Too many tanks

[davidr0607]

Can someone please fix this game? The tanks are suppose to be only on one side on the 6 sided dice and yet it is obvious to everyone that plays the game that they come up at a way higher rate than then that. It is badly programmed. No, this is not a bug.

[robinzig]

Can someone please fix this game? The tanks are suppose to be only on one side on the 6 sided dice and yet it is obvious to everyone that plays the game that they come up at a way higher rate than then that. It is badly programmed. No, this is not a bug.

Huh? I mean, if you are correct that the weight given to each die face is incorrect, this clearly would be a bug.

But humans are notorious for assuming that they're getting abnormally bad luck when this actually isn't the case. Before raising a bug or making a complaint, I suggest you record every die roll over a good number of plays (a few dozen, at least - it's not like this game takes long to play), to count how many dice are rolled and how many times a die comes up. If, over a sufficiently large* number of rolls, the proportion is significantly different from 1 in 6, then you may have a case. (But I'd still encourage you to keep going for longer - even a run of luck so poor that it has only a 0.01% change is guaranteed to happen to someone at some point given the amount of plays there are of this game.)

Also, don't forget the 1 in 6 is only for the rolls themselves. You shouldn't count the proportion of your 13 dice that END UP being tanks because the game rules force you to keep tanks but reroll some or the other dice, so of course you will end up with significantly more than 1 in 6 of your "locked in" dice being tanks. That's part of where the fun of the game comes from

*I am not a statistician so I sadly couldn't tell you how large is "sufficiently large", but I'd have thought a few hundred rolls would give a fair enough indication

[RicardoRix]

Even if it was true, then it wouldn't even matter. It would be the same for all players.

[voriki]

Even if it was true, then it wouldn't even matter. It would be the same for all players.

Yup, there's no uneven game. Even if 5 sides were tanks and 1 side was not, everyone would still have the same odds.

[robinzig]

Even if it was true, then it wouldn't even matter. It would be the same for all players.

It would still matter, because then the BGA version would be different from the physical one, and the different odds would affect strategy so players are entitled to know the "real" odds.

But I don't believe the claim, not unless I see hard evidence.

[Meeplelowda]

it is obvious to everyone that plays the game that they come up at a way higher rate than then that

I played this game so much that I was a Guru for it at one point. A run of bad luck doesn't mean the game programming is flawed. No one is entitled to or guaranteed "average" rolls over any short-term period. Over the long term, there are also no guarantees. You only have a quantifiable, but not guaranteed, chance to be within a certain margin centered around average.

In order to back up this claim with more than feelings, you would have to record all rolls over hundreds of rolls an apply conventional statistical analysis to the data. The rolls in one game....or even 10 games...are not a large enough sample size. And anyone's memory of what happened is unreliable.

[RicardoRix]

Even if it was true, then it wouldn't even matter. It would be the same for all players.

It would still matter, because then the BGA version would be different from the physical one, and the different odds would affect strategy so players are entitled to know the "real" odds.

Kinda, but even then, it would still be the same for each player not knowing the real odds.
But either way, it doesn't matter, because the tanks are not rigged.

[Silene]

Also if you want to get good data, you shouldn't select which dice you count. So if you just had a very bad streak (which is normal to have sometimes), you shouldn't select your last 100 die-rolls. Better to select without bias. I.E. decide to count starting now your future x games/rolls. Or randomly select rolls of any random player about whose luck you have no bias yet.

[Jellby]

BGA is programmed such that people who just accept their bad luck get the worst rolls and draws, while those who are ready to complain and file bug reports when they see an issue will only get good rolls and so will be kept happy and quiet. Of course, that's not perfect, and sometimes people of the latter group get bad rolls too. It seems to happen more when there are bursts of solar activity.

[davidr0607]

People have assumed I posted this because of run of "bad luck". This is not true. I win about as many games as I lose so it's not about bad luck or bad strategy. It's about observation. In the around 50 games I've played so far, I have seen with my own eyes how many tanks come up and others have commented on this in the games. It would be hard to recorded for this as the game moves pretty fast (and I wouldn't want to run down that stupid clock - the worst part about BGA). I will try and record my turns at some point and prove it but it would need a large sample size.