Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
My "a-ha" moment came from the timing of the matches.
In order for the game to be legal, you need to be playing the exact same deck of cards as your opponent, thus removing the "luck of random cards" element from winning. (There's still a different luck factor, as explained in the last post, but we'll ignore that here.)
So let's say I want to play the 60 cent game.
I enter that game, and it finds an opponent for me.
Usually it will find an opponent. Sometimes it will admit it couldn't find an opponent, and will let me play anyway, where I have to wait for someone else to be matched with me in order to get my results.
However, I noticed something very interesting. In most cases, my opponent was already finished before I was! That is, as soon as my 3-minute game was over, the app presented me with their score versus mine, and crowned a winner.
This definitely wasn't because I'm a super slow player. So what does this mean?
Well, recall that you can play without it having found you an opponent.
So how does it match you?
It is now my theory that they are matching you based upon your opponents' RESULTS in the match, rather than their SKILL LEVEL.
So let's say I start a game, and they have the following ALREADY COMPLETED games in the queue:
Mark: 7483
James: 8022
Bill: 3411
Michelle: 9613
Lydia: 5065
If they really want me to lose, they will match me with Michelle, regardless of whether Michelle is a great player or just got lucky on that one game.
If they want me to have a close game, they'll match me with Mark or James.
If they want me to win, they'll match me with Lydia.
If they REALLY want me to win, they'll match me with Bill.
Now, I'm not so vain to believe it's all about me. They also have to contend with whether they want Lydia, Bill, Mark, Bill, and James to win. After all, in each match there's a winner and a loser.
But this could be shuffled around perfectly to where it combines what they want to see happen AND what matches are already complete.
So let's say Michelle just re-deposited real money after losing. They want her to feel like it's not hopeless. Well, lucky for them, Michelle happens to score really high on this game. So they have someone who scored high AND they want to see win. They match her with a good player who they want to see lose, and voila, almost guaranteed result they want.
Conversely, let's say Bill isn't a bad player, but just had a bad game to score only 3411. But they also want him to lose. He's a perfect one to match with a mediocre player they want to see win at the moment.
And what if nobody with a completed game matches what they want to put you against at the moment? Well, that's where the "Searching for opponent..." thing comes in. This way, they simply put YOU in the pool of players with existing results, and match you with someone which would accomplish their goal.
For example, say they want to see me lose, but nobody has scored high in that queue. They just place ME in the queue, wait for someone else to score higher than me with the "Searchng for opponent..." message as well, and pair us together after a short intentional delay.
Of course, this is all just theory. But there's definitely something to the fact that, most of the time, I'm matched with people who seem to have already completed their game.
Alternately, they can simply match you on delay. When someone is halfway through and doing well, they match you with that person if they want to see you lose, and they match you with a person halfway through and doing poorly if they want to see you win.
And aside from matching you with a person only after both of your scores are known (which they may or may not be doing), this is probably all legal. They can hide behind "We're trying to match people based upon skill level" if challenged.
In short, I don't trust this app at all.
It also wouldn't surprise me that they reason they don't care if people multi-account (for the free $3) is because they know i's just about impossible to turn that initial $3 into a win of more than a few bucks before they make you lose.