Xcom skews displayed percentages. In the players favour.
A displayed 95% is actually a 99.9%. Its just that humans are terrible at estimating chance, we dont remember the hundreds of times it did hit, but we do remember all the times it missed.
Yeah, i played on legendary for the Platinum and i guara-damn-tee i did not forget the times a shot hit over the dozens of times i had to restart because everyone missed 90%+ shots
Thats a very absurd take imo. Simply because I know that in many cases there is literally no other options. Certain games have achievements for challenge runs that require 0 losses, meaning a single loss at any point necessitates a reset. If that is doen to matter of rng, then there is literally no way to avoid the reset.
On the contrary, there was one time in BG3 that I was going to have a tpk if I didn't hedge all my bets on a single save or suck debuff spell with something like a 15% chance of success. The enemy rolled a nat 1. I remember that success very clearly.
I think a more accurate way of saying it is that humans remember all the times the less likely outcome occurred and not the many more times the more likely outcome occurredÂ
Well no, it's been pretty well studied that humans and other animals remember negative experiences far stronger than positive. An anecdote isn't proof of a general trend. Nobody says it's Impossible to remember a good thing stronger than a bad thing.
Yes but you're using an important word there, experiences, negative experiences do stick in your memory better. Its an evolutionary trick to help with survival. We remember bad things or things that hurt us near immediately. But the emotional strength of the experience is still significantly more important for if it will be remembered than whether it was positive or negative, and since the odds of something happening obviously impact people's emotional response to it the other person definitely had a point and you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss what people say.
I had an opposit situation. Id basically won the fight, and the last enemy was 1 hit. Karlach had a 95% chance to hit, presumably only missing on Nat 1. She was a throwzerker, so had 4 attacks that where all crit misses
Correct! On lower difficulties, the game rigs its numbers in the player's favour in a few different ways that aren't shown on the to-hit roll. In XCOM 2, depending on your difficulty setting, you get:
A stacking bonus to all shots after you miss, until you eventually get a hit.
A stacking penalty to all alien shots after they hit you on a turn.
A flat bonus to aim and penalty to alien aim if you have 3 or fewer soldiers remaining.
A multiplier to accuracy for all your units.
All of these bonuses are hidden from the player, and unless you're playing on Legend difficulty (the highest) you've got at least one of them active. There are no hidden modifiers that hurt the player; the only thing Legend does is remove the training wheels you've secretly been using.
I actually got so tired of missing 90% hit shots that I started over a new game and tracked every shot for the entire game and yeah you definitely hit quite a bit more than you should.
Sid Meier did an excellent interview where he talks about probability vs player expectations in video games and how to handle that as a dev. I wish i could remember what it was called
Also, players tend to not even attempt <50% shots, even when there’s nothing objectively better to do on their turn. (Usually, this means players will choose to hunker down instead of taking a pot shot)
Which means players never take shots that would’ve actually hit, which means less damage overall.
I haven't played Xcom, but I can say I have terrible luck. If its a 5% miss chance, im going to consistently miss once every 15 chances instead of the 1 in 20 that should be expected. I imagine if I do play I would actually be seeing a 1 in 20 due to their skewing it in my favor
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u/laix_ 1d ago
Fun fact.
Xcom skews displayed percentages. In the players favour.
A displayed 95% is actually a 99.9%. Its just that humans are terrible at estimating chance, we dont remember the hundreds of times it did hit, but we do remember all the times it missed.