🎲😢 PRNG dice support group — and ranting

@djensen

@brian-cannon

@brian-cannon There is just something drastically wrong with the dice, and there has been for awhile. I have suspicions of a number of things but that there is something badly wrong I have no doubt. How units like infantry and artillery have such a dramatically successful hit rate on defense and conversely units that require a 3 or more have a god awful hit rate. The funny thing is as Axis on turn 1, my units defending West Russia and Ukraine never seem to hit a damn thing, but on subsequent turns on the attack I cant take Transjordan without suffering a casualty if I take it at all, or Japs attacking Anwhei turn 1, 4 inf and a fighter and I see 2 defending infantry wipe 2-3 attacking infantry, it just simply doesnt make sense and its terribly sad that there has been nothing done to correct the problem. Have the devs deliberately weighted the dice? Does each player have their own dice profile? Are players using third party programs to affect dice rolls?

@djensen I have played hundreds of game @djensen. This season a couple of handful’s as I left out of pure frustration for a couple months due to the dice and the inaction of the development team to recognize there was a serious problem and to react to it. I have played countless games of the actual board game and know how frustrating normal dice are but the dice represented in this game are ridiculous, not borderline ridiculous, but completely ridiculous.
I have participated in the Dice survey and when asked about high value units scoring automatic hits I answered NO, as I do not believe automatic hits are called for nor fair. What I did say is I want random dice. I believe the Devs have always known about the dice, in fact I think the dice as they are were deliberately put in by the Devs to even out the slight Axis advantage that this version of the game has. It is one thing to see a crazy result a couple of times but that isn’t the case here, the oddities in rolls are frequent and continuing.
As far as the developers, had they been transparent with the community from the get go, I think the player base might have been more understanding, but rather than listen early on, they denied completely there was a hint of a problem. Now they seem to be reacting to the ground swell of complaints but it rings hollow, and is undercut by their previous inaction. The dice are the most important aspect of this game, and if they aren’t fair or there is something wrong, then the integrity of this game and the results are nothing. That isn’t to say strategy does not play a large part, it certainly does but dice decide outcomes.

@brian-cannon This isnt me BTW, just another customer

@brian-cannon @djensen I would point out that a few months ago, Wargamer.com featured A&A 1942 online and pointed out the problematic dice, as well as pointing out the lack of response to said dice by the Developers. The writers for Wargamer.com have been around wargames based on dice, it’s their profession. The response to the article from a former developer at Beamdog was to downplay the criticism and said the article’s criticism of the dice “was just a thing”

@brian-cannon @everyone

You folks need to clarify if the dice was original or stabilized, once they acknowledged the problem they fixed it. You used to hear me go ad nauseum about “tit for tat” dice results. But no more. I believe its fixed. I’m now at 84% and each game has bad rolls and i win anyway. The change was immediate from the first game with stabilized dice.

@imperious-leader stabilized dice only exist in custom games, I do not play custom games

@brian-cannon Well play normal games then?

@imperious-leader ranked games are a lot easier to play Imperious, I dont have to look for anyone, I click the button and the game is assembled. I understand your point but why if the dice are fixed why didn’t they just implement those dice game wide? I have also seen a post by Quintin casting doubt that the stabilized dice are any different.

@brian-cannon “ranked” games are 1 vs. 1 and that’s not Axis and Allies. The whole point is to deal with the inadequacy of worse teammates making mistakes, or learning from a better player and not finely tuned coordinated national strategies. This simulates the actual war as nations had their own path that at times was not perfectly coordinated like some symphony. You constantly have to adjust to your teammate and your own mistakes during the game. On the other hand, i don’t have trouble getting into games but im wondering why some rooms you cant get into when you click, and others get you stuck in limbo. I prefer to create my own games, lots of people just join quickly.

@imperious-leader I dont enjoy multi player games Imperious, just like I dreaded group assignments in school. I want to make decisions as far as my units and purchases. I find it to hard to coordinate multi player games as far as schedules and what have you. As far as Ranked games not being Axis and Allies? When I played the board game it was almost always 1v1, and rarely multi player. That is just the way it was. It is still Axis and Allies.

The problem is that the Devs have known this for awhile. Why else would they not release their data? Anytime someone brings this critical fact up, the only answer they get is to post the survey as if somehow that is an answer to a problem that’s gone on for 4 seasons. Then who ever brings up the problem with the dice is then attacked by the dice defenders as people who don’t understand dice.

There was not a need for all these opposing factions and bad will had their been an acknowledgement initially to a problem with the RNG dice and a response. Most everybody just wants a fair representation of actual random number dice. No one or certainly not the majority of those that bring the dice up do not want an “I win” button, nor do we want guaranteed hits, we simply want dice that are truly random.

@brian-cannon said in 🎲😢 PRNG dice support group — and ranting:

…we simply want dice that are truly random

Anyone who uses the phrase ‘truly random’ is likely one who will refuse to accept a ‘truly random’ result if it wasn’t to their liking. Everyone on the planet rolling a ‘1’ on a six-sided die at the same time is a ‘truly random’ outcome. All of the ‘dice defenders’ often equate improbable with impossible.

@eqqman So sayeth another one of the dice defenders.

@brian-cannon said in 🎲😢 PRNG dice support group — and ranting:

@eqqman So sayeth another one of the dice defenders.

Not really, as it happens. I have two major issues with the game that have caused me to quit playing twice: I don’t like being able to play only country a day in a game and then spending 23 hours waiting for my opponent to do something and I don’t like the dice outcomes (for example, I ‘feel’ like Battleship bombardments fail at a much higher rate than 1/3 of the time). The former is hardly a fault of the developers and the latter I am honest enough to admit is an opinion not backed up by any personal analysis of the dice results, it’s anecdotal.

What I -do- defend however are hypotheses backed up by data and real proofs over opinions. Read any post complaining about the dice and you will find a lot of emotion that drowns out all acceptance of the facts. The ‘facts’ usually presented are ‘I and everyone I know had a bad experience (or continue to have a bad experience) therefore the algorithm doesn’t produce a random result’. This is not a proof that withstands any scrutiny but players having a bad time expect it to be taken as gospel because they are frustrated.

Consider this example: a player rolls a single die to attack with three Fighters and three Infantry and gets 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. No analysis I can think of on this data (a real math wonk can correct me here) will indicate that the dice rolls as an aggregate show anything out of the ordinary. If the player chose to roll their Infantry first, they will complain that the dice are unfair because they ‘should’ have gotten at least one hit from their Fighters. If they rolled the Fighters first they may be aware that the rolls seemed to have given slightly more hits on average but are very unlikely to complain that the dice are unfair. Player interpretation of the rolls has zero bearing on the randomness of the algorithm producing the rolls.

Anyone who swears that the dice are not sufficiently random is welcome to try the following experiment: play a game and record every dice roll that occurs and then total them up for how many times each number occurs -only-, so for example if you logged a total of 957 rolls you know that a 1 was rolled 342 times. If for example you find that by doing this over the course of several games the expected value of the dice is many standard deviations off then maybe there is something there about the dice being poorly randomized. If the person doing this experiment is also one who swears that these kinds of rolls ‘never’ happen to them in real life, I would also then recommend performing an equal number of real life rolls by hand and comparing the outcomes. Forum posters love to state that such bad luck as happens in A&AO never really occurs to them, but since no person I know has ever actually logged the results of their dice throws playing a face-to-face version of A & A such statements are supposition and not proof.

A subset of posters claiming they’ve ‘proved’ the dice aren’t random like to say things such as ‘the dice are broken because in X games I wrote down the number of AA rolls and AA hit more than Y amount of the time’. The flaw in these arguments is that probability doesn’t care if you’re rolling for AA or not. Players are adding additional layers of outcome requirements that have zero to do with genuine randomness- like AA ‘should’ hit 1/6 of the time or if every battle I fight has 80% odds then I ‘should’ win 80% of my battles. Sticking with the AA example, players complaining that AA outcomes ‘prove’ the dice are broken need to go back and do the experiment to see if the number of 1s rolled over the course of the entire game seems to be about 1/6 of the total rolls or not.

At the start I mentioned I don’t like the dice rolling either. I’m very disappointed only around 1/3 of players (I think, it was pretty low) wished for the low luck option as this makes it unlikely to be pursued by the developers. My own opinion (not fact) is that the algorithm being used produces streaks of results too frequently, giving lots of situations that result in excessive hits or misses. But this doesn’t mean that the rolls skewed too heavily one way or another over the course of a game. Our problem here is that we prefer to have a more even distribution of values over an extremely small sample size (i.e., less than a dozen rolls). I have no idea what algorithm currently developed by computer science gives this result better than the one currently in use by the game. I suspect if there was one the developers would switch to it in a heartbeat. Either way though, the minute you say ‘I want random but I don’t want streaks’ you’ve moved away from a ‘genuinely random’ system. I wrote in another post and I stand by it that nobody playing this game really wants a truly random number generation, they only want one that ‘feels’ random. Be honest- if the dice ‘felt’ right to you, would you care enough about the actual randomness to go into any in-depth analysis on if the numbers would truly be random enough? Anyone who ‘feels’ like their AA is hitting consistently 1/6 of the time should actually be suspicious since it would be odd that such a small specific subset of all the dice rolls in a game happened to have such an even distribution all on its own.

Likewise I don’t understand why players insist that the developers release some set of data for them to scrutinize. Anyone who already thinks the dice are unfair will never be convinced otherwise by looking at some imagined developer data since logic rarely trumps emotion. You can see it already in the posts where people -do- attempt rigorous analysis of the rolling only to be countered by what basically amounts to ‘don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I know’ arguments.

Apologies for the overly long response, and good luck to you with your gaming.

I’m personally unhappy with the developers for various reasons, and I’m not interested in wasting my time dealing with them or contributing to their sales numbers.

But if there’s people that really want to do some work to evaluate 1942 Online dice, let them step up. I have some understanding of the issues, and provided personnel of sufficient quality I can train and administer an organization until it can run itself.

So how about it? Step on up!

1. No money

2. Get told what to do by an aardvark.

You can contribute to a community with a better understanding of statistical analysis as it applies to Axis and Allies, and an answer, once and for all, to “ARE these dice messed up?”

(Note: I don’t really expect takers, but if there ARE serious takers, then we’ll see what happens.)

@aardvarkpepper Since you don’t own the program and may be unaware that they installed 2 dice systems…perhaps you may have a more informed opinion of their efforts?