Dice

[Bender3002]

Always these amusing stories about manipulated dice rolls/card draws. So story telling time: I have played another racing game (Pole Position) and we drove in a championship series among friends. 2nd race of the season, there was a series of unlucky (for me events), which lined up perfectly and messing with my strategy. It was a perfect dice roll, followed by a perfect dice roll, followed by a perfect card draw. Only 1 in 500 chance and yet it happened. Maybe I should have asked the owner of the game, if he gave me e loaded dice.

What we have here is the usual selective perception with confirmation bias.

[Khayzhard]

Nevertheless, I'd like to point out just a couple of things: as you can see, my account is quite old, and if you look at my account details, you'll see that I've played a lot of games here on BGA, including dice games (like Can't Stop, for example) where RNG plays a major role.

This game is no different. All the games are supposed to use the same RNG (in fact, are mandated to do so for dice rolls), which means that in order to do what you say is happening, the game itself would have to be tweaking the dice rolls to help the high-Elo player, which means the game would have to analyze the game state to figure out what roll would be most helpful. (The game would also need to know who the high-Elo player is, and the API doesn't give it any way to determine that!)

I gave you a way to look at the source code, but you don't seem very interested in actually finding out if your claims are true. I am neither a BGA dev nor a high-Elo player, but I am not a fan of people who come in here with conspiracy theories and no interest in investigating them or backing up their claims. Any antagonism you see is based on this behaviour.

I mean, you haven't even provided a single example, let alone anything conclusive.

Furthermore, before posting in this thread, I'd posted very few messages on the forum (just do the math). I want to emphasize this: about 5 messages in about 13 years of membership. This should make it clear that, if in 13 years of membership, I haven't been a user who complained about games, but now I've exposed myself in this way, I probably did so after careful consideration and after seeing with my own eyes that in most cases what I described above happened.

It might mean that about you, but it doesn't mean it about most people. I can only judge on what I see.

The only "examples" I could present are the recordings of all the games I played. These games are what made me say what I said, but I don't know if they're publicly available. If that were possible, then you could at least understand why I had this doubt (I'm not saying they'd prove me right, but they should at least explain why they influenced my thinking). Regarding your suggestion about the source code, I haven't given you an answer because, unfortunately, I'm not a computer programming expert, so I wouldn't know exactly what or where to look.

In any case, I don't think there's anything else to add for either of us for now; perhaps, in the future, after playing more matches, I might dispel these suspicions and retrace my steps. Beyond that, however, I can't say for now.

[Khayzhard]

Always these amusing stories about manipulated dice rolls/card draws. So story telling time: I have played another racing game (Pole Position) and we drove in a championship series among friends. 2nd race of the season, there was a series of unlucky (for me events), which lined up perfectly and messing with my strategy. It was a perfect dice roll, followed by a perfect dice roll, followed by a perfect card draw. Only 1 in 500 chance and yet it happened. Maybe I should have asked the owner of the game, if he gave me e loaded dice.

What we have here is the usual selective perception with confirmation bias.

I don't mean to make this discussion interminable, far from it, but I think it's fair to at least make one small clarification (because I fear it's gone unnoticed by everyone): in my second post in this thread, I explicitly stated that I've had both POSITIVE and negative experiences with dice, explaining that I've also had some very lucky dice rolls, especially against lower ELO players. Just for the sake of completeness.

That said, I don't want to repeat what I've said so far; as I already said in another post, for now all I can do is play a lot more games and see what happens; perhaps I'll realize I've just misunderstood everything, and I'll have no problem reconsidering my statements.

[Rsabbado]

The only "examples" I could present are the recordings of all the games I played. These games are what made me say what I said, but I don't know if they're publicly available.

Just to answer this question of yours, yes, all tables played in BGA are stored in a public script format, so they can be replayed by anyone interested in watching a previous match. You can access anyone's profile, enter their gaming history, filter by game or by date and BGA will show you all tables of the specified game (or period). You can then select any table and choose to view the game replay, from the point of view of any of the players involved in that match.

[BarnardsStar]

The only "examples" I could present are the recordings of all the games I played. These games are what made me say what I said, but I don't know if they're publicly available.

Just to answer this question of yours, yes, all tables played in BGA are stored in a public script format, so they can be replayed by anyone interested in watching a previous match. You can access anyone's profile, enter their gaming history, filter by game or by date and BGA will show you all tables of the specified game (or period). You can then select any table and choose to view the game replay, from the point of view of any of the players involved in that match.

I'll just add, you can go to the table's "lobby" and copy its URL -- that would look like this: https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=901285462

I don't believe there is a way to link to a particular turn within the game, and Formula D games tend to be long, so if you have any specific examples within a game, giving us the approximate turn number would be helpful.

My expectations, to be clear, is that we'll find some examples of luck, and some examples of "player planned ahead to maximize their 'luck'". Actually showing a systemic bias would take a lot of data, but I do want to see what you are seeing.

As for your other post, about not knowing what to look for within the game ... you don't need to be able to read or understand everything about the game. Just, if the game looks at players' Elos, I would expect to see something within the code referring to Elo. Maybe a method called "getElo()" or a property retrieval like "player.elo" or something. I don't think the code could possibly look at players' Elo scores without at least once having "elo" mentioned.

[FrankJones]

I don't believe there is a way to link to a particular turn within the game, and Formula D games tend to be long, so if you have any specific examples within a game, giving us the approximate turn number would be helpful.

There is a way, but for some reason it doesn't always work.

[FrankJones]

Regarding your suggestion about the source code, I haven't given you an answer because, unfortunately, I'm not a computer programming expert, so I wouldn't know exactly what or where to look.

When a random event is needed within a game, the code calls a function that generates a random value from a specified range. (1-6 for a roll of a single die, for example.)

My understanding is that all BGA games use the same random integer function, something like "random.int". I forget exactly.

Regardless, this function, when called, simply generates an integer from within the desired range. The function does not perform any other actions. It does not perform analysis of the game state. The function has no way of knowing what constitutes a "good" roll or a "bad" roll. The function doesn't even know which game is being played when the function is called.

So, for a game to have "rigged dice", it would require the developer to have extensive knowledge of the strategy for that particular game, and to write a convoluted series of code to analyze the game state and player status if there were to be some sort of favoritism toward or against any type of player (High-Elo, Low-Elo, veteran, beginner, etc.). This is highly implausible, since it would require a great deal of work to accomplish nothing useful. And, as explained above, this could would be easily visible by anyone who cared to view the code.

I hope that helps explain, in mostly layman's terms, why these assertions (always lacking actual evidence) are generally met with skepticism, and eventually, when the assertions continue to persist, with frustration or other strong reactions.

[Khayzhard]

Perfect, thank you all for your explanations. I think I have a clearer idea of how things might work now.

If my initial doubts and suspicions offended anyone, I apologize. Unfortunately, when I'm dealing with stuff that seems strange to me, and whose precise functioning I don't know or understand, I often have a hard time trusting. This is probably a major flaw of mine.

At this point, I don't think I have anything else to say. I wish you all good gaming, and who knows, maybe one day we'll find ourselves competing in a Formula D match.

Best regards, everyone.