dice algorithm is clearly flawed

[Paddles]

I completely agree with poster that a game of Catan can extremely frustrating due to biased dice. Its probably also true that the dice is random, but for many games the dice is still the deciding factor.

Do you mean "biased" or "unlucky"? Because the words mean very different things. I've played plenty of Catan games where I've had unlucky dice, and yes they can be frustrating. But I've never seen any evidence to support some people's claims that the dice are biased.

I dont get why BGA havent implemented a card deck dice generator. Imagine dice determined by a number of card decks, number of dice sets determined by their probability. When the deck(s) is depleted, it start over. Will still be randaom, but much closer to a normal distribution for every game. Will put strategy in the high seat, not lucky dice.

Catan has a dice deck available, both in physical sets and on BGA. As for other games, a dice deck doesn't always make sense, some games would be ruined by it (Backgammon for example).

Oh, and the expected distribution of the sum of two 6-sided dice is triangular, not normal. "Normal distribution" has a specific meaning, and counting dice rolls can't follow a normal distribution (normal distribution is a continuous distribution, but rolling dice are discrete).

[Knibbeltje]

Either this is not working as it's supposed to, or I'm totally misunderstanding how it's supposed to work. So you have a deck of cards (a deck of 36 by the looks of it) containing 'dice rolls' 2-12 occuring more or less often according to their probability, so for example: one card for 12 or 2 and five for 6 or 8. When the deck is depleted, it's reshuffled and starts over, right? Then, at the end after 60-100 turns we should see the probability represented in the game statistics and sometimes I do, but often I don't.

[Knibbeltje]

I was trying to add a screenshot, but didn't work..: https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=940251581

[Paddles]

The dice deck doesn't go through the full 36 combinations exactly once before recycling - otherwise there would be a couple of turns each game where the results would be predictable. The BGA dice deck mechanism is outlined in https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49941

For the printed (face-to-face) dice decks, the instructions are to reshuffle a few (five?) cards before the end, not wait until the entire deck has been run through.

[Coleus1]

There is a bias algorithm implemented on BGA Catan. You can easily spot the favored player after first few rolls, independet of the settlement placements. Not every game, the devs are not stupid. Play Catan on other sites or in real life and this becomes even more apparent. The experience is very different on BGA Catan.

[Suoivax]

There is a bias algorithm implemented on BGA Catan. You can easily spot the favored player after first few rolls, independet of the settlement placements. Not every game, the devs are not stupid. Play Catan on other sites or in real life and this becomes even more apparent. The experience is very different on BGA Catan.

There is no "algorithm" for dice. It's simply a command in the programming language.

"random.int"

[Paddles]

There is a bias algorithm implemented on BGA Catan. You can easily spot the favored player after first few rolls, independet of the settlement placements. Not every game, the devs are not stupid. Play Catan on other sites or in real life and this becomes even more apparent. The experience is very different on BGA Catan.

So how can you tell that it really was biased towards a player, rather than the simpler hypothesis that one of the players happened to be lucky in the first few rounds with a fair random number generator?

If I gave you all the dice rolls for the first four rounds of twenty games, with fifteen of them using fair dice and five of them using biased dice, could you guarantee that you would correctly identify which give games were using the biased dice? Would you be willing to donate, say 10,000 dollarbucks to either BGA or a charitable cause of my choice if you got it wrong? I'd be happy for you to define the board position (positions of hex tiles, number markers, settlement positions for each player, identifying which of the players meets the hidden criteria for being favoured), either the same starting position for all twenty games, or separate positions for all twenty games.

[Jellby]

You can easily spot the favored player after first few rolls

I'd say even more. You can easily spot the favored player after the very first roll. The player who got the higher roll is the favored player. Clear as daylight. Actually, the first player to roll the dice is clearly the favored player. No discussion.

[Gulchen]

@ Goforit22 ​ :

Code: Select all

[shoe, shoe[j]] = [shoe[j], shoe];

Either that language has quite unusual syntax, or your code would replace ​ shoe ​ with an ordered pair.