Confidence Interval wrote:mumra wrote:Crawl is a random game.
I think what these comments relate to is not the randomness of Crawl but the fact that the parameters of the random events can be changed (by the developers) - for example, the likelihood of OOD encounters on low levels could be increased. The game would stay random but the mean and distribution of occurrences of such encounters could shift, in this example making the game more difficult.
This is certainly true. But things can vary so wildly in Crawl, a sample based on a handful of games doesn't give you anything near an accurate mean or distribution. You have to take a very large sample to get an accurate picture.
Confidence Interval wrote:mumra wrote:The fact is that some players have had this happen to them a few times in a row, and they've decided to post here or on IRC...
We ought to start a thread about how the game has got easier and see if similar numbers of players join in to report easier games.
It would be a smaller thread; only because statistically, people are less likely to post on forums if they have nothing to complain about
Confidence Interval wrote:mumra wrote:1. You have rolled a dice 100 times. It has come up '6' every time. What is the probability of the next roll being another 6?
Highly likely. If a die comes up with a six every time I'd say it's very probably weighted, or has a six on every side, or something like that.
Incorrect. It was one of Xom's dice. The next roll was '0'.
Confidence Interval wrote:Using your thinking: if players reported finding the game more difficult, and it *had* actually become more difficult, we would still dismiss their reports. Based on player report alone, on what basis would we ever be able to identify whether the game's difficulty had changed?
Actually it's happened before. I can't remember the exact context; but at some point there were some reports about a particular RNG issue, and those reports were being dismissed using similar arguments. Eventually someone did look at the code and discover a bug.
Again we're talking probabilities: plucking numbers completely out of thin air, I'd say there's a 1% chance of truth in any given report of RNG bias. If 10 people make such reports for each released version of Crawl, then on average every 10th version will have an actual genuine issue.
The thing is, the OP started with "It would seem...". Nothing is out of place here. It's perfectly normal for
someone to perceive that the game has got harder after they start playing a new version. It's a logical connection to make - I've installed a new version, and had a run of bad games. Must be the new version! Crawl is a popular and hard enough game that we can expect this chain of circumstance to happen to more than one person. So you can't on that basis expect a developer to go hunting after a bug that probably doesn't exist.
Now if someone were to, say, set up a simulation of D:1-3 to tally the monsters seen there, and run that simulation 1,000 or 10,000 times ... and then do the same on 0.9, and show there was a significant change ... that might get someone's attention and maybe there would be something to fix. Or you could just pull that data from online play - and those are statistics that get looked at anyway, and I'm pretty sure it'll be noticed if there's a significant difference. Actually I'm
pretty sure this would have been noticed during the tournament, and by the top players, who have a generally good sense of what is and isn't realistic/fair for Crawl to throw at you. Personally, I've played a bunch of games on 0.10 and it seems to me things are just the same as ever, i.e. Crawl is vicious and unforgiving. I haven't seen any spawns quite like the worst that people are describing in this thread but I had my share of tough situations.
So "on player report alone" would have to be:
a) A known top player, or
b) An overwhelming number of individual reports (which we're not seeing), or
c) Statistical analysis as above, or
d) A player actually digging through the source and proving there's been a change
Until I saw one of those, I would be inclined to be slightly dismissive