As an XCOM player I know the ways of RNGesus all too well

I usually trust the math without question until it happens to me. Sometimes it just feels SO bad when it happens that your brain is like "No, this can't happen! Not to me!"

This is such a good example of "true" randomness vs "perceived" randomness. Such a key cornerstone of general game design. Great video Tim!

Man, the internet is so cool. Your games made my childhood I never thought I'd get the chance to just hear you talk about the processes that went into them

I play old school runescape where many items are highly rare drops with odds of 1/500 or so on a boss. Many people will start to complain once they have 500 kills, feeling that they are "dry" and should have gotten the item by then. But the reality is that going up to 1500 kills, ~5% of players will still have not gotten that item. When you consider that hundreds of thousands of people have played this game over the years, 5% is a VERY large number of players. I personally prefer it compared to having some sort of upper limit or increased odds per kill, and I always feel better when I start looking at the math behind it.

Getting people to actually communicate what they really want versus what they say they want is a woeful errand indeed.

Reminds me of when I played Candyland for the first time as an adult and realized that the instant you shuffle the deck, the game is decided and the whole thing is just drawing cards and seeing who already won. Barely even a game there

I always hear incorrectly that he says "Hi everyone, it's your boy Tim". I'm pretty sure it's because of Jawbreakers guy with his "Hi everyone, it's your boy Zack".

Tim, all these talks have made me really regret my decision to leave the gaming industry (I worked as a sound designer). I've even gone so far as to re-download Wwise and FMOD in order to refresh my memory with those tools, and I'm thinking about updating my resume/portfolio. I don't know if I'll go through with it yet, but truly, thank you for re sparking my passion.

We just built our own blockchain algorhythm to have some control over randomness without making it absolute. This way you dont get 4 crits in a row with 10% crit etc. Because you can't balance for true randomness and no one really likes it. Having 95% chance to hit and missing 3 times in a row feels terrible for the player.

One thing I've learned about randomness and probability rolls is that the dice will do whatever they want until it reaches infinity rolls.

This really touches on a bigger issue in not only game design, but so many other jobs that involve different people needing things from each other within the company.

in the 80s, tetris used to be pure random but somewhere in the 90s they swapped to something the fans call a seven bag shuffle.

I love learning through this series. Thanks, Tim.

"Well, let's do math. I love math!" Reminds me of how Jonathan Blow is (apparently still) mad at Sid Meier for suggesting that RNG shouldn't be exact because it makes players feel bad. And you're right, it's absolutely a communication issue. I've spent a lot of time in my career translating between programmers and non-programmers and sometimes there wasn't even anything to translate; both sides wanted the exact same thing, but the language they were using was causing the other party to think the opposite. Some of my favorite moments involved programmers telling me something wasn't possible, and then watching management spin their wheels endlessly trying to get what they want rather than accepting they can't have it their way. Management behaving like children...I feel like there's a corollary in here somewhere 😂

This is hilarious. "I want randomness!" Tim: "Not this again..."

This is a great example of other departments not knowing what they want or not knowing how to express (logically) what they want. Interesting stories! I think a lot of times these happen naturally as an outcome of "changing their mind" when a team is developing a feature or set of features which are not always implemented perfectly on the first iteration. Adding to that, changes also tend to happen when the feature has been tested or played around with enough to know how it "feels" when played in "developer brain mode" versus "player brain mode" as a designer.

This was incredible haha, I absolutely love stories like this. The 1 in 8000 over a week was so interesting.

That song shuffling logic development was hilarious.

Excellent video, Tim! I run into this all the time at the studios I work with. The last part especially resonated a lot with me. I often describe it as "listen to their issues, but ignore their solutions", because most of the time those would be "patches" that would fix the symptom, but not the disease, and it would still cause problems in other parts of the game.