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Discussions RISK Global Domination Feature Requests
Implemented

New Dice Algorithm / True dice rolls

Game does not use true dice roll probabilities. Many, many times I've had 97-99% chance to win and dont.


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Professional stochastic modeler here; this game is a complete sham and an utter waste of everyone’s time. The original comment on 97-98% probabilities becoming 50/50 is at the heart of the issue. Sure, the rolls might be evenly distributed but the NBA would blush at the level of “fixing,” going on. Played 100+ games over the last week, and was both the beneficiary and the victim of this incredible design flaw. The app version of the game is like bowling with the bumpers randomly going up and down; DON’T BOTHER! YOU HAVE YOUR WHOLE LIFE TO LIVE! Shame on SMG for failing to hear their customers for OVER TWO YEARS. Look forward to seeing them go under and hoping a competent developer gets the rights. You hear that SMG? You’re as valuable as a 20 on 1 blitz attack that yields 1:1. Useless, frustrating, but most of all, INCOMPETENT. PSA: joined this forum to say YOU HAVE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE TO LIVE!
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This game is the biggest cheating POS I have ever seen.  Any time you start doing REALLY WELL, you suddenly can't win a game.  Once this happens, you lose almost ever dice roll.  You get the worst positioning to start off the game.  Your automatic rolls take bad losses.  It is so frustrating.  What a way for the algorithms to cheat good players.  Piece of crap game!  I've wasted too many hours to become an expert to continuously be screwed over time and time again.

Kevin, I have to agree with Peter.  What you said doesn't make any sense.

"Have your ever noticed how in your dice roll statistics that the percentages are flat across the board??? This proves that the dice rolling is flawed."


If anything, your observation is evidence for the exact opposite conclusion.  If you played games with real dice and kept stats on your rolls, you should expect to see that each individual roll (1,2,3,4,5 or 6) would happen about as much as any other.  As you play more games, you'd expect to see those percentages getting closer to each other.  This is because rolling a 1 is no more or less probable than rolling any other number, that is, every individual roll is equally probable.

If after many games you noticed you rolled ones (or any other roll) a few percentage points more or less than any other roll, that would be evidence that the dice rolling scheme isn't true to real dice.

If you don't believe me get out some real dice, roll them about 600 times (or get 600 dice and roll them all together one time, ha!) and keep track of how many times you rolled each number.  You'll see that you roll each number roughly the same number of times as any other number.  If you then calculate what percentage of rolls come from each number, you'll see that the percentages are very close to one another, and these %s get closer to each other as the number of rolls grows large.

Kevin, Im not one to advocate SMGs methods for dice, however what you explained pretty much invalidates what I have learned 9 years of university study in mathematics, probability, statistics, and a topic called "stochastic processes. First off, dice rolls are independent events. That being said, the likelihood of rolling any specific number on one die is equally likely. The issue isnt the RNG, which if Im correct, is the Merseinne Twister, the same one I use in Monte Carlo type simuations in my work.There may be some cognitive belief that the rolls give apparent short term patterns, however its a sure bet that the more rolls are made, the more the likelihood is a Uniform Distribution i.e. evenly distributed in equal likelihood in what is known as the Law of Large Numbers. Ive played over 3k games and have noticed anomalies in Blitz Mode. This is because SMG doesn't use a truly realistic Markov Transition agorithm for Blitz. Now that being said SMG likes to conflate issues when people bring up dice rolls. Its not the RNG for each roll but the values of the matrix elements in the Transition matrix that they, human beings have assigned or "biased". For example lets say you are attacking with 10 armies on a country that has 3 armies. Several calculations involving RNGs take place. First the number of dice you choose as an attacker up to 3, is a human input. Then a "roll outcome is simulated. A random number is generated, and the outcome is determined depending if that number, evenly distributed between 1 and 0, is either greater or equal to the likelihood of the specific outcome. Cheaters and hackers that design their APIs have learned to adjust outcomes in their favor by altering the likelihoods of outcomes in their favor. This is done by biasing the specific values for the Transition Matrix elements that govern the specific situation. In a true Markov process, or chain, the next outcome only depends on the present state, and not history. SMG in my opinion hasn't done their due diligence in preventing hacking APIs that adjust Transition matrix element values, or have designed a purposly flawed Transition Matrix apart from realistic board condition. The moral of the story is players must be cognizant of Blitz Mode anomalies not born from the RNG, but the algorithm that depends on it. If the TM is truely realistic then 10 v 3 should win more than what Blitz outcomes show in the long run. They need to document their TM element values are validated say with 100 billion dice rolls for each outcome possibility. A parallel processing computer can do that nicely. The other option would be for them to put yhe algorithm up on the cloud, but that would cost them, and eventually the player, more money.since compute time isnt free. Keep pressing these people to produce a more realistic Transition Matrix. If you see me out there, my handle is SMG Blows. Im tired of the Blitz Mode failures to reality.
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Have your ever noticed how in your dice roll statistics that the percentages are flat across the board??? This proves that the dice rolling is flawed. There should be a different percentage for each one!! this means in order to achieve this flat distribution that dice rolls depend on the previous rolls, increasing the probability for dice rolls that haven't occurred as much,which is not based on reality at all! So an example is basically if you roll bunch of 4,s, 5's and 6's the PRNG is going to make 1-3 more likely, ergo you roll 12 dice against 2 and you lose.
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Jukka, I completely agree. I had the goal of getting to master and would just play a few games per day, often one or two at my lunch break (depending on how long the first one took and I averaged about 30 minutes). Anyways, after getting to Expert, I kind of just stopped playing because it wasn't fun working against the faulty statistics. And regardless of how the math works out (I haven't tested it yet, but it's on my to do list), we've all played the "real" board game and there's obviously something to the complaints when we tell SMG that the board game was more fun. The dice rolls needs a serious fix.

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I used to like to this game, but deleted all Apps just because these random probabilities made me more angry than happy about gaming. I used to quit every time probabilities were completely arbitrary, then I stopped playing the game. The one start review on Apple store from me. A small revenge for taking my euros.

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I completely agree, the rng in this game is really bad. They need to make it less rng, and more about the number of troops you have. I've had a situation where I 15 and my opponent had 16 and He took my territory without taking a single hitpoint! This game having rankings is just kind of a joke at this point, there is way to much rng.

Did the recent soft-update change the dice back to its old method? I noticed some lag on big blitz battles. It used to do that years ago.

Untrue probabilities really piss off in this game.


You have true probabilities or your are tinkering probabilities.


So how you decide whom to favor? Game looks very biased.

Eh... If your rank actually falls back down to novice you should be playing novices and beginners. The point of ranks is to find others of similar skill. Otherwise, it's a huge waste of time and no fun. And why would a grandmaster want to play games where coming in 2nd place will knock away a lot of points and winning give next to nothing?

People who won't play beginners are gutless. I was Master, then went down to Novice mainly due to bad luck, Blitz fails, collusion. Dont be a gutless pussy and knock off beginners before the game starts. You never know if they are a former Master working back up
Yeah It was always absurd to hear the accusations of bias in favor of or against just about every possible segment of the player base. Thanks for the reply. I am using a RNG for my “true dice” simulator. I still use an rng in my implementation of Ryan’s algorithm just not as often and it is noticeablely different from the true dice version in general being more favorable to the underdog then the true dice simulator. The RNG I use is just the one in java’s java.util.Random (specifically Random.nextInt()) perhaps not particularly well regarded, I actually don’t know, but since I use it across both simulators I think it should provide some insight.

Hi SectaOne,


pelase understand that some of the questions, properly and detailed answered, would help potential cheaters and hackers and therefore are under wraps.

"First does SMG use the algorithm Ryan described on reddit to generate the battle outcomes?"

This is one of them, but Ryan is not entirely wrong. No detawils here, however, we are glad that FINALLY someone confirmed we don't favor anyone and that the rules are the same for all, AI and Human, Novice and Expert, Freebie and Premium user.

"Third what specifically are you referring to when you say you are within 0.X percent?"

When we tested our algo against

http://riskodds.com/index.php

and a test system written here,

our outcomes in 10.000, 100.000 and more battles were always less then 1% off the value there (fluctuating in both directions), referring to WHO WINS.
Troop losses were within 5% +/- of those there.

One problem we found with using ANY RNG system, no matter which (tried several industry standard ones) is that users experience unlikely cases more often than they would expect in real life. It's partially Voodoo.

Best,

Ivan

Hi Ivan thank you very much for all the hard work you and everyone at SMG puts into the game. I have some questions that I hope you’ll take the time to answer. First does SMG use the algorithm Ryan described on reddit to generate the battle outcomes? Second are outcomes generated by the client instead of the server? Third what specifically are you referring to when you say you are within 0.X percent? Is that win probability, troops remaining or something else? Thanks again for the hard work Risk is my favorite game and I appreciate all the hard work that goes into the app.
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