![The Vaxxed are all XCOM Players [649x515 - 67KB]](https://pic8.co/sh/YQyL8K.jpg){kind=link}
Never played it. Can you explain the inside joke?
The game shows your hit percentage for every shot, which players use to determine if they will even take the shot.
98% shots miss all the time.
https://files.catbox.moe/06arl4.webm
https://files.catbox.moe/os00hx.webm
tl;dr your troops will miss point blank shots with 98% chance to hit repeatedly, and enemies will 1-shot you from across the map with pistols with perfect accuracy. Every. Fucking. Time.
That first one is an awesome video, but what happened is that alien proc'ed lightning reflexes which, combined with simultaneous overwatch, caused all the shots to miss. There is a mod where you can enable sequential overwatch, which makes the game easier because you hit more and waste less ammo/opportunity.
That's also a modded version of the game. That particular alien doesn't have lightning reflexes in the base game. Maybe none do; not sure.
Base game Lightning Reflexes (xcom.fandom.com) only avoids one Overwatch, check the notes section on that link. I'm pretty sure that's the Long War mod, which makes it so Lightning Reflexes can clear all shots in a single move round, gives it to Thin Men, and also pumps enemy health like crazy. Thin Men only have 4 health in the base game, that thing has 12 health.
RNGs work by distributing over the required range for a large sequence. But it says nothing about the order of distribution or set size to obtain full range of distribution.
The result is certain shots can miss. Even entire sequences of sure things can miss.
Well, yeah, and also the RNG in XCOM isn't. Or, I think what is actually happening is the numbers displayed in XCOM's UI don't match the actual implementation. The actual drawn randoms might be reasonably random
I play the battletech game and such complaints are common there too. Six 50% chances. Odds are three will connect. Zero connect. Of course, things like three 97%. Zero connect. You get the idea. It cuts the other way too.
The issue isn't that the number is wrong. The issue is the way pseudo RNGs work don't match our human expectations of random distributions over relatively short sequences.
I assumed it is the same issue with x-com as is a common rng complaint. Maybe not.
This might help (gamedeveloper.com)
My AV has problems with your link. Can you explain in basic way?
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.”
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