How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games
nautil.us
nautil.us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY7aRJE-oOY
Multiply that by a million daily active users and it really works out to "Stuff that has a 1-in-a-million chance of happening will happen to somebody every day". Leading to player reviews like "The game rolled me a 1-out-of-10 SIX TIMES IN A ROW!!! The game is explicitly cheating me!!!" every day. Thus games tend to use random shuffles rather than independent random numbers so as to better align with common misunderstandings about statistics...
tl;dr I think Civ players are right to expect to win when they have a better unit.
For example, Musketeers will almost always lose to Riflemen even though their stats are very similar apart from the Riflemen unit having 100% more health.
There are some things I disliked about the game, for examples city walls turns any city into an almost impregnable fortress until the very end of the game, but the unit health system was satisfactory.
A good replacement example would be Archers (3 attack, 2 defense, 1/1 hit points/firepower) vs Musketeers (3/3 attack/defense, 2/1 hit points/firepower).
Regarding city walls: If the units inside are musketeers or weaker, cannons may do well (depending on the units' respective veterancy). If they're riflemen or higher, I think veteran artillery will still generally win. And then, of course, there are bombers and howitzers in the later game.
About city walls:
The computer loads cities up with a massive amount of units on deity (usually enough to defend against a one-turn attack, I find it difficult to park enough cannons or artillery next to their cities). The only reliable way I have found to take out cities is to spam their cities with diplomats and sabotage until I get their city walls, it is always the very last thing he will sabotage.
It's hard to get a technological advantage for a long time because computer players will always help each other with technologies so in that sense they can get 6x as much science output as the player, although usually less because the computer is not very clever about boosting their trade.
I think the balance would have been better if catapults, cannons, and artillery straight up ignored city walls like the howitzer does.
The pollution from nuclear missiles contributing to global warming make the endgame frustrating too because the computer loves to use nukes, and you are punished for their pollution squares as well as your own. Sigh, time for a new game. lol
For a more realistic and complex treatment of nuclear warfare, I strongly recommend DEFCON.
https://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/ || http://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/
So you can (and will) miss 90% shots, it should not happen twice in a row the same turn.
Edit : Found the source : https://twitter.com/m1sp/status/697268847187890176
Slightly OT, but I found the argument most convincing that the "improbable=impossible" way of thinking sometimes produces logically inconsistent or plain impossible results.
The classic wheel of fortune is an example: You're playing wheel of fortune with three other persons. The wheel is evenly split into four quarters, with each of the quarters having the name of one person written on it. (So one of the four quarters is "your" quarter) The wheel is spun and the person whose quarter ends up on top gets the reward.
How gif is your chance to win? 1 / 4. How big is your chance not to win? 3 / 4. So it's unlikely that you will be the winner. However, the wheel is fair, the probability of winning is the same for each player. So it's unlikely for anyone to be the winner. At the same time, it's physically impossible for the wheel not to produce a winner.
If you think of unlikely events as "practically never occuring", this is a logical contradiction. Only if you accept that unlikely events do happen, the contradiction can be resolved.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
Do you mean that it will produce hands to match the target odds no matter what cards are traded in?
Fire Emblem (another strategy game series) solves this problem by taking the average of two random numbers. If the average is lower than the "to miss" value, an action succeeds [0]. This skews the probabilities at the low and high ends so that an 80% chance becomes 92%, 90% becomes 98%, etc, to minimize the occurrence of "spearman defeats tank" scenarios where players assume a 1/10 chance of failure will never happen.
edit: My example's not averaging, forget which game I was using where they multiplied them together somehow.
http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Chance_to_Hit_(EU20...
You can see the code in there : https://twitter.com/m1sp/status/697268847187890176
It is increasing your chance to hit if you've a missing streak and if you have lost soldiers. And lower the chance of the enemy hitting you if they've already hit you this turn and you have less than 5 soldiers. So you can (and will) miss 90% shots, it should not happen twice in a row the same turn.
I'm not sure if Dota2 has mitigations against that, but I've certainly seen it in other games.
Go and hit a neutral unit so that you have 2+ hits in a row without your ability/item proc'ing and then save the next hit for an enemy player since your next hit is likely to have a higher chance of proc'ing.
I think that's been patched now but it was there for a good while.
I wonder how many people are going to learn probabilities all wrong because of this. Whatever they learn just won't feel right because hey all these games work the way it makes sense intuitively.
Imagine a coin that flips heads exactly every 2nd time because it's a 50% probability. Would make magnificent future casino patrons or startup employees or ... well a lot of things that rely on chance and probability.
I'm briefly recalling some lectures during University that we're hardwired to find patterns, even when there aren't any, and we make some pretty wild conclusions about the patterns we find this way. I've seen otherwise fairly reasonable players during DnD tell me it's time to "switch to the late night dice" because the current D20 hits a bad luck streak after awhile, and they adamantly adhere to this.
With games it's the same way. League of Legends tweaked it's crit chance algorithm to be a little less random because it could be so wildly swingy and players didn't like it - crit reliant champions would either feel amazing as they melted, or they'd feel useless after a series of successive non-crit attacks. The Dodge mechanic was removed almost entirely since a few select champs could have amazing fights where they got lucky and got 3+ dodges in a row even at relatively low dodge percentages.
It sucks to be the type of person that does understand probability in a reasonable way, but the evidence in games shows that just isn't how the grand majority of players operate.
Having worked with Mr. DeMar, I can also say that he engineered other things to make you feel lucky without being so obvious.
It was only recently discovered that in Robotron:2084 (a video title he designed with Eugene Jarvis), the game's difficulty would ratchet down dramatically if your game started out badly (i.e. you were getting killed over and over before making it out of the first wave).
There were also some clever things Larry put into stuff like pinball match routines. This is the "random" number that would come up at the end and if your last two score digits matched, you won a free game. Cleverly, if you were playing a multiple-player game, the odds of one person winning a free game would suddenly increase - thereby increasing the real-world chances that the rest of the players would insert more money for another round.
Baseball is a game of obsessively recorded stats anyways, and we'd use that to our advantage to model pitches, plays, games, seasons, etc. into something that 1) reflected what truly (historically) would/could/should happen in a given scenario, and 2) was fun and kept the player coming back for more. (Or else we'd hear about it in reviews!)
Well, turns out #2 is really, really important. Playing to statistical misunderstandings had to be part of the consideration. "That pitch/play/decision/outcome would never happen as often as it does! Fix it!" a producer with more baseball knowledge than I would claim. "It's happening exactly as frequently as it does/has historically," I would counter. Doesn't matter. Games need to be enjoyable and that means playing to common (mis)perceptions even if they're statistically wrong. But not too wrong. (Or else we'd hear about it in reviews!) :-)
I came up with:
f(x) = (sin((pi * x) - (pi / 2)) + 1) / 2 where x is between 0 and 1
I'm a collector of randomness functions for games. Weighted, gaussian, linear, etc. This sinusoidal randomness will be handy! Thanks for the inspiration.
Most of thoses require faster-than-human actions, though. But some RNGs are even simpler: in the GBA RPG Golden Sun, the RNG is seeded only when the system is turned on, so you can engineer any rare drop just by following an action script. (I wrote a blog post about this specific instance awhile ago: http://minimaxir.com/2013/05/guaranteed-to-be-random/ )
Are those devices really unable of anything better?
The greatest enjoyment I derive from games is that of accomplishment. To me, there is no greater feeling of accomplishment than placing well in an iRacing league race or having a great dogfight against a human opponent in a DCS server. I don't even need to win the race or shoot them down to derive a sense of satisfaction as the outcome is entirely determined by skill and one can always strive to improve their skills.
I've always subscribed to the line of thinking that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. Whatever "luck" one experiences in a simulation type game, whether or not it is in their favor, is still something that required skill if it was to be taken advantage of. If I skip a yellow flag pit stop and make a fuel mileage gamble, I still have to have a feel for how far I can stretch the tank and how skilled the other drivers are as if they race clean all the way to the finish I'm going to still be a lap short. Sure, my opponents might say I "got lucky" but my luck was a result of a calculated gamble rather than an artifact of a lucky roll in the game's algorithm.
I'm probably the outlier but I think there's something to be said for games that refuse to introduce artificial luck. They aren't for everyone but they deliver an experience that can't be matched any other way.
There are very small elements of luck, just enough to stop the games from feeling sterile or unnatural, but nothing big enough to decide the outcome of a match without being completely overshadowed by the strategic decisions leading up to it.
The metaphor he draws here is what he refers to as the skill chain. Each link in the chain reflects the point at which the player on the lower link is unable to defeat the player on the higher link above some small percentage. The longer the chain the more skill is rewarded by the game.
However this has a downside for an online game that isn't as popular as the ones you mention, you will be unable to find interesting games without having to wait for a long time for the correct opponent to appear. And it makes matching up well against your friends less likely.
Randomness can be used as s tool by a skilled game designer to shorten the chain and allow for more player to compete with each other. It also gives the player an element outside their own weakness to blame when they lose and that can make the game more enjoyable.
So it's something pro players tend to dislike but is typically accepted as the price of having diversity of skill in the player pool. (Poker vs chess for example)
This is actually exactly what real life shooting is like. There is RNG in the process.
What a developer CAN do is control just how tight the shot pattern is. One example is to have a wide shot pattern when the player is standing, tighter when crouched, and really tight when prone. Or use an "iron sights" mode for tighter aiming.
I've not worked out yet whether higher rank/XP and health status (HP) are also factors on shot spread and the progression of spread under continuous fire?
Don't even get me started on Hearthstone.
Could not help myself.
So with enough skill, you can remove most of the luck aspect from the game.
But if the characters always autonomously chose the best interaction, then almost anything the player told them to do would distract them from their perfect AI driven routine, and effectively make their lives less efficient and more miserable.
So instead of picking the top scoring action to do next, it fuzzed their behavior by picking randomly from the top several actions, making them less compulsive and more whimsical, and giving the player more opportunities to have a positive effect on their lives, instead of being a negative influence.
Then again, some people would prefer to play The Sims that way, by bringing them down like they're wearing a turtleneck and a backpack all day, messing up their otherwise perfectly balanced idealistic lives by acting as Satan instead of as God, more like Afterlife and Dungeon Keeper!
It's interesting that when tried World of Warcraft, I lost interest quickly as I found it too much like a slot machine.
I don't know if it's a personality trait (I'm a programmer so I tend to analyze everything) or because I grew up in the era of 8/16-bit games, where games were a lot more skill based in nature.
In A Theory of Fun Raph Koster says fun is basically about learning. What video games teach you a feel for probabilities? There's poker -- anything else? There ought to be.
Every trading card game, Hearthstone is a popular example.
Bringing this up made me wonder if we couldn't have a game that's to poker what Go is to chess -- simpler rules, deeper play, keeping poker's nondeterminism and incomplete information.
[1] https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/11217/how-do-i-a...
anyways, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pkVVJuBfgo
We know that the more TV kids watch, the more likely they are to end up in hospital from an accident - their view of physics and risk has been distorted. Are heavy game players more likely to get fired from their first few jobs?
I grant that games have to be fun, but I wonder if there isn't a way to both please the player, as is done now; and inform them about the downsides of reality too - by showing them the contrast with a reality-run-through (maybe as an option), or by showing them after the game where they got an assist, or something.
I started thinking about this topic heavily after playing Borderlands 2 a lot. Quite apart from the sociopathic role-playing bits, it became very clear to me that mere perseverance was being rewarded far more than skill, or increases in skill. Much less real learning. Just churning through a level badly a few times would you'd level up enough to be able to Steam through it. (Pardon the pun.) I don't know what the effects of this on developing minds are - will they persevere at hopeless real-world tasks futilely waiting for the pity-timer to kick in, but not really try to learn or improve in the meanwhile? Will they rarely persevere 'cause the rewards are too slow in coming? I dread to think (but could be wrong to be pessimistic.)
I do think I learned a lot about learning when playing solo computer games decades ago in a way that is all but impossible now, since online players or your buddies will tell you the most efficient way. There's nothing like realizing you've played the carriers in Starcraft the wrong way for years to make you reevaluate whether you're a good learner or have really tried to figure out how the world works; or really understand the world, your relationships or anything else.
http://www.mauronewmedia.com/blog/why-angry-birds-is-so-succ...