Real time test: Is the opposition in the weekly race random?

christinewupp

I've been put to the test by @QueenB to come up with some evidence that King are in fact telling a lie when they claim that the opponents in the weekly race are a random selection.

I find myself this weekend up against some unusually strong opponents:

Both my games that I took on holiday with me and that are competing in the Summer Cup have the same opponents, so I accept that this may be due to the fact they are connected to the same Wifi.

However I left my Poppy account at home in England. Sitting on the kitchen table and playing not a single game since this week's episode race started.

My hypothesis is this:

My active participating games which are passing several hundred levels are going to get stronger opponents next week than my Poppy game which has been inactive during this week.

If opponents are truly random then there won't be any noticeable difference.

Watch this space.

christinewupp

This is really odd and so I've decided to dig up my thread again:

This week, so two weeks following my last post, in which I concluded that the outcome of my test was not quite as I had expected, I found that the Poppy account had ridiculously easy opponents!

Here the outcome after playing the new releases:

There are the usual "losers" who stopped playing days ago (most of them haven't played for six days) but the one opponent who is still playing only scored 33. This one:

With a score of just 33 most of those 67 levels/7days must have been last Sunday before the new weekly race started. I often see opponents who start at level 67 in the weekly race. The players in places 5-8 all got stuck at level 71 and never progressed for the entire week. Those at 3 and 4 stopped playing 3 and six days ago at levels 74 and 77.

I wonder if this is a delayed response of the game to my week of absence and if this is the true outcome of my real time test. I had played 45-60 levels each in the past two weeks, but no levels at all three weeks ago. Could it be the game is allocating players by looking at our game three weeks ago (and not last week as I had assumed)? It would then make sense to me how King control the event. Those other players are probably real but their games may also be at a time delay. My best theory now would be that the algorithm looks at what we achieved three weeks ago, then picks players two weeks ago and sends those to our games with a one week time delay, so that what we see is their progress the previous week. This is the only way King could know the outcome: Obviously they picked players who could not beat me because they had got stuck early on in the game. They cannot both be real and be playing simultaneously to myself. I would lean towards them being real but from last week or from two weeks ago and what we are seeing is a time delayed race for which, like in Candy Royale and Factory Frenzy, the outcome of our opponents is already decided at the start.

christinewupp

This is really odd and so I've decided to dig up my thread again:

This week, so two weeks following my last post, in which I concluded that the outcome of my test was not quite as I had expected, I found that the Poppy account had ridiculously easy opponents!

Here the outcome after playing the new releases:

There are the usual "losers" who stopped playing days ago (most of them haven't played for six days) but the one opponent who is still playing only scored 33. This one:

With a score of just 33 most of those 67 levels/7days must have been last Sunday before the new weekly race started. I often see opponents who start at level 67 in the weekly race. The players in places 5-8 all got stuck at level 71 and never progressed for the entire week. Those at 3 and 4 stopped playing 3 and six days ago at levels 74 and 77.

I wonder if this is a delayed response of the game to my week of absence and if this is the true outcome of my real time test. I had played 45-60 levels each in the past two weeks, but no levels at all three weeks ago. Could it be the game is allocating players by looking at our game three weeks ago (and not last week as I had assumed)? It would then make sense to me how King control the event. Those other players are probably real but their games may also be at a time delay. My best theory now would be that the algorithm looks at what we achieved three weeks ago, then picks players two weeks ago and sends those to our games with a one week time delay, so that what we see is their progress the previous week. This is the only way King could know the outcome: Obviously they picked players who could not beat me because they had got stuck early on in the game. They cannot both be real and be playing simultaneously to myself. I would lean towards them being real but from last week or from two weeks ago and what we are seeing is a time delayed race for which, like in Candy Royale and Factory Frenzy, the outcome of our opponents is already decided at the start.