Among the other hats I wear, I’m a programmer. A million years ago (this was the Windows 95 era), I wrote a silly little puzzle game that used the C/C++ “rand()” function to generate random numbers. My little monsters moved in entirely a random manner.
Here’s the thing: when I started testing the game, sometimes the monsters were stupid, sometimes they seemed malevolently sentient, determined to kill me. There was no real pattern (which is kind of the whole point of the rand() function) …
… which is pretty much what I’ve seen in the few weeks that I’ve been playing Angry Birds 2 again.
Look: of course Rovio wants to make money. That’s why they’re in business. But they’re not going to make much money by frustrating people. Having (or even a few thousand) paying customers isn’t much of a business model.
I had tried AB2 when it was first released and soon deleted it. Now I’m trying it again and find it challenging, but I haven’t seen anything unreasonable. Rovio has made some nice changes, too — for example, when I played it before, sometimes I got 1 or 2 stars on a really hard level. Now I never fail to get three stars, even if I watch videos and buy a “play on.”
Oh … I’m not a bot (at least, not the best of my knowledge). I’m currently doing well in the Arena. The key, as others here have pointed out, is to play often. I only make it to the 7th level maybe 1 out of 5 times. I also don’t “play on” if I know that I’m going to lose. I’ll end the game and start over.
Just some food for thought, folks. Have fun! Life is too short …
