ll go with Eagle, as I always believe a Strike beats using two pigs. 21.6 million. Meter barely moved. 6 behind, and opponent up to 16.2 million. YES, that 4 million point gain is reasonable. I scored nothing. THEY finally threw a bird like I’ve been throwing the whole game.
Throw 7, Popper. Not as effective as I’d have hoped. 22.8 million, bar now at 55%. Opponent picked up 4 million as well. Level NOT cleared.
Throw 8, second on room, bomb. Still didn’t clear. 25 million, opponent has 22 million. Bar at 85%. Note that my opponent was probably filling his bar more quickly than I the last couple throws, simply because he was lower score, and the next free bird was “cheaper” for him.
Throw 9, third in room, Chuck. Cleared room. Bar at 95%. 26.3 million. Opponent 24.1 million. He has 2 birds left, I have 6.
Throw 10, Blizzard. Inched me up to 26.9 million for a free bird. 27.1 total. Did not clear, did not intend to.
Throw 11, Chuck. Horrible throw. 30.6 million to his 27 million, but not only didn’t clear, but left two birds far from each other.
Throw 12, Chuck, headpopped one. 31.0 million, opponent is done at 27 million. I have four birds left. Meter near 20%.
Throw 13, Chile. This is what he’s good for. Cleared the last bird, and some structure. 31.9%, meter MAYBE 25%.
Throw 14, Ducks. A throwaway bird at this point. 33.2 million. Yes, my scoring is slowing down… because I use my powerful birds up front, unless a spell or specialty bird is called for. Now I have Blues and Silver left, and no ice in the structure. Bar at 33%. No choice but to use Silver and hope for the clear, but it doesn’t look good.
Throw 15, Silver. 35.5 million. Bar at 50%. This is NORMAL. My last free bird was at 26 million, and I shouldn’t expect another one until about 40 million. The number of points between free birds is non-linear. Left one straggling bird that Blues *might* clear, but I won’t get a free bird. Game over.
Throw 16, Blues. 35.9 million, got the last pig. Winning streak 4, 8 stars.
Now, this is pretty typical for one of my matches. In fact, I didn’t win by as much as I usually do. 8 stinks. I have 106 stars in the arena, and have played 11 matches. (You do the math).
Game physics changing? Of course they do. How else can you reach a faraway pig with a given bird one day but not the same distance and same bird in a different room?
Different room, different distance. Some rooms you can throw Blues all the way to the end. Others are very long rooms where you can barely get Chuck there with a boost. All rooms are not to the same “scale”. Watch the pig sizes at the various zoom levels.
Big prizes? True, 1 in 5 in theory. Not in practice.
Statistical analysis, please, or its just a theory subject to selection bias.
I used to play backgammon. The best consumer grade app cheats like you would not believe. I found out how, posted on Apple store as a review and not only the review was censored, I was almost banned from the review section. To their credit, the way they cheat was light-years better. Easier to do that than fix the software.
Backgammon is a “solved game” — there is always a “perfect move”, which is why such software is banned. Poker is not solved because of the amount of hidden information. And Angry birds isn’t you vs. someone else, where there’s incentive to cheat. It’s you vs. a recording of someone else, in an unknown room (though I believe it’s likely the same series of rooms), with unknown spells, with those spells being treated in an unknown manner.
Think about that. I just documented a run where I had 5 spells to start. How often are you matched against someone like that? Now, is my run ever included in the pool for you to play against? If it is, how are my spells “removed”? I use spells to judiciously pick off troubling birds, but almost always reserve “real birds” for the first throw in a room. If my run is used, and my spell throws (and their points) are just removed, then my run may be at a natural advantage to one that had no spells, because my birds that “count” are more frequently thrown at pristine rooms with high scoring potential, while those of others might be spent or wasted on the stragglers that my spells take care of.
We just don’t know.
What I do know is, it isn’t some conspiracy by Rovio to clear the inventory of infinite spells (which can still be had). If they had that intention, they’d just wipe out the spell inventory of anyone who didn’t buy them, or the gems — it wouldn’t be hard to calculate which spells in inventory are legitimate if their database is in ANY way accurate and complete.
It is also not a conspiracy by Rovio to intentionally favor one player over another, not to offer odds other than that which would be dictated by a truly random source of entropy to extract gems from players more quickly.
Decisions we’re not privy to in the scoring system, or the playback system, or the matchup system, might not be what you’d personally prefer, but I’ve watched this game evolve since 2015, and every change has been seemingly thought out, and tested in focus groups before being given to us all.
Rovio’s simply coming to grips with the inflation caused by infinite spells.
Can’t argue with you there, at least on the premise. I think the 25K hats were a poor decision (and one I bet they wish they could undo), and I think storing gem and pearl counts on the local device instead of on the server is probably the worst decision they ever made. If anything ruined the game, that did, as that one fact is what makes most exploits exploitable.
In the end, though, you may not like the changes, but I think overall they have made the game better…. and had the game started where it is now, and without any gem or pearl exploits, nobody would be complaining.
Jester
