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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
9 years ago
Solved

Are cards drawn actually 'random'?

I'm very skeptical about how much in this game is actually random.

We've all seen how when redrawing your initial cards in a match, 50% of the time you get the same cards again.

I'm pretty sure everyone has noticed how you get groups of the same cards over and over when you purchase multi-packs.

What other ways have people noticed that this game is not as 'random' as it presents itself to be?

Has anyone looked through the game's code to see?

  • EA_Andy's avatar
    EA_Andy
    9 years ago

    @castertroyt - Just because there's a low chance of something happening doesn't mean it's impossible...just unlikely.

    - Andy -

6 Replies

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    9 years ago

    The game is random, you're just experiencing recall bias. Our minds are incredible at perceiving patterns where there are none. Your observation is very common in the gaming world. Choose any game with randomness and search their message boards or subreddits, and I bet you'll find accusations of cheating there.

    Here is a very interesting post from a game developer who performed experiments to determine how his players experienced randomness as cheating:

    https://gemsofwar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/210140183-Does-the-AI-Cheat-

  • Gabochido's avatar
    Gabochido
    Seasoned Veteran
    9 years ago

    EDIT: Myopic cat beat me to it, but I think we agree.

    Let's talk about motive first.

    For gameplay the only reason to remove randomness would be to make it more normalized and to avoid those unpleasant cases of getting bad hands or repeated cards when you don't want them. Making the randomness more clumpy would only make the game experience worse and would serve no purpose. It's not like people flock to the store to purchase more gems after a run of bad luck. 

    It's actually a similar situation for opening cards. You might think that modifying the RNG for opening packs so that people get more repeats would make more money and that would be a reason to do it, but that is the opposite of what usually happens. Most companies (EA too in other games) make it so that after after opening a certain amount of packs you are guaranteed to get a higher rarity card. Opening these cards is what makes people feel addicted to purchasing and opening more packs. Getting a bad run of repeats actually generally discourages purchasing and that's why companies try to avoid this. So basically, modifying the RNG to be worse would just make the game make less money, so there is no reason to do it.

    Even beyond a motive, implementing algorithms that are very close to true randomness is very easy, so technical difficulties would certainly not be a reason.

    In my experience, seeing clumps and repeated instances is exactly how randomness works truly works, it just that our minds like to remember the cases when we see clumps and feel that something truly random should be normalized (no clumps). I bet that if you calculate the probability of getting a dupe and start taking notes of every single card you draw or swap or open, you'll find that after a long enough sample size that it is close enough to the expected variance.

    You may be surprised to hear this but most online CCGs have people mentioning that they find the randomness questionable, MTGO is a particular outstanding example. But I can probably point to at least one forum post like this one for every single online CCG I've played.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    9 years ago
    At the start of the game, when you refresh your starting cards and get the "same card", I believe it is just refreshing to other copies of that card from your deck. So if you put x4 peashooter in a deck, if you refresh a peashooter at the start of the game and get peashooter again it actually refreshed the first copy into the second copy.
  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    9 years ago

    One time I was dealt 4 Camel Crossing cards. I refreshed all 4 of them, and got 4 more Camel Crossing cards!

    Explain that!

  • I rolled 4 sixes with 4D6....that's impossible, dice are not random. 

  • EA_Andy's avatar
    EA_Andy
    Icon for EA Staff (Retired) rankEA Staff (Retired)
    9 years ago

    @castertroyt - Just because there's a low chance of something happening doesn't mean it's impossible...just unlikely.

    - Andy -

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