We are fleecing you in your games. I am a computer programmer. To be more specific, I deal in heling design and write the code for some of the biggest games out there, ones that are “free to play” with add-on purchases. One of my biggest projects before I moved on was Magic the Gathering Arena.

I’ve seen plenty of comments suggesting that games are fixed to make you lose. Those are met by comments that says the writer is just a poor loser. Guess what? Both are correct.

We don’t create these games for you to have fun as the primary goal. They are money makers first and always. Ever wonder why you get those really bad streaks of losing? It isn’t just bad luck. It’s designed bad luck.

Sales are terrible when people can win on skill alone. Only the whales are buying much, because people can win enough to stay happy without spending much money. This is bad for business.

So what did we do? We made it to where winning can be extremely difficult. The more often you barely win or lose, the more you get into rage-mode purchasing, trying to buy better cards to win. That’s what we want. That’s what makes the game so profitable. Whales are nice cash infusions, but they only account for so much. For every whale, there are a thousand casual players who wouldn’t spend much money. Those casuals are our main target. They lose, they spend more.

How do we do it? Simple math. Well, not so simple, but the idea is simple. The more you win, the more we match you up with players as good as or better than you. We want to keep people at the 50% win rate as much as possible. The easiest way is to just match them up with better players.

The second way, and most complicated, is manipulating deck matchups. Ever think it is weird that you keep getting matched up against the worst possible matchup for you? Yeah, that’s on purpose.

It essentially works almost like card counting. Each card is given a value of what it is strong against and weak against. Each time a card wins or loses against other cards, that information is gathered to compile values. Over hundreds of thousands of interactions, it starts drawing up a solid picture. We then take those values, multiply it by how many times those cards are in the deck, and create the matchups that we like the most (the ones that get you to buy more).

Summary of how we match players: 1) Calculate winning streaks. The higher your win percentage in recent games, the higher the modifier.
2) Using the modifier, calculated against a player’s “skills”, create a list of players actively looking for games. 3) Select matchups based off of deck interaction.

If you are winning too often,