Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Scammish: MtGA still rigged... un-retirement

Saw a new update and wanted to try it out.

Some cool new features... experience is still poor.

MTGA random stats?

There are lot of pages discussing the RNG of MtGA and how it is well distributed or even slightly biased. None seems to be close to my playing experience.

All the studies are based on numbers by WotC, so I am just going to say BS on whatever they publish. I do not believe the people who are saying good things about the MTGA RNG. Do not belittle the posters that the negative outcomes are due to the sheer number of games that we play or that our memory only remembers negative events more prevalently.

Rigged opponents

I have been playing black for a couple days. 60+ games and a couple red aggros. Lots of white aggros. Still lots of droughts and floods with a 24/60 land ratio.

Today went back to my red aggro deck. 20+ Suddenly half of my opponents are red aggros. No white aggros.

RNG? Cheating?

3 games in a row. I play against someone who had at least two Wandering Emperor.
1 game with 2 four-of-a-kind cards within 8 rounds
There are pairs of cards that I always see with opponents like Djinn / Tolarian Terror, Sheoldred / Obliterator, etc. Do I ever just see one? Nope. Do I ever get both? Nope. I will concede that it is likely that a mono-blue deck have a higher chance due to the amount of cards that it draws... but the consistency is still too high. 

Opponent rarely floods or droughts

Ever notice that the opponent never gets stuck on two lands? I have seen that maybe twice in the last half year. Maybe if you include everyone that quits without playing, that is maybe once a day.

Ever notice that opponent multi-color deck always has the right lands? I've played against many 5-color decks and they have all 5 colors with their first 5 lands. With duress, I even saw one that only had 2 of the same land then drew 4 lands of each other color and play Jodah by round 5.

Yet when I play 2-color deck, I consistently only get one color. I even mulligan 3 times in a row and drew only one color.

I have droughted several times up to rounds 9 and 10... always stuck with 2 initial lands.
  1. 7 draws no lands, (20/60 = 1/3) which is 0.04% or 1:2187. So even if my memory is inflated, I should have seen this once since I started playing. Yet, I see get this daily which is far less than a hundred games. Even if you want to argue weekly, this is a very far cry from expected value.
  2. When I flood, half my cards are land. This almost always happen right after I break out of a series of drought.

Bots? Suspicious

Are the bots really bots? Do they leave without playing a card? Do they leave because you kill one creature? Do they chat? Do their cards highlight as if they are looking at the cards?

I guess you could program that... but why? Particularly when there are so many other issues...

Toxic opponents

And for real players, why even have a limited chat options? Why is there no option to auto-mute? "Oops" after I play a card is clearly sarcasm. As much as I do not take it to heart, it still decreases my liking of this game and makes me regret the times that I forget to mute the opponents. Half the "Good games" is un-sportsman where I am afraid to even say Good Game because I do not know if they have something up their sleeve. I also have a hard time responding to people saying Hello but at he same time thankful they reminded me to mute the chat.

Game still crashing

Game still continuously crashing. Every time the phone goes to sleep or locks, the game has to reconnect to the server. No other games I played has this "feature". Also it takes longer for the game to reconnect than to just shut it off and start it up again. So..........