dice odds?

[Cardinalsrule]

maybe someone who's got some experience in statistics can answer these questions?

What are the odds of losing all your troops when you are attacking 6 against 1?

5 against 1?

4 against 1?

 

[WidowMakers]

Here is the wiki page for Risk odds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(game)

But here is a quick rundown
Roll #1 - Attacker (6) vs 1 = 34.03% of attacker loses 1
Roll #2 - Attacker (5) vs 1 = 34.03% of attacker loses 1
Roll #3 - Attacker (4) vs 1 = 34.03% of attacker loses 1
Roll #4 - Attacker (3) vs 1 = 42.13% of attacker loses 1
Roll #5 - Attacker (2) vs 1 = 58.33% of attacker loses 1

So prob of 6v1 and losing until 1v1 exists is : .3403*.3403*.3403*.4213*.5833 = 0.00968 = 0.968% or approx 1 in 100

 

[Eunoia]

You just made me feel very unlucky. haha 6v1 losses has happened to me three time. 7v2 has duped me a couple times too.

 

[Cardinalsrule]

Thanks wids, interesting page.

so what are the F***ing odds of losing a 6 on 1, a 5 on 1, and 2 four on ones in four consecutive turns, like happened to me yesterday? (and then losing 10 in a row on a 13 v 4 attack the next day)

The amount of completely unlikely losses that I've experienced this week REALLY has me doubting the 'randomness' of the dice program currently.

 

[KungFuDuet]

Getting this line - I always have to tell people to read an article

http://www.majorcommand.com/wiki/Nature_of_Dice_Luck_and_Streaks

Go on, read it.

 

[Cardinalsrule]

yeah, I've read it before, KFD. So you're telling me that I've had good dice in the odds of thousands to one against the occurrance that I just forgot about? Don't think so.


Edit: I've literally read the entire wiki, top to bottom, and I believe that the psychology of that section is true, but in this case it doesn't hold water. To balance out this, I'd have to do something like attack a 20 with a 3 and win. Doubt I'd forget that.

 

[Robinette]

you're missing the point... it DOES balance out.. you see, your opponent received insanely great results in those turns... lol...

 

[hellrise]

I believe there is a bug these days - I have been losing troops consecutively in games, 9 to 1, 6 to 1, all in a row. If anybody interested, I can list the games. There must be a bug going around affecting some...

 

[hellrise]

you're missing the point... It does balance out.. You see, your opponent received insanely great results in those turns... Lol...

lol

 

[Chilly]

you're missing the point... it DOES balance out.. you see, your opponent received insanely great results in those turns... lol...

Actually. Tongue in cheek aside. Since it is a zero-sum game and there is no "house", her point is totally valid. Except that player most likely wasn't there to note it.

I've intentionally made note a few times in my head when I've been ridiculously lucky to try and temper the frustration when it goes the other way.

That wiki page is good...but check out the following link for a really good Risk Dice Calculator: http://www.dandrake.com/risk.html

 

[MajorMajor]

I believe there is a bug these days - I have been losing troops consecutively in games, 9 to 1, 6 to 1, all in a row. If anybody interested, I can list the games. There must be a bug going around affecting some...

damn! I just wrote about a billion words on dice probabilities and how majorcommand's system has certainly some sort of bias that exaggerates outcomes either way, but I accidentally closed the browser before hitting "post". (what are the odds? )

I'm not gonna rewrite the whole thing, but suffice to say that I've been calculating the odds of certain battles that I'm part of (either winning or losing, so no loser's hindsight bias here), and the number of extremely rare outcomes have been way more often than they statistically should. just during the last week I saw a 15k:1 and a 16k:1 that I was part of. losing a 6x1, for instance, should happen once out of every 103 times - I know I haven't seen 103 6x1s, but I've probably seen that happen at least half a dozen times.

I don't know if it's the algorithm used to calculate the dice, or how attacking and defending dice are paired, or a temporal component in the formula... but I'm convinced that exacerbated outcomes happen way more often than they should - in a way that's often annoying.

 

[Atlas-shrugged]

I am actually at the point where I will not come back here because the dice compared to other more established site is turning me away.This site has great potential except the dice are way off.

 

[Tapeworm]

The psychological power of negative results is stunning to behold. As the wiki article states, each roll is independent of the next. You remember the bad ones more than the good ones. This game can be very frustrating (and exciting) but I would counsel anyone on a bad streak to keep rolling dice. I'm not talking about a single game or assault in particular, but keep rolling in general. And sit up and take notice when things go your way. When that happens, feel sorry for the guy who just got his ass kicked and is thinking about screaming bloody murder. He used to be you.

 

[KungFuDuet]

The psychological power of negative results is stunning to behold. As the wiki article states, each roll is independent of the next. You remember the bad ones more than the good ones. This game can be very frustrating (and exciting) but I would counsel anyone on a bad streak to keep rolling dice. I'm not talking about a single game or assault in particular, but keep rolling in general. And sit up and take notice when things go your way. When that happens, feel sorry for the guy who just got his ass kicked and is thinking about screaming bloody murder. He used to be you.

Agreed! I just won a 8v10 with 4 troops surviving.

 

[Shepherd]

I am actually at the point where I will not come back here because the dice compared to other more established site is turning me away.This site has great potential except the dice are way off.

I used to be a mod at the most established of the other sites, and the most common complaint was about dice. Well, actually cheating may have been the most common complaint, but dice were right up there. Bad luck can sting anybody at every site and there's little we can do about (unless you play fixed force); if we can continue to keep the cheaters and trolls down to a minimum I feel we've got a big advantage over the "more established" sites.

 

[Atlas-shrugged]

I used to be a mod at the most established of the other sites, and the most common complaint was about dice. Well, actually cheating may have been the most common complaint, but dice were right up there. Bad luck can sting anybody at every site and there's little we can do about (unless you play fixed force); if we can continue to keep the cheaters and trolls down to a minimum I feel we've got a big advantage over the "more established" sites.

No I do not agree , and I have seen the forums there for years, they do not have the complaints of dice odds, the one thing I NOTICED IS THEY HAVE LARGE AMOUNTS OF TROOPS ALLOWED AND THE THING HIT ME RIGHT OFF HOW IT WAS DIFFERENT THERE, with the way the dice odds work, I like it better, but was actually turned on by a person there talking in the forum 2 years ago about this place being a good new site to try.
But Good luck , I will play here only occasionally without membership on off hours in realtime .



I also realized now which is the next day that I never complained or saw a reason to about this issue there, that is why I cannot just see it your way , been here since you started and thought the same thing then almost 2 years ago.

 

[MajorMajor]

about the "psychological power of negative results", there are 2 things to be said:

1. like I said, I notice how frequent unlikely rolls are even when attacking. the system seems to be bipolar, somehow.

2. attacking with a 2x10 happens much, much less often than 10x2. so you won't remember winning a 2x10, simply because you won't try it. losing a 10x2, however, you definitely remember. when you're on the defending side of a 10x2 and you get lucky, you often don't even realize it, unless you roll down the record and count how many units the attacking side had on that territory on that particular round. so it's perfectly natural that people pay more attention to negative unlikely rolls rather than positive ones.

I stick to my claim: some component of the dice randomizer tends to generate extremely unlikely outcomes more often than they should statistically happen. the FAQ on dice rolls is perfectly true: rolling a 6 just after having rolled another 6 is just as likely as any other time. but you can't interpret that idea as that rolling 2 straight 6s is just as likely as rolling one 6. it's not.

if you toss a coin 10 times, you might get 5/5, 7/3 or even, twice out of every 1024 times you do it, 10/0 (or 0/10). but geometric progression of probablities means that, if you toss a coin 100,000,000 times, it's practically impossible to get 100,000,000 of any side. you'd have to be absurdly lucky to get anything close to 51% to either side.

I'm not gonna mention specific plays I've had, because any one of them could happen in real life, however unlikely. but having played 700+ rounds, I'm firmly convinced that battle outcomes in majorcommand don't correspond to real-life dice rolls.

that can be really frustrating at times. a lot of people might have that impression due to "loser's bias", but, like I said, I've actually been keeping track of the outcomes of my battles and their probabilities. I can't pinpoint the problem without seeing the algorithms used, but it's definitely there. maybe even on purpose - who knows. sort of like removing cards 2-7 of the deck in a poker game to spice things up a little, to make exciting hands more likely.

I'll keep enjoying MajCom (which is really great after all - good work, guys), with the extreme lucks and bad lucks you get. some people might even find that exciting - you know, the faulty odds inserting twists here and there in the games. but that's gonna keep bugging me - probably because of item # 2 above: you're much less likely to try wild, unlikely attacks than certain ones, and much less likely to realize you just defended a 10x1 than being frustrated by losing a 10x1 attack - so the excitement part of having dice that exaggerate either way tends to cause much more of an impression on the losing side.

 

[Shepherd]

First, to Atlas. Over at Conk (we may as well name it, or perhaps you're talking about a different site) if you do a forum search of "dice" you get 29,940 results. A thread that was begun on March 15 is already five pages long, and there are other threads started in the past few weeks as well. At that site you can call up your dice history, yet there are still thousands of posts by folks unhappy with their luck.

I don't know what Conk's current system is, but i believe they used to pull their dice rolls from a pre-generated list (of many thousands of results) rather than generating random numbers each time an attack is made. Whenever I got bad dice, a voice inside me instantly blamed the site because that list of dice must be weighted against the attacker. I decided that the list was biased against 3-1 rolls - which I remember losing a lot - but possibly favorable toward 2-1 rolls.

Coming over here, I feel the exact same way: the odds say I should win my 3-1 rolls, but often I don't. There's either something wrong with the server, or there's something wrong with my expectations. So how often do I lose 3-1 rolls? Is it close to 1/3, which is what it should be? Probably, but I don't tend to remember the 3-1s that I win; I expected to win those, so they didn't phase me.

As far as rolls happening here that wouldn't happen in real life, well, yes they could happen in real life. A run of bad luck - and good luck - can strike in any game or dice or cards. It's rare, but it happens. But when you start playing games on-line, in which the normal length of a game is compressed and you can have dozens of games going at once, you increase the odds of a good or bad streak because you're playing so many more games, and thus rolling the "dice" much more often. I bet if you sat down with friends and played 15 games of Risk over the next week, you'd see a few examples of extreme luck.

It is my understanding that the numbers generated by the server here are each generated independently. The server doesn't decide first who is going to win or lose and then assign a number, it generates a random number between one and six for each of the troops in play - up to three independent numbers for the attacker, up to two for the defender. The exact same line of script is being run for the attacking troops' numbers as for the defending troops' numbers. Let me repeat that: the system for generating the attacking dice is the same as that generating the defending dice. If anyone is suggesting that the "dice" systematically favor the defender, what they're saying is that either (1) we have programmed the server to favor the defender, or that (2) the server has a mind of its own and has decided it wants to help out the defender. Since the second option is ludicrous, that leaves only the first: that we want the attacker to lose. But why would we do this? Wouldn't it actually make more sense for us to tweak the server so that the attacker has an unfair advantage, since that's what our users see and we want to make our users feel successful and keep on playing?

 

[mark]

(2) the server has a mind of its own and has decided it wants to help out the defender. Since the second option is ludicrous,

I, for one, welcome our dice server overlords.

 

[Robinette]

It was once suggested to have a different metric for results that would reduce streaks... not eliminate them, but REDUCE them... It was soundly rejected in favor of the Fixed Force option, which has NO luck at all. I thought it would be best to have all 3, but others think it should be just all or nothing. The reduced streaks was essentially a dice flip, where streaks can still occur, but are reduced by a significant amount. Sounds like there would be many people that would be happier with this, but there were strong feelings against it. Again, it wouldn't eliminate streaks, but it would be closer to what people EXPECT from random.