I hate the dice in this game!! This is how I know it’s messed up: I had 6 vs 1 last round, and lost. This round I had that exact scenario and lost again!

So I looked up a risk dice odds calculator. As an attacker, using 6 vs 1 the results based on 18,278,959 tries:

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Long-Term Battle Simulation

Attacker Won: 99.1% of the time (18106542 of 18278959 trials)

Average Conquering Army Size: 4

Defender Won: 0.9% of the time (172417 of 18278959 trials)

99.1% chance of winning! Yet I lost that exact thing 2x in a row!

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This kind of thing happens all the time and a group of us have been playing on Wargear for well over a year, hundreds of games in total.

Can someone please explain how the odds are calculated, because it's infuriating!

I only did a little over 100,000 trials, with attacker fighting to the last man. I did it in 10,000 increments and didn't sum them ...just watched so mine are estimates.

Attacker wins ~99.5 (which is even more often than with your trials)

Avg. Conguering Army size: 5.5 (this makes more sense)

So with a 99.5% chance of it happening, the probability of it happening twice in a row is 0.25% So it'll happen every 400 tries, right?  Quite unlikely, but in the long run it is actually likely - it must happen every once in a while on WG when you consider how many 6v1 battles there are. I'm always intrigued by the psychology of it all. You certainly notice it when it happens.

Occasionally dice are good, occasionally they are bad. Play 100 turns and you're supposed to get a situation that happens 1% of the time once. Play 200 and it's supposed to happen twice. And so on. 

Memory works in a funny way, it seems it's easier to remember the bad than the good. If you've played many games then I assume your dice has been according to the odds in total, (even if crazy in some games) or fairly close to it. I know mine has been. It just doesn't feel that way after a bad game.

You only have 1 public game played that we can look at, but you can do the same thing for your private games.

This: http://www.wargear.net/games/luck/591575 lists the distribution of your dice rolls (how many attacking dice rolled a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 and how many defense dice rolled a 1, 2, 3, etc.).

This: http://www.wargear.net/games/log/591575 shows the exact dice numbers that were rolled for every attack during a game.

In that game a total of 3,324 dice were rolled in 755 attacks. Even in a single game it isn't that weird to see more than one "unusual" result.

Note: if it is during a game with fog, your information will be limited. After it finishes you can see everything.

I question the dice almost every day my brother...I've heard of 14 vs 1...no luck and 34 to take 3.... Pratik and Andrnut

Like I said though, this is all too common in the last year of paying. And whats even more common is that there are certain players that I will lose against nearly every single roll (and they will walk right through me) within a game, but the others arent an issue. It “seems” that who you win or lose against is predetermined in whole or in part.

Can anyone speak to that?

Game link?

dcolum23 wrote: Like I said though, this is all too common in the last year of paying. And whats even more common is that there are certain players that I will lose against nearly every single roll (and they will walk right through me) within a game, but the others arent an issue. It “seems” that who you win or lose against is predetermined in whole or in part.

Can anyone speak to that?

With but one public game to your credit, it's impossible for us to 'speak to it' using your data, which BTW would be the most convincing of explanations, yes?   If you post links to a handful of private games where you think this is the case, there are a few here that would take a look I'm sure.

I can see your win/loss private game stats here:

http://www.wargear.net/players/info/dcolum23/Player%20Stats

It looks to me like you are doing fine - your average game size is 4.2 - so if everything were equal you would expect to win about 25% of your games (1 in 4) and you have won 37.5% of your games (1.5 in 4).

I'm sure that an evaluation of your existing games would make you feel more assuaged, but I think this question has been asked and answered (I understand that it wasn't answered to your satisfaction, but it was answered).   See Litotes answer above

The 5 people who are answering your questions would know if there was a dice bias, and without wanting to say so flat out (because it'll feel to you like you're being ignored) I think they'd all put money on the fact that there is no bias.  They have a combined total of 22653 games played, so they should know. 

MB is one of the highest ranked players on this site, bar none, and he already admitted that he's seen the same luck (and much worse) as all of us have.  If dice were biased, they would be biased in the favor of these 5 guys, and they're all saying:   "It certainly feels like it sometimes, but......"

The reason why you're seeing this is not because of a dice bias, it's because of the difficulty for humans to perceive the probability of real life events objectively.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/02/the_improbability_principle_rare_events_and_coincidences_happen_all_the.html

Read just about anything by the father of behavioral economics:  Daniel Kahnemann ("Thinking Fast and Slow")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglect_of_probability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Just my two pennies....

I appreciate it guys, really.

I must mention that the fact that I've won just under half of my games isn't actually evidence that the dice results are realistic... it just means I've either played well enough with what I had or orchestrated worthwhile alliances.

There have been so many impossible losses that simply can't be ignored: 13v1 and losing? What are the chances of that actually happening in real life? Yet these rolls happen time and time again.

More to my other suspicion is that there are certain players that these sort of unbelievable rolls happen against all the time. How could that be if everything was random?

I still love this game, but there sure are some frustrations are seem far too consistent.

Feel free to post examples.. It still looks to me like you've only played a handful of games.

adding to the discussion: there have been multiple people over the years (a number of us on this thread have been here at WG since its inception) that have similarly complained about dice improbabilities. All of them have either a) left the site due to their perceptions or b) stuck it out and realized there was nothing untoward going on.

There actually happened to be a a couple users who provided data (at some point) that was sufficient enough that caused WG to switch to a different random number generator. We haven't had any real issues since switching to the current RNG. However, we do listen (as testified by serious and considered answers above) and if there were enough evidence to support an issue with the current RNG...

weathertop wrote:

There actually happened to be a a couple users who provided data (at some point) that was sufficient enough that caused WG to switch to a different random number generator. 

hmmm.... I don't remember that. Maybe vaguely, but not really. Not doubting you -  

Amidon37 wrote:

weathertop wrote:

There actually happened to be a a couple users who provided data (at some point) that was sufficient enough that caused WG to switch to a different random number generator. 

hmmm.... I don't remember that. Maybe vaguely, but not really. Not doubting you -  

 

Yeah - With my memory such as it is - I recall tom making a switch.

I think I first saw this here on wargear, but if anyone hasn't yet seen the DiceOMatic, you need to check this thing out:

>To generate the die rolls, I have used Math.random, Random.org and other sources, but have always received numerous complaints that the dice are not random enough. Some players have put more effort into statistical analysis of the rolls than they put into their doctoral dissertation.

So this guy built a machine that actually rolls dice and then uses computer image processing to read the rolls.

>There is no doubt that I will still receive complaints about the rolls, but now I can honestly say I have done all that I can possibly do: the rolls you get are exactly as random as those you would get throwing by hand. As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice. Tangible revenge.

http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic

I did a search because I remembered an old forum post.  Tom would have to confirm if that RNG has changed since....

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/167p1/Ive_seen_enoughthe_RandomLuck_Talk

M57 wrote:

Feel free to post examples.. It still looks to me like you've only played a handful of games.

I've played 60 to be exact, 59 of them have been private games. How would you like me to give examples.

Here's one: literally just now my buddy rolled 15 v 3. Once he was down to 2 men left, how many did the defender have? 3! Not a single defender lost ... that, my friends, is practically impossible. I get that it *could* happen, but it happens all the time ... and multiple cases of this within the same game. 

>How would you like me to give examples.

I think they want a link to the game.  Just copy the URL.

dcolum23 wrote:

I've played 60 to be exact, 59 of them have been private games. How would you like me to give examples.

Yeah - links to the games