You don't need to have played a game a lot to spot a pattern. The pattern of when there's luck involved there will definitely be people around who complain about the randomness being flawed. It can be observed in all the luck-driven-popular-game forums. So either it is some big conspriracy that put a ton of effort into replacing a
(a) simple random number call
with a
(b) complex system of evaluation game status, evaluating people at the table, tweaking the numbers in a way that is not too obvious but only visible to some very special observant people, hiding the code, bribing all the volunteer and/or professional developers etc. And to what end? To favor one chosen player in the game. Why this one? To gain what? Suspicions on which groups of players are usually favoured are all over the place. After all this is user vs. user and not user vs. the bank.
Either that or people have trouble understanding that randomness naturally produces weird patterns without any bias at work.
It doesn't stop at the borders of BGA. So if you say it is something specifically happening on BGA I can tell you - it is and was the same on other platforms. I used to play a lot on another platform which made Catan available for online play ~30 years ago (and it still is available there). And guess what? In the same manner people have posted on the forum there that they are sure something spooky is going around with the RNG in Catan. That site even had an on-the-fly-statistics of all the dice-rolls available. Not sure if that made it better or worse...
So if you have "spotted" it on BGA but not on other platforms... maybe you are only among the chosen ones who can see it here and on other platforms others were chosen... or maybe give the thought a try that you might have spotted some indeed strange results (that can happen naturally on unbiased RNG) and since then spiralled into confirmation-biased perception. Occasionaly run into weird results again (which again naturally happens on unbiased RNG) and perceive them very strongly and remember for long while unspectacular results quickly fade from your memory.
(a) simple random number call
with a
(b) complex system of evaluation game status, evaluating people at the table, tweaking the numbers in a way that is not too obvious but only visible to some very special observant people, hiding the code, bribing all the volunteer and/or professional developers etc. And to what end? To favor one chosen player in the game. Why this one? To gain what? Suspicions on which groups of players are usually favoured are all over the place. After all this is user vs. user and not user vs. the bank.
Either that or people have trouble understanding that randomness naturally produces weird patterns without any bias at work.
It doesn't stop at the borders of BGA. So if you say it is something specifically happening on BGA I can tell you - it is and was the same on other platforms. I used to play a lot on another platform which made Catan available for online play ~30 years ago (and it still is available there). And guess what? In the same manner people have posted on the forum there that they are sure something spooky is going around with the RNG in Catan. That site even had an on-the-fly-statistics of all the dice-rolls available. Not sure if that made it better or worse...
So if you have "spotted" it on BGA but not on other platforms... maybe you are only among the chosen ones who can see it here and on other platforms others were chosen... or maybe give the thought a try that you might have spotted some indeed strange results (that can happen naturally on unbiased RNG) and since then spiralled into confirmation-biased perception. Occasionaly run into weird results again (which again naturally happens on unbiased RNG) and perceive them very strongly and remember for long while unspectacular results quickly fade from your memory.