esper
This is an issue where game design interacts with human psychology mostly pretty negatively. Our human brains are bad at handling randomness. What a probability “feels like” is totally divorced from what the numbers are.
You encounter this in poker a lot even at high levels of play as the numbers create a sense of “entitlement” to a positive end result. If it’s 80% to win a hand, a player will often exclaim after losing that it was “my” money, when in fact their expected value was only 80% of it. It gets weirder as this attitude happens down to a common “coin flip” where any pair (say 22) is a 51/49% favorite over any two over cards (Ace-King being the common example from holdem).
What I’m saying, is that randomness in game design is super duper hard.
I would personally feel offended as a player if I find out that game-stated probabilities are misleading as I remember Brandon suggesting. I’m not hating on Brandon here, just stating a position. Conversely, how you always win on the first slot pull in Dragon Quest totally rules, because I am a man of contradiction and/or hypocrisy. 😝
