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Is 2RN "lying" to the player?


MuteMousou
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So personally, I do not conceptually think that 1RN or 2RN is better than the other, they both are more appropriate for certain situations depending on what a specific game wants to do,. However, I've heard comments a few times saying that "2RN is lying to the player," and for the most part I don't think I really agree with this wording, though the meaning behind it may be subject to some interpretation, sure. 

I don't necessarily think that FE games ever make it evident that the hit amount is supposed to be a percentage from 0 to 100, nor does it tell you, if this was the case that 1 is actually 1, 2 is actually 2, and so on. It's simply a number that shows you  accuracy, and the assumption is that a higher amount means a higher chance to hit, I don't believe you actually need to know the exact chance of each hit occurring in order to complete the game, in fact I would guess that most people who have ever played a 2RN FE game don't actually know how the RNG system works. However, there are some arguments against, this, I think that the fact that the numbers going from 0 to 100 are a good reason to possibly assume it is a percentage... because this is how people generally write percentages for other things, but in this case the game isn't using a percentage symbol.

However, there are other reasons that the scale is from 0 to 100, or from 1 to 99 anyway. The displayed number is the exact hit calculation dependent on the hit and avoid values of the characters involved, and it is also the number, in 2RN, that the 2 RNs must average out at or below in order for a hit to occur. FE games on their own are built specifically on this scale and it would take some major changes for it to not be this way. It would be possible, potentially, for the game to display both the displayed hit and the actual hit, or for it to perhaps explain the 2RN system, but I imagine that they decided against this because it would be too confusing or convoluted to throw all this at the player, and either way I don't think the player needs to know exactly how it works anyway. I can't imagine it would be possible for actual hit values to match up with actual hit chance in 2RN, and doing a different scale, such as 1 to 500 or something, wouldn't really serve any purpose either, so even if the actual hit isn't equal to the displayed hit chance, 0 to 100 just kind of makes a lot of sense for a scale. 

So, I think that with using the 2RN system there aren't many feasible ways to get away from "lying" to the player, and I don't think there is anything wrong with the 2RN system in the first place, having a hit chance doesn't require the displayed chances be exactly from 0 to 100.

Anyway, what does everyone else think about this?

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I guess it's "lying" in a literal sense, but it's to the player's benefit at the end of the day. When you're playing these SRPGs and see 80%-90%, in your mind that should basically be a guaranteed hit, but with 1RN you will have the unlikely outcome happen more often than you'd like. Obviously when playing the game we aren't going to spend too much time worrying how dependable hit rates in the 70s will be especially when you probably can't do much about it early in the game.

In a way I think 2RN or whatever method is implemented to make the RNG less wild, creates a more honest gaming experience. Intuitively hit rates 80% and up should feel comfortable to rely on, and even if a miss happens, surely another won't happen consecutively... right? Then there's the converse for 40% and below. And like you mentioned showing the actual hit rate will be convoluted because of the math involved that most people aren't going to be aware of. Showing the hit base hit rate, that you can calculate easily if you want is fine, and you're not going to be stressing over a 90% missing or a 30% hitting that much anyways.

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Yes, I find it to be lying. If the numbers went above 100, which is absolutely possible to do, then I could see it as just displaying a high number, but that they cap the display there is obviously going to make it look like a percentage. And that's assuming it doesn't even use the % sign, which I'm pretty sure it does. Maybe not on the HUD, but at least on the weapons hit has always been displayed with a %, I think.

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13 hours ago, MuteMousou said:

However, there are some arguments against, this, I think that the fact that the numbers going from 0 to 100 are a good reason to possibly assume it is a percentage... because this is how people generally write percentages for other things, but in this case the game isn't using a percentage symbol.

It literally was percentages for the first 5 games, and there isn't another meaningful way of displaying accuracy other than percentages in one form or another.

 

13 hours ago, MuteMousou said:

I can't imagine it would be possible for actual hit values to match up with actual hit chance in 2RN

...there are easy to find lookup tables for what the true accuracy is for each displayed accuracy number in 2RN, in fact one can be found here: https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/

 

2RN (Fates RN too, but it is more complicated) is lying to the player, but most people don't mind because it is a lie they want to hear. People like to think likely things are more likely than they are, and unlikely things less likely then they are, and the way 2RN skews things feeds into this false belief. People don't like to think about a 90 means missing 1/10 times, and if you try for enough hits like that across a map, you will see those misses.In 2RN you have to look up what the accuracy you see means from some outside resource to know how accurate it actually is, instead of being told directly like the old 1RN system.

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7 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

It literally was percentages for the first 5 games, and there isn't another meaningful way of displaying accuracy other than percentages in one form or another.

 

The first 2 games display it as a bar, so unless you meant that the bar also = percentage, that's actually not true that the first 5 games display it as a percentage. Some JRPGs display hit chance as "low" "high" and so on, and never tell you an actual value of hit chance. there are definitely more ways of displaying it than just 0 to 100. You can argue that those methods are better or worse perhaps, but those exist and they exist for reasons that the devs believed to be appropriate for the context for whatever reason.

7 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

...there are easy to find lookup tables for what the true accuracy is for each displayed accuracy number in 2RN, in fact one can be found here: https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/

I'm not sure what that has to do with the thing you quoted. What I was saying is that the displayed hit value you have is precisely based on a number found as a result of the avoid and hit values of the characters involved. It's impossible to have that value be the same as the actual hit value in 2RN because 2RN doesn't change in regular increments, and because the actual hit is based off of the displayed hit anyway.

7 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

2RN (Fates RN too, but it is more complicated) is lying to the player, but most people don't mind because it is a lie they want to hear. People like to think likely things are more likely than they are, and unlikely things less likely then they are, and the way 2RN skews things feeds into this false belief. People don't like to think about a 90 means missing 1/10 times, and if you try for enough hits like that across a map, you will see those misses.In 2RN you have to look up what the accuracy you see means from some outside resource to know how accurate it actually is, instead of being told directly like the old 1RN system.

I mean, how is it lying though? I don't think I really agree with the framing that it's all about people like being lied to and so on, I think if the developers just decide that's better for the game balance then it's not necessarily about how people view chances of things happening and so on. Like, imagine FE6 without 2RN, the hit values are already complete ass in that game so 1RN would potentially make that game more of an RNG fest than gaiden.

Edited by MuteMousou
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8 hours ago, Jotari said:

Yes, I find it to be lying. If the numbers went above 100, which is absolutely possible to do, then I could see it as just displaying a high number, but that they cap the display there is obviously going to make it look like a percentage. And that's assuming it doesn't even use the % sign, which I'm pretty sure it does. Maybe not on the HUD, but at least on the weapons hit has always been displayed with a %, I think.

I don't believe The GBA games display it with a percentage sign anywhere and I don't think any game does

Edited by MuteMousou
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2 minutes ago, MuteMousou said:

The first 2 games display it as a bar, and also JRPGs often display hit chance as "low" "high" and so on, there are definitely more ways of displaying it than just 0 to 100. You can argue that those methods are better or worse perhaps, but those exist and they exist for reasons that the devs believed to be appropriate for the context for whatever reason.

That bar that the first two games have is showing you a percentage if you know how to read it.

 

31 minutes ago, MuteMousou said:

I'm not sure what that has to do with the thing you quoted. What I was saying is that the displayed hit value you have is precisely based on a number found as a result of the avoid and hit values of the characters involved. It's impossible to have that value be the same as the actual hit value in 2RN because 2RN doesn't change in regular increments, and because the actual hit is based off of the displayed hit anyway.

Thanks to 2 RN those hit and avoid numbers are abstractions that no longer have the meaning they once did. In a way keeping hit and avoid displayed like that (without some mention of 2RN) is half of the lie, as the player is no longer able to use those numbers without referencing outside sources. They could have at least displayed the actual accuracy number in the combat forecasts.

 

15 minutes ago, MuteMousou said:

I mean, how is it lying though?

Its lying for the same reason promising you 100 apples, and then giving you 64 would be lying, even if I claimed that 100 was secretly in base 8 instead of base 10 after the fact. The context is implying the units, and unlabeled 2RN is just as out of nowhere as unlabeled base 8 would be.

 

27 minutes ago, MuteMousou said:

I don't think I really agree with the framing that it's all about people like being lied to and so on, I think if the developers just decide that's better for the game balance then it's not necessarily about how people view chances of things happening and so on. Like, imagine FE6 without 2RN, the hit values are already complete ass in that game so 1RN would potentially make that game more of an RNG fest than gaiden.

Even if they wanted the under the hood benefits of 2RN they could have at least tried not to lie to the player by displaying the actual accuracy in the battle forecast, or just finding a way of explaining what those accuracy numbers mean to the player.

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I don't think I'd call it "lying", since that's an emotive word that often implies some sort of malicious intent that I don't believe was there. I think that the system can give the wrong impression, though, and certainly has the potential to mislead the player. Even in games that don't outright state that hit is a percentage chance, that is -- at the very least -- an impression that the player could easily have and which the game does nothign to discourage.

From personal experience, when I got back into Fire Emblem a few years ago after some time away from the franchise, I assumed that the displayed figures for hit were a percentage chance, then after a while of playing I thought I was getting really lucky, then after even more playing I realised that what I was experiencing was beyond luck and that the numbers must be fudged, and then only after that did I remember, "oh right, Fire Emblem does the thing with two random numbers for generating hit chances".

It's nothing new that video games use smoke and mirrors to try to create a more entertaining experience for the player, though. Off the top of my head, I've heard of racing games that display different stats for different vehicles even though they all handle the same, story-driven games which imply that pretend to have consequences for a lot of actions but are actually mostly linear, platform games that let you jump even after you've run off the edge of a platform, and action games that make the player's last health bar last twice (or more) as long as it should. And many more that I'm not immediately thinking of. This sort of thing is endemic to the medium and has been for decades.

For the most part, I think that this sort of thing is pretty harmless. The only time I think it really hurts is when it means that nothing that the player does really matters. It's hard to enjoy anything by Telltale Games as much once you know that you'll be railroaded back onto the main story path no matter what choices you take; it's hard to enjoy NBA Jam as much once you realise that it has such extreme rubberbanding that every game against the computer is going to be close. 2RN in Fire Emblem isn't like that. Once you know that it's there you can work around it and make some more informed decisions, but it doesn't make the entire game pointless.

It's also a bit odd in that the people who are most likely to benefit from it are casual players who don't have a strong intuitive grasp on probabilities, but these are also the players who are least likely to realise that it exists. People who realise what's going on probably either play a whole lot of Fire Emblem, hang about in Fire Emblem fandom or otherwise read or talk a whole lot about Fire Emblem, or have a strong intuitive feel for probabilities. These people are not the target audience for the fudged hit chance that the 2RN system provides. It's there to make the game fun for a more casual player who will get frustrated and disheartened when they miss a 90% attack, even if it is the tenth one that they've done in that map.

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6 hours ago, MuteMousou said:

Like, imagine FE6 without 2RN, the hit values are already complete ass in that game so 1RN would potentially make that game more of an RNG fest than gaiden.

That's not really a good argument. Binding Blade is designed around True Hit. If it didn't use True Hit it wouldn't use those hit rates.

Edited by Jotari
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3 minutes ago, Jotari said:

That's not really a good argument. Binding Blade is destined around True Hit. If it didn't use True Hit it wouldn't use those hit rates.

This is like saying "if everyone had higher growth rates then their base stats would be lower," this is like, a completely unverifiable statement. Either way, every game that uses 2RN has different average hit rates despite 2RN behaving the exact same in all of them.

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I say this is a case of "If it ain't broke don't fix it."

So the percentage in FE6 is not true. So what? It hasn't made the game any less enjoyable, and 2-RNG has been a staple of the series for several games until Fates came up. If anything I actually liked that dodgetanking was a thing in FE6 courtesy of 2-RNG. I feel no need to change the formula unless if there is a specific reason for otherwise. 

Fates can be an exception, since I can see that 2-RNG would arguably make Hoshidan units broken in terms of accuracy and avoid. Remakes may be another exception, especially if the game is designed around a particular chance calculation. I don't know about Navarre in the original FE1, but him in my playthrough of the DS remake was not the best Swordmaster due to the already low dodge rate in the latter half of the game made even worse by 2-RNG.

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3 hours ago, MuteMousou said:

This is like saying "if everyone had higher growth rates then their base stats would be lower," this is like, a completely unverifiable statement. Either way, every game that uses 2RN has different average hit rates despite 2RN behaving the exact same in all of them.

Well precisely. Saying Binding Blademwould have the same weapon accuracy with 1rn is also a completely inverifiable statement. Except the developers would surely do things different if things were different, because as much as people complain about Binding Blades hit rates, they are very carefully designed in tandem with the game.

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9 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Well precisely. Saying Binding Blademwould have the same weapon accuracy with 1rn is also a completely inverifiable statement. Except the developers would surely do things different if things were different, because as much as people complain about Binding Blades hit rates, they are very carefully designed in tandem with the game.

You could say "the devs could have made things different if things were different" to literally anything, so what is the point in ever speculating on anything?  This is just, a vapid statement because it's not presenting anything concrete or something that can at all be discussed.

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3 hours ago, henrymidfields said:

I say this is a case of "If it ain't broke don't fix it."

So the percentage in FE6 is not true. So what? It hasn't made the game any less enjoyable, and 2-RNG has been a staple of the series for several games until Fates came up. If anything I actually liked that dodgetanking was a thing in FE6 courtesy of 2-RNG. I feel no need to change the formula unless if there is a specific reason for otherwise. 

Fates can be an exception, since I can see that 2-RNG would arguably make Hoshidan units broken in terms of accuracy and avoid. Remakes may be another exception, especially if the game is designed around a particular chance calculation. I don't know about Navarre in the original FE1, but him in my playthrough of the DS remake was not the best Swordmaster due to the already low dodge rate in the latter half of the game made even worse by 2-RNG.

Tbf it's not that hard to dodge tank in fe4 or 5 either
The hit rates are like that in FE11/12 because they were already kind of like that in FE3, FE11 is much more a remake of FE3 book 1 than it is of FE1, because nobody ever really cared about FE1.

Personally I wouldn't care if they ever returned to 1RN, I really don't have a preference but I guess 2RN generally makes you feel more at ease.

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Obligatory Katie Tiedrich.

It's a white lie, but still a lie. One that's actually really, really common in video games in general, although not necessarily with the same 2RN implementation. Humans just have a very poor intuitive grasp of probabilities, so a game with accurately presented odds will often make the player feel like it's rigged against them. I remember Sid Meier talking about this in his autobiography; Soren Johnson said that in Civ4 a 95% will just always succeed; and even Darkest Dungeon, which generally doesn't go out of the way hold the player's hand, has a hidden +5 Accuracy modifier for every attack the player does, as I recently found out.

I personally find that Fire Emblem's 2RN is a bit too extreme, actually. The difference between true hit and displayed hit hovers around 12 points, which turns (to take some common DnD dice rolls)...

  • a 1/6 chance into a 1/17 (17% --> 5.95%)
  • a 1/8 chance into a 1/33 (12% --> 3%)
  • a 1/10 chance into a 1/47  (10% --> 2.1%)
  • a 1/20 chance into a 1/182 (5% --> 0.55%)

So basically, if you roll a "Fire Emblified" D8, getting a 1 is rare enough that you wouldn't really take it into consideration. Rolling a 1 on a "FE-D20" is something that would be expected to happen like once or thrice in a full DnD campaign (campaign, not session). It's a very warped presentation of odds.

edit: I actually like the effect of 2RN - I think it's good that it makes outcomes a bit less random - but I don't like that the game doesn't tell the truth about it.

Edited by pong
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1 minute ago, pong said:

I personally find that Fire Emblem's 2RN is a bit too extreme, actually. The difference between true hit and displayed hit hovers around 12 points, which turns (to take some common DnD dice rolls)...

Yeah I would agree with that, I think TearRing Saga did the idea better. For those who don't know, TRS basically uses a less exaggerated 2RN, where at most the actual hit can be about 7 points lower or higher than the displayed hit, and around 1-3 points of difference towards the middle. It also works for crit rates, though. For crit rates this is especially noticeable because all displayed values 7 or lower are always actually 1, meaning a 7% crit is actually 1. Good game, I'd recommend others try it. 

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2RN was implemented to encourage safe moves and discourage risky moves, and to imitate people's perceptions of percentage chances, we naturally don't think any low percent hit rates will hit, if it ever does we call it ''unlucky'' even though it would be statistically likely to hit after enough misses. 

In a way I wouldn't call it 'lying' to the player because lying implies it's done with malice or intention to deceive.

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3 hours ago, MuteMousou said:

 

You could say "the devs could have made things different if things were different" to literally anything, so what is the point in ever speculating on anything?  This is just, a vapid statement because it's not presenting anything concrete or something that can at all be discussed.

You're the one who brought it up first when you said imagine Binding Blade with 1rng. My responses were dismissing that as a bad argument on these grounds. Binding Blade has 2rng. That's how it was designed. So saying "imagine what it'd be like if it didn't" is an empty statement because it does, and if it didn't, it wouldn't be Binding Blade.

Edited by Jotari
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On 12/8/2021 at 7:45 AM, Theghostcreator said:

2RN was implemented to encourage safe moves and discourage risky moves, and to imitate people's perceptions of percentage chances, we naturally don't think any low percent hit rates will hit, if it ever does we call it ''unlucky'' even though it would be statistically likely to hit after enough misses. 

In a way I wouldn't call it 'lying' to the player because lying implies it's done with malice or intention to deceive.

Basically this. It provides some insurance to "safe" plays, which is key in a game where hit rates may not always be 100 and the stakes of missing are higher than most RPGs.

I also agree with @pong but more on the grounds that pushing low hits down more isn't healthy. Hit rates below 50 are already ill-regarded and they become downright insufferable to play with under 2 RN (see: FE6 throne hogs). This isn't an issue with enemies but deflating their hit rates can leave the player feeling overconfident. You know the story: someone puts a unit into too many enemies' range, they get hit too many times and die, and then the player blames it on the RNG when they had a hand in their own bad luck. Conceptually I like Fates RN the most because it pads high hit rates, but less than 2 RN, and it doesn't punish low hit rates so you have to be mindful of non-zero hit rates.

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The game says that the probability of an event happening is X while the actual probability of an event happening is not X and could in fact be far from X. To call this something other than lying would require the biggest leap of logic in the history of the world, so 2RN is lying to the player. That said, I understand that your objection to the statement "2RN is lying to the player" comes more from a question of designer motivation and what is the best way for the designer to communicate information to the player. In essence, what you are asking is "Did the developers communicate this information to the players in a way that is harmful to the player's ability to play the game" which is obviously more nuanced.

I'll present my point before making a separate post responding to everyone else because I'd rather lay my own cards on the table before going after everyone else :)

Yes, 2-RN is lying to the player. That said, I do not blame the developers for lying to the player in this way because adding the necessary UI to help the player understand 2RN hitrates would be far too cumbersome for an average casual player and would just bloat the information provided and confuse the audience. I'm making a few assumptions here. The first is that the game developers have already decided that they want to implement 2-RN (or some other advantageous RNG mechanic) into their game and that this decision is non-negotiable. I don't really care why any group of devs would decide to favor the player under the hood, but let's just assume that they are.

For my second assumption, I'm going to have really low standards for the ability of the average player to read the UI. This may seem pessimistic and elitist but remember that, for any video game, 90% of players will pick up the game, play it through onceish without looking up anything online, have a good time, and put it down without once telling anyone on the internet about their experience. Hell for a lot of games this number may actually be closer to 95 or 98 or 99% who really knows. Don't forget that literal children also play video games and a lot of FE games were rated E or E-10 and therefore have to be appropriate for younger demographics. People like the lot of us on SF are a tiny minority. Furthermore, of that small 10ish% of people who ever talk about FE online, most of them (that I've met) don't even know what the stats do or how to read a battle UI. I know this evidence is anecdotal but I see all the time players will run into a combat and be surprised when their unit dies in the combat or have no idea that an attack they're giving will fail to kill an enemy or other really simple mistakes that just seem completely beneath the experience of anyone in this thread.

If I were leading the game design under those two assumptions (which I think are fair to make) I would probably have made the exact same decision that every 2RN FE game has ever made: present the hit rates on an integer scale of 0-100 (before true hit calculation) then hide it under the hood, and here's why. It is highly likely that if anyone actually learns about the 2RN hit system, they first learned about the regular hit calculation (the whole 2xskill + 1/2 luck + so on and so on) and have already gotten a grasp on that. I'd say understanding how the "hit rate" before 2RN is calculated is an absolute prerequisite for understanding that 2RN exists and how it functions. Therefore it is even more useless to the player to only show 2RN hit. You're presenting them a piece of information without giving them any of the tools needed to motivate or understand that information for themselves. It's the same reason why we teach kids the alphabet before we teach them how to write a sentence. There's no way to use your sentence-writing knowledge if you can't even articulate a single letter. If someone cares enough about the hit rates that they want to be reading it, you have to give them the ability to understand how the stats feed into it so that they can learn information at an appropriate pace.

Maybe your objection to the above point is "if it's bad to only show the 2RN hitrate, Why not show both?" This would be absolutely more confusing for a player trying to learn the game and especially for the 99%. Why the hell are two different hit rates being displayed? Which one do I actually use? How is one derived from the other? Honestly the only place I can think to show the hitrate is on the battle forecast and because this is such a compact and important part of the UI then cluttering it up with an additional difficult-to-motivate number only makes the most commonly misunderstood part of FE even easier to misunderstand.

So am I bothered by it lying to the player? These days, if someone cares enough about their video game to learn how the stats work into the calculation AND they derive the hit rate calculation (before 2RN) AND they somehow figure out that the true hit rates are different than what they appear to be (through a series of highly nerdy empirical measurements and statistical analysis) then they're probably smart enough to discover the internet and learn about 2RN hit way before they need to take any of those steps. The chances that someone is actually intentioned enough to understand probability AND the calculations in the game AND use them in the plans while also not having the resources to look up these kinds of things are small. Therefore no, I am not bothered by the way that FE games present 2RN hit (or rather, that they don't present 2RN hit) to the player.

 

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On 12/8/2021 at 8:39 AM, Jotari said:

You're the one who brought it up first when you said imagine Binding Blade with 1rng. My responses were dismissing that as a bad argument on these grounds. Binding Blade has 2rng. That's how it was designed. So saying "imagine what it'd be like if it didn't" is an empty statement because it does, and if it didn't, it wouldn't be Binding Blade.

Saying "you are using a bad argument" hasn't really been substantiated at all because all you have said is just "you can't speculate on a hypothetical because the game would be different if it were different" and then restating it with slight variations.

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22 hours ago, OriginalRaisins said:

Yes, 2-RN is lying to the player. That said, I do not blame the developers for lying to the player in this way because adding the necessary UI to help the player understand 2RN hitrates would be far too cumbersome for an average casual player and would just bloat the information provided and confuse the audience. I'm making a few assumptions here.

My view on this is that the word "lie" here just sounds emotionally loaded, and I don't necessarily agree with the framing presented when most people use it, as if implying that the 1RN system is inherently better or something if 2RN is lying to you. I think there is some question as to whether it would fit the meaning of "lie" in the manner of literally telling you something and then later contradicting it, which I don't believe it does, the game never outright says that the hit numbers mean anything specifically, and partially I think they intentionally attempted to avoid using the word percentage in most games to avoid it being led this way, such as in japanese fe6 the game stats that accuracy is your "probability" to hit and not your percentage chance to hit. In fe7 English, it says that avoid "affects enemy hit %," I believe that this wording might have been in place due to not having enough space for the word "probability" or "chance," but it doesn't use the % in Japanese here. So, while I guess it still could be lying depending on how you interpret what the game provides you, it is not lying in a sense of, for instance, if the game told you outright that something worked one way but it actually worked another way such as some of the skill descriptions in fe10 lol, but the game does not ever tell you that it is 1RN, but maybe that should be the assumption? Either way it's definitely not malicious whatever you think of it. 
 

22 hours ago, OriginalRaisins said:

Furthermore, of that small 10ish% of people who ever talk about FE online, most of them (that I've met) don't even know what the stats do or how to read a battle UI. I know this evidence is anecdotal but I see all the time players will run into a combat and be surprised when their unit dies in the combat or have no idea that an attack they're giving will fail to kill an enemy or other really simple mistakes that just seem completely beneath the experience of anyone in this thread.

You mean like they don't even know what the thing on the forecast means? I find this hard to believe.

Edited by MuteMousou
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On 12/7/2021 at 7:17 PM, lenticular said:

It's nothing new that video games use smoke and mirrors to try to create a more entertaining experience for the player, though. Off the top of my head, I've heard of racing games that display different stats for different vehicles even though they all handle the same, story-driven games which imply that pretend to have consequences for a lot of actions but are actually mostly linear, platform games that let you jump even after you've run off the edge of a platform, and action games that make the player's last health bar last twice (or more) as long as it should. And many more that I'm not immediately thinking of. This sort of thing is endemic to the medium and has been for decades.

I think that's a pretty good point to bring up is that video games tend to do this sort of thing a lot. I'm not really of the mind that the game needs to tell you literally everything about how things work, and I think in a lot of instances if it did it would be too convoluted or unnecessary for most players. For example, if the devs really wanted, they could also explain how the AI works at literally every point, but part of the fun is figuring this out on your own, and while that can lead to things going wrong sometimes, I feel as if the answer people are looking for at points is that they want the game to make it impossible for something to go wrong or for anything to ever be missed... which, I thought the fun of things a lot of the time was figuring out something on your own or learning something new..

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1 hour ago, MuteMousou said:

Saying "you are using a bad argument" hasn't really been substantiated at all because all you have said is just "you can't speculate on a hypothetical because the game would be different if it were different" and then restating it with slight variations.

You're the one who substantiated that I was saying you have a bad argument when you said

On 12/8/2021 at 8:54 AM, MuteMousou said:

This is like saying "if everyone had higher growth rates then their base stats would be lower," this is like, a completely unverifiable statement. Either way, every game that uses 2RN has different average hit rates despite 2RN behaving the exact same in all of them.

Imagine what Binding Blade would be like with 1rn is a completely unverifiable scenario because Binding Blade does have 2rn. Sure we could imagine it with 1rn and being completely the same. I can also imagine Genealogy where everyone has 1hp. It being a hypothetical that exists isn't a decent argument for or against saying Genealogy's HP values are too high. Imagining Binding Blade with 1rn isn't conductive to any sort of useful point for or against 2rn because 1rn Binding Blade is a complete fantasy. It's like saying "imagine Ike killed the Black Knight on their first encounter". Sure, we can imagine it and talk about it for fun, but it has no bearing on the actual story of Path of Radiance, because that's not what happened. Saying "Imagine Binding Blade with 1rn doesn't prove, enhance, challenge or change an argument. That's why it's a bad argument.

Also multi quoting is an available feature to be used.

Edited by Jotari
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45 minutes ago, MuteMousou said:

. I think there is some question as to whether it would fit the meaning of "lie" in the manner of literally telling you something and then later contradicting it, which I don't believe it does, the game never outright says that the hit numbers mean anything specifically, and partially I think they intentionally attempted to avoid using the word percentage in most games to avoid it being led this way, such as in japanese fe6 the game stats that accuracy is your "probability" to hit and not your percentage chance to hit. In fe7 English, it says that avoid "affects enemy hit %," I believe that this wording might have been in place due to not having enough space for the word "probability" or "chance," but it doesn't use the % in Japanese here.

To be honest I think the whole argument that "it's not presented as a percentage so it's not actually lying" is a really irrelevant semantic argument. Even without the percent sign present, it's still a binary outcome (only a hit or a miss) with a chance communicated from 0 to 100. How else are you supposed to interpret that besides a percentage? Even if you say "probability" instead of "percentage" as the japanese version does it's still mathematically equivalent to a percentage, except you just divide by 100 to get the proper representation.

Any random event with a binary outcome has a probability of success between 0 and 1. Whether you choose to represent this probability with a number from 0 to 100 or a number from 0 to 1 or even a bar which is filled in only part of the way is pretty much irrelevant. At the end of the day, the only information regarding the success chance of their attack is some kind of proportional representation. If the filled in part of the fe1 bar occupies 75% of the space, it's only reasonable that the player would conclude the hit chance is close to 75%.

If there was literally any way that the player could derive from the information presented in the UI that a "75 hit" is expected to hit the enemy about 87.5% of the time then sure I could buy that the information represented isn't actually being dishonest. But as far as I can tell the only way for a player to discover that the chance to hit is not 75% is for them to take matters into their own hands, ignore all the information presented, and empirically measure the success chance after some experimentation. All the clues that could possibly lead you to believe that 2RN is modifying the hit rates are all completely absent from the UI.

54 minutes ago, MuteMousou said:

My view on this is that the word "lie" here just sounds emotionally loaded, and I don't necessarily agree with the framing presented when most people use it, as if implying that the 1RN system is inherently better or something if 2RN is lying to you.

I understand this is your objection which is why I qualified my post in its first paragraph. I totally agree that saying "2RN is lying to the player" carries an implication that 2RN is a bad design choice, which I completely disagree with. You and I are on the same page in this matter.

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