How Your Mind Screws with You in Games Like Diablo
- Thread starter Rhykker
- Start date
I really enjoyed this article and its interestin how you were able to tie them into complaints about D3. I dig it.
This could be done for any blizzard game of the last decade really. Even starcraft relies on rng, to a lesser degree.
This article also applies to WoW for me, having seen a lot of similarities in thought. Of course the article can be applied to pretty much anything that relies on chance aka the-RNG-boss (who is unkillable and an asshole). Like the Headless Horseman's mount in the Halloween event. People are still absolutely convinced that there are server times involved in the drop rate chances, the most prominent is the 7am/7pm myth that it will drop most at that specific time. (although I can't find the discussions about the myth anymore, it was prevalent for a long long time)Rhykker said:
It also works with the collective beliefs that spawn up from time to time about various things like upcoming raids that haven't ever been announced (Emerald Dream has been thought to be a raid due to a map from vanilla that wasn't removed post-beta, also thought to be the subject of every damn expansion since Burning Crusade prior to the actual expansion announcements), to speculation on NPC dialogue and "the future of WoW".
Crazy shit. It reminds me of those gambling addicts who think their lucky charms and ritual bets can somehow alter the chance laws and that batshit insane belief that hotstreaks can be extended indefinitely (which ultimately is proven wrong by the House winning in the end, always).
Wow, that is a striking parallel. Thankfully we don't gamble with our money in these games, just time.
I loves me some thought fallacies! This applies most commonly to religion and superstition. We are only human. Weak. Scared. Human. Anyhoo, Derren Brown's book, Tricks of the mind, goes fairly deep into this realm. A highly recommended read. 
AS people have pointed out already: These elements are intentional aspects of Blizzard's design philosophy. Which really says a lot about Blizzard as a company. I suppose there is some skill in knowing how to manipulate people, but forgive me if I want to play games that treat me with at least a modicum of respect.
Nice article,
starts of a bit weak but gets better with every page.
and these mind failures are not only related to games. There is a big portion in it on how social and religious phenomena work, too.
starts of a bit weak but gets better with every page.
and these mind failures are not only related to games. There is a big portion in it on how social and religious phenomena work, too.
Calling some of those things "fallacies" makes the assumption that computer RNGs are completely random. In reality, they aren't...because computers can't be random. What is happening is a seed is selected in a large list of numbers, and the output is predictable if you know the seed (see also: Minecraft terrain generation).
So, there actually can be such thing as a "hot hand" if the seed just happens to line up with right numbers that you're looking for. Of course, not being able to see the calculations going on behind the scenes, it would be basically impossible to take advantage of that. But given enough observation, someone could theoretically "crack the code" for when good or bad "random" things will happen in a computer game.
So, there actually can be such thing as a "hot hand" if the seed just happens to line up with right numbers that you're looking for. Of course, not being able to see the calculations going on behind the scenes, it would be basically impossible to take advantage of that. But given enough observation, someone could theoretically "crack the code" for when good or bad "random" things will happen in a computer game.
The forums are always full of people desperate to confirm a total non-existent fallacy too - the notion that certain loot is geared to drop in specific areas, or from specific enemies. It's a complete load - the RNG is king. But people are still determined to find it. Clustering illusion, maybe?
Of course, that's ignoring the number of people who want things changed so that that is the case, because they don't know what randomness means.
Of course, that's ignoring the number of people who want things changed so that that is the case, because they don't know what randomness means.
You're kinda underestimating what a "large" list means, though. The most used computer RNG these days is the Mersenne Twister, which in its most common interpretation has some 10^6000 terms. Yes, it's crackable if you can get 624 straight observations, but there's far too much randomness in D3 to find that number of seeds.Avaholic03 said:
Literally true; practically absolutely infeasible. Note that in on-line multiplayer games, there isn't ever only one pseudo-random number generator sequence in existence at any given time, and the number picked to represent the result of any given action will depend not only upon who is doing the picking, but where the picking is done, why the picking is done, and the number of other people picking numbers simultaneously.Avaholic03 said:
Minecraft terrain generation is done by one process, using a simplistic algorithm (java.util.Random embodies a linear congruential sequence using a single 32-bit integer as a seed), whereas there could be hundreds or thousands of player avatars in one WoW region, each of whom is represented by a group of processes on the server, each of which may have its own pseudo-random number sequence---or perhaps the processes are in a work queue, and each processor serving that queue has its own pseudo-random number sequence. (I do not know how WoW servers are coded; if you do ... feel free to tell us.)
Also, in large real-time simulations (such as Diablo or WoW) it is expected that pseudo-random number sequences will be re-seeded with true random numbers every so often. True random numbers aren't actually hard to come by; a hard drive is a good source of them, for example. The idea is like so: hard disks are kept inside electrically and chemically neutral atmospheres, but those atmospheres still have mass and friction. Consequently, they affect the speed of the disk and of the read/write head as it moves around the disk, in turbulently chaotic (if minuscule) ways. So, while the disk is spinning, time how long it takes the read/write head to move from point A to relatively distant point B on the disk, and use the low-order bits of that timing as your random value. On Linux, that's exactly how /dev/random works. It's slow, but you don't need many true random bits to make a good pseudo-random sequence seem more random.
Not having played D3, the game this article most reminded me of was Civ4. Losing a 99.9% battle hurt pretty bad. Losing 2 in 10 battles felt like the world was trying to destroy your game. Saw a lot of people complaining about a cheating AI when they got these sort of streaks.
...Except if you can do that, you can just go for the something else that uses PRNG - oh I don't know - Every automated encrypted information on the internet or something?Avaholic03 said:
I just think that obtaining a rare item is a waste of resources compared to obtaining all the world's online bank account information.
P.s- Escapist, if you make the survey as the part of the capcha, I will intentionally press opposite of my answer every time.
I had to make a new account just to comment on this after it was linked on Diablofans (with a short cutoff from the part about the Von Restorff effect) - in the early times of Diablo 3, double drops *did* happen - as in, exact clones of items that you had just received. It happened ONCE to me in the span of a summer of playing (It was an andariels helm, which dropped twice from a single charger-bull thing in the caverns of ice. Curious, as white mobs are not supposed to be able to drop more than 1x item at a time - exact same stats on it, down to the same amount of armor).
You may have heard of this and believed it to be the Von Restorff effect (which very much is a thing - people get 3x ramaladnis in a day now and assume they're common as fuck, while others go houndreds of levels without), while in reality, it was a very real bug in the game that did happen on very rare occasions. After more than 650 paragon levels in RoS it has never happened again, and none of my friends have reported it for more than a year, so I believe the bug has since been fixed.
You may have heard of this and believed it to be the Von Restorff effect (which very much is a thing - people get 3x ramaladnis in a day now and assume they're common as fuck, while others go houndreds of levels without), while in reality, it was a very real bug in the game that did happen on very rare occasions. After more than 650 paragon levels in RoS it has never happened again, and none of my friends have reported it for more than a year, so I believe the bug has since been fixed.
Part of the problem with computer games is that things like this at least sound plausible. While there are various superstitions surrounding dice, for example, most of them aren't actually taken particularly seriously and are just seen as a bit of fun. Someone might have a "lucky" die, but they're not going to spend hours arguing that the laws of physics genuinely don't apply to it. But with computer RNGs, things like the time actually can be used and therefore have an effect. As Tamayo says it's essentially impossible for anyone to actually notice that effect, but the mere fact that it's not physically impossible as it is in other cases lends some extra plausibility that can lead people to believe they've seen an effect even if they wouldn't believe it in a non-computer game.Imperioratorex Caprae said:
And the problem here is that in some games, the AI actually does cheat. It probably doesn't in Civ, but the fact that we know it does in many games, often extremely blatantly, again lends plausibility to the idea in cases where it's actually just our biases fooling us.Gibbatron said:
Then there are other games where what is thought to be a random process actually isn't. For example, many games have a "critical chance" where you have a percentage chance to do extra damage or whatever. But while in some games the chance is calculated each time and can cause sequences of consecutive critical or long periods without, other games will simply have every 5th hit be a critical precisely to avoid the randomness. Someone who doesn't know the details of how a particular game deals with that sort of thing can easily be led to believe there's something funny going on just because their expectations are wrong.
Starcraft is a heck of a stretch, there's not much random in it, failing to think of any way of applying any of this article to it.Flutterguy said:
Obviously Hearthstone has enough randomness for some of this, but Heroes of the Storm isn't really relevant either. There's also no reason to restrict it to Blizzard, he showed Borderlands and D&D at the beginning, and as he said, almost every game with elements of randomness could be used.
He didn't say they didn't happen. He said they weren't remotely as frequently as people believed. That's what the fallacy is, that we think the unusual happens more often than it does because we remember the unusual more than the mundane.Dracodraco said: