Dexter S. Bateman said:
I can't say I've played the game, but I believe both the outlandish scenarios and the RNG not necessarily being crap... I've read the game has a fairly high number of bugs and glitches, couldn't it explain the RNG bugging out once in a while? So although the RNG might not pick 80 shots at 90/95% to miss (because yes, that is an astronomically small chance), if the game's bugging out and some part of the code or other is getting fed the wrong numbers, it's easy to believe the scenario may happen to a few people in a short period of time, rather than by chance for the one in 5 million in 600 years.
I'm not really concerned with all of this (I'm not that much of a fan of strategy games anyway), but there seems to be a real high amount of vitriol being generated over a game that's known to be a bit buggy at times. Stop the hate people!
Mycroft does not present the scenario as a potential bug, he presents it as a flaw inherent in the RNG.
Part of the issue of course is that the situation he's outlining is improbable/impossible for reasons that go beyond missing 80 shots in a row.
The first is the "80 shots in 6 rounds of combat" situation. If he outfitted his squad only with classes that could shoot twice in a turn, he'd max out at 72 shots. This would limit him to Assault and Heavy, as Sniper's Double Tap requires a hit to take the second shot, and Support does not have the ability to fire twice. A situation in which a team of all Heavies and Assault exists is somewhat unlikely...a situation in which they go 6 rounds using their double shot ability over and over especially so...and a situation in which those abilities allow for a 95% hit chance is astronomically unlikely. Heavies are notoriously inaccurate, and Rapid Fire has an Aim penalty. Perhaps they were all using scopes!
With me so far? Good.
He goes on to say he's fighting against a basic floater. I'm assuming the floater is alone, since 6 turns of all misses by his crew is going to leave him floating in the breeze for return fire, and we've already established that his guys are going to be sitting on top of this floater to be getting the accuracy bonuses necessary to get anything close to the % chance he's talking about. The characters in question are likely quite high level, too, for that accuracy, which makes the presence of a floater even more confusing, as they phase out of the game fairly quickly. Is the floater itself returning fire? We are left in the dark.
He claims he didn't need to reload as "research makes reloading almost unnecessary", so he's far enough along to have researched extra ammunition. He claims he never reloaded, so this isn't an issue of save scumming duplicating the seed. This is 6 consecutive turns of a hysterically unlikely group makeup shooting at a fairly improbable foe and taking a statistically impossible number of shots in the process with an extraordinarily unlikely % chance of success, all while never running out of ammo against a foe that apparently never fires back. RNG comes up with crazy numbers? I believe it. Game is buggy? I believe it. This scenario? Has the whiff of fabulation, wouldn't you say?
There's a few possibilities here. One is that the game just went buggy, you're correct. That's always possible. That's a mighty specific and multi-faceted bug, but the game is notoriously buggy so we must keep an open mind. Two is that Holmes is a little crazy. He did, after all, imply the game was secretly bigoted because he got too many psionics of a particular nationality on his playthrough. Three, and by far the most likely, is he engaged in a little hyperbole, and being a defensive/argumentative chap decided to dig in and bluff his way through when challenged on it. Once you've gone down that road you cannot very well, 15 posts later, say "Oh hell I admit it, I was fibbing". You'd look like a tit. So he's taking the only road available to him, which is to pontificate at length about how the people questioning him are zealots working to protect the game, or too daft to "look behind the curtain". It stands to reason that a peek behind the curtain would reveal a master hyperbolist spinning fables, but that's neither here nor there.
And I'm really not doing this to re-open things with Holmes, we're all good here, I have no vested interest in hounding him over this. I don't really care. I just thought I'd point out why the accusation of fibbery existed in the first place. It wasn't vitriolic, at least not from me. It was just such an obvious, bald-faced fabrication I couldn't get past it at first.
