Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-34343471-20181216223907/@comment-35284508-20181217161257

IspkWha1e789 wrote: A blank puzzle Geez, that's the worst. I complained to MyTona about the frustration of the missing colors in both HL and TB and sent screen shots. You do feel manulipated. If any of you have ever played the Jewel Quest games, there are hundreds of puzzles and expert levels and I never felt there was any funny business going on. Of course it is a pay once game. Nevertheless the puzzles are challenging. Manipulation of the color mix is fairly standard in games of this type. In most they make the puzzle look complex, difficult to near impossible and then manipulate the mix so it is easier to win. This gives the player an extra confidence/ego boost that they can best even the most impossible puzzles and may not (or may not want to) realize that the game was fixed in their favor. But games with wide open spaces like those pictured above become trivial unless they boost the required numbers to intimidating levels or restrict the percentage of goal colors. We don't have the number of observations required to check this for sure but I don't doubt that it happens.

I sort of doubt that they have programmed a change in the game so that you can lose several games, give it a rest, and then the program changes to make it easier. But we might be able to test whether they do. If you are bored some time and either have energy to burn (or SOV time to burn). Write down the number of colors required to win, play without using tools and at the end subtract the number of the colors that still remain for the goal and add in the number of colors on the board at the end if you lose. Play several times in a row, give it a rest if you want but keep up this tally until you win. Report results here for all the games played. If they are manipulating the percentage because of your losses then we will see a pattern of increasing numbers either a few more at each play or a bulk increase at some point. I suggest gathering 20 such sequences before we even comment about possible trends.