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I can think of two specific examples where breaking the rules of probability resulted in better player experience: In tf2, you randomly get weapon drops, up t

I can think of two specific examples where breaking the rules of probability resulted in better player experience: In tf2, you randomly get weapon drops, up to a limit per week. The initial obvious solution was to randomly roll if they get a new weapon every X minutes of gameplay. This lead to players getting long unlucky streaks where they got little to no gameplay. They eventually changed it to when you get a weapon drop, it rolls to see how long you have to play until you get a new weapon. Players can be unlucky still, but it's drastically better. The other example was in civilization they showed percentage chances of winning a battle. The problem is that when a player would have three battles with say a 50% chance of winning and lost them all, they would get very frustrated. So they changed it to be much more like the average person perceives statistics to be. This means actually weighting the percentages differently from what the player is told so that if a player has a third of a chance to win each of three battles, it's actually very likely they will win one of them.

purplelobster 14y ago
Ah, this is what made Risk so frustrating at times. Many a good friend was lost to that game.
T-hawk 14y ago
The other example was in civilization they showed percentage chances of winning a battle. ... This means actually weighting the percentages differently from what the player is told This is a (persistent) myth. None of the Civilization games actually do this. Civilization 4 is the only game in the series that displays combat prediction as a percentage chance, and the source code for Civ 4's combat engine is publicly released and well understood. (I am a developer on a Civ 4 modding project and familiar with the code.) The earlier Civ games before 4 don't display any kind of combat odds, and Civ 5 has a totally different system that isn't based on winning percentage. So, unless you're talking about some other game like Galactic Civilizations or a mod for Civilization 4, this isn't true. Your underlying point is certainly true, though: gameplay often is perceived as a better experience with "randomness" smoothed out to produce more uniformly distributed results.

purplelobster 14y ago

Ah, this is what made Risk so frustrating at times. Many a good friend was lost to that game.

T-hawk 14y ago

The other example was in civilization they showed percentage chances of winning a battle. ... This means actually weighting the percentages differently from what the player is told This is a (persistent) myth. None of the Civilization games actually do this. Civilization 4 is the only game in the series that displays combat prediction as a percentage chance, and the source code for Civ 4's combat engine is publicly released and well understood. (I am a developer on a Civ 4 modding project and familiar with the code.) The earlier Civ games before 4 don't display any kind of combat odds, and Civ 5 has a totally different system that isn't based on winning percentage. So, unless you're talking about some other game like Galactic Civilizations or a mod for Civilization 4, this isn't true. Your underlying point is certainly true, though: gameplay often is perceived as a better experience with "randomness" smoothed out to produce more uniformly distributed results.