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Comment by a13o | Hacker News Reader

In head to head games there's always someone ready to blame 'the algorithm' for their loss rather than their own performance, deck matchup, or rng. (The usual suspects.)

Game developers are not incentivized to induce losses. Losses lead to poor session length and retention. Moreover, a desire for fast queue times discourages deck analysis by 'the algorithm'. Why restrict your matchmaking pool so you can pull the strings?

The only queue manip mechanism I know of is in the player's favor. If you're on a losing streak you can be queued with others on losing streaks as a way to break at least one of your steaks and prevent you from logging off.

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Match making games are actually designed to keep successful players and teams from winning too much. Essentially in something like Halo a competitive team will slowly empty out players in the queue over the course of the night, as their opponents choose to stop a few games early (devs responded by keeping those teams in queues longer than necessary).

MTGArena aggressively manipulates what kind of deck you will play against (which disables the ability to make a counter META deck, since after picking a few counter mechanisms you're very rarely going to be put against the archetype you foil even if you hunt half the field), manipulates who goes first (some Streamers stand at recording over a thousand games and have gone first under 30% of the time, current formats are extremely powered up so the first turn advantage is the deciding factor of who wins often), and manipulates opening hands (something the devs have blogged about).

While harder to prove MTGArena also buries/floats cards. Some cards have patterns of existing in your opening hand or only after your 17th-22th draw, others occur in your opening hand more than 50% of the time, some truly toxic cards like Agent of Treachery are likely to have 3 of 4 of your copies in the last 20 cards. (Agent of Treachery is the easiest to see since such decks also have to tools to cycle through their deck and stall out the game to see their whole deck).

The shuffler also has a habit of giving duplicates of cards or making someone draw a duplicate of a card more often than "expected".

> Match making games are actually designed to keep successful players and teams from winning too much.

> MTGArena aggressively manipulates what kind of deck you will play against

> manipulates who goes first

> MTGArena also buries/floats cards.

> The shuffler also has a habit of giving duplicates of cards or making someone draw a duplicate of a card more often than "expected".

These are all falsehoods spread by people who are looking for something to blame after losing games. Seeing patterns that are not there.

You're posting conspiracy theories as if they're facts. There is no evidence to support these claims. Why would the developers spend money implementing such features just to make their players angry and dissatisfied? They can barely hold the game together as it is.

> and manipulates opening hands

This part is true, but only in a limited way in best-of-1.

>Match making games are actually designed to keep successful players and teams from winning too much.

Match making is generally designed to provide fair matches; this will naturally result in even really good players losing matches as their ELO rating converges on where it's supposed to be. It's like how in many games you'll see players complaining about a "forced 50% winrate" when really, that's just what happens when you're at roughly where you're supposed to be. You can't win forever.

> MTGArena aggressively manipulates what kind of deck you will play against

Only in Historic brawl is there desk strength based matchmacking

> manipulates who goes first (some Streamers stand at recording over a thousand Never confirmed.

> While harder to prove MTGArena also buries/floats cards. Some cards have patterns of existing in your opening hand or only after your 17th-22th draw

Not confirmed, and an easy thing to get confirmation-bias on.

>The shuffler also has a habit of giving duplicates of cards or making someone draw a duplicate of a card more often than "expected".

Not confirmed and doesn't make sense? It's not like the shuffler is shuffling the deck as you play, that would break far too much.

EDIT: To be clear, the only actual shuffle "rigging" Magic Arena does (that the devs have talked about extensively due to Arena being Bo1 and Magic traditionally being Bo3) is your initial hand is generated twice and the shuffler chooses what it thinks is the better opening hand to present to you. After that it's all random.

Here's a plausible explanation for making screw worse on 2 landers and flood worse on 5 landers: Wizards has data showing that keeping a 2 or 5 lander is bad for their metrics but players still tend to do it often, and they wish to artificially deflate results with such hands to disincentivize people keeping them. Let's say naturally your deck will have a 30% win rate keeping a 2 lander but the shuffler enforces screw and your actual win rate is 20%. You remember keeping as worse than it really is and you mull more often on 2 lands, leading to longer and more engaging games.

Of course, no evidence for this at all, but it seems like a plausible reason to me why they might do something like what's described.

So in this hypothetical, the reason they want to push players into accepting better opening hands is because losing in such a way is no fun. So their strategy to teach players better behavior is to make them experience it more often and to a worse degree? Like a parent who makes their child smoke a whole carton of cigarettes because smoking is bad for you?

The idea would be to make it artifically worse (in terms of win rate) so it becomes less common.

There are three kinds of "possible worlds" with respect to shuffling, in M:tG. Let's call them "shuffle-worlds". We have a) a Balanced World, where land and non-land are well-mixed and you can expect to draw them in a way that represents their distribution in your deck; b) a Glut World where there's a big bunch of land stacked close to your opening hand; and c) a Screw World where there's a big bunch of land stacked far from your opening hand.

Now, your opening hand can give you no more than a hint of which world you're in, but it's the best you can get, short of library manipulation, including reshuffling and land-thinning effects (which are not available to all decks). What's more, Screw World and Glut World are bad, and there's two of them, whereas Balanced World is good but there's only one of it. So you're more likely to be in the Screw or Glut World, than the Balanced World, in any game you play.

So if you get a 2-land opening hand, you can expect to be in a Screw World, and if not, then you can expect to be in a Glut World (with the glut of land lurking just beyond the first 7 cards). If you see a 5-land opening hand, the same but for a Glut World.

And if you get a balanced opening hand, well, you may not be in a balanced world but, at least, if you've built your deck right, you can play your game for a few turns, and that should really be enough.

Note that all that happens in the physical game, as well as the online games. The only difference is that in the online games the shuffling is done automatically, but whether this means it's a shuffle more or less likely to bring up Balanced World draws, that's up for research.

The solution is to always try to play degenerate decks: decks that need only very little land (Good, old, Senor Stompy being the exemplar- I'm talking about the 18-land Ice Age archetype) or decks that need a lot of land, like decks with big, splashy, expensive spells that need to be stuffed with 25-26 land (in 60-card formats that is). That way, you're artificially tipping the scales towards either a Glut World or a Screw World, but you've actually built your deck around it. And now you have two good worlds to look forward to (because the Balanced World is not going to hurt you if, again, you've designed your deck right) so luck's on your side.

You gotta make your own luck. The rest is self-deception. And people who play games of chance always have their little superstitions.

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