The RNG feels so wrong

[Black Spider]

I played XCOM (ever since enemy unknown) and I know that in the reboots, they modfied percentages to make sure that 90% is not actually 90% but a lot lower, maing those infamous misses. But at least in XCOM, i could quickly adopt my strategy, instruct another character to intervene etc.
In this game, I strongly get the feeling the roll adjustment is happening too. But instead, im just staring at a spinning ball waiting to retry the same over and over again.
Too many times I miss a roll, and often it is barely (85% vs 86%). At this point I really doubt if the numbers are really random.

Here's an idea
If you are going to implement this (stupid) RNG modifier where you keep missing a roll with a minor digit, at least give the player a minor boost (instead of a full effect).
The game does this partially, by implementing a Critical failure. But this is also poorly implemented. AFAIK it is when the roll is 99+. So if you have a 97 percent, and the roll is 99, this is still considered a critical failure.
Instead, I would opt for a ranged result based on distance of the roll vs the percentage
-50 super effecitve
- 30 effective
-10 slight extra bonus
0 normal inscrease
+10 slight increase
+ 30 no increase
+ 50 critical failure

This way, at least I wont get the feeling i am progressing if I have a slight miss. And maybe, it feels rewarding if you have a +80 vs a < 10 roll (super effective), and you will notice these rolls more often as they grant extra bonusses.

[LorDC]

Publicado originalmente por Black Spider:

I played XCOM (ever since enemy unknown) and I know that in the reboots, they modfied percentages to make sure that 90% is not actually 90% but a lot lower, maing those infamous misses. But at least in XCOM, i could quickly adopt my strategy, instruct another character to intervene etc.

Actually, the opposite is true. On normal and easy player has hidden bonuses to hit chance. Also, people actually decompiled game code and confirmed that there isnt any kind of RNG rigging going on. (Talking about Firaxis' XCOM EU 2012 here.)

Publicado originalmente por Black Spider:

In this game, I strongly get the feeling the roll adjustment is happening too. But instead, im just staring at a spinning ball waiting to retry the same over and over again.
Too many times I miss a roll, and often it is barely (85% vs 86%). At this point I really doubt if the numbers are really random.

There is no hidden roll adjustments happening in the game. Period. The number you see when choosing mission is exactly the same number that is used to roll for success. (Except of course, when some modifiers gets applied mid-turn like doing crackdown on the same turn as purging or investigating councilor before assassinating him.)
I personally spent at least a dozen hours inside decompiled game code and can tell you that there is no "cheating" going on behind the scenes. Not while doing missions and not anywhere else. In fact, I specifically rechecked mission resolution code one more time before typing this.

Also, just FYI. 86% success chance equals to 14% chance of failure. Which means that if you have 6 councilors doing such missions you should expect roughly one fail per turn on average. Which also means that on average every four in-game years you can expect three fails in a row.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

The only RNG rigging I have seen and can confirm happens in game is turned councillors failing their task, which is how it should be even if it does result in a councillor rolling 101 out of 100 now and then.

[DaBa]

So many people still do not understand how random chance works and they suspect foul play... Look, when something has a high chance to work, let's say 80%, it doesn't mean that it will work 8/10 times when you try. It means that it has 80% chance to work EVERY SINGLE TIME. If you fail 80% chance 10 times in a row, that doesn't mean it's bugged or that the RNG is rigged, it meant you got UNLUCKY.

And feeling like something is not working in your favor is not even close to compelling evidence, we tend to fixate only on all the times a good roll failed us, and not on the times when it did not or a bad roll actually succeeded so you are naturally biased to think that way. If you want to prove whether RNG is wrong or not, then do a proper experiment with a proper sample size, like a 1000 attempts.

[gimmethegepgun]

Publicado originalmente por LorDC:

Publicado originalmente por Black Spider:

I played XCOM (ever since enemy unknown) and I know that in the reboots, they modfied percentages to make sure that 90% is not actually 90% but a lot lower, maing those infamous misses. But at least in XCOM, i could quickly adopt my strategy, instruct another character to intervene etc.

Actually, the opposite is true. On normal and easy player has hidden bonuses to hit chance.

Unsure whether you're referring to EU/EW or 2, but in 2, Commander difficulty also has a hidden bonus for the player after missing reasonable shots. Only Legend accurately tells you what the hit chance is in all cases.

[Black Spider]

The mechanic still sucks imo, whether it is truly random or not. In XCOM 2, you had things like bullet grazed or something, where you inflicted a minor damage.
This is a computer game, not a dice game. So we can add mechanics that make this depedency on RNG less relevant.
Let control tokens have "hitpoints", so that you need to take multiple turns to fully take one. Lets say each CP has 100 HP (per faction). 1 counsilor does 10 + perc - rolled damage. So if you have 75% chance, and the RNG rolls 30, you score 55. So you only need 45 to take the CP. Allow regeneration of the CP hitpoints if there is no one from that faction attacking it. This makes actions like detaining more interesting since you interupt the enemy counsilor.
Let a failed assiniation attempt result in the target going into hiding, or maybe losing HP that needs to recover. If you roll a critical failure, let your counsilor get hit instead depending on the security rating.
Give a marginal boost when failing a public campaign slightly.
And if a councilor keeps throwing bad rolls, question their loyalty with the investigation.

In a game where you only have 4 -6 counsilors per month, it feels really like waste of time if you keep missing everything on small errors. I already resorted into savescumming with this game (3 months of failures in a row with 4/ 5 counsillors, all 70+ changes, might as wel reload 3 months back and reload and redo). And the moment if have to do decide to use this tactic (sucessfully), I quickly lose interest. If i want to play a game where a dice determines a hard yes / no, i can play a boardgame. Im asking for a little bit more sophistication in the game mechanics that feel more rewarding.

[Synopse]

There is a reason why many games have a fail-stack mechanic. It can easily be frustrating to have a series of bad rolls, because there is a chance to happen. There is no way to fix this experience in a simple way, because RNG doesn't care about "bad luck". I consider game designs heavily relying on RNG sub-optimal.

[gimmethegepgun]

Publicado originalmente por Black Spider:

In XCOM 2, you had things like bullet grazed or something, where you inflicted a minor damage.

Bullet grazing in XCOM 2 is solely caused by the Dodge stat of the target, which turns hits into grazes. It's not a near-miss on the roll thing.

[KaiserTom]

Publicado originalmente por Synopse:

There is a reason why many games have a fail-stack mechanic. It can easily be frustrating to have a series of bad rolls, because there is a chance to happen. There is no way to fix this experience in a simple way, because RNG doesn't care about "bad luck". I consider game designs heavily relying on RNG sub-optimal.

There's so much you can control though about the RNG and it all buffers out over the very long run of the game. Fail-stack is needed for shorter experiences and RNG you don't have as much control over. And games where it can really fail-snowball on you.

All of the missions have numerous ways to influence their odds, drastically sometimes between turns. Yeah you have to plan. Yeah sometimes you will fail. If you really, really need it to not fail, you should be having two agents on it.

[LorDC]

Another thing is that in general, there is no real punishment for failing a mission. You can always just try again.

[Wolf Fang]

Reminder that if your counselor is turned they can change any successes into fails so if you constantly are rolling fails you might want to get someone to check that counselor. Also the aliens can get access to counselors with like a base 10 to 15 in most stats so unless your counselors loyalty is 20+ its entirely possible for them to be turned. Also the stat you usually see is "apparent" loyalty. which can be way off of their actual loyalty.
As for RNG the main reason it feels a bit bad in this game is the lack of cheats. In most games (XCOM for example) the displayed percentage is actually lower then the actual, with a bigger bonus if your having a bad time with misses.
Also you are being screwed over by your brain, which has a multiplier on negative responses, so its likely that you will get 8/10 successes on a 80% chance and still think you got unlucky, because your brain dwells on the 2 fails more then the 8 successes, and overtime the "expected" good results simply get deleted from memory.

I wouldn't recommend this game unless you can get into the dwarf fortress mindset of "losing is fun" you have to have a sanguine disposition about your losses or your gonna hate this game.
Edit: removed misinformation.

[gimmethegepgun]

Publicado originalmente por Wolf Fang:

Reminder that if your counselor is turned they will change any successes into fails by changing the roll to whatever you need +1 so if you constantly are rolling one off from victory you might want to get someone to check that counselor.

Setting a failure threshold doesn't mean that all rolls will be above that value. You can easily see this by setting an enemy you turned to like 95% and see them get rolls below that that will still cause a 65% to fail.

(in all difficulties but commander and legend you get +15 to hit after every miss for example)

It's actually +10 for Rookie and Veteran, and +15 on Commander. However, Rookie and Veteran have a 1.2x and 1.1x, respectively, multiplier on all success chances, and Rookie has a bunch more stuff.