The "Randomness" in this game feels more than a little off

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
1

Been messing around with pet battles, and I can’t help but notice the glaring demonstration of statistical improbability that makes me really wonder if the game’s “dice” are broken or actually rigged.

Pets with a 95% chance to hit are missing 4 times in a row.
Meanwhile, the NPC pets never miss unless I use an ability that lets me block or dodge.

Other examples from the past:

Priest had a talent at one point that gave them 70% chance to resist spell pushback when casting a heal. I almost never noticed this actually work. I always suffered pushback like I didn’t even have that talent.

Was on my rogue in vanilla doing a quest in Ashzara fighting satyrs. One of them hit me with a curse or something that gave me a mere 20% chance to heal the enemy on hit. That 20% chance of something bad happening went off at least 80% of the time.

I’ve grouped with tanks back in TBC/Classic who didn’t quite have enough CTC, so they had a 1% chance to be crit - and they got critted constantly.

Over the past 8-10 months of raiding on multiple characters per week, I’ve rolled over a 40 on loot maybe six times. I’ve had whole raids where I couldn’t roll over a 20. Never once have i gone through a raid where every roll was 80 or higher.

It really feels like the “dice” in this game are weighted down for us and up for the mobs.

How on earth does a battle pet with a 95% chance to hit miss 4 times in a row. And it’s not rare. It happens all the time, so it can’t be a fluke. Several guildies of mine are talking about the same thing.

2

Pet battles had higher chance of dodge when they were implemented and it does feel like this is what we got.

Some information about what got changed later on.

3

Yeah. Good info but it basically just says that they reveal the hit chances now. That’s not explaining why something /says/ it has a 90 or 95 percent chance to hit then proceeds to miss 4 times in a row.

One line in that article even says “players WILL hit” so there’s no more case of one miss making a loss… yet I miss constantly. Especially if the enemy pet has 40 life left and the next hit will kill it, I ALWAYS miss at least once before it lets me finish it off.

4

Reading post it says that they wanted some level of rng early on and it explains that level difference and some skills have higher chance to miss than what they show. This was fixed in 5.3 to be more reliable and less problematic which is why I don’t think we got that change in mop classic moreover one of the example is about dragon skills not being 100% before the change which is what we got.

Having a higher level of rng if we keeps the same balance means that the tournament on timeless isle will be much more harder and that you’ll want to have many duplicate to be sure to be able to reliably clear it.

5

its everything that feels off like this

  • double of the same item week in week out from bosses, and zero of another item at all.
  • pet turrets miss all 9 shots in a row
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6

Yeah either the moves are erroneously labeled for accuracy or the dice are cheating.
Every pet battle i’m doing today, my anub w a hit chance of 80% misses more than half the time. I had one match where out of 22 attacks, only 8 of them hit… at 80% supposed chance.
Chrominius howl has a listed 100% chance to hit and that missed once.

And yet the computer controlled mobs NEVER miss. Not once. Half the stuff I do misses, and the computer is just 100% perfect 100% of the time.

7

Agreed.

I got Ashes of Al’ar on my first try. It was pretty bizarre, but I moved on. Got Mim’s head on my 6th try, peculiar, but just good luck. Invincible on my 5th try? Pretty weird. By the time I’m getting Glacial Tidestorm by my second try I’ve just resigned myself to believe that RNG sometimes is just literally broken. That is too wild of a probability to happen on all those mounts. I’ve got more as well only low run counts, like the HFC mount in ~8-10.

Idc what math speech I’m given on how probabilities work, that’s all just too lucky to be pure chance.

8

It’s called the “Warcraft Rumble Remix” where the computer seems to have an innate ability to sense what cards you will be using, and has exactly optimal counters.

In all seriousness, they later removed the randomness on many abilities later, and it made it feel more boring to always hit, but when the re-added the randomness, I felt like the percent shown matched the performance.

So, my guess is, the dice were initially broken, they removed dice, then re-added dice that were correctly balanced and did not always roll a “1.” I don’t think we got the fixed dice, because my pets seem to miss a ton.

9

Yeah they miss way more than they should according to the listed hit percent.
Anub says 80% chance to hit, but it misses roughly 50% of the time.
Abilities that have a 90% chance to hit seem like they hit about 75% of the time.
I haven’t dared to use any ability listed lower than 80% chance since I figure it will hit once for 20 tries.

Another thing I’ve noticed, almost every time an enemy pet is one hit away from death, that final hit WILL always miss once. The other day I had an enemy pet down to 14 health. My pet still had 1600 or so health. After a CRAZY missing streak (80% chance to hit) my pet was down to under 200 health before the game finally allowed me to finish off the enemy pet that had 14 health remaining for around 8 turns.

Meanwhile, enemy pets still never miss. Everything they do works every time. (unless I use an ability like liftoff/burrow/shield or whatever that forces a dodge/block. It absolutely feels like the game is cheating.

A guildie of mine was playing that hearthstone thing and he’s a programmer/math nerd type guy… and he did some sort of comparison study against the accounts that pay vs accounts that use the free service and he determined that the paid accounts win consistently more than the free accounts, which tend to “seem to do okay” right up until the guy who paid gets unusually lucky and just crushes them. So, given that Hearthstone seems to be rigged to favor ppl who pay for it, I wouldn’t put it past them to bake in some sort of “finger on the scales of fate” here rather than giving us true random “roll of the dice.”

10

Humans are godawful at statistics and probability when going by our guts. If you want anyone to take this kind of complaint seriously, you need data.

Record your pet battle results in a spreadsheet or something so you can post it; if your spreadsheet demonstrates a meaningful sample size that also shows a significant outlier, then Blizzard might pay attention.

(But remember also that if something has a one in a million chance of happening, it might be unlikely, but if there’s 100k people doing it every day then it’ll happen about every ten days to someone.)

11

Okay, so I did 10 pet battles using anub only and only using his base attack with an 80% chance to hit.

Hit % 60.00% 73.33% 54.55% 84.62% 90.00% 100.00% 83.33% 80.00% 72.73% 81.82%
Miss % 40.00% 26.67% 45.45% 15.38% 10.00% 0.00% 16.67% 20.00% 27.27% 18.18%
Round Result
Hit 9 11 6 11 9 8 10 8 8 9
Miss 6 4 5 2 1 0 2 2 3 2
1 hit stoneskin stoneskin stoneskin stoneskin stoneskin stoneskin stoneskin stoneskin stoneskin
2 hit hit miss hit hit hit hit hit miss hit
3 miss hit hit hit hit hit hit hit hit miss
4 hit hit hit miss hit hit hit hit hit hit
5 stoneskin miss hit hit miss hit cap miss hit hit hit
6 miss stoneskin stoneskin miss hit hit cap miss hit miss miss
7 hit hit hit hit hit hit capture miss stoneskin stoneskin
8 hit miss miss stoneskin hit hit stoneskin hit hit hit
9 hit hit miss hit hit hit hit stoneskin miss hit
10 hit hit miss hit hit hit hit hit hit
11 miss miss hit hit hit miss miss hit hit
12 miss stoneskin miss hit hit hit hit hit
13 miss hit hit stoneskin hit hit hit
14 stoneskin hit (crashed) hit hit
15 miss hit hit hit
16 hit hit hit miss
17 hit miss hit
18 hit

Had a few runs where the accuracy was way low but also a few runs where it was higher than it should be. Guess it balances out and the ‘feels’ were observational bias or something. When I tracked it, it didn’t seem all that far off.

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