Hi, I’ve been a mahjong player for about two decades now and have been playing online apps - including this one for a very long time now. I used to love playing this app. However, I’m a bit puzzled by something that is ruining the experience for me. Has this game been updated and made harder or something?
Now, I’m just like any seasoned mahjong player: I have won my fair share of games in this app (sometimes by huge margins) and other games I have lost (sometimes by big margins), but recently, the AI seem incredibly lucky and next to impossible to beat straight away (this skewed-luck is especially noticeable in 3 player mahjong mode due to the near complete removal of the manzu suit and the fact it’s only three players playing). For example: the deer character (I forget her name) got three consecutive baiman riichi hands in a row within her first four turns of those hands (and this was as dealer).
Even weirder is it appears if the AI know exactly what is in the other players’ hands (including yours). I just played six games there and in about half of those the AI were discarding bizarre choices of tiles which then would inexplicably match up with another AI’s win for that hand (e.g. The parrot character was dealer and discarded honours and terminals for their first five turns, the snow leopard who was South, discarded a 7 Souzu, then a 4 Souzu, then a 5 Souzu, a 3 Souzu then a 1 Souzu (none of these were immediate discard draws from the wall) and with the 1 Souzu dealt into parrot’s menzen honitsu 1-4 Souzu wait hand. This character did this weird discarding of suit tiles at the start of four different hands in the same game and dealt into the other two AI hands - two of these hands being for single tile waits for closed, ordinary hands (again where discards were only terminals and honours and riichi was not declared) and within the first four or five turns, and this behaviour only occurred when my owns hands were a 2 or 3-Shanten which I would then turn into a riichi hand on average by my 3rd turn and where I would mostly only discard typical starting tiles - unneeded honours and terminals. So it totally puzzles me how she did that without knowing what tiles were where.)
In fact another egregious example of the above has been the numerous times where I and the AI after me have both declared riichi and one of the other two AI will inexplicably declare a simple pon or chi from the AI before them (without Dora or having declared a yaku-hai or itsu, which is weird considering I never have the kuitan rule accepted) and then oddly, due to the shift in tiles due to the call, the player after me would draw and discard my winning tile. Now, I know this is a valid tactic to potentially mess with ready hands but it’s odd how often I’ve been in that situation in this app and had my winning tile shifted like that.
What’s even weirder is how if you verse any random three characters they will play brilliantly, have superb defence and have insane luck and soundly beat you, you then immediately rematch those characters (choosing them in the selection screen and sitting them in the exact same positions as before) and they are inexplicable and incredibly easy to defeat due to them making beginner errors and other obvious plays. Then you play other characters and they go back to being extremely difficult - it’s bizarre.
I’m genuinely starting to think I have a weird or buggy version of this game or something.
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Taleeha
AlexIDuh
Hyper-Researcher