Are competition opponents all human?

[Francis Crawford]

What’s the current thinking as to whether competition opponents are all human?

E.g., on iOS I keep running into “Matt”, who seems to zoom up leaderboards in a real hurry …

Topic

[WeeNaoise]

I believe they are human on this one. I thought the opponents for Shockwave were probably not.

[arceemega]

In a word, yes. All the competitors in every event have always been real people, including Halloween, Christmas, and all more recent events. The only “fake” friends you ever see is when choosing a buddy when not logged into Facebook.
There is a 5 minute cooldown on how often you can see the latest leaderboard information though, which was added to increase server stability (so you may see people’s scores jump 2-3 event’s worth of score in one go).

[Kdubz]

Based on the “glitch” from the first day of the competition I think now players are computers moreso than ever. Especially since it seems like more and more people lose interest in the game due to lack of new content.

[Pampeans]

@kdubz

The “glitch” from the first day was simply the failure to remove the scoring from the previous challenge. If you take screen shots of your final score before the next contest (a lot of us do in case there’s a problem) you would have had proof.

Please this thread from one of the previous challenges: https://www.angrybirdsnest.com/forums/topic/rovio-please-clarify-are-there-npcs-in-the-challenge-competitions/

Hope this helps!

[Kdubz]

I don’t know what scores you’re talking about…no one in any of my groups ever scored 4000+ in a single day and I can’t see other players challenge coin totals.

[Pampeans]

I believe the 4000+ scores were leftovers from the Encore in C-Minor challenge. I had a screen shot of my leaderboard from that contest that was the same as the first day of this contest. In other words, the leaderboards had not been erased. Further, the 4000+ number was was a cumulative number from the end of the previous contest not a one-day total.

[TriPolar]

I know that I’ve just shared this thought in a couple of other locations but it is highly applicable here as well…

I reall do find it strange that we only see our scores & no one else’s at the end, when see our prize for the completed day…as far as I know this is the only AB game that does this, leaves me to think their maybe more going on behind the scenes…

@arceemega Thanks for that bit of info!!! However it still leaves me mystified as to how I dropped from 1st to 2nd on day 4. I didn’t play in the last couple of hours because of the sizeable lead that I had. I did quit/restart thing a few times. I was in & out of the leaderboard. While doing other things in the game…running nodes, professor pics lab any checking the status of my TFs in the barakas, while trying to plan the next couple of upgrades & potential accessories to purchase, etc…
So in theory the board should have refreshed itself. Up until the final 30 seconds I had over a 250 point lead. What seemed impossible to lose rank but when the prizes were given I was in second not first. While still a good rank. There’s a huge difference in the prize tokens received. Also affect our plans and the war play. Had I known there was a possibility for me to lose rank, I would have easily spend more gems to ensure my lead.
If you have any insight on this it would be greatly appreciated!!!

[Optimus_Pig]

Well I’m pretty sure I’m human, and I’ll admit that I may have stolen a day or two at the last moment, heh ;)

[sukerman13]

According to my knowledge,there should only be humans…
And the opposite thing probably happened with me…. I started an event,after some nodes i was at 6th place,then for some reasons i did not play much and 3-4 hours before the day ended,i started playing all the time,i catched up at the top 3 and afterwards,by spending gems,i came first and by far from the second..
Maybe that guy thought he would easily be first,but also maybe my score was not updated all the time throughout my game play…
I agree with @tripolar that when we receive our tokens at the end of everyday,we should be able to see the ranking board and compare it with the screenshots we keep..

[WeeNaoise]

I am struggling to believe in this competition. Most contests, I come first or second every day with little expenditure in gems. But this one seems to be following the same pattern as one previous one (the one with the gold optimus prime IIRC) where regardless of the time of day you start, there are opponents called Drew, Igor, Sergio and various others whose scoring patterns defy all logic and are able to sweep ahead at the end with improbable scoring feats, leaving me in the 4-6 category. Not that I care greatly since almost everything in this contest is purchasable with gems anyway – no point spending gems to avoid spending gems!

[Optimus_Pig]

Just in case you were wondering if humans really do get those insane leaderboard scores?

Yes. Yes, they do.

(And no, this wasn’t me.)

[Francis Crawford]

700 tokens is a weird number to have … oh, wait. Not necessarily weird if you had a lot more, spent a bunch, and that’s what’s left over. :)

[Optimus_Pig]

Yep. I’m pretty sure this person had already bought everything they wanted to buy from the token exchange.

[Pampeans]

Wow! @optimuspig I’ve never recharged that much, how many gems did he/she spend? Does the recharge max at 100 and just keep costing 100 for each additional recharge?

[Optimus_Pig]

Don’t know how many gems.

And yes, recharges max out at 100, so they just keep paying 100 for each additional recharge after that.

If you want to figure it out quick and dirty, it wouldn’t be too hard. Just follow the template of the “back of the envelope” calculation I did when we were discussing the guy who had 12,000+ points a couple of days ago.

[Pampeans]

No worries, I’m assuming this came up on Facebook and since I’m not privy to the thread, I just wondered if the gem total was part of the conversation. Plus, for that particular challenge, skill level played a large role in run averages.

[Optimus_Pig]

Looked again. They’re unsure, but guessing over 2,000.

[Pampeans]

Thanks. They’re headed towards 95 million coins, anyone in the Facebook crowd with more than 100 million?

[Optimus_Pig]

No idea about that, but there are several who have over 1,000,000 pigs (cumulative lifetime).

[Kdubz2]

No matter what time of day I start the challenge, the scores to win daily on this challenge are way up than previous events. I would always get top 3 in my groups previously with only doing one or two recharges. On the first day of this challenge I only ran 4 nodes in 24 hours and finished 3rd because I forgot about it. Now it would take several recharges to even be semi-competitive (top 5). I find it hard to believe THAT many people are really interested in these stupid accessories that barely make a difference.

Seems a little fishy that there is a new release version and suddenly daily challenge totals are ALWAYS through the roof every day. Who cares so much about these dumb accessories? For the amount of gems to do that many recharges, you could just buy the accessories. I think interest and playership in this game is way down. If there’s no motivation to use gems, no one would spend money on buying gems and Rovio makes no $$$$. Why would Rovio actually tell us the truth that it is rigged and they’re trying to make more money? It’s obviously rigged.

I would still like to see more challenging levels in the challenges so its actually a challenge. It’s the same old boring crap.

[TriPolar]

Something of interest that I happened to come across. You the buddies that you call in, when you either don’t have FB or a connection issue… I know some people recognized some names of opponents being the same. Take a look on the credits… Especially under the exicent team,there are some interesting coincidencs. I know that nobody(well a rare handful on the planet) has a truly unique name, as in nobody will has the same name but it is very interesting.

Also very interesting is the actual Quality Assurance team. 4 people: Director, co-ordinator, 1 tester and 1 person for localization. So 1 real QA tester! Explains a lot!!!

Also not sure how many people have noticed. The discriptions for some accessories have changed again. Most notably “Weapon Cooldown” to “weapon reload” for (but not limited to) Shockwave (wings), SoundWave & SoundBlaster (cassette), as well as Dark Megatron (Medallion). All of which also happen to be at 20%.

Along with the other discriptions that I mentioned previously, it seems that somebody at Rovio/Exient is trying to clean up the accessories labeling. Slow & long process but at least it’s being done!