Why do people quit playing?

[anakayub]

As soon as I get get a new computer soon (my old one just broke, this is via phone), I'd very much like 2 watch your games. Ask most of the better players, and they will tell you like Gallifax: a lot comes more 2 skill, including risk management. I've lost games where luck was screwed favoring me, and won convincingly even when luck was screwing me over. Not that I'll convince you, but I'm with the view that how you deal with random probabilities is a significant skill in this game (some including Noy have pointed this out before).

[Doc Paterson]

Your arguments are terrible.

And yours are awesome!

my luck is considerably worse than the average person's.

since I have lots of experience from other strategy games it shouldn't be hard to apply it here.

I -can't-, because my bad luck with RNGs makes the game unplayable.

This effects me a lot more than it does you, as I tend to get drastically lower averages than other people

I do just fine with X-COM on any difficulty.

The average person should be able to compensate for the luck factor. I can't, so I want it gone. Period.

* * * * *

What they and I take issue is your last statement. What proof do you have that the game can be determined by a "coin toss?"

...A 50% chance to-hit is virtually a coin toss.

You said "a game can be determined by a coin toss." Funny that you'd be gambling the whole outcome of a game on a 50 percent chance. It's a bogus concept anyway, because you can't pinpoint any one thing that is the one-and-only decider of a win or loss. Even assuming that your supposition is right, it's foolish to balance your strategy on those kinds of odds.

The average person doesn't CARE about realism in a strategy game.

Guess what, bub: Wesnoth is as the devs want it to be. If the "average person" enjoys it, that's a bonus, but public opinion as such is not a guiding force in the development of the game.

[Fosprey]

I want to clarify that this thread is about why people quit. It really doesn't matter if people are right or wrong about the luck factor. People still quite because of it.

And gallifax is a wesnoth defender by itself, he knows he lost more games than 1% when he played better than his opponent, at least 10%, i saw games of him losing where luck screwed him, he says "i could have played better" wich is true but don't invalidate the point.

TOC top players stated that the game can be luck defined, ask JW or SUVOROV, I can even quote gallifax "3rd game was on sablestone delta. I choose dwarfs again and Mythological got undead. A matchup I really like:) Mythological did well to recruit 3 ghosts to make up for the bad terrain . Made it hard for me. At the end I got lucky and won the match."-"2nd game was a drakes mirror which I won with luck at the right times."

Also i can't find where is the TOC2 but i remember reading that any of the two finalist could have taken the win, it was just a matter of luck.
I asked around and HALF the top 10 of the ladder think a lot of games are decided by luck,

But i'm not complaining, if you want to have heavy luck in the game , that's fine, to everyone that complains like me, i suggest stop doing it and help me in my mod project in my signature to make a mod of wesnoth where luck is not an issue.

I personally talked to to most of recognized of good players, and they somehow accept some wins and loses are in the end definied by luck, but they are fine with it, since, and it's ture, a superior player can get from a 60 to 95% of the wins anyway, depending the player's skill difference. It seems that for devs that's enough, and i would say that if you played a best of 5, the winner will be the better player something like 90% or more.

In fact luck is not the major reason i decided to do the mod, i think i could live with the present luck weight, some people do, some don;t.

[Cainen]

You said "a game can be determined by a coin toss."

No, I didn't. I said that hit probabilities usually come down to a coin toss, and that's true - most people who are using the terrain intelligently will make it so, if not even worse than a coin toss.

Guess what, bub: Wesnoth is as the devs want it to be.

Then why bother even taking input at ALL? That approach is not necessarily a good one, either.

[Doc Paterson]

And gallifax is a wesnoth defender by itself, he knows he lost more games than 1% when he played better than his opponent, at least 10%,

What a talent you have to be better able to understand those matches than Gallifax.

I can even quote gallifax "3rd game was on sablestone delta. I choose dwarfs again and Mythological got undead. A matchup I really like:) Mythological did well to recruit 3 ghosts to make up for the bad terrain . Made it hard for me. At the end I got lucky and won the match."-"2nd game was a drakes mirror which I won with luck at the right times."

Which Gallifax do you find more credible, this "younger" gallifax, or our current Gallifax?
He's come a long way since then, and wins a lot more games against good players. In addition, the above is very obviously tempered with politeness towards his opponent. No one who actually watched those games (did you?) thought that it was "decided" by luck.

Also i can't find where is the TOC2 but i remember reading that any of the two finalist could have taken the win, it was just a matter of luck.

Gee, if "someone" said it, it must be true. I watched those matches, and talked to a lot of good players about them, and didn't hear that from any of them.

I asked around and HALF the top 10 of the ladder think a lot of games are decided by luck,

Great. I wonder what the top 2 players think? Regardless, the current top ten has more than a few players with only moderately good win records, who've risen to the top by playing match after match after match. I have no problem with them at all- They should do whatever they find fun. But do not mistake success on this ladder for success in a real tournament, where good players have to face good players all along the way, and play matches that are equally weighted for each competitor. Several players who have done well in tournaments have lost interest in the ladder, and as they become less and less active, there's been a rise in medium-skilled players (don't anyone take this personally, it's just my opinion), who have advanced with a combination of decent playing and match-spamming.

Anyways, let's see how that HALF does in TOC4. I predict some luck-blaming....

[Fosprey]

The real problem is that ther is no evidence that you will accept as a prof that the game is luck based.
But i would accept an evidence , put someone you think is good against me and if he beats me ten times out of ten, then i accept there is no luck involved. I;m a mediocre player. Of course i've beat everyone active and decent at least once and most of the time i played less than 10 games, i beated them because i was lucky. i offer you to prove us that the game is not luck based.

You also talk about some good players, where is the evidence they are good? the last tournament was played long time ago in an old version, the only evidence right now is the ladder, they are not there, i can't know if they are good or not, to me they are not, they have no evidence to support them

[Chris NS]

You said "a game can be determined by a coin toss."

No, I didn't. I said that hit probabilities usually come down to a coin toss, and that's true - most people who are using the terrain intelligently will make it so, if not even worse than a coin toss.

So what? A typical Wesnoth game will have hundreds of coin-tosses or near-coin-tosses. And anyone who knows anything about probability knows than when you have hundreds of coin tosses, you will almost certainly have near 50% heads and 50% tails.

Now, obviously, in Wesnoth some "coin tosses" matter more than others. That is part of the game. Do you gamble your horseman charging the goblin spearman, or try something safer but less effective? That is the same kind of choice many games have. So your attack didn't go to plan. Do you have a plan B? If not, can you hastily cobble one together now? Expecting the unexpected and reacting to the unexpected is all part of the game.

Yes, for some people, the randomness is frustrating when it goes the wrong way. Fair enough, that's their personal preference. But for other people, removing the randomness would take away the unexpected and make the game dull to them. You can't please both. Since the devs are all unpaid volunteers, I think it's fair enough they get the final say on which game they want.

Guess what, bub: Wesnoth is as the devs want it to be.

Then why bother even taking input at ALL? That approach is not necessarily a good one, either.

An open source game could be like Wesnoth, or Civilisation, or Age of Empires, or Warcraft, or Risk, or Chess, but it cannot be all of these at once. And yet, that's the mess the devs would be heading towards if they bent over backwards for every request to make the game more/less deterministic, with more/less levelling and more/less powerups and more/less opportunities to builds things and more/less power given to one unit or another. All games have their niche, and Wesnoth's niche includes randomness. There is plenty of scope to discuss how to polish off Wesnoth to be even better as the game it is meant to be, but pointless to accommodate every request to make Wesnoth a fundamentally different game.

Wesnoth is not the strategy game for everyone. No game is. If you don't like a game where you win some and lose some (albeit where skilled players win a lot more than they lose), this isn't the game for you. Good luck finding a multiplayer game where you win everything though.

[Cainen]

So what?

As far as I'm concerned, this makes the game not even close to worth my time. There's not even an option to change this behavior - you really have no clue how much this'd help the complaints. Lobbying against this means you're either a dev or elitist in the actual sense of the word.

That is part of the game.

That doesn't even remotely stop me from disliking it.

Do you gamble your horseman charging the goblin spearman, or try something safer but less effective? That is the same kind of choice many games have. So your attack didn't go to plan. Do you have a plan B?

What good is a Plan B if it fails due to the RNG? A Plan C?

If you're playing Contingency Plans: The Game, you shouldn't be playing a game that ends up

If not, can you hastily cobble one together now? Expecting the unexpected and reacting to the unexpected is all part of the game.

Expecting the unexpected usually includes being completely unable to predict what's going to happen. You could hit every time, miss every time, hit once, etcetera, and to consistently expect the worst is going to make you lose.

Yes, for some people, the randomness is frustrating when it goes the wrong way.

And it goes the wrong way far too often because of the hit percentages.

Fair enough, that's their personal preference. But for other people, removing the randomness would take away the unexpected and make the game dull to them. You can't please both.

That's not true.

An open source game could be like Wesnoth, or Civilisation, or Age of Empires, or Warcraft, or Risk, or Chess, but it cannot be all of these at once. And yet, that's the mess the devs would be heading towards if they bent over backwards for every request to make the game more/less deterministic

The problem is that you aren't thinking modularly. There's a reason a lot of KDE users hate GNOME, and it applies here too - you can't tailor the game to be the most fun for you if you weren't the target audience in the first place, since the devs aren't even giving the option to do so. Assuming even basic experience with a computer, KDE appeals to several sorts of users - you set how everything works yourself, so you CAN'T go wrong.

Wesnoth is not the strategy game for everyone. No game is. If you don't like a game where you win some and lose some (albeit where skilled players win a lot more than they lose), this isn't the game for you.

That does NOT mean you should completely ignore feedback on what's making a lot of people hate the game, and then provide particularly bad reasoning as a reason WHY to keep this instead of working at fixing it. I don't think there'd be a single complaint from any reasonable person if someone added an option to remove the randomness from Wesnoth.

Good luck finding a multiplayer game where you win everything though.

I don't have much of a problem doing this when I'm playing with who I was. In Spring and UFO:AI and almost any other game? I didn't lose to them. Period. I was a better planner and much faster than they were - there's no sizable RNG involved there if you're playing optimally. What makes you think that losing at Wesnoth quite often was my fault when the RNG can easily be at fault too?

[BIG_LIZARD_PWNZ]

As far as I'm concerned, this makes the game not even close to worth my time.

by3by3 d00d! 1+5 b33n aw350m3 hav1ng u ar0und!

[AI]

Essentially, your argument is against randomness in the game. There was a "less randomness" mod a while ago, it died. If you want to, you can revive it.

As for randomness itself, this is war, stuff happens, nothing can be perfectly predicted. Wars are won and lost by strategy all the same.

In the end, if you don't like the game, stop playing it. Find a game you like and stop complaining about the very core principles of this particular game.

[Wesnothian]

The luck factor requires some imagination of your own, atleast that's what I think.
See it this way, your Elvish Fighter engages the Orcish Grunt, You hit only one time and the Orcish Grunt hits two times,
see it as if the battle was taking place in real life, the Orcish Grunt dodged the Elvish Fighter's sword or defended himself with his own sword two times, the Elvish Fighter dodges the Ocish Grunt's sword, but gets succesfully slashed two times.
You might think I'm crazy about what I just said, but that's actually how I think, everytime my unit engage in combat with the enemy, I imagine how it would look like, and the luck factor would actually disappear for you if you have enough imagination. Let's take as example that your getting very ''unlucky'' and your Elvish Archer misses all her arrows because the Orcish Grunt hided could succesfully dodge them, now you can call this unlucky or you can use your imagination and say that basically the Orcish Grunt was better at that fight, later afcourse, you can get lucky by having him miss all his slashes or you hitting all your attacks.

This is basically how I see it, It's a game afterall, and a game is made to entertain, adding imagination to it would entertain you more unless your a realistic gamer, but if you were, you wouldn't have downloaded the game because you knew it would be an fantasy game!

[anakayub]

That does NOT mean you should completely ignore feedback on what's making a lot of people hate the game, and then provide particularly bad reasoning as a reason WHY to keep this instead of working at fixing it. I don't think there'd be a single complaint from any reasonable person if someone added an option to remove the randomness from Wesnoth.

Ugh, you're telling us that developers should spend time making an option changing the very core single principle of Wesnoth? That's like telling that pawns in chess should move diagonally and capture horizontally. Chess doesn't change its game for people who don't like it. If you don't like it due to its core principles, you don't have to play it. Find some game that suits your principles of gaming. Developer time is better spent improving the game as it is, not making Wesnoth B. That is unless you are willing to work on it.

I don't have much of a problem doing this when I'm playing with who I was. In Spring and UFO:AI and almost any other game? I didn't lose to them. Period. I was a better planner and much faster than they were - there's no sizable RNG involved there if you're playing optimally. What makes you think that losing at Wesnoth quite often was my fault when the RNG can easily be at fault too?

Come on, you know the rules around here: no assertions without proof. Show us the replays where RNG screwed you the game more than your own mistakes.

[Weeksy]

Playing poorly gets you into situations where you can let luck screw you over. If you play so that getting unlucky in a few places won't lose you the game, then luck won't screw you over. If you don't, and you get unlucky, it's not really luck that's hitting you, it's the fact that you played yourself into a position where you could get unlucky. If you choose to gamble, you're putting yourself at risk to lose.

[Sapient]

So what?

As far as I'm concerned, this makes the game not even close to worth my time. There's not even an option to change this behavior - you really have no clue how much this'd help the complaints. Lobbying against this means you're either a dev or elitist in the actual sense of the word.

So the fact that the game includes randomness which evens out over time makes the game not even close to worth your time?

Then posting in a game forum about a game that you profess to be a waste of time is an even WORSE waste of time.

Cainen, as far as I am concerned you are an outright troll and just flame-baiting.

We will have you banned if you continue to act like a moron/jerk on this forum. You have been warned.

But, since this was all just a waste of your time, I'm sure you won't mind.

[Velensk]

As far as imagineing luck in effect:

I ussualy see unit on unit battles as several hundred on several hundred. For me the attacks are just a abstracted way of representing how lethal a combat was for either side, in terms of moral as well as fatalities. Under certain conditions, or with certain luck, or bravery, though you would lose men, you would not lose relativly many and your moral would be almost completly uneffected (you take no hits) or varying degrees of such. Certain units are more likely to be completly ineffective at breaking their enemies, or very effective (low stikes high damage)

example: the orcish hordes crashes against the line of stout defenders who hold their ground and repel the orcs after a few minutes of intense fighting, with limited loses the line prepares for a new attack with renewed hope. ;:; or ;:; the orcish hordes smash headlong into the defenders who sway under the press of their charge and break scattering into a lose mob that gets cut down by the rampage. Both of these sound quite plauable.
Now elves are skilled and are thus less likely to be completly ineffective in their attack or defence, unless so weak that they are not as strong or as aggressive so they are far less likely to be completly devistating. If you try to put elves in place of orcs in the example I gave it does not sound right.

I also like to see it that way for ranged combat. If the archers are attacking then they have pulled into range to send a volly of arrows at their enemies ranks. On the other hand if the melee unit is attacking, either they've gotten the drop on the archers or they have survived the previouse turn long enough to engage them directly.

This image also explains defences better, it makes little sense that dwarves suddenly become unhittable because they are standing in a moutain, however when you think about a regement of dwarves each one of them invetrate moutaineers, having the equipment, and the experiance to utilize every aspect of the moutains to make themselves hard to break, then it makes sense. Same with elves. For elusives like footpads it makes sense that it is harder to bring down your force on forces who know how to avoid advisaries (their high def), and that being unarmored they will get hurt more if you do manage to engage them (negitive resistances), and that they won't be able to take to many hits to their moral being unorganised (low hp)

There are logical inconsistancies, many of them infact, but this is the way I prefer to imagine it. I find if funner to play my battles on a grand scale dispite the tactical lvl reasoning, even if my opponent is thinking of an RPG style skirmish. There are logical inconsistancies with both views (for example the rebelion against queen ashivere overthrew her castle with an amasing large army of 60ish people!), but I prefer the grander scale and thus tend to see it that way.