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> repeatedly missing increases your chance to hit That’s amazing—a logical fallacy as a feature!

• vintermann 10y ago
  It's not so unusual. Sid Meier has talked about a feature like this, and I think even Civilization (the first) had it.
  • minikomi 10y ago
    Mario Kart certainly has a "the more you're losing, the faster you go" .. or at least the inverse implemented. Along with "the further behind you are, the more likely to get a blue shell".
    • vintermann 10y ago
      That's a catch-up mechanism, that's different than merely smoothing out outlier streaks. Though I think that the reason this feels necessary, isn't that people are irrational and believe in streaks - it's that they used a poor random model in the first place. Maybe a spearman should simply never beat a battleship.
  • bluesign 10y ago
    also many racing games etc, have speed bonus if you are behind , ex: wipeout allows speed up, if you are tailing an opponent.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
• Kurtz79 10y ago
  How is this a logical fallacy ? Technically you would see the effect of your shot (i.e. too much to the left) and adjust your aim (more to the right).
  • MereInterest 10y ago
    He is referring to the Gambler's Fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy). That is, the belief that in a series of uncorrelated events, after a long string of losses, you are more likely to have a win.
    • Kurtz79 10y ago
      Thanks, I knew about the Gambler's Fallacy, but I really didn't make the connection (also since they are not really uncorrelated... :) )
  • tremon 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy the mistaken belief that, if something happens more frequently than normal during some period, it will happen less frequently in the future, or that, if something happens less frequently than normal during some period, it will happen more frequently in the future
  • pjc50 10y ago
    Yes, although in XCOM it's applied across all shooters and all targets, so a miss by trooper A against alien B will improve the chance of trooper C to hit alien D.
• eterm 10y ago
  It's interesting, because it means that on average you'll do substantially better than your expected hit rate. For poisson processes a lot of the expectation of the time taken "comes from" long tails. If you're rolling a fair dice, if you cap at 12 (i.e. the 12th roll will land a 6 no matter what) then your expected time to roll a 6 goes down from 6 to 5.4. So by applying a "correction" on strings of misses without applying a similar correction to a string of hits it skews the mean down which actually changes what your average hit-rate is. It would be interesting however if the tested hit-rate was adjusted lower to account for this effect, that would make it "fair" again by the hit-rate stat reporting the average hit-rate, but would make the randomness generate "appear more random" to humans.
• pjc50 10y ago
  So here's the thing. We (the playing public) expect different types and standards of "fairness" from games of skill and games of chance. We expect that games of skill are beatable by playing better and that they should generally be beatable. People get very upset if they've sunk hours into something to discover that it's unwinnable, especially if it was unwinnable all along as soon as the random seed was chosen. In games of chance on the other hand, people understand that you can work at making better bets but you can't make yourself "luckier" by force of will. So it's easier for people to blame the RNG gods than berate one another for lack of skill. Edit: remember in game design, especially human vs. AI, it's not about beating the player but about maximising their enjoyment of the process. You have to make the defeats fun as well.