[cognitive]

This is Rovio land. Probability laws do not apply.

Think of common chest math. Gems are always the last item to go, and more often than not, not free.

Loot boxes have been under serious regulatory scrutiny for a reason.

[cognitive]

Legenary chests give hats? who would have thought :). I’ve opened 175 LC’s and got 2 hats, seen maybe 3 or 4…

 

[cognitive]

There is a larger philosophical issue here. The disparity between FP and scores. It seems that the better you are, and I mean the guys perpetually at the top of the MEBC, the more points you score – but A LOT more. I’m at 50% of the FP of those players and would not expect to score half their points, but they’re scoring 5x what I do in MEBC and likely 4x more in Arena and CVC judging on what I see.

That may be good for business, but overall a new player starting now has absolutely zero chance of ever seeing the light of day because it’s stacked against entry level players.

[cognitive]

Does it work just by pulling data from Facebook? or you enter things manually?

 

[cognitive]

the odds are not 1 in 5 for any cards in rare or legendary… click on the (i) button for details.

[cognitive]

Once you have one set of +11 or +whatever hats it seems it may be better to buy rainbow feathers, no?

 

[cognitive]

I suspect Rovio must have figured out it’s easy handouts to good clans, so we got the increasingly impossible hat events… Last few I haven’t bothered to do past the first reward.

[cognitive]

So far Rovio has had a storied history of releasing bad code – spells counting as 1 instead of actual, infinite spells, chests every 30 hours or whatever, numerous iterations of arena matching failures, and so many more it is difficult to believe they’re actually releasing production software this non-nonchalantly. I’m surprised Stella doesn’t crash and burn every time I fling her…

And this is before we get into intentionally messing with game physics (Terence of yore vs weakling of today), false trajectories, bad physics keeping piglets alive… Or with probabilities.

We get it that it’s hard to write good code, and even harder to make money doing it. But you don’t need to stoop this low. There’s 100 different technical solutions to the clone and such problem, the easiest one being player audits.

If a ‘new’ player suddenly lights up the scoreboard, how expletive deleted difficult is to trace back his history? I’m not talking every expletive deleted chest he ever received, but major milestones like rank advances, arena tourney wins, clan affiliation. Is it too darned expletive deleted difficult to check if there is a record of WEI at 139 stars, whether he was 138, 137, 136… 3, 2, 1… Come on people. This is basic SQL. Basic basic SQL.

 

[cognitive]

It’s about as useful as Clan Chests :). Is anyone actually buying one for their clan? Or trying for a new opponent in Arena? I’ve humored it a couple times just for kicks and giggles, nothing of significance. It’s like, an arena match with a LOWER FP’d opponent is nearly always a guarantee that the guy will have a breakout score into the tens of millions.

I’m surprised they haven’t done the OBVIOUS yet. For an extra 50 or 100 gems, your bird gets an extra 25 or 50% ability increase for a single time or current event…

[cognitive]

in light of the MEBC cheating epidemic, I wonder why Rovio spends more time rigging ToF than actually fixing critical issues…

 

 

[cognitive]

No apples at all for me… Played DC, two gifts, played 2 of 3 sequence of KPP, no apples or gifts, played 5 or 6 map levels (just cleared a boss last night), no apples. Not a ONE.

Conspiracy? maybe I need to practice more :)

 

 

[cognitive]

What we need is ban by device ID – in a phone that’s easy, they should be able to access IMEI or MAC address, and for tablet, MAC address. Ban by that and you should be good.

Hey Rovio: please forward 1,000,000 pearls to my Swiss account if you implement the suggestion :)

[cognitive]

The part about practice and improve your game forgets a very basic premise of the game. The variability inherent in Rovio’s whims.

I am about 600 FP and average 50000  in CvC best score. However, when you play the exact same level 5 or 6 times, the scores should be clustered around the same value. That is not happening. Not with me, not with my clan mates. Generally, from a CvC event, I may have 1 or 2 super good games, 1 or 2 super BAD games where nothing goes right, and the rest meh, 30-35M. Such variability, when rooms and bird sequences are identical, is rather questionable. I’m good enough to apply the same fine motor skills every time, but Rovio’s idea of repeatability is very different than mine. To my uneducated eye (and 35 years of gaming and 35 years of software development) it seems that the variability is there to entice you to play more by offering a wild swing of scores.

Practice is good, but luck – or lack thereof – is what wins games. I often see Angry Knight and Stan LeRoy make rather unfortunate mistakes, yet in the grand scheme of things because of FP and free birds they can get great scores. Not so for a lot of other folks. You can practice all you want but if the game is rigged to cause you to lose, it’s a waste of time.

As far as MEBC, it’s simply the only thing they can reliably hack and ‘inject’ scores. I doubt they’re actually playing. Today there’s two ‘players’ that are identical, HUA and WEI, reported and banned yesterday @ #5 and #6, now un-banned and #1 and #2. I suppose we can practice for that too.

[cognitive]

I’m not a 24/7 player, more like DC, ME, and Clan events and Arena 1 streak a week in Vanilla league :). I had 40k feathers in 2 days thanks to a nice 12,500 feather chest and winning several clan events. I should have Stella when we win tomorrow’s CvC.

Having said that, it’s an exercise in futility.

 

 

[cognitive]

I’m not so sure it’s server lag. If I check my league buddies on Sunday after 1 day of play we’re all supposedly in Diamond League and Bob from Accounting is in Legendary, that could make sense (Bob got promoted to Legendary on Saturday).

But this happens on Fridays too, so it’s unlikely that replication is behind by days.

Such things are likely stored in a cloud service provider (AWS, Azure…) so it’s not likely they are impacted by localization. There’s a more sinister reason but Rovio is not telling.

[cognitive]

In CvC we haven’t encountered a cheater in maybe 6 or 7 clan battles… But we had them on 6 of 6 prior to that.

I’d say – knock on wood – Chuck? – it’s SLOWLY getting better.

[cognitive]

I’ve had decent success (i.e. level 15 with 1 pig, 20 with 2) following a similar strategy. 1st pick random, 2nd pick random, then 3, 4, etc if you didn’t hit a pig, pick the card the pig was.

Problems: Not sure this is reset after hat floors (5, 10, 15…). It usually works. Also, as @mbittenbende indicated,  it’s not unusual to hit 3 in a row after 20-25. It’s common to hit 2 in a row then.

Guaranteed to hit 2 in a row? pig, select free video then pig again more so than 1 in 4 that it should be.

Yet @krena brings up a good point regarding randomness (or lack thereof). There definitely is a ‘penalty’ for paying for continues (aka pig storms).

[cognitive]

Machine learning is a lot easier than you think. A LOT. as it’s done on the server side.

A few patterns have been identified, and lets not forget the Hat Event Leniency… during early days of such events you can make it to 20-25 without anything more than a pig or two. Consistently.

A common occurence at that time is a pig storm, which is basically after you get past 20-25 you run into 3 pigs in 4 or 5 cards…

Or, hit pig, use video, the next card seems to have higher chance of pig unless you paid the 20 rubies.

 

[cognitive]

I collected ToF data from November 2017 to February 2018 and it shows significant and often consistent variations…

– odds of advancing are better in Hat event weeks

– overall odds of hitting pig @ level 2 not consistent with expected (0.25). Generally higher

– another poster here went to 90 (at the time) and reported 40% odds of pig before 5, 10, 15, etc floors. Should be 25%

– entertaining observations such as – hit pig, watch video, hit pig immediately seem to be happening too often

– pig-storms (3 pigs in 4 or 5 picks) around 25-30 floor.

There were weeks where I could not get past floor 2 or 3 whole week without a pig. This event I’ve made it to 30 twice, 25 and 20 several times, and the lowest with 2 pigs has been 15.

I’ve wasted enough tuition in probability and statistics courses to know it ain’t random.

[cognitive]

The issue is not difficulty per se – I can understand level 1200 being harder than level 120. But DC has always been rather simple, and with meager payoff. All of a sudden it became like the MCAT most days.

What you describe is great in a console game with loyal followers (say, Halo). But AB is a phone game for the masses, not a console game for the hardcore gamers.

There is too much dependence on ‘luck’, far more than it should be. Even in CvC events where everything is fixed in stone, I often see huge variations in my own score or that of my teammates. Even in Clan events where you play a very similar layout 4 or 5 times in a row, I can cruise thru 4 times with 3 or 4 birds left at the end and once things just ‘stop working’ and either I lose points, I pay the Rovio tax, or…

Why is it that DC / KPP / Arena rooms are often MUCH more complex than regular map rooms?

[cognitive]

yes… FP in Arena cards different than Clan.

[cognitive]

Is the difficulty level of DC the same regardless of player level? if so, how can a new player have a prayer of finishing DC? I’m in 580+ FP and either require multiple trips (kind of like Differential Equations in college :)) or give up…

[cognitive]

Four hats, can’t get past level 5. It’s just that Rovio has really figured out how to design tough rooms…

[cognitive]

AB2 is full of little gems like, in ToF, you have a pretty good chance of hitting a pig after you just hit a pig. Or, a near guaranteed pig @ 2 for a week after you miraculously made it to level 20 of ToF with only one or two pigs.

But the micropig survival rate is just amazing as of late.

[cognitive]

It is getting to be rather difficult to win without 60 or even 120 gems if you have a 3-4-5 day.

2-3-4 or 3-4-4 (rare) are fairly doable but there are days – today for one – that the 3 and 4 are fairly easy, 1 or 2 easy structures per room, and the 5 part is pretty much 4 and 5 groups of pigs in dense structures.

I cringe to think what the less experienced players encounter, because I’ve been at it for a while now and it is getting harder by the week. I don’t mind the challenge, but the rewards are measly at best.