[godelski]

I can't seem to find the video, but I remember Sid Meier talking about how he had to manipulate the battle odds to what people thought was fair combat. For example, they thought that if they had a 2/3 chance of winning, they should win practically every time and thought it was unfair when they lost. Even though they won 2 out of every 3 matches, on average.

The average person doesn't understand expected outcome, that it means ON AVERAGE it will take this many times to obtain the thing. Lottery tickets are a bad example because the expected outcome is still really high, though most people still understand this.

[canadian_voter]

For example, they thought that if they had a 2/3 chance of winning, they should win practically every time and thought it was unfair when they lost

Like that time I lost my entire squad in X-Com because they all kept missing their 80% to 95% chances to hit. There was much rage that day.

[godelski]

I always hear this with X-Com, and have experienced it myself. Though it is really possible to miss 90%s several times in a row. It shouldn't happen often, but our monkey brains hate it and it feels unfair. It is a hard balancing problem.

[tzakrajs]

Why not have a system that is able to average out the rolls to happen in a way that good/bad rolls don't clump together and are spaced more evenly? Couldn't you generate the rolls and then sort them in favorable way or reroll whenever a roll is too far outside of some predicted thresholds?

[godelski]

There's a question of how you want to play with statistics. Do you want to play with fair dice or dice that give you an advantage? You might be saying to yourself that your storage tactic is still a uniform distribution, but you're forgetting sample size. You're also removing some uncertainty.

So, you can roll dice over and over, but you actually need a lot of samples for the stats to converge. That's why it is called the law of LARGE numbers. It is still possible to roll two 12s in a row on dice, but we wouldn't expect it to be common. By your clumping together, you need to not only store a lot of data, but now your "random" events are dependent rolls and not independent.

Really it is just a question of what you want to do and how you want fairness perceived. Do you want your game to act like dice? Or do you want a slight advantage? BTW, i2om3r linked the video I was talking about there Meier discusses peoples' perception of fairness. In the end, you have to determine what is best for your game. Maybe stacking the deck makes better gameplay, maybe it doesn't.

[eropple]

Sure. But that's not what X-COM was (or the new ones are, though they mess with the rolls a little at lower difficulties).

Sometimes you just roll snake eyes. Then you deal with it.

[godelski]

Sometimes you roll snake eyes two or three times in a row. You still have to deal with it, and doesn't mean the dice are loaded.

[hermitdev]

Pretty sure this was after Civ 1, when you'd lose a battleship to a spearman surprisingly often. Been a while since I've played Civ 2, don't think there was the concept of cumulative damage, yet, but there was by Civ 3. Definitely seems "fairer". Sure a spearman can possibly damage a battleship, but unlikely to destroy one.

Also, it's Sid Meier.

[godelski]

I can't remember which Civ it was, but I remember he was talking about an early one. I'd love to find that video again.

(Also, fixed my post. Thanks)

[QAPereo]

This is a huuuuuge issue in the world of informed consent too. When you tell someone the odds regarding a procedure, do they really understand those odds?

[Negative1]

Sid (and others) did much the same thing that F2P games do now; make the odds 'flexible' using accumulators, counters and other tricks. For example, the odds displayed may be 66% chance of victory, but over time, that number changes based on a number of fuzzy factors (number of consecutive victories/losses, time since last victory/loss etc...). He even had a random coin flip in there cause 'randomness is what makes games fun'. So even though it said 66%, there's something like a 1 out of 10 chance that you'll just lose, to spice things up. I mean really, how fun would it be if tanks always beat archers. :-)

In the pursuit of making a fun and interesting experience, it's not as bad as it sounds since it leads to a rewarding experience (though getting 2 hours of sleep because Civ is so addictive could be construed as negative). When providing questionable reward to the player and in a money grab via psychological manipulation, well, yeah, seems pretty exploitative and not so honorable.

What's most interesting to me is the wildly different perspectives that gamers on different platforms will tolerate. Zynga/Facebook gamers seemed to never care. Mobile gamers follow suit but some are a bit sensitive to this manipulation. Console gamers are familiar with these tactics since the horse armor days but have a red line (Destiny 2 just crossed). PC gamers have zero tolerance and will go up in arms as soon as their precious games are violated with F2P mechanics (though Ubisoft is doing pretty good here since they're doing it somewhat respectfully).

[i2om3r]

For reference, here is the video: https://youtu.be/MtzCLd93SyU?t=19m28s

[godelski]

THANK YOU!!!!! I've looked for that video several times and have been kicking myself for not bookmarking it.

[alasdair_]

The same thing happens with weather forecasts, where "95% chance of sun" gets downgraded to "80% chance of sun" because people assume 95% == a sure thing.