Dice Seeds

[Maiko]

I wanted to keep this separate from the UI discussion, as it's technically not UI related, while still being a very contentious topic.

In Doom972's new UI thread, Tyr posted the following regarding the rationale behind the move to the new dice seed on game load in singleplayer:

Originally posted by Tyr:

The new dice are deterministic, you're currently able to reload with the same results (online) as some users have already realised. This was taken out of solo play though so that if users were for any reason presented with a scenario they couldn't continue past, their whole game/save wouldn't be jeopardised or held ransom to a pending update for a specific fix.

The present implementation was the option we felt most comfortable combining the updated/simulated dice system with.

After all the discussions and feedback surrounding the seeding of the dice recently, we may consider revisiting it, we'll try keep users abreast of any decisions after we have chance to discuss/make them internally. As mentioned though, we do read what the community posts, even if we don't necessarily step in and post our thoughts on the matter.

Which gave me a thought. If the main reason for the change was to prevent games from being unplayable due to how the seed was generated, could that choice be made when the game is loaded? For example, having a small button next to the play button that toggled whether the game would generate a new dice seed or use the old one.

This would allow those who want to have the 'do-over' option to have it, it would also allow those who want the 'different outcome' option to have it, and it would allow for those instances where the dice seed ended up causing some problem and would need to be reset.

Now, obviously, I'm not a developer, so I don't know the intricacies of Talisman's particular coding, but to my year-and-a-half of CS mind, this doesn't seem like it would be a very difficult implementation.

Something along the lines of:
if(newSeedButton = true) then
generate new seed on load
else
use old seed

[Little Nemo]

Personally I don't mind if the game is unplayable because of the seed. In fact, I cannot imagine a situation in which the seed would prevent the game from being playable. At the end of the day, this game is not a game of life, we won't die if one of them will be unplayable. We just will start another game. Plus, this game has been out for years now, so if finishing the game would be a serious issue, it would be addressed a really long time ago. Since it was not, I don't think it's an urgent matter that needs being fixed.

tl;dr Bring back the old seeding system.

[potterman28wxcv]

Originally posted by Maiko:

Now, obviously, I'm not a developer, so I don't know the intricacies of Talisman's particular coding, but to my year-and-a-half of CS mind, this doesn't seem like it would be a very difficult implementation.

Something along the lines of:
if(newSeedButton = true) then
generate new seed on load
else
use old seed

I can't speak for Nomad, but from their posts I guess that this would require to support two kind of savefiles : the old seed saves, and the new seed saves. Or to implement a new save system that generalize the two previous approaches

In theory I don't think it should be super hard (maybe something like : if the seed entry of the savefile equals 0, then generate a new seed on load. Else, use that seed. -- or a combination of a boolean and a seed value, with the boolean set to true or false depending on whether a new seed should be generated or not when loading). In practice, you never know how hard can it be, it depends a lot on their software architecture.

Originally posted by Little Nemo:

Personally I don't mind if the game is unplayable because of the seed. In fact, I cannot imagine a situation in which the seed would prevent the game from being playable. At the end of the day, this game is not a game of life, we won't die if one of them will be unplayable. We just will start another game. Plus, this game has been out for years now, so if finishing the game would be a serious issue, it would be addressed a really long time ago. Since it was not, I don't think it's an urgent matter that needs being fixed.

tl;dr Bring back the old seeding system.

Yeah this. When reading Tyr's post I was like "Did I ever encounter an unfinishable game before because of the seed being kept?". Even if I did, I don't think it would be a big problem. I mean, compared to being locked ad-vitam-eternam on Jail space because it got terraformed when the space is not supposed to, it is nothing.

My point being that there are so many other things that need to be addressed. No one asked for this "problem" (if it posed problem to people? I am subscribed to this forum, I see tons of threads about AIs and semantic bugs, I don't think I saw one about not being able to finish a game because of the seed?) to be solved, and yet this decision was taken without asking the playerbase what they would prefer between possibly unfinishable games (the way it was before) vs not being able to redo your actions.

[Mew Mew]

I wonder if cards and dragon tokens also being random was intentional? Roommate and I have been suffering through the horrible new sound effects, and have discovered we can cheat like mad against the AI players and the game itself. Get a movement roll we don't like? Restart the turn. Get Dragon Rage? Restart the turn. Another character is trying to attack us? Restart their turn. I avoided losing a life to the Posessed by restarting his turn when I was going to lose. He rolled a different result, preventing him from landing on my space. Some turns later I pulled Dragon Rage. Restarted and got a yellow token instead.

[Little Nemo]

^Cheaters Paradise ;)

[sjgf]

The die results should be the same and the token draw should be the same each time the same Turn is reloaded.

[LoneSylvan]

Originally posted by Mew Mew:

I wonder if cards and dragon tokens also being random was intentional? Roommate and I have been suffering through the horrible new sound effects, and have discovered we can cheat like mad against the AI players and the game itself. Get a movement roll we don't like? Restart the turn. Get Dragon Rage? Restart the turn. Another character is trying to attack us? Restart their turn. I avoided losing a life to the Posessed by restarting his turn when I was going to lose. He rolled a different result, preventing him from landing on my space. Some turns later I pulled Dragon Rage. Restarted and got a yellow token instead.

Why?
as in...
why bother cheating it?
I seriously don't 'get' it.
It's a game... losing lives / getting bad results is part of it... part of the fun.
I really don't understand all this hate on the dice seed due to cheating... if people want to cheat then they must be loving it - for those of us that just want to play the game - we're loving it too = win win right?

[Driss]

Originally posted by Lone Sylvan:

Originally posted by Mew Mew:

I wonder if cards and dragon tokens also being random was intentional? Roommate and I have been suffering through the horrible new sound effects, and have discovered we can cheat like mad against the AI players and the game itself. Get a movement roll we don't like? Restart the turn. Get Dragon Rage? Restart the turn. Another character is trying to attack us? Restart their turn. I avoided losing a life to the Posessed by restarting his turn when I was going to lose. He rolled a different result, preventing him from landing on my space. Some turns later I pulled Dragon Rage. Restarted and got a yellow token instead.

Why?
as in...
why bother cheating it?
I seriously don't 'get' it.
It's a game... losing lives / getting bad results is part of it... part of the fun.
I really don't understand all this hate on the dice seed due to cheating... if people want to cheat then they must be loving it - for those of us that just want to play the game - we're loving it too = win win right?

People are not that black and white. If a game is too easy to cheat than those who wouldn't otherwise think of cheating may be tempted to. Reloading a save until you get a desired result is not fun for a lot of people yet they might find themselves doing so. It's just not great game design.

[Maiko]

Cheating, exploiting, whatever. My philosophy is in single player games, the person playing shouldn't be made to feel ashamed for however they wish to play the game. I'm kinda on both sides here as I like the challenge and feeling of accomplishment from playing and beating games 'legit', but I also get frustrated sometimes and just want to move past something instead of banging my head against it.

And then sometimes I just want to dink around and have fun. I remember I used Cheat Engine one time to give my Gambler character something in the range of 50 Fate and dumped them into a Lottery roll. To the game's credit, it did pay out the obscene amount as expected. And yes, I do know I could have just used Cheat Engine to give me 50 gold, but I wanted to experience the ridiculous event of 'winning' an insane amount of money. In my head I was trying to think of the lottery officials in the game world going "He won how much? We don't even have that much gold to begin with!"

Anyway, regarding the different rolling/seeding methods, I did think of another reason to at least have the option for keeping the same seed through an entire game, and that's debugging. If a problem happens and you want to find out if it was just a one-time thing or if it's an actual bug that should be reported, you'd need to be able to reproduce it. The devs also I think would want to be able to have reproducible turns for their own debugging/QA purposes.

Regarding the dragon tokens, I think that actually is a bug. I remember a while back that the spell deck would get reshuffled or cards drawn during a turn would still be drawn if you reloaded the turn or something. Glad that was fixed.

[Gilga ™ |Yonaguni|]

Originally posted by sjgf:

The die results should be the same and the token draw should be the same each time the same Turn is reloaded.

Yeah, we demand it and Nomad is ignoring us.