Deleting my BGA account, just wanted to say GoodBye

[FrankJones]

Exactly. The results of a dice roll or a card draw are rarely "neutral". Each outcome is likely either favorable or unfavorable, and there may be a lot of these outcomes in any game. When people have mundane dice rolls or card draws, they likely pay little attention, but it may be the case that many of these outcomes are "slightly favorable", also known as "getting a little bit lucky." We likely do not notice the small ways in which we get small amounts of good luck here and there. But a highly unlucky outcome will stick in our memories.

In almost every game in which I lost a close game to what I perceived to be something very unlucky, I was able to find, upon analysis, one or more small mistakes or maybe one major one, without which I likely would have won the game despite the perceived bad luck.

[Ceaseless]

Im not a techie nor a dev.. I have no idea how the scoring system works.

That's fine, there seem to be several people who are that have already posted, you can refer to their posts.

I do know I am on the receiving end of losing when I play players with higher or more elo than I..

That's why they're higher rated than you. The higher your rating, the more BGA weighs you down, taking more for losses and giving you less for wins. If they couldn't beat lower rated players more often than not, they lose those extra points.

I agree there are times it seems the game is rigged to favour some.. for instance.. a number of times I have been in what looks like the sure winning position.. only to get trashed by the higher elo in the last few moves...

That can happen often even in games with no luck at all. One player thinks for sure they're winning, only to find out they're losing, having been outplayed and realizing their priorities were apparently wrong. A lot of players have no idea just how outclassed they are, which may even be part of the reason for the gap in the first place.

IMO there is something wrong as an elo bias becomes obvious when you play as often as I do.

You do realize everyone starts at the same 0 rating when they begin, right? Everyone who got their high elo had to start at 0 and climb their way up, then as they kept playing they had to defend it, which gets harder the higher your elo. You have your cause and effect backwards. The players that were winning more reliably got higher elo, the higher elo didn't help them win more reliably. If we set your rating to 1000 and had you keep playing rated regularly, you'd lose all of those extra points to fall back to where you were.

I don't know if some games are biased toward a particular player by the dev or not but I guess that's possible.. but why? ELO yes, definitely, a particular player - Id be surprised..And honestly, who gets a full heart winning bc of a cheat anyway? Silly idea.
Cheers.

You said it yourself that you're not a techie or developer yet apparently choose to ignore the people that are.

[FrankJones]

To give a bizarre and perhaps silly example:

In the terraforming Mars forum, we occasionally get a "bug" report of someone saying something along the lines of: "My opponent seems to be cheating. At the end of the game, my opponent seemed to have unlimited moves and scored an impossible number of points."

(In Terraforming Mars, after one player has passed, the other player can do as many actions as the cards and resources allow, sometimes scoring 50-60 points (or more) to make a seemingly impossible comeback, when in fact, the game was already over as soon as the "seemingly winning" player passed while the other player was holding the well-planned winning cards and resources.)

"Miracle" comebacks are often just good planning by the more experiences player combined with a lack of awareness of the actual game situation by the less skilled or less experienced player.

Another example from the game "Earth": I was playing against the top-rated player. I took my final main action and was ahead by 60 points. Against most opponents, this is a win. But not against this top-rated player. He still had his final rebuttal main action. I had to watch and hope/pray he could not score 60 points. For good players, scores in games of "Earth" are usually in the range of 200--250 for a game in which each player takes 6-9 main actions.

My opponent in this particular game not only scored the 61 points needed to make a big comeback win, but also scored far more than that, totaling nearly 100 points. In one turn. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't a rigged deck. It was planning, skill, and experience. He is one of two players who have clearly established themselves as the 2 best players at this game. It's no accident that seemingly miraculous final-turn wins occur.

[Meeplelowda]

"Miracle" comebacks are often just good planning by the more experiences player combined with a lack of awareness of the actual game situation by the less skilled or less experienced player.

Another example from the game "Earth": I was playing against the top-rated player. I took my final main action and was ahead by 60 points. Against most opponents, this is a win. But not against this top-rated player. He still had his final rebuttal main action. I had to watch and hope/pray he could not score 60 points. For good players, scores in games of "Earth" are usually in the range of 200--250 for a game in which each player takes 6-9 main actions.

My opponent in this particular game not only scored the 61 points needed to make a big comeback win, but also scored far more than that, totaling nearly 100 points. In one turn. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't a rigged deck. It was planning, skill, and experience. He is one of two players who have clearly established themselves as the 2 best players at this game. It's no accident that seemingly miraculous final-turn wins occur.

I'm not a Vale of Eternity master by any stretch, but BananaHarambe is (he is currently inactive, but has a higher Elo than the current highest active Elo). He has talked about how the best players 1) know the deck by heart, and 2) construct their hand so that they can almost guarantee massive points in the final two rounds. For them, they have to get massively unlucky to not score a lot of points at the end. It just looks like luck to players not as good.

Same with Carcassonne. The best players aren't just getting lucky and always drawing good tiles. They also know all the tiles and have arranged their prior placements so that things they still know are in the pile will likely benefit them.

[Meeplelowda]

He actually deleted his aaccount!

Yes, but what do you think the chances are that they made a new account and are lurking this thread?

[tbhp]

If a developer could write code that somehow favors one Wingspan player with an RNG result, that same developer would likely be able to write a code for a computer player to be a competent opponent at Wingspan, which has been shown not to be the case. So much information would need to be taken into account for a set of coded instructions to understand how or why a specific result would favor one player over another in a complex thematic strategy game.

Advantaging a player is totally different than knowing how to play a game. In order to know how to play a game, a program has to understand everything about the game. In order to know how to advantage a player, a program has to know just one little thing that gives a player an advantage. Even if you only change the odds from 50/50 to 51/49, that's still a rigged system and still effectively advantages one player over another.

The mistake people seem to make in this thread is that they expect a rigged system to reach its desired result most of the time. But that wouldn't be your goal if you were to design something like that anyway, because in that case the rigging would be way too obvious.

[nik592]

The mistake people seem to make in this thread is that they expect a rigged system to reach its desired result most of the time. But that wouldn't be your goal if you were to design something like that anyway, because in that case the rigging would be way too obvious.

If a system is "rigged" to try and benefit a player without considering all of the factors that go into the strategy of a game, and only giving them a "slight" advantage, it's likely indistinguishable from no advantage at all, or what pure random luck looks like (sometimes you get lucky, sometimes not). I'm not disagreeing with you that someone could poorly code rigging to try and favour a particular player on each dice roll, but if it's not actually doing that, and is sometimes possibly working against them, then what would be the point?

And as I also said, you're still probably talking about half a dozen (or more) lines of code and some decision to be made (ie. what does a good roll look like?), versus a single line of code to just get a random number. Unless they're writing in code to advantage themselves specifically in most scenarios (and premium vs. non-premium wouldn't be that), what would be the point?

[tbhp]

The mistake people seem to make in this thread is that they expect a rigged system to reach its desired result most of the time. But that wouldn't be your goal if you were to design something like that anyway, because in that case the rigging would be way too obvious.

If a system is "rigged" to try and benefit a player without considering all of the factors that go into the strategy of a game, and only giving them a "slight" advantage, it's likely indistinguishable from no advantage at all, or what pure random luck looks like (sometimes you get lucky, sometimes not). I'm not disagreeing with you that someone could poorly code rigging to try and favour a particular player on each dice roll, but if it's not actually doing that, and is sometimes possibly working against them, then what would be the point?

And as I also said, you're still probably talking about half a dozen (or more) lines of code and some decision to be made (ie. what does a good roll look like?), versus a single line of code to just get a random number. Unless they're writing in code to advantage themselves specifically in most scenarios (and premium vs. non-premium wouldn't be that), what would be the point?

The point would be to offer a more positive experience on average to a population of players they think is beneficial to please. They don't need to give them a huge advantage, any increase over the expected win probability is good to take. Also note that they wouldn't want to steer things too far in one direction, because then you run the risk of alienating the players who are disadvantaged, which is not good either.

[nik592]

As I just said, if the effect is that minimal, it's likely to be indistinguishable from real randomness and probably unlikely to lead to any positive feelings (or possibly not even an increased win ratio) for the targeted players. So there is no point.

You're also suggesting that unpaid devs are going to go along with this mostly pointless activity... why exactly?

[BarnardsStar]

And the accusations of rigging are never about anything subtle, mind you. It’s entirely possible there could be subtle rigging, but nobody ever alleges that.