I was reading that Online Casinos, and mobile gambling games have an outside certification process for RNG like Technical Systems Testing (TST), that go to great lengths to check that the Algorithm used in there application is legit. So Im wonder if there are other certifications for games such as MCOC, that test a true RNG.
Slot machines are required by law to be certified, and that certification includes validating that the RNG used to generate the results passes a specific set of tests for randomness. There are certification organizations that can perform this audit for them to comply. There are no such regulations for online games in general, so no one pays to have this done.
One problem is that it would not be trivial to do this even if a game company wanted to. Most online games these days use a lot of cloud-based services not under the control of the game operator which would make it difficult if not impossible to fully certify an online game. The reason is that it is basically worthless to certify an RNG in isolation, because how would you know that RNG was actually being used by the game, in every part of the game, and that the RNG wasn't changed or tampered with in any update of the game. Furthermore, the RNG alone only generates random numbers: how the numbers are used by the game to select random rewards is more important to determining if the rewards obey certain randomness criteria, and those parts of the game are also constantly in flux. A slot machine is a physical piece of hardware that can be certified as a whole. The RNG certification is one tiny piece of the entire certification process that works together.
To be fair, the description simply says charges are distributed “randomly.” It doesn’t say each value has an equal chance. One would think that’s what it means, but who knows?
The game team should expect more threads like this the more the game hinges on pRNG results for basic gameplay (random buffs, random charges, buff/node interactions, etc.). Here’s to hoping we get something other than a version of “who are you going to believe, Kabam or your lying eyes?”
Dr. Zola
I don't think this has anything directly to do with randomness. I think randomness can make testing harder, but I think this is more of a case where Kabam doesn't document their game well, and in fact in spite of their statements to the contrary has an aversion to documenting their game well. A suspicious mind might conclude that Kabam wants players to not know how the game works, so they can't know for sure if a behavior is a bug or not.
If I had access to the technical game data and the developers for Q&A, I'd write the documentation myself voluntarily because I believe game players deserve well documented games. But the sheer amount of time it takes to figure anything out in the game, combined with the fact that the game developers are willing to change things without notice, makes this a Herculean task for anyone to attempt without direct access to the game implementation.
Consider the fact that it is very likely no one, and I mean literally no player or developer, can actually give a *complete* answer to the question: how does the game determine how much damage you do? The game is four years old, and this is the most fundamental question you can ask about the game, and all answers to this question have caveats and unknown edge cases. I would bet if you asked even the systems developers, they'd have to look it up in the source code.
To be fair, the description simply says charges are distributed “randomly.” It doesn’t say each value has an equal chance. One would think that’s what it means, but who knows?
The game team should expect more threads like this the more the game hinges on pRNG results for basic gameplay (random buffs, random charges, buff/node interactions, etc.). Here’s to hoping we get something other than a version of “who are you going to believe, Kabam or your lying eyes?”
Dr. Zola
I don't think this has anything directly to do with randomness. I think randomness can make testing harder, but I think this is more of a case where Kabam doesn't document their game well, and in fact in spite of their statements to the contrary has an aversion to documenting their game well. A suspicious mind might conclude that Kabam wants players to not know how the game works, so they can't know for sure if a behavior is a bug or not.
If I had access to the technical game data and the developers for Q&A, I'd write the documentation myself voluntarily because I believe game players deserve well documented games. But the sheer amount of time it takes to figure anything out in the game, combined with the fact that the game developers are willing to change things without notice, makes this a Herculean task for anyone to attempt without direct access to the game implementation.
Consider the fact that it is very likely no one, and I mean literally no player or developer, can actually give a *complete* answer to the question: how does the game determine how much damage you do? The game is four years old, and this is the most fundamental question you can ask about the game, and all answers to this question have caveats and unknown edge cases. I would bet if you asked even the systems developers, they'd have to look it up in the source code.
That's crazy.
It is crazy.
One could also take that final point of yours and posit that becausethey aren’t entirely sure how something will work in game, the designers lean on hazy language to provide wiggle room.
I don’t really think that’s the case, but strange interactions between champs and nodes makes me wonder sometimes. The game is over 4 years old, there’s potentially new code on old code on older code and new coders writing on old coders’ code. It wouldn’t be unthinkable for stray bits to still be hanging around doing weird things. Happens in complex modeling all the time if you aren’t careful.
Ultimately, it would be nice to have a mod on periodically with some coding expertise who was willing to shed insight on questions like this one.
Random as it applies to Sabretooth just makes me think you can’t choose his persistent charges and you’ll never be aware of what it is. With Mephisto he starts with 3 charges plus one for any KOs he had. Corvus starts with zero and goes up based on completed missions. Morningstar gets them based on sig, and her L3 mechanic. Heimdall gets them based on how many buffs he ended the match with. Sabretooth? You will never know. Sure you can guess but there’s no indicator as to what he will start out with.
In my experience with my 5/65 is he does get 3 the majority of the time. My guess based on my own personal experience was 50% - 3, 35% - 4, 10% - 5, and 5% - 6. Looks as though you’re roughly around the same mark as me. Kabam is infamous for its vague and ambiguous descriptions. Unless otherwise stated it should be believed that all charges between 3-6 are equally distributed. I mean, supposedly it’s the same when it comes to crystals. It’s not stated in the crystal’s description but we are told to believe it’s an equal chance for each champ.
I don’t think a rundown would be effective because they would have to preface everything with, “As far as we understand, as of today...” and end with “subject to change, YMMV”.
'RNG' Biggest lie sold in this game. It is rigged. If there was same chance to get any champion why have i got only one champion released after blade. And i have opened over 30
Well, we don't know what the background calculations they use are aka the formulas.
However, the post is flawed because it never actually gives a percentage it is supposed to occur... just says random. That random number does not automatically equal 100% or any separated parts of it.
The only way you could know if the numbers were accurate is to have the number the buff is supposed to be generated by, test it a large number of times to even out the ratio to account for rng, and then it would still only be speculative if it was right or wrong since (like coin flips) presumably it could continue on ad infinitum and get different numbers.
Really need Kabam's internal formula to know for sure.
Kabam needs to clarify that it is 'random', in that it is not possible to predict beforehand whether you get 3, 4, 5 or 6. However Kabam also has to clarify that the weightage to each, or the probability in rolling each number, is different. The tested results bear striking similarity to what we'd expect - 6 being the best has the lowest chance. But the phrasing by kabam is ambiguous and on a plain reading would lead one to infer that it is a 25% chance for each.
More worryingly, if this is 'random' to Kabam, what else in the game is said to be 'random' but actually involves probabilities of different weightages - drop rates for specific champs, class-specific crystals?
One could also take that final point of yours and posit that becausethey aren’t entirely sure how something will work in game, the designers lean on hazy language to provide wiggle room.
I don’t really think that’s the case, but strange interactions between champs and nodes makes me wonder sometimes. The game is over 4 years old, there’s potentially new code on old code on older code and new coders writing on old coders’ code. It wouldn’t be unthinkable for stray bits to still be hanging around doing weird things. Happens in complex modeling all the time if you aren’t careful.
Ultimately, it would be nice to have a mod on periodically with some coding expertise who was willing to shed insight on questions like this one.
Dr. Zola
I remember reading something Miike posted about on a topic similar to this thread shortly after I joined the forum. I wanna say the topic was champion attributes, the post was very long with great explanations of coding mechanics. Whatever that post was it’s clear from this thread the community would respond well to forum moderators sharing insight on how developers design/code certain aspects of MCOC.
Kabam needs to clarify that it is 'random', in that it is not possible to predict beforehand whether you get 3, 4, 5 or 6. However Kabam also has to clarify that the weightage to each, or the probability in rolling each number, is different. The tested results bear striking similarity to what we'd expect - 6 being the best has the lowest chance. But the phrasing by kabam is ambiguous and on a plain reading would lead one to infer that it is a 25% chance for each.
More worryingly, if this is 'random' to Kabam, what else in the game is said to be 'random' but actually involves probabilities of different weightages - drop rates for specific champs, class-specific crystals?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything else that's "random" that doesn't have percentages attached to it.
Kabam needs to clarify that it is 'random', in that it is not possible to predict beforehand whether you get 3, 4, 5 or 6. However Kabam also has to clarify that the weightage to each, or the probability in rolling each number, is different. The tested results bear striking similarity to what we'd expect - 6 being the best has the lowest chance. But the phrasing by kabam is ambiguous and on a plain reading would lead one to infer that it is a 25% chance for each.
More worryingly, if this is 'random' to Kabam, what else in the game is said to be 'random' but actually involves probabilities of different weightages - drop rates for specific champs, class-specific crystals?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything else that's "random" that doesn't have percentages attached to it.
Domino's Critical bleed... I still have yet to figure out that ability. I've been working through LOL paths and its odd because some synergies seem to effect how often she triggers her critical bleed.
For example, when I bring ST, and DPX with Domino she triggers her Critical Bleed at least every other sp3. However, when I bring AA, Beast, and Colossus (36% increased special damage synergy) there is a noticeable difference in the amount of times she triggers critical bleed to the point where it is extremely difficult to solo any champ with 3 mil health. For some reason with the special damage synergies active she triggers critical bleeds much less.
This is odd because none of her synergies affect the rate at which she should be triggering critical bleeds. (And before anyone asks the question, yes I'm throwing sp3 when she is lucky).
Kabam didnt respond then, and they won't respond now. They will just ignore it.
Of course they will...they intentionally ignore all topics that are pointing out scam mechanics they just as intentionally encoded to the game. They are very well aware of them all in the end so what more is there to say?
They will on the other hand gladly participate in topics like "What champ you used to fight The Collector" if you are interested to know!
Kabam didnt respond then, and they won't respond now. They will just ignore it.
Of course they will...they intentionally ignore all topics that are pointing out scam mechanics they just as intentionally encoded to the game. They are very well aware of them all in the end so what more is there to say?
How is this a scam mechanic? I agree there isn't much for kabam to say in this thread. The OP seems to have done some solid data collection and he has his answer. The %s are what they are. Doesn't change anything.
Because I am bored at work I went to a Random ORGs website (hint hint) and set up the Random Number Generator to pick either 3,4,5,6. I did this 100x just like OP. The results are below, and seem more probable and not weighted.
There is no "scam mechanic" going on in this situation.
There is simply a lack of information. As aforementioned, the word usage in the description is technically correct albeit vague.
We are simply asking if Kabam could put things like this in champ descriptions to avoid any suspicion of foul play and/or to help players make better informed decisions.
Kabam needs to clarify that it is 'random', in that it is not possible to predict beforehand whether you get 3, 4, 5 or 6. However Kabam also has to clarify that the weightage to each, or the probability in rolling each number, is different. The tested results bear striking similarity to what we'd expect - 6 being the best has the lowest chance. But the phrasing by kabam is ambiguous and on a plain reading would lead one to infer that it is a 25% chance for each.
More worryingly, if this is 'random' to Kabam, what else in the game is said to be 'random' but actually involves probabilities of different weightages - drop rates for specific champs, class-specific crystals?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything else that's "random" that doesn't have percentages attached to it.
I posted a comment, but apparently it has to go through moderation... Not sure when that will happen. I had mentioned Domino's critical bleed.
There is no "scam mechanic" going on in this situation.
There is simply a lack of information. As aforementioned, the word usage in the description is technically correct albeit vague.
We are simply asking if Kabam could put things like this in champ descriptions to avoid any suspicion of foul play and/or to help players make better informed decisions.
How is it that all of those "lack of information" situations there are in MCOC actually always work against the players? Always put us to disadvantage.
Alright, maybe scam is a bit exaggerative, deception it is then. They know the numbers they are working with, the same numbers you got from your test, those numbers are not there by coincidence, they could be transparent and write it down straight, yet they choose not to. On purpose. It's as far from honest mistake as it can be.
Basically, I don't know anywhere where it tells me what that chance of her causing a critical bleed is. I have been working through paths in LOL with her and I am noticing that some synergies seem to effect the rate at which she causes critical bleeds. When I run her with her lucky/unlucky synergies (ST and DPX), she triggers her critical bleed significantly more than when I'm running mutant special damage team (AA, Beast, Colossus).
This makes no sense to me as none of her synergies directly effect the rate of her critical bleeds, but it is quite obvious to me that something is affecting it. When I run ST and DPX, I have no issues soloing SL (critical bleed seems to trigger roughly every other sp3), however, when I run AA, Beast, and Colossus, I struggle to get SL down because I am not triggering her critical bleeds (had it trigger twice in the entire fight).
Also before anyone says anything, yes I'm throwing sp3 when I'm lucky. On top of that, I have done practice fights many times in both RoL and LOL testing both sets of synergies and it's always the same. When I run mutant special damage team she does not trigger critical bleeds very often.
Because I am bored at work I went to a Random ORGs website (hint hint) and set up the Random Number Generator to pick either 3,4,5,6. I did this 100x just like OP. The results are below, and seem more probable and not weighted.
3 - 23
4 - 16
5 - 33
6 - 28
Problem is that the game mechanics don’t use a strict RNG, to my knowledge. Rather, it is pseudo-RNG, which can be quite different.
I’d be interested to know whether ST’s charges are supposed to be equally weighted. If so, makes a person wonder whether coding decisions produce similar disparities in other areas of the game.
Perfect opportunity for a well-informed mod to wade in and talk with us—thread is not inflammatory, has stayed in bounds and on topic and asks a fairly relevant question. No legitimate reason to close it down.
There is no "scam mechanic" going on in this situation.
There is simply a lack of information. As aforementioned, the word usage in the description is technically correct albeit vague.
We are simply asking if Kabam could put things like this in champ descriptions to avoid any suspicion of foul play and/or to help players make better informed decisions.
I disagree with this.
Random applies a random number between 3 to 6. I’m yet to see someone who has stated they get 5 or 6 charges comsistenly. If this were working as intended, you would be seeing a range of people stating they get mostly 6s and the other end of the spectrum.
It seems to me there is some sort of weighting association to the charges, so weighting is a lot higher on 3 and 4 compared to the higher end. I believe this is also the case with most crystals too.
Getting them to change the description will work in there favour of course. It’s not equally random.
Because I am bored at work I went to a Random ORGs website (hint hint) and set up the Random Number Generator to pick either 3,4,5,6. I did this 100x just like OP. The results are below, and seem more probable and not weighted.
3 - 23
4 - 16
5 - 33
6 - 28
Problem is that the game mechanics don’t use a strict RNG, to my knowledge. Rather, it is pseudo-RNG, which can be quite different.
I’d be interested to know whether ST’s charges are supposed to be equally weighted. If so, makes a person wonder whether coding decisions produce similar disparities in other areas of the game.
Perfect opportunity for a well-informed mod to wade in and talk with us—thread is not inflammatory, has stayed in bounds and on topic and asks a fairly relevant question. No legitimate reason to close it down.
Dr. Zola
Exactly, some clarification would be greatly appreciated. I tried a similar RNG experiment by assigning a number to all the champs in the 5* crystal and did 100+ generator pulls and there was an even distribution of top tier champs vs undesired champs, but in the game, it seems horribly weighted towards old or trash champs.
I did the same with the featured crystal (of which I still have not pulled a feature) yet the website generator did pop of a lot of the featured champs.
There is no "scam mechanic" going on in this situation.
There is simply a lack of information. As aforementioned, the word usage in the description is technically correct albeit vague.
We are simply asking if Kabam could put things like this in champ descriptions to avoid any suspicion of foul play and/or to help players make better informed decisions.
I disagree with this.
Random applies a random number between 3 to 6. I’m yet to see someone who has stated they get 5 or 6 charges comsistenly. If this were working as intended, you would be seeing a range of people stating they get mostly 6s and the other end of the spectrum.
It seems to me there is some sort of weighting association to the charges, so weighting is a lot higher on 3 and 4 compared to the higher end. I believe this is also the case with most crystals too.
Getting them to change the description will work in there favour of course. It’s not equally random.
Again, all it says is they are chosen at random.
Think of it like this:
In a jar, there are 4 different colors of marbles: blue, red, white, black.
There are 100 marbles in the jar: 50 blues, 30 reds, 15 whites, 5 blacks.
If you reach in and choose one at random, the randomness doesn't affect the percentage. You have a 5% chance to randomly pull a black marble.
Comments
Slot machines are required by law to be certified, and that certification includes validating that the RNG used to generate the results passes a specific set of tests for randomness. There are certification organizations that can perform this audit for them to comply. There are no such regulations for online games in general, so no one pays to have this done.
One problem is that it would not be trivial to do this even if a game company wanted to. Most online games these days use a lot of cloud-based services not under the control of the game operator which would make it difficult if not impossible to fully certify an online game. The reason is that it is basically worthless to certify an RNG in isolation, because how would you know that RNG was actually being used by the game, in every part of the game, and that the RNG wasn't changed or tampered with in any update of the game. Furthermore, the RNG alone only generates random numbers: how the numbers are used by the game to select random rewards is more important to determining if the rewards obey certain randomness criteria, and those parts of the game are also constantly in flux. A slot machine is a physical piece of hardware that can be certified as a whole. The RNG certification is one tiny piece of the entire certification process that works together.
I don't think this has anything directly to do with randomness. I think randomness can make testing harder, but I think this is more of a case where Kabam doesn't document their game well, and in fact in spite of their statements to the contrary has an aversion to documenting their game well. A suspicious mind might conclude that Kabam wants players to not know how the game works, so they can't know for sure if a behavior is a bug or not.
If I had access to the technical game data and the developers for Q&A, I'd write the documentation myself voluntarily because I believe game players deserve well documented games. But the sheer amount of time it takes to figure anything out in the game, combined with the fact that the game developers are willing to change things without notice, makes this a Herculean task for anyone to attempt without direct access to the game implementation.
Consider the fact that it is very likely no one, and I mean literally no player or developer, can actually give a *complete* answer to the question: how does the game determine how much damage you do? The game is four years old, and this is the most fundamental question you can ask about the game, and all answers to this question have caveats and unknown edge cases. I would bet if you asked even the systems developers, they'd have to look it up in the source code.
That's crazy.
Like I said, the randomness is technically correct; however, there should be a clarification in there to help players make better informed decisions.
It is crazy.
One could also take that final point of yours and posit that becausethey aren’t entirely sure how something will work in game, the designers lean on hazy language to provide wiggle room.
I don’t really think that’s the case, but strange interactions between champs and nodes makes me wonder sometimes. The game is over 4 years old, there’s potentially new code on old code on older code and new coders writing on old coders’ code. It wouldn’t be unthinkable for stray bits to still be hanging around doing weird things. Happens in complex modeling all the time if you aren’t careful.
Ultimately, it would be nice to have a mod on periodically with some coding expertise who was willing to shed insight on questions like this one.
Dr. Zola
@Kabam Lyra
Any insight?
In my experience with my 5/65 is he does get 3 the majority of the time. My guess based on my own personal experience was 50% - 3, 35% - 4, 10% - 5, and 5% - 6. Looks as though you’re roughly around the same mark as me. Kabam is infamous for its vague and ambiguous descriptions. Unless otherwise stated it should be believed that all charges between 3-6 are equally distributed. I mean, supposedly it’s the same when it comes to crystals. It’s not stated in the crystal’s description but we are told to believe it’s an equal chance for each champ.
However, the post is flawed because it never actually gives a percentage it is supposed to occur... just says random. That random number does not automatically equal 100% or any separated parts of it.
The only way you could know if the numbers were accurate is to have the number the buff is supposed to be generated by, test it a large number of times to even out the ratio to account for rng, and then it would still only be speculative if it was right or wrong since (like coin flips) presumably it could continue on ad infinitum and get different numbers.
Really need Kabam's internal formula to know for sure.
More worryingly, if this is 'random' to Kabam, what else in the game is said to be 'random' but actually involves probabilities of different weightages - drop rates for specific champs, class-specific crystals?
I remember reading something Miike posted about on a topic similar to this thread shortly after I joined the forum. I wanna say the topic was champion attributes, the post was very long with great explanations of coding mechanics. Whatever that post was it’s clear from this thread the community would respond well to forum moderators sharing insight on how developers design/code certain aspects of MCOC.
I also remember the transparency post. I hope they will shed some light on this.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything else that's "random" that doesn't have percentages attached to it.
@Hamin
Nice to see you are not ''Shrugging' anymore on this as you did on the post I did last month:
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/110485/sabretooth-charges#latest
Im getting same results still
Kabam didnt respond then, and they won't respond now. They will just ignore it.
Domino's Critical bleed... I still have yet to figure out that ability. I've been working through LOL paths and its odd because some synergies seem to effect how often she triggers her critical bleed.
For example, when I bring ST, and DPX with Domino she triggers her Critical Bleed at least every other sp3. However, when I bring AA, Beast, and Colossus (36% increased special damage synergy) there is a noticeable difference in the amount of times she triggers critical bleed to the point where it is extremely difficult to solo any champ with 3 mil health. For some reason with the special damage synergies active she triggers critical bleeds much less.
This is odd because none of her synergies affect the rate at which she should be triggering critical bleeds. (And before anyone asks the question, yes I'm throwing sp3 when she is lucky).
Of course they will...they intentionally ignore all topics that are pointing out scam mechanics they just as intentionally encoded to the game. They are very well aware of them all in the end so what more is there to say?
They will on the other hand gladly participate in topics like "What champ you used to fight The Collector" if you are interested to know!
How is this a scam mechanic? I agree there isn't much for kabam to say in this thread. The OP seems to have done some solid data collection and he has his answer. The %s are what they are. Doesn't change anything.
Yep. It was that post that piqued my curiosity and caused me to analyze it further.
3 - 23
4 - 16
5 - 33
6 - 28
There is simply a lack of information. As aforementioned, the word usage in the description is technically correct albeit vague.
We are simply asking if Kabam could put things like this in champ descriptions to avoid any suspicion of foul play and/or to help players make better informed decisions.
I posted a comment, but apparently it has to go through moderation... Not sure when that will happen. I had mentioned Domino's critical bleed.
How is it that all of those "lack of information" situations there are in MCOC actually always work against the players? Always put us to disadvantage.
Alright, maybe scam is a bit exaggerative, deception it is then. They know the numbers they are working with, the same numbers you got from your test, those numbers are not there by coincidence, they could be transparent and write it down straight, yet they choose not to. On purpose. It's as far from honest mistake as it can be.
This makes no sense to me as none of her synergies directly effect the rate of her critical bleeds, but it is quite obvious to me that something is affecting it. When I run ST and DPX, I have no issues soloing SL (critical bleed seems to trigger roughly every other sp3), however, when I run AA, Beast, and Colossus, I struggle to get SL down because I am not triggering her critical bleeds (had it trigger twice in the entire fight).
Also before anyone says anything, yes I'm throwing sp3 when I'm lucky. On top of that, I have done practice fights many times in both RoL and LOL testing both sets of synergies and it's always the same. When I run mutant special damage team she does not trigger critical bleeds very often.
Problem is that the game mechanics don’t use a strict RNG, to my knowledge. Rather, it is pseudo-RNG, which can be quite different.
I’d be interested to know whether ST’s charges are supposed to be equally weighted. If so, makes a person wonder whether coding decisions produce similar disparities in other areas of the game.
Perfect opportunity for a well-informed mod to wade in and talk with us—thread is not inflammatory, has stayed in bounds and on topic and asks a fairly relevant question. No legitimate reason to close it down.
Dr. Zola
I disagree with this.
Random applies a random number between 3 to 6. I’m yet to see someone who has stated they get 5 or 6 charges comsistenly. If this were working as intended, you would be seeing a range of people stating they get mostly 6s and the other end of the spectrum.
It seems to me there is some sort of weighting association to the charges, so weighting is a lot higher on 3 and 4 compared to the higher end. I believe this is also the case with most crystals too.
Getting them to change the description will work in there favour of course. It’s not equally random.
All outcomes are random, but some outcomes are more random than others.
I think that sums it up nicely, whether odds of gaining specific rank up materials, champs, ability procs or anything else is concerned.
Exactly, some clarification would be greatly appreciated. I tried a similar RNG experiment by assigning a number to all the champs in the 5* crystal and did 100+ generator pulls and there was an even distribution of top tier champs vs undesired champs, but in the game, it seems horribly weighted towards old or trash champs.
I did the same with the featured crystal (of which I still have not pulled a feature) yet the website generator did pop of a lot of the featured champs.
Again, all it says is they are chosen at random.
Think of it like this:
In a jar, there are 4 different colors of marbles: blue, red, white, black.
There are 100 marbles in the jar: 50 blues, 30 reds, 15 whites, 5 blacks.
If you reach in and choose one at random, the randomness doesn't affect the percentage. You have a 5% chance to randomly pull a black marble.