“You’d probably have to buy this one thousand times to get what you’re looking for”
People still buy lottery tickets though because “there’s still a chance”.
Not sure how you fix that.
The average person doesn't understand expected outcome, that it means ON AVERAGE it will take this many times to obtain the thing. Lottery tickets are a bad example because the expected outcome is still really high, though most people still understand this.
Also, it's Sid Meier.
(Also, fixed my post. Thanks)
Like that time I lost my entire squad in X-Com because they all kept missing their 80% to 95% chances to hit. There was much rage that day.
Sometimes you just roll snake eyes. Then you deal with it.
So, you can roll dice over and over, but you actually need a lot of samples for the stats to converge. That's why it is called the law of LARGE numbers. It is still possible to roll two 12s in a row on dice, but we wouldn't expect it to be common. By your clumping together, you need to not only store a lot of data, but now your "random" events are dependent rolls and not independent.
Really it is just a question of what you want to do and how you want fairness perceived. Do you want your game to act like dice? Or do you want a slight advantage? BTW, i2om3r linked the video I was talking about there Meier discusses peoples' perception of fairness. In the end, you have to determine what is best for your game. Maybe stacking the deck makes better gameplay, maybe it doesn't.
In the pursuit of making a fun and interesting experience, it's not as bad as it sounds since it leads to a rewarding experience (though getting 2 hours of sleep because Civ is so addictive could be construed as negative). When providing questionable reward to the player and in a money grab via psychological manipulation, well, yeah, seems pretty exploitative and not so honorable.
What's most interesting to me is the wildly different perspectives that gamers on different platforms will tolerate. Zynga/Facebook gamers seemed to never care. Mobile gamers follow suit but some are a bit sensitive to this manipulation. Console gamers are familiar with these tactics since the horse armor days but have a red line (Destiny 2 just crossed). PC gamers have zero tolerance and will go up in arms as soon as their precious games are violated with F2P mechanics (though Ubisoft is doing pretty good here since they're doing it somewhat respectfully).