Ridiculous dice

[Jontia]

Every one of these threads ends up with people pointing out the stats on the dice rolls. What is left out of the frustration-discussion is the timeliness of the dice rolls in comparison to what was forced on the board. There are scenarios that will force you to leave a solo when you'd rather not. I'd love to see the stats on how often that gets punished with the perfect two dice scenario, navigating blank spaces on the board. There are far too many instances of a perfect posterior extraction roll that is punishing to the result of the game. Sure, one of two dice hitting perfect is expected, but the sniper shot of a two dice roll seems very unbalanced. There seems to be some dreadful if/then logic behind the randomness.

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This is a pretty clear "I remember when bad things happen to me" moment. In a way it's totally unprovable, without vision of the code at the time of the roll you can't prove the this particular kind of bias, because collecting dice rolls over time is meaningless, you're suggesting that the game notices critical moments in play and fixes the dice to help one player.

In another way, it's pretty clear that this isn't happening. You can see the code for the game if you sign up for a developer account. And the programming required to cheat in this way would be extremely obvious. And not trivial to actually code. It requires a huge conspiracy of silence from unvetted people. It just isn't at all feasible.

[MattTheHoser]

I apologize for my own rolls when it's obvious that they've ruined a close game. It's not a bad things happen to me scenario. It's BGA dice rolls make for ruined games far too often.

This is a pretty common feeling among players, hence all the threads and all the believers that only look at overall stats and not how individual games are affected.

I enjoy the game of backgammon, BGA makes that hard with ridiculousness. Sue me.

[Jontia]

This is a pretty common feeling among players, hence all the threads and all the believers that only look at overall stats and not how individual games are affected.

I'm not sure it is a common feeling. Because there have been 7.5 million games played on BGA and there are only 163 backgammon theads on the site. Most about other topics and few with more than 20 or so posts. This feels like squeaky wheel syndrome, yes a few people are talking about it. But who's going to come to the forum to start up a thread called "impressive dice randomness, well done programmers"?

[euklid314]

I apologize for my own rolls when it's obvious that they've ruined a close game. It's not a bad things happen to me scenario. It's BGA dice rolls make for ruined games far too often.

This is a pretty common feeling among players, hence all the threads and all the believers that only look at overall stats and not how individual games are affected.

I enjoy the game of backgammon, BGA makes that hard with ridiculousness. Sue me.

You asked in your last post why the responses deal with statistics and not with the timeliness of the dice rolls.

The reason is that only some very few conspiracy theorists believe that the (unpaid) programmer of the BG implementation analyzes the current game state before every dice roll and "handpicks" the results of the dice according to the game situation. And he did it in a way that all dice statistics are perfect in the end and somehow he has hidden his code such that nobody from the other (unpaid) developers and not even BGA itself can find this hidden code.
The hardest conspiracists even believe that he has hacked the BGA site such that he can include informations like ELO or premium/non premium status in his decision (because no other developer of all the hundreds of games has access to such information).

You see that believing such conspiracy theories seems really crazy - thus it is not worth discussing them.

That being said: In my (real life) tournament play I also "apologize" for lucky dice - in a way like: "Wow, this match I was the luckier. In the important situations I just got what I needed and thus you had no chance to win".
Backgammon is a game where I did beat the National Champion of my country in a match to 7 when I was still beginning to learn the game. Now I can beat the World Champion in a match to 7 with perhaps a 10-20% probability. In a match to 19 my chances are slim.
Whoever cannot accept to lose a match although playing superior moves as their opponent will not get happy with the game of Backgammon.
If you watch the best Backgammon players they will not complain about bad luck. Their goal is to make the correct decision in each of their moves and they know that only in the long run this will get them winning their fair share. For a single game or match making all the correct decisions does not necessarily help you win. Players that whine about bad dice (which they threw themselves!) after each lost match are very hard to tolerate...