RNG - my pet peeve

I admit that I get upset about my luck pulling champs.

I admit I like to come into the forums to complain because misery loves company.

I understand the people who say "It's RNG, man..."

Except... RNG was developed to "simulate" luck. It is not the same thing as luck.

Why do I say simulate? Because the program generates the seed that generates the random number. When I'm playing cards or flipping a coin or doing anything else, there isn't a seed generated before I flip the coin. Fate is in control 100% of the time.

Do we know how the game generates the seed? No. If we did, we could 'game' the system.

Don't slot machines fairly use RNG? Yes. But their RNG is regulated by the government because it's gambling.

Have there ever been cases where RNG was found to be defective? There have been a few slot machine companies that have been sued because their RNG favored the house (and in the case of gambling, laws and regulations set the odds the house can have).

Why do game developers actively fight against being classified as gambling (even though when you're dropping Odin's to pull champs you're gambling)? Because then there would be regulations that would protect us predators. (This always casts a shadow over companies that hide behind RNG as the reason your rewards suck.)

Dismissing people's beefs just just saying "It's RNG, get over it" isn't a value added comment.

Comments

DNA3000

MMCskippy wrote: »

Do we know how the game generates the seed? No. If we did, we could 'game' the system.

Technically true, but not in practice. In practice, I know for a fact that certain games periodically reseed by clock LSB. But that doesn't really give me any practical way to reverse the RNG sequence.

Don't slot machines fairly use RNG? Yes. But their RNG is regulated by the government because it's gambling.

Have there ever been cases where RNG was found to be defective? There have been a few slot machine companies that have been sued because their RNG favored the house (and in the case of gambling, laws and regulations set the odds the house can have).

Never to my knowledge, at least not where the facts were on their side. There have been some cases where well placed engineers have rigged slot machines to pay off under certain specific conditions, so they could use that knowledge to automatically win lots of money from the casinos. And there have been cases brought against slot machine manufacturers over "deceptive" RNG that were later dismissed or lost (because they were found to not be). Sometimes RNGs have failed certification, but always on very esoteric grounds that are unlikely to affect normal play. That's the gaming industry erring on the side of extreme caution.

In fact the vast majority of computer games use one of a couple RNGs that are well studied. Most are variations on LSRs (like Mersenne Twister and its variations) or LCGs (which I think Visual C++ tends to use). Although they are not cryptographically secure, they generate sufficient randomness for something like a video game (to wit: they generate sufficiently random looking distributions of values, and to the extent that they contain any weaknesses they are potentially predictable under certain extreme conditions which can only help the player, not work against them).

Why do game developers actively fight against being classified as gambling (even though when you're dropping Odin's to pull champs you're gambling)? Because then there would be regulations that would protect us predators. (This always casts a shadow over companies that hide behind RNG as the reason your rewards suck.)

That's a completely different subject. Game companies don't actively fight against being regulated because there's some secret about randomly generated rewards they want to "hide behind." The way these work are extremely well known. In fact, the gaming industry (aka gambling industry) is itself highly regulated and they not only do not "hide behind" randomness, they explicitly *define* their industry in terms of randomness. Randomness is what differentiates most forms of regulated gambling from so called "games of skill" which have completely different rules governing them.

In fact virtually nothing about how MCOC crystals work would be illegal if MCOC was classified as gambling under US law. The only change they would have to make is a change to the visual spinner, which doesn't exactly match the statistical odds of the crystals themselves. They could completely eliminate spinning or make the spinning fast enough to completely blur the visible results, or generate the visual elements in the spinner with the same random generator used for the crystals, and that issue would disappear.

The primary reason game companies do not want their games defined as gambling under the law is almost certainly because almost all jurisdictions place age restrictions on gambling, as well as advertising and marketing restrictions. Which is again a separate issue, but not something you can likely point to as a problem if you're an adult.

Helicopter_dugdugdug

“In fact virtually nothing about how MCOC crystals work would be illegal if MCOC....”

U have no inside knowledge of their RNG, How can u make such claims?

DNA3000

Helicopter_dugdugdug wrote: »

“In fact virtually nothing about how MCOC crystals work would be illegal if MCOC....”

U have no inside knowledge of their RNG, How can u make such claims?

When human beings converse, they generally make reasonable assumptions that are considered reasonable in the context of that discussion. When the OP made statements about slot machines function without demonstrating first hand expertise and direct knowledge of how they work, then proceeded to compare them in certain ways to how MCOC crystals work, I felt it was reasonable to assume, for the sake of condensed discussion, that when talking about gambling which the OP directly compared to MCOC crystals, that the crystals actually worked in a manner similar to how he was implying they did.