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..........

Bored: Combination Lock Puzzle

I was just surfing random sites and stumbled across this site when I visited randomnumbergenerator.com. This was pretty fun and felt like a good brain exercise as I tried to do this all in my head. I ended up having to take some notes for 6 reels on crazy level.

Here are my "best" times (I only played each one once except for 2 reels standard which I played 3 times):

Reference

http://www.combinationlock.com/play.asp?r=6&d=2

Life: Visa CC Changed due to Target Hack

It is just life that I have to go through this credit card change hassle just because I went to Target once to buy a box of envelopes. So many stores like nearby supermarkets, bookstores, and whatnot, I choose the one that gets hacked.

The hacking event happened a while back and I did get a warning from the Chase site that my new card will be sent (which I have not received). I watched my account and no suspicious activities.

Then suddenly a couple days ago, my card suddenly was declined. This is very odd because I was just using it the previous day. After logging on, I found that they already changed my card number. Well, I'm glad that I no longer had any automatic charges that went to my old card but what a pain that would have been to change at a random time.

Life: Randomness in terms of free will, destiny, and fate (Take 7 of infinite)

For me, solving randomness is the ultimate way to cut corners in life and perhaps the only way to "solve" life. Because the more I think about it, the more I need to know. At some point, my mind has to contain more atoms to understand a single atom thus it is an impossibility to solve life through brute force. The only alternative is to truly become one with the world which I'll leave for another topic which I also do not think is solvable via the conscious mind.

Back to randomness... I like using casino games to visualize the unknown and the known. The games typically have simple rules yet works with a finite set of known values. For example, a typical poker deck has 52 cards, 13 cards of 4 different suits. Once I shuffle the deck, there is a 1 in 52 chance I will guess the card on top correctly. And no matter how much I try to make a better educated guess, the known world already knows what the top card is.

So me guessing is like free-will. I use only a limited set of knowledge to figure out what the card is. Any gambler would also be exercising their free-will to determine the card for they could potentially choose any card. But the dealer who has seen the top card, he know longer has free-will to guess the card because he already knows it.

My choice is like fate. Through whatever psychological explanation of seeing a lot of a certain number or associated colors or the proximity of the full moon, there really was only one choice I would have made. In other words... if you knew exactly how my brain works, you would have known my answer before I knew my answer.

Likewise, the top card was fated to be at the top. The deck was shuffled precisely so that specific card would end up at the top even though it was not the intention of the dealer. Thus a machine that can watch the cards or calculate how the deck was shuffled, it had not free-will in knowing what the top card is. Also, the security guard watching the game on video in slow-motion also has no free-will because he now knows what the card is.

Although destiny is often used interchangeably with fate, I will use it as a predetermined result. In other words if I was destined to guess the card correctly, the top card is not known. The top card will be whatever card I guess. For this to work in reality, this would mean that the world was unraveled backwards like solving a problem backwards... except that I "live" it forwards.

Thus, I think the comparison between free-will, fate, and destiny do not have to be mutually exclusive. Each can co-exist in the same matter as I have described above.

This is important to me because I think this helps me understand about randomness, just something that fascinates me like infinite, duality of choice, nothing, irrational and complex numbers. Each with their own characteristics of existence yet not something fully understood (likely will never be). Unlike those, randomness does not truly exist (in my opinion).

The world is what it is. If the world went back in time, I would not even know. Just like how the "actors" in a video do not know when you rewind a video or fast forward or put into slow-motion. If randomness truly existed, the ending would change each time you replayed the video. The top card could potentially change each time you went back in time.

In a small scale, randomness is our mind's way to simplify a problem through statistics. If I flip a coin, it is 50/50 chance that it lands heads or tails. The coin landing on its side is negligible or even irrelevant because you'd just re-toss the coin anyways. Worrying about how hard you flicked the coin, how high it went, and etc., it is much easier just to say it would be one over the other.

On a grander scheme, we gamble on many things all the time in life except the odds of it failing is very, very small. "If I go at this speed, I will have better chance of hitting a green light." "I forgot my badge, what are the odds that guard happened to step away when I get there." What are the odds you get a flat tire? What are the odds that you get hit by a drunk driver? If I deal out 52 cards randomly to 52 people, each person has a 1 in 52 chance to have the ace of spades but yet someone is guaranteed to have the ace of spades.

Although life is about decreasing risk at an effective rate, there are times when we want randomness to be as "chaotic" as possible, like generating security keys, simulating a casino game, or possibly just to make things "fair" (like the lottery). How does someone go about making things random?

If the problem of randomness is about the limitations on the knowledge of the guesser, then randomizing a value is about making the environment as impossible for the guesser to "calculate" the answer at an effective rate. Because true randomness is impossible, effective rate is important to how close to true randomness the application needs to be. For example, if a weighted coin has 75% to land on head and you win 100 points each time you guess correctly, you will likely always choose heads. Even if it cost 1 point to play, you will continue to guess heads. But if I make use a "fair" coin, then you will likely choose to not play at all because the probability is that you will lose each game.

By observing all the randomness around us and trying to make as much sense as possible, I wonder if it is possible for me to guess randomly. People have a tendency to start with heads or tails. People have a set of numbers they tend to use for "random" purposes. Even for things we never would had to choose between, we still have tendencies. It could be the constant use of certain words, or constant visuals of a certain numbers, or an infinite of things that make us tick that predetermines our supposedly random choices. In other words, ultimately, if I were starving and there were two plates of food equidistant from me. Which plate would I go to first? Or will I just starve to death because I cannot make a logic choice?

Thus, at some point each of us has a moment of insanity to break out of an unsolvable problem or dilemma however small it may be. Hope that will make sense to me some time in the future.

Reference:
http://xkcd.com/221/