Jonathan Blow on Rigged RNG in Games ("Sid Meiering")

[@BlowFan]

This video wasn't supposed to be about Dicey Dungeons at all really. That clip was there only to give context on what Blow is saying later. Maybe I shouldn't have included it at all because now I feel that it distracts from the point of the video.

[@BlowFan]

​@@fennecbesixdouze1794 I haven't made any conclusions about Dicey Dungeons. I have never played it. The main point of the video is that it's bad if a game lies about its rules. If you forget about the Dicey Dungeons bit maybe you can even agree on that point?

[@nickrett4221]

@@BlowFan Thank you for combining the two separate clips into one, the emerged content provokes thoughts and analysis way further than would be otherwise.

[@BlowFan]

​@@nickrett4221 Thanks! I'm always glad when I manage to combine multiple clips into a meaningful whole.

[@blackdragoncool]

Dicey Dungeons doesn't manipulate RNG values: twitter.com/terrycavanagh/status/1183808073342898177. I think this clip shows that there IS something to be said for Sid Meiering RNG, people will almost always find it unfair if they get 1/1000 bad luck, even if they're "hardcore" gamers, even if they understand the maths. If you don't want people to find your game unfair, or if you're trying to make a satisfying game with minimal rage quit (say if you're making an AAA game with a ton of economic pressure to succeed and appeal to a broad audience) it makes sense to account for human's inability to intuitively understand probability by screwing with the RNG a bit. Obviously the extent to which the RNG is skewed is another matter... I do think there's something to the moral argument about having the responsibility not to teach people about faulty probability though, I hadn't thought about.

[@blackdragoncool]

I think a solution to this would be fudging rng so players (for instance) dont get 3 really bad rolls in a row but then being clear in the ruleset or wiki about how the fudge mechanism works.

[@KilterTalks]

If the dev wants to give you a higher probability, why can’t they just say that? If you want to give me 90% instead of 80% then just say 90%. What really bothers me is the opposite, when a 20% drop is really a 2% drop to “make the game longer”

[@shamirin]

Jon took it entirely out of context. At least in XCOM: Enemy Unknown the percentage it states is baseline correct. It only starts to secretly affect the odds once you miss a likely shot, for example missing a 80% shot will then add a secret 15% accuracy bonus to your next shot. So its only purpose is to curb excruciating loses ( imagine how it would feel to lose hours of work to 5 80% misses in a row ) not lie arbitrarily at a baseline. Ironically XCOM's pity system stops exactly what got jon so frustrated, in a game where (presumably?) losing an encounter is off little consequence.

[@globalistgamer6418]

That might be an OK in concept (though I'm not sure I fully agree: I think it would be better to investigate a more robust way of putting a ceiling on bad luck that doesn't only allow the most extreme negative outcomes through, like Dragon Quest cutting your gold in half and sending you back to town, but letting you keep found items and level/xp gains instead of wiping your progress completely). However, from how you've described it, the actual execution is still flawed due to a lack of transparency. Show the pity bonus and final result in the UI (preferably with some in-universe explanation but even if not if need be). It's unreasonable to criticize Blow for not knowing the precise way in which the game is lying when the whole problem is its intentional obfuscation.

[@_--_--_]

@@shamirin The point wasnt when the game does it, the point was that the game doesnt tell you it does it. There is nothing stopping them to just show the 15% bonus to the player, thus actually show the 95% instead of the fake 80%. Just have a status buff that says "Joe Shmoe is angry he missed his shot, he will receive 15% accurary bonus on the next shot" or something functionally similar. Or say nothing and just show 95% in the window. Lying to your players, especially if its math related, is never a good thing. Numbers are numbers for a reason, they are supposed to be objective, if you dont want to be objective or want to be vague about what you show your players, then use words instead of numbers, so instead of a fake 80% that is 95% in reality, it could be "Very high hit chance".

[@shortcat]

what@@shamirindescribed is arguably even worse

[@KilgoreTroutAsf]

I'm going to gamble all my savings on red. 50% is actually a pretty good chance of winning.

[@qualia765]

well technically it's 49%, and we all know how horrible 49% chance is...

[@TipsyFGC]

The amount of times I been up and lost to green is disgusting 😂

[@pedrooliveira2089]

@@TipsyFGC it hurts so much...

[@maxclark5496]

regarding the dicey dungeons clip, i think a lot of commenters are overlooking the point jon makes that "because the tutorials were juiced and because i've been so unlucky, i kinda don't beleive it's random anymore. and because i don't trust the game, i don't want to play it anymore."

[@diegosandoval2043]

I wholeheartedly agree with him on his main point. I don't know if that dicey game is rigged or not, and I don't care. If your game lies about its rules, it's a crappy game. period.

[@seditt5146]

Yet the sad part is this gets done because the players inadvertently ask for it. They patronize things that hold their hand and lie to them. Fortnite is a prime example of it. They punish good players already hooked and reward bad ones so they can sucker everyone in and their skill in addicting players to that damn game is only matched by their deception about the players actual abilities. My son was really great at Fortnite, 13 years old and could have likely held his own with professionals in the game. I took him and made a new account allowing him to play on it and the kid won 2 out of 3 games and finished second in the third. For a 100 player game those odds are pretty nuts even if he is generally better than the overall field. It happened because they handy cap players depending how good they are. Your account has good stats they fuck you over. You're a noob? They do everything in their power to get you hooked such as making your aim better, making your shots stronger, shield stronger etc. They have stated the most important part is getting a new player to make their first kill and win. Its sick dude. I played the game one time on my sons account. I had full health, full shield. Stood there and shot a guy like 13-14 times which would be the max for the other player to possibly withstand. He shot me 4 times and I was dead which was the max possible. I was murdered by a default noob I shot over a dozen times in 4 shots. Last time I played that game LOL. Fucking hate Fortnite.

[@Lonewulf321]

Wait, what rules did DD lie about?

[@roderik1990]

@@Lonewulf321 It didn't, Jonathan Blow just came away from the game with the impression that it did. Ironically for much the same reasons that Sid Meiering is even a thing: we as humans are bad at judging random events.

[@Lonewulf321]

@@roderik1990 what a clown

[@TipsyFGC]

Tallywort. I’m working on my own project now but it seems as you go from level 1-2-3 the odds get worse. I can run warrior 1 and almost always use my entire dice. By level 2 that’s already redu Ed significantly. In 20 runs I managed to roll and reroll 5-6 more then 1-4 combined, with 3 and 4 being the lowest rolls (level 2 warrior gets 2 battle axes that do 2x damage max 4 When my build switches these also switch. So either I’m extremely unlucky or the game isn’t 1/6 odds for each dice

[@nickrett4221]

Jon inadvertently proves that telling truth is PROHIBITIVELY dangerous business, even when telling it to a highly intelligent person who explicitly asks you to tell only the truth. If Dicey Dungeons were like XCOM, he wouldn't ragequit. Because long chains of bad luck would be eliminated by designer to increase retention. Basically, videogames are doomed. It's natural selection: you either manipulate player to feel good, or it's "good night guys". Because in the end even the most rational mind is a slave to emotions, and will be used as a sharp tool to eloquently defend a whim.

[@forasago]

If random numbers result in long loss streaks and those are frustrating then there are TWO ways to fix that. 1. Add something to make loss streaks less frustrating. 2. Lie to the player and destroy a foundational building block of your mechanics (apparent random chance) creating tons of follow-up problems. Now which of these seems more sane? The problem with XCom was never that 60% should feel like 80% and 80% should feel like 95% and probabilities under 50% are okay if they lead to failure. The problem with XCom is that your success relies too damn much on random numbers. Instead of lying about the numbers they should have just increased the numbers or made failure less catastrophic. If players don't like losing team members and entire missions to a dice roll that said 80% then it's really autistic to think the problem is the number. Players simply don't like having to gamble with stakes that high. Lower the stakes and make the non-random parts of the game deeper.

[@nickrett4221]

If only it was so easy. The numbers aren't fixed. Players can, for one example, upgrade weapons and increase probability from initial 50% to 60%, 70%, etc. Once it increases to 90 or 95%, many people, especially with psychopatic tendencies, will consider it to be 100%. Others will subconsciously perceive a normal distribution for PC attacks but uniform distribution for enemies. Who knows. Sid Meiering = catering to those tendencies. Also, players actually like to gamble with high stakes, they just don't like to lose. Call it autistic or just greedy, but it's common human trait to be abused by entertainment industry. We're arguing this is morally wrong, but it works. And it's simply more efficient to make a shallow game with manipulative design than to painstakingly devise a deep non-random gameplay which ends up not fun to play.

[@GodOfMacro]

It's really OK to make the mechanisme just clear, when you loose you stack up some kind of karma that can then be used, or have a chance of reroll once in a while. The rule must be explicit tho.

[@nickrett4221]

​@@GodOfMacro I guess you suggest decreasing the impact of randomness only slightly, so that gameplay doesn't turn into pure chess. Well, this will only change the wording of frustration: - Karma stack: "Good night guys, the game CLEARLY hates me, it has just wasted all my karma to a streak of inconsequental rolls and now feeds me with 1s at boss battle!" - Random chance of Reroll: "I feel entitled to a reroll NOW and the game would better give it to me or I'll feel deprived." - Guaranteed Reroll: "Okay, so I'm always rerolling when I get less than 4 out of 6, thus the mean increases from 3.5 to 4.25, but the game's difficulty curve is CLEARLY adjusted as if it increased from 3.5 to 5.5, no less! Those developers just don't know math! Let me explain..." And of course those can be Sidmeiered: Karma stack: rubberbanding with plot-based attractors for luck. Random chance of Reroll: "miracle" rerolls, A/B-tested for max addiction. Guaranteed Reroll: the reroll rarely ends with less than the first roll.

[@GodOfMacro]

@@nickrett4221 well yeah, good points, you will eventually have bad luck stroke that will make any random system look biased. Don't you think it's possible to have explicit systems that reduce the impact of bad luck strokes without having to deceived players ?

[@Vinzaf]

Telling the truth is dangerous, because it leads to reactions like JB had to Dicey Dungeons - and now he gave up on the game, because it gave him a terrible experience.

[@kecksohn]

this is so funny to me

[@rinat2160]

And he even tells that he knows how random feels like, which means he doesn't know how random feels like. Random is random. You may throw dices ten times and get 6 ten times in a row.

[@deefeeeeefeeeeeeeeee]

@@rinat2160 No it's you who never played a game with friend with REAL dice. And you also never really look at software or code, or you are a really high level coder, thinking that the random() function is giving you TRUE random when it's not, it's pseudo random. Basically a sequence of numbers is generated depending on HW and other stuff that could lead if you are not lucky with a bad sequence number and you will never have luck... Stop saying constant bs, thx I mean more likely you are stupid if you think we can reproduce a randomness based on nature with piece of hardware lmfao. And you are even more stupid if you call yourself a programmer or whatever and you don't know that x)

[@rinat2160]

@@deefeeeeefeeeeeeeeee rdrand

[@travisdunsmuir806]

Wouldn't the unlucky rolls show that Dicey Dungeons is NOT Sid Meiered?

[@Minodrec]

It's not unlucky to roll a bunch of 1 as the witch with your 4th, 5th and 6th spellslots empty.

[@chinakat154]

I think what he meant in that context is that the probabilities feel fudged.

[@forasago]

@@Minodrec Are you saying that "spell slots" change the probability of your dice rolls? If the probability isn't 1/6 then it's not a 6-sided dice at all and you shouldn't represent it that way visually.

[@lula4260]

I'll chime in on this as a Dicey modder, the game DOES have hidden rng manipulation... in 3 places, A) the tutorial, where the game is HEAVILY scripted (for about 2 fights), a variant of an enemy for the final boss, made because a few statuses break it, and the final boss, where it's hilariously obvious (due to the fact that they only roll sixes). Cauldron has nothing in it's script that would imply anything about being deceitful to the player, it's literally `attack(1); givedice();` attack(1); is what tells the game that an equipment does damage, and givedice(); just rolls a dice between 1 and 6 (unless specified otherwise, ie: givedice(6); which would always give a six)

[@Lonewulf321]

@@lula4260 this comment is great, thank you.

[@tjohnson314]

I agree with him that manipulating probabilities is evil, but I think the answer isn't just to only show true probabilities. As his experience of Dicey Dungeons shows, playing games where you might get unlucky and lose no matter how well you play just isn't fun for some people. The real answer is that it's up to the game designer to tune the importance of luck in a game based on their intended audience. For a casual game, maybe having a high luck factor is a good thing, because it means that even people who aren't very good will have a chance to win. For competitive games, the luck factor should be relatively small, or even sometimes zero (e.g., chess).

[@ReasonMakes]

The obstacle should be random. Reward for adept performance should not.

[@zekicaneksi]

WHY THE FUCK WOULD IT LIE i don't even get how you can think that way its straight up unethical bunch of soyboys

[@Blahants]

While I agree that developers should present players with accurate probabilities, his complaints and frustrations about Dicey Dungeons pretty much shows why "Sid Meiering" happens. People are bad at estimating probability and this often leads to frustration from their expectations. When faced with real RNG, he feels like it isn't possible to roll so many ones in a row and so he no longer wants to play the game. Had the game lied to him and given him a favourable number where a one should have been, he would have felt better about the experience.

[@lastburning]

Consider this. You only saw a very small snippet of the whole stream so you don't have an accurate picture of all of his rolls during the game. Blow also said that the tutorial was Sid Meiered in the player's favor which he didn't like either. Are you sure that the game had accurate RNG?

[@Blahants]

@@lastburning I've played the game before and have noticed nothing of the sort. Yes, consecutive unlucky rolls are possible but it really isn't that rare of a case considering each roll is 1 out of 6. I also don't see why a developer would rig the RNG against the player and create a worse experience for their game, that seems to be quite the opposite of what "Sid Meiering" sets out to do. And yes, the tutorial has predetermined rolls, but this is so blatantly obvious I wouldn't consider it deceiving or tricking the players.

[@Minodrec]

Heikai Tutorial is scripted so ppl can test every mechanics explained. It's really efficient and that's the only way to make an actual tutorial sequence. Really if they want you to try a mechanic they have to be sure your dice are able to activate said mechanics. And the tutorial make a good job at making dice pool that are still logic puzzle. It's not just a bunch of "here is a 6 for your need a six ability". It is one of the best dice game tutorial I ever played... Maybe the best.

[@AdobadoFantastico]

Terry had actually acknowledged that the witch was broken. I'm not sure if he said it uses a pseudo-random scheme that played badly with her, or that there was some other issue but he has explicitly said she's prone to getting stuck with bad rolls and that he was working on addressing it.

[@fizzd7]

@@AdobadoFantastico where did he say that? all i could see was that he changed the generation for the witch's levels in 1.3, to add more health pickups, not anything to do with dice rolls

[@slowmo6518]

thanks for posting this. as a huge fan of xcom enemy within and unknown, part two was so frustrating, i declared that game broken and vowed to never spend another min on that ever again. but enemy unknown i still play to this day.

[@cthudo]

So glad I found this, it restored a bit of my sanity. I remember that Sid Meier GDC talk, it really really skewed my opinion of him towards the negative. At the time, I discussed this with several friends, and none of them could understand why I was upset about this.

[@sensereference2227]

But the video demonstrates that Sid Meier was right. After claiming to want games to reflect the reality of probability in their design in his speech, JB later ragequit a game because it wasn't boosting the probability in his favor.

[@TheJols]

Reminds me of playing Diablo 3 and getting the same item dropped at the exact same level on another character. It sort of just broke the illusion of randomness the game had for me completely. I don't really know what's going on with the game but now I think the game is going to dole out rewards when I need them instead of randomly, which sort of defeats the entire appeal of the game.

[@qualia765]

I am ok with games that say that give you better or worse odds hidden if it is dependent on how lucky you got previously as long as the chance that is displayed is the average change that is rolled. It has the drawback of not being true randomness, but at least it's not straight-up lying. The probabilities are still valid. An example that does this masterfully is the game of RISK that you can get on steam. It only does it to the 'Blitz' rolls where it automatically rolls until you completely invade or you don't have enough troops to invade more. And even better, at the start of the game, the host has the option to turn it off for everyone in the game. So it's not the same for every game, but I feel like the developers should be able to do whatever they want with the probability as long as the average is the same as the displayed chance. And if they do anything drastic, they tell the player they are doing it.

[@SumoCumLoudly]

I had to quit playing the only game I played - a sports game. It's completely rigged now to create balanced games regardless of player skill, so effectively you are no longer playing against an opponent in a consistent physical environment, you are holding the controller while a forced dramatic narrative plays out. People are spending money to get players and 90% are unaware that those players stats are irrelevant due to the artificial balancing. The theory is that they don't want to lose "play for fun" noobs who might buy coins so they stop them from losing 10 or 20 nil every game which would happen in a fair level playing field, and might lead to them stopping playing the game.

[@higgins007]

You're talking about PES?

[@SumoCumLoudly]

@@higgins007 yeah

[@higgins007]

@@SumoCumLoudly lol how did I know. It's disgraceful isn't it. Such a shame too, because there's a stonking great game underneath all the bs.

[@SumoCumLoudly]

@@higgins007 exactly, have not played it since 2019 and not missing it

[@KilgoreTroutAsf]

Ah, the classic rubber band AI.

[@opl500]

"I don't trust the game, I don't want to play it"

[@tiranito3715]

3:14 that's why I never follow gut feeling for real life... and even among games I don't carry over that feeling of how often X% is. Each game is it's own thing. When I for example use VATS in Fallout 1 I know that 80% there is a completely different thing from 80% in Fallout 4. I don't know, maybe most people have trouble switching their thought process when changing between games, but as someone who tries to optimize as much as possible in most games, I always pay attention to what a certain percentage means within the context of a given game, because as Jon said, games lie to us about RNG, so X% means something entirely different on each game.

[@eugkra33]

And then you sell them a loot box with a probability to win, which they now have a distorted view of.

[@stephenkamenar]

OMG the dicey dungeons rng clip! the cognitive dissonance

[@patrolin]

the first card doesn't matter, you only care about the other two being the same this gives you a probability of 1/9 or 11%, which is pretty common so yeah, you probably should account for players being irrational

[@ctx4241]

Cant believe we have 100+ people actually speaking english in Czech Republic. Progress

[@hati3813]

He makes some points worth considering, but I find them to be highly edge cases, and to fail to apply to reality in a practical sense.

[@salbertron]

the idea of jonathan blow angrily stomping out of the room because of something sid meier is saying on stage is really funny.

[@Vitorruy1]

It makes no sense for dicey dungeons to give players bad luck on pourpuse, Blow is just being whiny

[@ryanisbelle6107]

Do you not realize that if dicey dungeons didn't have the fake difficulty by lying about probabilities, then everybody would absolutely see it as a baby game because it would be far too easy? Look at the art style, it's Baby's First RPG.

[@DvH_2]

@@ryanisbelle6107 wait, so are you saying it IS a baby game (rigged against you) or NOT a baby game (not rigged)? It sounded they fudge the numbers to seem harder, but then you brought up the artstyle to show how it looks like a kiddie game.

[@famicom_guy]

@@ryanisbelle6107 it isn't an RPG

[@higgins007]

Even sports games do this nowadays and it's absolutely infuriating.

[@mattd8725]

People are likely to attribute good luck to their own skill, but bad luck is just bad luck. If you have a case where they are told up front that it would be very skilful to make a certain decision, but it ends in bad luck, then cognitive dissonance kicks in. In real life people expect such "mercy mechanics" such as if they put a modest amount of money in a bank they expect it to be protected even if the bank goes bust. The problem is the secretness of it, such as D&D having a rule book but also a "DM screen" so the DM can roll whatever he likes for dramatic reasons.

[@mattd8725]

In the original X-COM the rewards for skilful decisions were clearer because more soldiers means more high percentage attack rolls. Good decisions were more likely to average out to success without any "mercy".

[@gamikhan9087]

Some people are oblivious to how unluky jon was, 1 in 1944 of out of 6 dices getting five 1's and another either 1,4,5 or 6 (His case was 4 1 1 1 1 1). You cant even argue of cherrypicking the results because you cant make that many cauldrons unless you get an aproximate amount of 1's, somewhere in the ball park of 1 in 500, still really unlikely and thats problaly including cases where blow wouldnt have overreacted. So he was right on feeling that it was sketchy because he just got an extremely uncommon event, I dont blame him for not trusting the odds because who really knows.

[@rensborkent22]

I wonder how terrible lootboxes are SM'ed

[@putinstea]

A lot of games with lootboxes are affected by gambling laws that require them to didclose the odds actually.

[@putinstea]

@shr you get a third party it firm to test the RNG algorithm programmatically.

[@SEOTADEO]

Mad about rigged probabilities. Get's mad when actual random things happen and the probabilities are not rigged. Like 4 times getting a 1.

[@dariogifc0]

Yeah exactly. Butthurt gamers rage quiting the game after a streak of bad luck is exactly why Sid Meireing was introduced.

[@stumbling]

This sort of thing is genuinely, seriously, without any exaggeration, evil. This is where video games can actually harm people.

[@nickrett4221]

Well, it's exactly like junkfood, so...

[@YellowCable]

one thing that is missing is a conversation about the quality of rng generation and use. The fact that rng can be predicted fairly easily (speedruns etc) shows that pseudo-rng is still too pseudo and not rng enough

[@globalistgamer6418]

I'm not sure this is actually a problem, and might actually be the best outcome. For casual play it is still random enough to not be predictable, whereas for speedrunning metas it's usually better for the impact of RNG to be possible to reliably workaround.

[@globalistgamer6418]

People are saying that the Dicey Dungeons clip ironically demonstrated that X-COM's lack of transparency was correct, but I disagree. Blaming DD itself seems to have been wrong and unfair, but it's clear from what Blow said that he wasn't thinking about the DD outcome objectively specifically because he was viewing it through an expectation of obfuscation created by the X-COM experience. That is to say, not only was X-COM's design bad in itself, but it gaslit Blow so severely that it has negatively affected his perception of RNG in other games...which makes what it does even worse.

[@MrLordFireDragon]

Underrated comment, while some of Blow's remarks are clearly wrong ("I know what random feels like") he gave several other reasons about why he thought the game might be fudging numbers, and ultimately without any more information he believes it's possible because games like X-COM have broken his faith in games not tweaking their probabilities behind closed doors.

[@SashaGarcia]

*laughs in double suppressed Leviathan Mechtoid critting you twice in full cover*

[@alarcus3507]

Rigged RNG is harmful, especially when players are meant to learn from random cases game states, but the randomness behind is rigged. What truly annoys the player is not real randomness, but easily designed random cases actually excessively harsh for the player. Since players can take a rigged randomness, why not just tell them what they are acctually facing?

[@opl500]

We're rigging games when it doesn't even matter whether it is or not. This is getting pathological.

[@0xCAFEF00D]

Missing a 99% shot in a critical situation can be funny if you trust the algorithms at play. But in these fudged probabilities games arguably nothing changed there since we've just hidden the real chance. But I'm sure that players will have a moment of clarity when they actually consider the risk, in that moment they'll look at the presented risk and see "actually 1/20 times this happens, it's not that special". Except it was actually 1/100 because of how the game lies. You've given the player an underestimation of failiure and made an extraordinary event ordinary. I'm of the opinion that pity mechanics should be very clearly stated and not mess with your base chances. Maybe your soldier can't miss X times in a row with a probability of above X to hit and the game tells you that shot is guaranteed. That makes for more interesting strategic decisions. Long war (xcom mod) introduced a graze band which applies to both aliens and xcom. It extends the hit probability chances by 10% but counts those hits as grazes which causes less damage. Also a more interesting mechanic. A really bad example is Dota 2 that has Pseudo Random Distribution as they call it. Your chances of critting decreases with each crit and increases with each non-crit. They're patching over the fact that leaving a game like that to chance is a terrible idea. I'm sure this also messes with players intuition. It should be more explicit. Right now it's implicit that all RNG in the game is like that and nobody is told unless they read the wikis. Pure RNG is a pretty lazy solution a lot of the time. I don't think XCOM would be a better game if you just remove the feature.

[@moenibus]

In the end, you said nothing. This is not a casino. These are guns. We don't need probabilities. If it says 95 percent, idiot, 95 out of 100 shots MUST hit. Got it?

[@HeroHasCome1806]

@@moenibus that’s really not how probability works. If the shot is 95% and you make 100 shots, there is a chance that all 100 shots will miss. Because there is 5% chance of miss in EVERY shot. It’s not gonna change because you make many shots.

[@0xCAFEF00D]

@@moenibus Strangely aggressive when we basically agree. I don't like RNG in strategy games. I have no idea how you and three other people think I said nothing in all that. Sure I wasn't as terse as I should have but I make some points.

[@Ivan_Ooze]

BG3 is the new king of this shit

[@morkallearns781]

Complains about Sid meyering, then gets mad he had bad luck. Proof gamers don’t know what they want.

[@amisteryfella]

Designers and gamers know as much as anybody else about what they like, that phrase is unbearable

[@Pabloparsil]

People like Sid Meier harm society by making people dumber. We should strive to be like poker players or Tetlock's superforecasters, strive to distinguish between, say, 65% probability and 70%. But no, Sid Meier and I'm sure many other game devs want you to do the opposite

[@FXPips11]

Rng knows where your money is sitting,

[@patrikpass2962]

Please make a video about rng in hearthstone. They are fooling alot of kids with that game.

[@MenkoDany]

I miss GDS

[@desmondbrown5508]

This is one situation where I agree with Jon Blow sort of, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. I disagree with him that it's bad to lie about positive probabilities because that developer (Sid Meier) is correct. People don't enjoy missing a shit load because of bad luck. Hell, I'd almost argue it's better if they don't have to miss at all, or at the very least make it so the game doesn't punish missing so heavily if you ARE allowing missing because nobody likes to lose to luck. And many random chance games will do worse if basic game mechanics actually fuck the player 30 - 40% of the time. Nobody likes feeling like their not making progress or getting a result that they strategically planned well for just because of a bad roll. Hell, it's one of the reasons I personally don't play much DnD... I don't have fun missing or dealing low damage just because I got unlucky many times in a row. Games like Pokemon knew this well (which btw has a MASSIVE playerbase both casual and competitive) so they never have ridiculously low odds on an attack unless the move would be broken otherwise. Now if we're talking about low odds and lying, I completely agree with Jon. This is because that's how lootboxes and other insidious mechanics keep people playing by stringing them along with a great game for several hours, before slowly reducing odds and then lying about it or otherwise misleading players by taking away rewards and hiding those low odds but presenting it as if you're "just one roll away getting what you want." So in that regard I totally agree with Jon Blow about probability. I think this issue is a totally context-based situation and it needs to be based around not just player expectations, but around making the game enjoyable to play. If it were up to me, I don't think I'd really ever have lower than 50% probabilities for almost anything in games... But then I actually care about players enjoying and feeling rewarded for their efforts. If you were smart and outflanked somebody there should be a ZERO percent chance that shit goes totally wrong just because of a couple of missed attacks or low damage rolls.

[@twoplustwo5183]

You also feel richer if you pretend to have more money than you actually have... If you want a 60% win rate to *feel* like an 80% win rate, then you are just begging devs to ruin your intuition for probability. Probability is already unintuitive as it is, *so don't fuck with the player by displaying one probability while realizing another.*

[@gd7681]

Makes no sense that you’re okay with lying about high probabilities. Just make your chance of success high but don’t lie about it.

[@La0bouchere]

Designing games with the intention of making the player feel better is dumb though

[@seraphsalt1404]

can u add a opinion on black desert online cause this game is messing me up

[@jeramimachado383]

Every game has its own percentages of probability as long as you're going to a game knowing that I think could be just fine in life.

[@4.0.4]

Here's a solution: make it skill + RNG. Like instead of 95% make something a big target to click on, that on average, people will miss 5% of the time.

[@XTrumpet63X]

It seems obvious to me that the solution to humans being bad at probability is NOT to remove or alter probability. The solution is to alter humans - specifically by letting people be bad at probability so that eventually we all come to terms with that reality.

[@Toasty27-q6w]

The implication that children/people may misunderstand true randomness because a video game lies to them is laughably absurd considering the wealth of psychological study which shows that humans are inherently bad at both recognizing, and producing, truly random sets.

[@porteal8986]

that's part of the point, the game is reinforcing biases is a really bad way

[@casperes0912]

Want to say that on the harder difficulties, XCOM tells the truth and nothing but the truth

[@metropolis10]

I'm not sure how I feel about this. In platformers we generally agree cayote time and input forgiveness are great things, celebrated in games like Celeste that pride on tactical platforming. That's fudging and lying to the user too, but it's pretty agreed upon it's a good idea. In most games my friends and I usually say things like "that 80% is a lie" because it feels like it fails so often. So maybe Sid Meier is onto something about human perception and experience too.

[@todesziege]

I know I'm in the minority here, but I really dislike coyote time in most cases. Like, I know I missed that jump. Partly it is that I don't like being condescended to, but it also throws me off as it makes the controls feel unresponsive.

[@metropolis10]

@@todesziege I mean to be fair if you know you missed the jump, and coyote saved you, then it is probably not tuned right in that game. It's supposed to be very subtle and only fix instances that any reasonable person would go "I totally made that jump why didn't it work". When you play a game completely without any jump adjustments it feels so bad. Even mario has it.

[@todesziege]

@@metropolis10 People have different sensitivity to those things, and it's a case by case thing... but it's something I notice in a lot of modern platformers that bugs me. I don't agree that a "game completely without any jump adjustmets" feels bad --- maybe for a little bit but eventually you just learn where the threshold is.

[@jackeea_]

"it's happened so much tonight, it's not possible" It... is...? It's called bad luck? edit: "I know what random numbers feel like" good god this guy is pretentious. This video hurts to watch lmfao

[@AdobadoFantastico]

What he talks about in the first clip with "developing a sense for probability" is a real and well known phenomenon.Before video games even, a lot of tests were done with gamblers playing dice and card games. You can also see he's played 8 hours of it, which is far more than the tests I've seen. Usually if an inexperienced gambler is asked to pay attention they can figure it out in an hour or two, whereas experienced ones can sometimes tell within minutes.

[@patrolin]

​@@AdobadoFantastico i mean you can do statistical tests, but they still have a non-zero probability of being wrong

[@Sokommichklar]

He's so extremely wrong about this. There is a huge literature on perceived probabilities in human-computer interactions. This is not just a game developer's idea.

[@Ben-uh4wt]

Is there anything in particular that you would suggest reading? Sounds interesting

[@TECHNOBOG]

I'm glad many people in the comments noticed the contradiction presented in this video. The Dicey Dungeons reaction he had is exactly what true random provokes. You cannot "know how random feels like." To all the people asking why can't you just turn up all the chance - it's because you'd have a scale that looks less useful than it actually is. Humans have a better idea of the difference between 60 and 80 than they do about 85 and 99.

[@DavidDeCorso]

Games with heavy RNG elements just aren't fun. It's literally a nerf to skill.

[@Capybarrrraaaa]

Not really, as long as enough choices are presented, then you will get enough skill. You can't completely factor out randomness from anything and still have it be a complicated and/or enjoyable game. Correctly being able to judge the efficacy of an idea and balancing that with the probability of it happening is skill. The problem is frequently that there just aren't enough factors to make it skill.

[@DavidDeCorso]

@@Capybarrrraaaa chess is a complicated and enjoyable game that isn't random. Rng just takes something you could reliably calculate and strategize away from the player's control. And I'm not saying all RNG is always bad, but I think heavy RNG games just punish skill (bad decisions can be rewarded and good decisions can be punished in an RNG system) and make a game less rewarding in general.

[@reginaldstubtoe4185]

you never played chess against me. I move those little mugs all over the place at random

[@asmonull]

You can have skill expression built around RNG - where skill expression is players ability to maximize their chance of success while balancing risks between minimizing chance of negative outcome and shifting negative outcome chances to make worse scenario less likely. Which is, more or less, what XCOM at highest difficulty (when it doesn't stack odds and doesn't lie) does - every turn is finding optimum between aiming for a good situation and keeping the worst that could happen in check, then dealing with consequences. That is, if game mechanics allow for making some sort of emergency plan/prep in case very unlikely happens (which makes skill expression be more aimed towards your overall decision process rather than in-moment decision making).

[@roderik1990]

@@DavidDeCorso You kind of hit upon one of the reasons for RNG in certain games. In some game without the RNG the game is solved, there are no decisions, because the optimal choise is obvious. Clearly that is unwanted. And the RNG can bring replayability. I also rewards the skill of valuation, of considering the relative outcomes or risks involved in a move.

[@--..__]

This guy is such a pseud. In that second clip he gets mad and claims it's rigged and that's why he lost so many times in a row. That irrational belief is exactly why games add fake RNG so that you don't lose multiple times in a row. Gambler's fallacy in action but you think you're too smart to fall for it lmfao

[@ryanisbelle6107]

Okay. What I want you to do is go grab a 6-sided dice from your house. Sit in a chair at a table and roll that dice until you roll the same number 6 times in a row. You cannot get back up or reply to this message until it happens. Go.

[@thelaw3536]

@@ryanisbelle6107 That's a bad view of probability. Even if their were a very low chance for any one person it's possible for one of the people to land snake eyes over and over again. Implausible sure, but not impossible. The way to handle this, however, would be to increase the probabilities or tell the player.

[@ardalanghasemian3658]

This doesn't make any sense it's like saying heroes have to die at the end of the movie sometimes in order to be realistic, no one gives a damn about reality when they are escaping to entertainment and you are missing the whole point of playing video games. I don't agree about explicitly lying about rules all the time but if it's not fun it's bad, it's not about money or anything like that. Gaming like any other form of entertainment must be fun in the first place (other than some small niche exceptions). I mean if the whole point of the game is managing probabilities and risk (which is not very interesting to be honest) hell yea be hardcore about that but if the point of the game is managing some troops and kicking some alien ass and the luck is getting in the way of the experience just make it more fun.

[@SnakeEngine]

Don't know about you, but I have fun if the game is not lying to me and I can rely on its mechanics to make plans. Otherwise, just give me a win-button for fun. It's pathetic to even encourage that mindset.

[@lancesmith8298]

Local game developer loses his shit over RNG because he occasionally had bad rolls. Johnathan Blows.

[@Minodrec]

Because he identified a good roll as a bad one then overestimate the rarity of triple 1. Odds are 1/256 each time you roll 3 dice... It's really not unlikely to see this if you play dicey dungeon a few hours. Then he proceed to be a sore loser. Rage quit. And rent during 4 minutes about it. He is the typical "that guy" to avoid sitting with at a game table... especially playing a dice game.

[@ryanisbelle6107]

@@Minodrec did you notice he already had at least two ones on him at the start of the clip. So five ones in a row. What are the odds?

[@SomethingToSee101]

@@ryanisbelle6107 every sequence of five results has an equally low probability. Of course if it happened a lot it would be suspicous, but Jonathan was stupid by rage quitting about this sequence happening one time and justifying his bad luck by it being "reverse sid meyered"

[@lubricustheslippery5028]

The Sid Meier speak was really bad. He also said you should use stereotypes and people preconceptions towards them so it will be easier to understand the game for the players.

[@magnuscritikaleak5045]

Genshin Impact is the KING OF RNG mechanics.

[@4.0.4]

What does that mean? Do you get your waifu's SSR .png more often?

[@ppwalk05]

I agree with him on this, though on Legend Xcom's stats are what they say they are.