Implausibly bad luck

[frogstar_A]

If you hold two dice and reroll the other four, then you should expect about a 23% chance of not getting any dice that match the first two. And yet, literally this happens to me about nine times out of ten. Does anyone else experience this?

As others have said firstly start writing down exactly what happens on your rolls. Write down every time that you do what you've described here and record whether you do or don't get the dice that you're looking for. You might be surprised at just how often the role that you want happened. That said you would expect every possible sequence of dice roll to happen from time to time. Somebody is going to unfortunately be in the situation of getting an unlucky roll 9 times in the sequence of 10. Sadly perhaps this week it was you.

[bionic20]

The Cant Stop issues are not crazy/anecdotal. Just this week an admin admitted there was an issue with one of the arena leaders.

To answer some comments, we know that people posting here are not random-deniers or random-complotists, and you make a good case. This is the reason why we looked.

I looked at the game first several weeks ago when I noticed this thread, and saw nothing wrong.
Seeing this thread continued, another team member looked at the code this week (actually, discussing it, most team members have looked at some point), and at this player activity patterns, and saw nothing at first glance.

But reading your extra posts about how unlikely this series was, he decided to continue digging and after spending some extra detective hours found the answer in an unexpected place.

So you don't need to compute any more probabilities: you were right. We are discussing how to fix the issue. Once it has been fixed and deployed, we'll post the solution to the mystery.

IIRC, true RNG is one of the most challenging issues in programming. Talk about RNG being flawed is common in every online game, BGA is no exception. Thats why some games offer the option of rolling your own dice.

[Meeplelowda]

IIRC, true RNG is one of the most challenging issues in programming. Talk about RNG being flawed is common in every online game, BGA is no exception. Thats why some games offer the option of rolling your own dice.

"True" RNG can only be achieved with some naturally random physical process. For example, some hardware RNGs use thermal noise or other physical processes. But the outputs of a well-crafted pseudorandom algorithm will be indistinguishable from a "true" randomness despite being, by definition, deterministic. Not good enough for national security cryptography, but good enough for games on a website.

This, of course, assumes that someone does not have access to or can't predict the seeds being used for the algorithm. I hypothesize that the flaw discovered in the Can't Stop thread was not a flaw in the algorithm itself, but either 1) a security hole that allowed visibility of the seeds, or 2) a different security hole that allowed injection of a favorable seed. I'm curious either way.

[Een]

The Cant Stop issues are not crazy/anecdotal. Just this week an admin admitted there was an issue with one of the arena leaders.

To answer some comments, we know that people posting here are not random-deniers or random-complotists, and you make a good case. This is the reason why we looked.

I looked at the game first several weeks ago when I noticed this thread, and saw nothing wrong.
Seeing this thread continued, another team member looked at the code this week (actually, discussing it, most team members have looked at some point), and at this player activity patterns, and saw nothing at first glance.

But reading your extra posts about how unlikely this series was, he decided to continue digging and after spending some extra detective hours found the answer in an unexpected place.

So you don't need to compute any more probabilities: you were right. We are discussing how to fix the issue. Once it has been fixed and deployed, we'll post the solution to the mystery.

IIRC, true RNG is one of the most challenging issues in programming. Talk about RNG being flawed is common in every online game, BGA is no exception. Thats why some games offer the option of rolling your own dice.

To be clear: the issue discussed in that thread was NOT an issue with the RNG. Please don't twist my words.

[Romain672]

IIRC, true RNG is one of the most challenging issues in programming. Talk about RNG being flawed is common in every online game, BGA is no exception. Thats why some games offer the option of rolling your own dice.

Problem is, I doubt anyone can differenciate some 'random generated' rolls from completely random rolls. The difference look so small to me.
It's way more likely people interpret wrongly those roll and think it's flawed while it's not (or at least should not be felt by the players).

And games who offer option of rolling your dice will lose the option of create ranking on that same game.

[Meeplelowda]

IIRC, true RNG is one of the most challenging issues in programming. Talk about RNG being flawed is common in every online game, BGA is no exception. Thats why some games offer the option of rolling your own dice.

"True" RNG can only be achieved with some naturally random physical process. For example, some hardware RNGs use thermal noise or other physical processes. But the outputs of a well-crafted pseudorandom algorithm will be indistinguishable from a "true" randomness despite being, by definition, deterministic. Not good enough for national security cryptography, but good enough for games on a website.

This, of course, assumes that someone does not have access to or can't predict the seeds being used for the algorithm. I hypothesize that the flaw discovered in the Can't Stop thread was not a flaw in the algorithm itself, but either 1) a security hole that allowed visibility of the seeds, or 2) a different security hole that allowed injection of a favorable seed. I'm curious either way.

The Can't Stop thread has been updated with the reveal of what the problem was. I'm actually glad that both of my hypotheses about the flaw were wrong as either one would have been a serious issue. I was right, however, about it not being a problem with the RNG itself.

[bionic20]

The Cant Stop issues are not crazy/anecdotal. Just this week an admin admitted there was an issue with one of the arena leaders.

To answer some comments, we know that people posting here are not random-deniers or random-complotists, and you make a good case. This is the reason why we looked.

I looked at the game first several weeks ago when I noticed this thread, and saw nothing wrong.
Seeing this thread continued, another team member looked at the code this week (actually, discussing it, most team members have looked at some point), and at this player activity patterns, and saw nothing at first glance.

But reading your extra posts about how unlikely this series was, he decided to continue digging and after spending some extra detective hours found the answer in an unexpected place.

So you don't need to compute any more probabilities: you were right. We are discussing how to fix the issue. Once it has been fixed and deployed, we'll post the solution to the mystery.

IIRC, true RNG is one of the most challenging issues in programming. Talk about RNG being flawed is common in every online game, BGA is no exception. Thats why some games offer the option of rolling your own dice.

To be clear: the issue discussed in that thread was NOT an issue with the RNG. Please don't twist my words.

I didnt change a single word of your post nor said the acknowledged issue was with RNG. I brought the post here to dispute the point of view that you should blindly trust on the BGA algorithm at all times and that any criticism of it should be dismissed as crazy/anecdotal. If anything, the Cant Stop issue puts the BGA team in good standing as it shows they listen to their audience and investigate irregular incidents. Thats great and thank you, but I guarantee you it won be the last time.

[frogstar_A]

But you had already said that the RNG was “flawed” when that is misleading. It’s fine.

I understand your frustration, but im not sure this is a KoT issue; BGA's RNG algorithm is evidently flawed. Any experienced Can't Stop player can share with you the craziest dice sequences happening over and over

If anything, the Can’t Stop fiasco teaches you that if you think the RNG is to blame for something odd, chances are it’s something else instead (that could be bad luck or a bug).

[wrldtrvllr]

Unfortunately there is no practical way to actually analyse a set of game results to assess whether the bad luck is really statistically unusual. Nobody actually answered my original question which was specifically, does anyone else find that when they hold two numbered dice, a third one comes up far less often than chance would suggest. So maybe no-one else sees that.

Anyway, for me, this ridiculous luck continues, to the point that the game is now all but unplayable. It's not just that the matching third die rarely comes up. If my health is low, hearts rarely come up. If I am in Tokyo with weak opponents, claws rarely come up. Obviously one expects these things to happen sometimes but they are happening all the time. I've just come last in three consecutive games, with no way of avoiding it, because of the "luck" of the dice. A few weeks ago I was top of the rankings. Right now, I'm 599th.

So I wonder again, has anyone else experienced this seemingly permanent bad luck?

[Romain672]

I didnt change a single word of your post nor said the acknowledged issue was with RNG. I brought the post here to dispute the point of view that you should blindly trust on the BGA algorithm at all times and that any criticism of it should be dismissed as crazy/anecdotal. If anything, the Cant Stop issue puts the BGA team in good standing as it shows they listen to their audience and investigate irregular incidents. Thats great and thank you, but I guarantee you it won be the last time.

Problem, there is people on Poker which said the site are rigged. There is people who only play on these websites.
So how you explain that? Does the website put an advantage to people who play for a long time?
And legally, I know nearly nothing about it, but I think if you call a mathematicien to check the random generation on those website, and saw something wrong, you could win lots of money.

Anyway, for me, this ridiculous luck continues, to the point that the game is now all but unplayable. It's not just that the matching third die rarely comes up. If my health is low, hearts rarely come up. If I am in Tokyo with weak opponents, claws rarely come up. Obviously one expects these things to happen sometimes but they are happening all the time. I've just come last in three consecutive games, with no way of avoiding it, because of the "luck" of the dice. A few weeks ago I was top of the rankings. Right now, I'm 599th.

So I wonder again, has anyone else experienced this seemingly permanent bad luck?

You can have one or two people which said yes, and you will only get answers from people who got bad luck, not from people who got good luck.
It's normal as a human to put more attention to things which goes wrongly than things which goes in your way. So from that, it's normal that you claim those things.
Just do one thing: decide to count anything abnormal. Per example, count from now on the number of time you keep two differents dices and roll others. And count the number of time you only got differents dices. Do that 100 times and share the results
(if you can't count them easily for any reason, decide to count your next roll or not before rolling your dices. And never cheat)