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I honestly can't think of a single competitive game with RNG and/or matchmaking where people _didn't_ accuse the system of being unfair. Pokemon (Battle Tower/

I honestly can't think of a single competitive game with RNG and/or matchmaking where people _didn't_ accuse the system of being unfair. Pokemon (Battle Tower/Frontier/Subway etc.), League of Legends (Elo Hell), the list goes on... This goes back to before I was born, even. One of my past colleagues used to work on poker machines back in the 80s and the company would regularly receive complaints from people "proving" their machines were non-random. I would take this accusation with a massive grain of salt.

bluesign 6y ago
Yeah the problem is people assuming those games are simulations with little or none random. But basically RNG is big part of this simulations.
GlennS 6y ago
There's an interview with Sid Meier floating around somewhere where he discusses how, in Civilization, people will assume the computer is cheating at combat, unless you actually bias it quite strongly in the human's behaviour. Civilization shows you the odds for each fight based on the relative strength of the units. People expect to win a 90% odds fight every time. (I'm also currently partway through reading Thinking In Bets, which has some interesting things to say about this sort of thing.)
- AussieWog93 6y ago
  Fire Emblem is one of the games that shows fake probabilities to get around this problem - if the actual probability of an attack connecting is 95%, it will display a value of 80-85% to the user. The odd part is that I've played hundreds of hours of those games and never noticed anything wrong.
  - cma 6y ago
    Maybe people expect it to be one some kind of logarithmic scale.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  I am reminded about XCOM, which some players complained about being unfair, too. In fact, the game is cheating - but in favor of you. (first enemy critical hits get negated and after someone of your troop dies, the rest gets better chances of surviving and so on) But actually, I don't like that behavior either ..
- avianlyric 6y ago
  If I remember correctly Sid Meier’s point was a little more nuanced than that. It wasn’t that people expect to win 90% of the time, it’s that humans have a very poor intuition for odds and statistics. Pretty much everyone makes the common mistake of not understanding how a 33% chance of winning impacts independent events. People assume that 33% chance of winning, means a pretty such sure fire win after 3 attempts (after all 33% * 3 is approx 100%). But every battle in Civilization is an independent event, so to get a sure fire win (90% confidence) you need to fight something 6/7 times (I don’t know the exact number, been some time since I studied this). Having the number of fights you win against an opponent be 2 or 3 times greater than the intuitive number of fights makes people think the computer to cheating. When really they just don’t understand how stats work. To fix this the Civilization games actually skew their stats so they better align with human intuition. So if the game says you have a 33% chance of winning, then that means you’ll probably win after 3 fights. Despite the fact that really you have a 40%-50% chance of winning that fight.
  - devonkim 6y ago
    Sid Meier also worked with the Firaxis folks on the recent XCOM reboot and this is well known and documented now how the stats work out in the game and how the game will cheat for the player eventually on lower difficulties. Nothing more frustrating than lining up shots perfectly and missing a 98% point blank shot from 2 feet away. I’ve always wondered what that 2% could be - gun jams, the character slips on a banana peel, who knows?
    - username90 6y ago
      > . I’ve always wondered what that 2% could be - gun jams, the character slips on a banana peel, who knows? Or just, the other person moving around in a hectic life or death situation? Trying to shoot someone in short range isn't 100% hit. The characters calmly standing there waiting to get shot is just a game representation.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Counter-hypothesis: these games' higher level gameplay loops demand a higher level of consistency; players' mismatched expectations come partially from a place of "if that chance is actually 90%, then what you're asking me to do is impossible". Let me be more concrete. Take XCOM as the clearest example. On one hand, your troops level up with experience. A veteran soldier is more effective than a new recruit. So you need your them to survive, otherwise you'll be at a significant disadvantage on later missions. On the other, the developers want there to be some difficulty, to create a sense of tension (that you might not succeed) and make strategy matter. These two goals are diametrically opposed, given the genre. It is difficult-to-impossible to create a scenario where there is both a real risk of losing and where a player can recover from losing a nominally 90% roll. Maybe once per mission. To keep the gameplay balance intact, devs would need to raise the nominal chances to match the actual chances, not the other way around. The problem is, doing this would make it obvious to the player how much stronger they are than their opponents, in a game where you are supposedly vastly outgunned. So this type of fudging the numbers is more of a psychological trick by the developers, who want to have their cake and eat it, too. It's in the same class as shooters which prevent the AI from shooting you in the back or sniping you from offscreen, or horror games where the monster moves more slowly when you're not looking at them. An illusion to create a certain type of experience. Note: I don't dispute that people are bad at judging probabilities. But I also ask that you consider that players may use this reasoning (probably subconsciously): "The developer wouldn't set me an impossible goal. If I lose this battle, it will be impossible to reach the goal they have set. Therefore, my chance of winning must be 100%. The game says it is 90%. Therefore, when the game says 90%, it must actually mean 100%. Therefore, when I lose a roll that the game says is 90%, the game is cheating." They don't really mean the game is cheating, they mean the developer is setting them an unfair task, giving them the illusion that there is a chance at victory through smart play, when in fact there is none. I imagine you could test this hypothesis, or rather, how large of an effect it has, by taking the first 11 letters of the alphabet, randomizing their order, and then assigning them to probabilities 0-100% in steps of 10. Then have people play the game, showing only the letters. Then at the end, ask them to guess what each letter's probability is. This should show how much of the delta is the developer's fault vs player's. I think you'd want to do it with players whose perceptions have not already been poisoned by the lying of previous games, and use a less uniform distribution, so players can't guess the % just by figuring out the relative order.
nindalf 6y ago
Just to explain a term used here - the Elo rating system is used to give a rating to individual chess players. It works well - if you defeat someone, you gain points and they lose an equal number of points. The bigger the difference in rating, the bigger the change in points. A 1200 player defeating a 1250 player gains +7 points, but defeating a 2000 player would be more like +30. This system has also been adapted to team games like League of Legends and Dota 2. Teams are constructed such that most players in the game have the same rating. The winners gain +25 each and the losers lose -25. A significant minority feel that this is unfair. Clearly they only lost because of incompetent team mates so they lose points even when they play well. If only they could gain 200-1000 rating points, they would be playing with people at their own skill level, and they would win way more. Turns out this theory is a bunch of horse shit, as proven countless times. These whiners play high ranked players to temporarily take over their account, win 1000 more points and then start playing at their new higher rating. And then they proceed to lose 40 games in a row because they have no idea what they’re doing. Source - played Dota 2 for years. Rating was 3000 (top 5% at the time). I saw countless posts from whiners and losses from account buyers.
- jfim 6y ago
  Part of it is due to the game design though. There's a non-zero amount of games that are lost not because of skill, but because of another player trying out a new hero or build, someone having an off day, poor team composition, or the team chat degenerating into an all out flame war. If that happens, there isn't much that can really be done, and one is stuck in that doomed game for another half hour of unpleasantness. That's definitely a frustrating experience. As you point out, the ELO system is fair, but it's also a rather noisy metric. Players can be skilled with some heroes while being completely awful at others, and the ELO rating is only a singular value that has to capture this range of player ability.
jon-wood 6y ago
Poker machines are to some extent non-random. They can be tuned by the operator to set the rate at which they’ll pay out, some places will tune for better rates in order to entice customers in, while others set them to essentially be black holes for money.
- kyteland 6y ago
  These games are extremely random, by law. The card game itself is truly random, short of any unknown bugs that escaped testing by both the manufacturer and the regulators. The only thing that affects the payouts in a video poker game is the paytable, which is visible to the player up front and can't be changed while they're playing it, again by law. You can look up the expected value of each game online before putting any money in by the advertised paytable. Source: I've been a casino game mathematician for 20 years.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Incidentally, I would love to read some blog posts/articles about this stuff, if you've ever gotten around to writing them :)
Darmody 6y ago
I wouldn't call LoL unfair. If you're in elo hell means you're bad. If they match you with slightly better players, you'll drag them down, if you are matched with players way better than you, you'll be carried to victory without doing anything.
cableshaft 6y ago
Once upon a time I made a flash game named Proximity where players take turns being given a numbered tile from 1-20 to place on a hex grid, and it captures any tiles next to it of the opponent that is a lower number. It was pretty popular in its day (I'm actually working on a new version at the moment). Anyway, the way the tiles were drawn was that it gave each player an array of tiles of the same numbers that was just enough for how many turns they'd end up having, but it shuffled the order of each array at random. Even though that was the case, I often got players saying the game was cheating, and the computer always got high numbers and they always got low numbers, even on easy. I even had one player claim they counted the 20s and the opponent got more (although it's possible to increase the numbers on the tile by placing one of the same team's tile next to it, so I'm guessing they only counted at the end of the game and didn't reinforce the tiles as much). But it's literally not possible according to the code. And it wasn't a bug either, I tested it pretty thoroughly, and played the game a ton myself. And plenty of other players never had an issue with it too. That was when I learned that people in general tend to not be very good judges of randomness. And I've seen many examples since that reinforce that. As a matter of fact, I was actually working on a dynamic draw mechanic for the new game, where the further behind in score you were, the more of a boost to the numbers it would draw from you, to give you more of a chance to get caught back up (and vice versa, if you were ahead). So basically like this dynamic difficulty thing. I knew not everyone would enjoy that so I was planning on having it be something you could turn on or off in the Options menu. And it's not something to get more money off the player, just something that might improve their experience. The game will probably be a paid for game to begin with, or on mobile it might be free but you have to deal with ads unless you pay $5 to get rid of them.

bluesign 6y ago

Yeah the problem is people assuming those games are simulations with little or none random. But basically RNG is big part of this simulations.

GlennS 6y ago

There's an interview with Sid Meier floating around somewhere where he discusses how, in Civilization, people will assume the computer is cheating at combat, unless you actually bias it quite strongly in the human's behaviour. Civilization shows you the odds for each fight based on the relative strength of the units. People expect to win a 90% odds fight every time. (I'm also currently partway through reading Thinking In Bets, which has some interesting things to say about this sort of thing.)

AussieWog93 6y ago
Fire Emblem is one of the games that shows fake probabilities to get around this problem - if the actual probability of an attack connecting is 95%, it will display a value of 80-85% to the user. The odd part is that I've played hundreds of hours of those games and never noticed anything wrong.
- cma 6y ago
  Maybe people expect it to be one some kind of logarithmic scale.
hutzlibu 6y ago
I am reminded about XCOM, which some players complained about being unfair, too. In fact, the game is cheating - but in favor of you. (first enemy critical hits get negated and after someone of your troop dies, the rest gets better chances of surviving and so on) But actually, I don't like that behavior either ..
avianlyric 6y ago
If I remember correctly Sid Meier’s point was a little more nuanced than that. It wasn’t that people expect to win 90% of the time, it’s that humans have a very poor intuition for odds and statistics. Pretty much everyone makes the common mistake of not understanding how a 33% chance of winning impacts independent events. People assume that 33% chance of winning, means a pretty such sure fire win after 3 attempts (after all 33% * 3 is approx 100%). But every battle in Civilization is an independent event, so to get a sure fire win (90% confidence) you need to fight something 6/7 times (I don’t know the exact number, been some time since I studied this). Having the number of fights you win against an opponent be 2 or 3 times greater than the intuitive number of fights makes people think the computer to cheating. When really they just don’t understand how stats work. To fix this the Civilization games actually skew their stats so they better align with human intuition. So if the game says you have a 33% chance of winning, then that means you’ll probably win after 3 fights. Despite the fact that really you have a 40%-50% chance of winning that fight.
- devonkim 6y ago
  Sid Meier also worked with the Firaxis folks on the recent XCOM reboot and this is well known and documented now how the stats work out in the game and how the game will cheat for the player eventually on lower difficulties. Nothing more frustrating than lining up shots perfectly and missing a 98% point blank shot from 2 feet away. I’ve always wondered what that 2% could be - gun jams, the character slips on a banana peel, who knows?
  - username90 6y ago
    > . I’ve always wondered what that 2% could be - gun jams, the character slips on a banana peel, who knows? Or just, the other person moving around in a hectic life or death situation? Trying to shoot someone in short range isn't 100% hit. The characters calmly standing there waiting to get shot is just a game representation.
smichel17 6y ago
Counter-hypothesis: these games' higher level gameplay loops demand a higher level of consistency; players' mismatched expectations come partially from a place of "if that chance is actually 90%, then what you're asking me to do is impossible". Let me be more concrete. Take XCOM as the clearest example. On one hand, your troops level up with experience. A veteran soldier is more effective than a new recruit. So you need your them to survive, otherwise you'll be at a significant disadvantage on later missions. On the other, the developers want there to be some difficulty, to create a sense of tension (that you might not succeed) and make strategy matter. These two goals are diametrically opposed, given the genre. It is difficult-to-impossible to create a scenario where there is both a real risk of losing and where a player can recover from losing a nominally 90% roll. Maybe once per mission. To keep the gameplay balance intact, devs would need to raise the nominal chances to match the actual chances, not the other way around. The problem is, doing this would make it obvious to the player how much stronger they are than their opponents, in a game where you are supposedly vastly outgunned. So this type of fudging the numbers is more of a psychological trick by the developers, who want to have their cake and eat it, too. It's in the same class as shooters which prevent the AI from shooting you in the back or sniping you from offscreen, or horror games where the monster moves more slowly when you're not looking at them. An illusion to create a certain type of experience. Note: I don't dispute that people are bad at judging probabilities. But I also ask that you consider that players may use this reasoning (probably subconsciously): "The developer wouldn't set me an impossible goal. If I lose this battle, it will be impossible to reach the goal they have set. Therefore, my chance of winning must be 100%. The game says it is 90%. Therefore, when the game says 90%, it must actually mean 100%. Therefore, when I lose a roll that the game says is 90%, the game is cheating." They don't really mean the game is cheating, they mean the developer is setting them an unfair task, giving them the illusion that there is a chance at victory through smart play, when in fact there is none. I imagine you could test this hypothesis, or rather, how large of an effect it has, by taking the first 11 letters of the alphabet, randomizing their order, and then assigning them to probabilities 0-100% in steps of 10. Then have people play the game, showing only the letters. Then at the end, ask them to guess what each letter's probability is. This should show how much of the delta is the developer's fault vs player's. I think you'd want to do it with players whose perceptions have not already been poisoned by the lying of previous games, and use a less uniform distribution, so players can't guess the % just by figuring out the relative order.

nindalf 6y ago

Just to explain a term used here - the Elo rating system is used to give a rating to individual chess players. It works well - if you defeat someone, you gain points and they lose an equal number of points. The bigger the difference in rating, the bigger the change in points. A 1200 player defeating a 1250 player gains +7 points, but defeating a 2000 player would be more like +30. This system has also been adapted to team games like League of Legends and Dota 2. Teams are constructed such that most players in the game have the same rating. The winners gain +25 each and the losers lose -25. A significant minority feel that this is unfair. Clearly they only lost because of incompetent team mates so they lose points even when they play well. If only they could gain 200-1000 rating points, they would be playing with people at their own skill level, and they would win way more. Turns out this theory is a bunch of horse shit, as proven countless times. These whiners play high ranked players to temporarily take over their account, win 1000 more points and then start playing at their new higher rating. And then they proceed to lose 40 games in a row because they have no idea what they’re doing. Source - played Dota 2 for years. Rating was 3000 (top 5% at the time). I saw countless posts from whiners and losses from account buyers.

jfim 6y ago
Part of it is due to the game design though. There's a non-zero amount of games that are lost not because of skill, but because of another player trying out a new hero or build, someone having an off day, poor team composition, or the team chat degenerating into an all out flame war. If that happens, there isn't much that can really be done, and one is stuck in that doomed game for another half hour of unpleasantness. That's definitely a frustrating experience. As you point out, the ELO system is fair, but it's also a rather noisy metric. Players can be skilled with some heroes while being completely awful at others, and the ELO rating is only a singular value that has to capture this range of player ability.

jon-wood 6y ago

Poker machines are to some extent non-random. They can be tuned by the operator to set the rate at which they’ll pay out, some places will tune for better rates in order to entice customers in, while others set them to essentially be black holes for money.

kyteland 6y ago
These games are extremely random, by law. The card game itself is truly random, short of any unknown bugs that escaped testing by both the manufacturer and the regulators. The only thing that affects the payouts in a video poker game is the paytable, which is visible to the player up front and can't be changed while they're playing it, again by law. You can look up the expected value of each game online before putting any money in by the advertised paytable. Source: I've been a casino game mathematician for 20 years.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Incidentally, I would love to read some blog posts/articles about this stuff, if you've ever gotten around to writing them :)

Darmody 6y ago

I wouldn't call LoL unfair. If you're in elo hell means you're bad. If they match you with slightly better players, you'll drag them down, if you are matched with players way better than you, you'll be carried to victory without doing anything.

cableshaft 6y ago

Once upon a time I made a flash game named Proximity where players take turns being given a numbered tile from 1-20 to place on a hex grid, and it captures any tiles next to it of the opponent that is a lower number. It was pretty popular in its day (I'm actually working on a new version at the moment). Anyway, the way the tiles were drawn was that it gave each player an array of tiles of the same numbers that was just enough for how many turns they'd end up having, but it shuffled the order of each array at random. Even though that was the case, I often got players saying the game was cheating, and the computer always got high numbers and they always got low numbers, even on easy. I even had one player claim they counted the 20s and the opponent got more (although it's possible to increase the numbers on the tile by placing one of the same team's tile next to it, so I'm guessing they only counted at the end of the game and didn't reinforce the tiles as much). But it's literally not possible according to the code. And it wasn't a bug either, I tested it pretty thoroughly, and played the game a ton myself. And plenty of other players never had an issue with it too. That was when I learned that people in general tend to not be very good judges of randomness. And I've seen many examples since that reinforce that. As a matter of fact, I was actually working on a dynamic draw mechanic for the new game, where the further behind in score you were, the more of a boost to the numbers it would draw from you, to give you more of a chance to get caught back up (and vice versa, if you were ahead). So basically like this dynamic difficulty thing. I knew not everyone would enjoy that so I was planning on having it be something you could turn on or off in the Options menu. And it's not something to get more money off the player, just something that might improve their experience. The game will probably be a paid for game to begin with, or on mobile it might be free but you have to deal with ads unless you pay $5 to get rid of them.