![The Vaxxed are all XCOM Players [649x515 - 67KB]](https://pic8.co/sh/YQyL8K.jpg){kind=link}
Some quotes:
most players have one in common: your soldier is standing two feet away from an alien foe, shotgun trained on their glistening ooze sacs. The chance to hit is through the roof--eighty, even ninety percent. Your soldier empties a clip, and hits nothing but air.
This can be immensely frustrating, and even feel unfair because of the way that humans process statistics. “Players may view that number not from a mathematical sense, but from an emotional sense,” says Solomon. “If you see an 85 percent chance to hit, you’re not looking at that as a 15 percent chance of missing. If you thought about it that way, it’s not an inconceivable chance you’re going to miss the shot. Instead, you see an 85 percent chance, and you think, 'That’s close to a hundred; that basically should not miss.'”
[...]
So how did Firaxis make sure XCOM 2 wouldn’t unduly batter the psychologies of their player base? Well, the calculations that go into each shot aren’t as heartless as you might think. “There’s actually a number of things that tweak that number in the player’s favor at the lower difficulty settings,” said Solomon. “That 85 percent isn’t actually 85 percent. Behind the scenes, we wanted to match the player’s psychological feeling about that number.” That 85 percent, according to Solomon, is often closer to 95 percent.
[...]
“Random is never the way people expect it to be,” said Solomon. “Whether it’s a sequence of shots that you think is impossible, or a sequence of misses you think is impossible, or seeing patterns in the nicknames your soldiers get. We’re human beings--we see patterns.”
The issue here is that not only would it happen with 3 consecutive shots with an 85% chance which should be roughly a 1/300 occurance, it will happen with two consecutive shots at 95% chance which should be a 1/400 occurance, and multiple times through a level or playthrough. So the instance isn't a catestrophic failure that is a memorable once/game thing, it is something that happens so often that you have to be a massochist to handle it. It is at the same level of a spearman holding against a tank in a civilization game.
Yep, what people don't understand and some developers don't understand is that this often isn't because "humans don't understand statistics well", it's often a simple case of "the games pseudo-random number generator SUCKS".
And that's often what players are noticing about these scenarios. Typically game developers don't really take any special notice or care about how to set up their PRNG code, and that results in truly bad random number generation, which is often egregious and annoying in how often it clusters towards unlikely results.
It does actually take some effort to get a properly random distribution of numbers rather than having it hit extremes more frequently than it really should.
Most people don't understand that PRNGs are kind of a bullshit thing. They can work but ultimately you are making something that is not random, a modern CPU, produce a "random" result. Contrast this to hardware true-random RNGs and the difference is night and day, especially for a naive implementation of the standard sort of PRNG.
I don't know shit about coding but I can't imagine why whatever they have in place plus conditions of:
If sum hit chance x Actions > or = 150 min hit = 1 If sum hit chance x Actions > or = 270 min hit = 2 If sum hit chance x Actions > or = 360 min hit = 3
wouldn't create something that feels a hell of a lot less like griefing the player through RNG. Even if it is technically less random and does skew some results in favor of the player dropping the low end of results slightly.
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