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338

That game was so bugged out…

That game was so bugged out…

(post is archived)

[–] 1 pt

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.

[–] 1 pt (edited )

Edit:

Oops forgot to address your point too, which yeah you're right, there are ways to get around bad distributions from poor generation like what you proposed, and it would work to smooth it out and not feel so crappy to the player for sure.


The reason why is because newer programmers will naively initialize their random generator, and/or use a standard random generator rather than a more robust (and more random) one, resulting in rolls something like this:

rand(10)

1 1 1 1 6 9 9 9

And you might say, "Well that's a perfectly random result", which it could be when utilizing a hardware random generator with actual entropy, but CPU based random generation is only pseudo-random, so the initialization and choice of algorithm can affect the results such that clustering of same results in rather unlikely distributions like that become more common. Often times when RNG in a game seems bad it's simply because it is.