Game developers sometimes make the “randomness” favor the player, because of how we perceive randomness and chance.
For example in Sid Meier’s Memoir, this is mentioned.
Quoting from a review of said book:
> People hate randomness: To placate people's busted sense of randomness and overdeveloped sense of fairness, Civ Revolutions had to implement some interesting decisions: any 3:1 battle in favor of human became a guaranteed win. Too many randomly bad outcomes in a row were mitigated.
The original link being discussed in that thread is 404 now, but archived copies of the original link exist such as for example https://archive.is/8eVqt
I used to get so many comments about how the computer opponent in a tile-based board game of mine cheats and got all the high numbers while they always got low numbers, and I'd be like "that's mathematically impossible. I divide the number of spaces on the board in half, generate a deck of tiles to go into a 'bag', and then give a copy of those same tiles to the other player.
So over the course of the game you'll get the exact same tiles, just in a different random order.
Now to be fair, I didn't make that clear to the player that's what was happening, they were just seeing numbers come up, but it was still amazing to see how they perceived themselves as getting lower numbers overall compared to the opponent all the time.
Meanwhile on the base game difficulty I was beating the computer opponent pretty much every game because it had such basic A.I. where it was placing its tiles almost totally at random (basically I built an array of all possible moves where it would increase its score, and it would pick one at random from all those possibilities, not the best possibility out of those).
My Dad used to play a lot of online poker, and he used to complain when other players got lucky with their hands, be like 'I know the chances are like 5% of them getting that! They shouldn't have gotten that!' and it always reminded me of those people.
The better option would be to just increase the flat odds. DQM: The Dark Prince is brutal with it's odds, but fair. A 45% chance is 45%.
In games like Civ/EU/Stellaris/Sins/etc It makes sense that a 3:1 battle wouldn't scale linearly, especially if you have higher morale/tech/etc. Bullets have a miss ratio, 3x as many bullets at the same target narrows that gap and gives the larger side an advantage at more quickly destroying the other side. So just give it an oversized ratio to scale the base (1:1) odds at.
That keeps "losing" realistic...a once in an occasion happenstance of luck/bad tactics/etc but also a generally very favorable and reliable outcome for your side.
I worked on a game where we added a "fairness" factor to randomness. If you were unlucky in one battle, you were lucky in the next, and vice versa. Mathematically you ended up completely fair. (The game designer hated it, though, and it wasn't shipped like that)
Games like Battle for Wesnoth which have it implemented right, you’ll look at a 90-10 scenario with 2 attacks and end up with the 1% scenario. Enough to make a man rage. I have degrees in Mathematics, I am aware of statistics, and all that. And yet when I played that game I would still have an instant “wait what, that’s super unlikely” before I had to mentally control for the fact that so many battles happen in a single map.
Was good because it identified a personal mental flaw.
For a small while I've had the idea of a [game engine/fantasy console/Scratch clone?] that comes packed with a bunch of example games. The example games should be good enough that people download it just to play them, but they are also encouraged to peek into their source code. I'd hope for it to be a sneaky gateway into programming.
For that, I'll keep this in mind: "Unlucky players may look at the source code of a chance-based effect to check if the odds are actually as stated."
lol, love seeing that I'm not the only one who did this. Being suspicious of WoF was the first and last time I peeked at the Balatro source.
Game developers sometimes make the “randomness” favor the player, because of how we perceive randomness and chance.
For example in Sid Meier’s Memoir, this is mentioned.
Quoting from a review of said book:
> People hate randomness: To placate people's busted sense of randomness and overdeveloped sense of fairness, Civ Revolutions had to implement some interesting decisions: any 3:1 battle in favor of human became a guaranteed win. Too many randomly bad outcomes in a row were mitigated.
https://smus.com/books/sid-meiers-memoir/
Some threads on randomness and perceived fairness in video games can be found here on HN too, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399044
The original link being discussed in that thread is 404 now, but archived copies of the original link exist such as for example https://archive.is/8eVqt
I used to get so many comments about how the computer opponent in a tile-based board game of mine cheats and got all the high numbers while they always got low numbers, and I'd be like "that's mathematically impossible. I divide the number of spaces on the board in half, generate a deck of tiles to go into a 'bag', and then give a copy of those same tiles to the other player.
So over the course of the game you'll get the exact same tiles, just in a different random order.
Now to be fair, I didn't make that clear to the player that's what was happening, they were just seeing numbers come up, but it was still amazing to see how they perceived themselves as getting lower numbers overall compared to the opponent all the time.
Meanwhile on the base game difficulty I was beating the computer opponent pretty much every game because it had such basic A.I. where it was placing its tiles almost totally at random (basically I built an array of all possible moves where it would increase its score, and it would pick one at random from all those possibilities, not the best possibility out of those).
My Dad used to play a lot of online poker, and he used to complain when other players got lucky with their hands, be like 'I know the chances are like 5% of them getting that! They shouldn't have gotten that!' and it always reminded me of those people.
The better option would be to just increase the flat odds. DQM: The Dark Prince is brutal with it's odds, but fair. A 45% chance is 45%.
In games like Civ/EU/Stellaris/Sins/etc It makes sense that a 3:1 battle wouldn't scale linearly, especially if you have higher morale/tech/etc. Bullets have a miss ratio, 3x as many bullets at the same target narrows that gap and gives the larger side an advantage at more quickly destroying the other side. So just give it an oversized ratio to scale the base (1:1) odds at.
That keeps "losing" realistic...a once in an occasion happenstance of luck/bad tactics/etc but also a generally very favorable and reliable outcome for your side.
I worked on a game where we added a "fairness" factor to randomness. If you were unlucky in one battle, you were lucky in the next, and vice versa. Mathematically you ended up completely fair. (The game designer hated it, though, and it wasn't shipped like that)
Games like Battle for Wesnoth which have it implemented right, you’ll look at a 90-10 scenario with 2 attacks and end up with the 1% scenario. Enough to make a man rage. I have degrees in Mathematics, I am aware of statistics, and all that. And yet when I played that game I would still have an instant “wait what, that’s super unlikely” before I had to mentally control for the fact that so many battles happen in a single map.
Was good because it identified a personal mental flaw.
Dispatch too. If your odds are above a certain threshold, the mission is a gimme.
I think XCOM does this as well.
The 8-ball joker is even more BS. I think I’ve only seen it trigger once ever.
I've read the source a few years back. It's all implemented fairly as it says on the tin.
I've long been suspicious of the RNG/seed implementation.. but not curious enough to automate testing of it, though.
It's been done, it's a valid RNG. It's somewhere on Reddit if you want to try and search for it.
I figured it had been tested by someone more motivated than me, haha, thanks! Will look for it when I'm back at a computer.
Neat example of cognitive bias, the brain perceives the Nope as being much more prevalent than it actually is!
For a small while I've had the idea of a [game engine/fantasy console/Scratch clone?] that comes packed with a bunch of example games. The example games should be good enough that people download it just to play them, but they are also encouraged to peek into their source code. I'd hope for it to be a sneaky gateway into programming.
For that, I'll keep this in mind: "Unlucky players may look at the source code of a chance-based effect to check if the odds are actually as stated."
I didn't know I could check but after losing like 20 times in a row I just stopped taking WoF. Never saw the good outcome.
I’ve 100%’d Balatro and wheel of fortune is quite strong. It’s never worth taking before you’re at max interest though.
I'm sure it's strong if you hit it, I never did so to me it was a waste of chips.