Is RNG "fake difficulty"?

For most reasonable definitions of difficulty either yes, in that it doesn't affects the difficulty rating.

For example say your difficulty rating was based on how long it takes the average person to build the skill necessary to beat the level.
Imagine 2 identical levels where one has a d100 dice check at the end. Even though it would take much longer for the average person to beat this level, it would take the same amount of time build up the skill to beat it.

For most reasonable definitions of difficulty yes, in that it doesn't affects the difficulty rating.
For example say your difficulty rating was based on how long it takes the average person to build the skill necessary to beat the level.
Imagine 2 identical levels where one has a d100 dice check at the end. Even though it would take much longer for the average person to beat this level, it would take the same amount of time build up the skill to beat it, hence the difficulty is the same.

But with this definition we have a problem, in that randomness throughout the level prevents you from practicing, thus making the amount of time needed to build skill artificially increase. So we can refine the definition of difficulty to
how long it takes the average person to build the skill, during relevant play time, necessary to beat the relevant section of the level.

>>713303208 (OP)
I think you need a little of it to keep players on their toes, but having too much is so much worse than having too little.

a game should be possible to beat 100% of the time by a player making optimal choices based on information available to the player. If that's not the case then it's fake difficulty.

>>713304226
Name 5 popular games that can't be beat first try if you played them frame by frame

>>713304620
Black souls 1
Black souls 2
That's all the games I've played

my initial reaction to that inquiry was: HELL YES IT IS! Upon further thought, i feel like it depends on how the rng is implemented. A lot of games go way too crazy with it
also inclined to agree with this >>713304226

>>713303208 (OP)
Being good at a game means being able to make the right decisions with the given information, without any rng it just turns into memorizing patterns until you can beat the game with your eyes closed and the sound off.

>>713305112
In reality the vast majority of games are much easier than memorizing even short patterns let alone game length patterns.
Chess has no rng and no mater how many patterns you memorize a kid can beat you through skill and feel

>>713303208 (OP)
Usually no. Stuff like bosses have slightly random movements or attack patterns is a way to make the player have to pay more attention to what's happening in the fight instead of being able to memorize everything. But any random pattern an enemy can give you should be beatable by the player. It only becomes unfair once the dev introduces patterns that force you to lose no matter what you do.

>>713306479
What you posted has nothing to do with the thread. Going into a rpg boss fight under-leveled and under-prepared will get you killed that should be obvious to anyone that has ever played one before.

>>713306806
>>713306479
It's somewhere between a visual novel and a tower defense game. The genre isn't skill based at all unless we are talking about skill with math and stats.

>>713306806
it goes by pretty fast but look again. The boss has a chance to blindside the party, giving it a free turn at the start of combat. The intended strategy is that you have a character who can block each of the boss's 1 shot attacks it does every turn, but when it rolls a blindside there's absolutely no way you can survive the first attack so you simply die.

>>713306806
Retard-kun, the superboss got a free turn at random. It had nothing to do with being underprepared. Fatlus could've simply programmed in a condition where that doesn't occur with bosses, but they chose not to.

>>713303208 (OP)
There is a fine line between forcing the player to adapt on the fly and forcing the player to predict the future.
If you have to play the same situation over and over until the outcome randomly becomes possible despite player skill, it's shit design.

>>713307191
but who cares? You already know the optimal strategy nothing you as the player can do to change that. The "player" isn't even involved past a certain point, it's just a VN.
It's not like Mario where you can change your strategy on the fly to adapt to the situation.

its just gambling

>>713307480
>>713307509
Again. You aren't making any choices so it literally doesn't change, the "added difficulty" is restarting the fight. Wow so tough I have to press a button

>>713304226
/thread
this is the metric I use to separate shitty roguelikes or even games in general from the good ones
turn based slop trash games are for the most part shitty due to rng overtaking gameplay

>>713304226
>>713307614
Name 5 popular games that aren't?
>inb4 no I didn't mean the game itself I meant every fight in the game

>>713307191
YOU ARE LITERALLY PLAYING A VISUAL NOVEL THAT SAYS I DIED WHILE FIGHTING THE KING BUT GOT RESURRECTED AND BEAT THE KING AND ARE GETTING MAD ABOUT THE PLOT BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO KILL THE KING IN ONE SHOT LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO YOU ARE AN INCEL

All entertainment is wasted time. Why get mad at devs for wasting your time in a way you don't like? Who cares

>>713303208 (OP)
No, it's random difficulty.

>>713307769
is your logical here that you can just reset a game and play repeatedly and replay from the start until you win no matter what the contents of the game are?
Obviously I meant you should be able to beat a game in one playthrough.

A popular game that fails at this would be Nethack. Overall I like Nethack but it definitely has some fake difficulty because it's possible to just unavoidably instantly die early in the game, for example if you just don't happen to have any boots randomly generate until the 3rd floor and then you fall into a spiked pit and the spikes are poisoned and the poison is deadly poison. This is effectively an unavoidable death. Even if you stopped and searched every time you moved it still might not detect the pit.

>>713307481
There are definitely situations with this boss fight where predicting the future is the only way to not die.
But that's Kaizo for you. It's meant to be unfair.

4channel is 75% schizos posting the same shit over and over again.

>>713309672
you can't expect the LLM bots which make most of the posts here to be too creative, the technology is still being developed

>>713308334
yeah bro why complain about anything just shut up and play the game you don't like

>>713309821
>I don't like something because I am schizophrenic and can't notice that it's exactly the same as things I do like
MEDS

>>713309931
who are you quoting?

>>713310025
The voices in your head

>>713309931
>the only reason people didn't like concord or dustborn or suicide squad or hyenas or marathon or veilguard or the saint's row reboot is because they had schizophrenia

>>713305948
This doesn't apply to multiplayer games because having a thinking opponent already introduces more than enough uncertainty into the game.

>>713303208 (OP)
depends. if it's done in a way that objectively changes the difficulty, like the zombies in resident evil or super macho man in punch-out, then yes

>>713303208 (OP)
>don't bring any items whatsoever
>rely on the pity shroom at the end
>for the final boss
>ZOMG FAKE DIFFICULTY
I supposed fake difficulty is just zoomerspeak for having mental retardation.

>>713305112
you actually can turn this boss into a memorization game because of how the RNG is done
if you hold B or A constantly, the attack patterns will be the same every time

>>713310193
the main appeal of adding RNG to PVP games is that it reduces how much skill effects the outcome which makes the game much more fun for stupid and unskilled people, thus widening the appeal. Even a retard or child can sometimes just draw a cracked hand in poker or land on the star swap tile in Mario Party.

not that the randomness totally removes skill, of course. it can be balanced out by just having an extremely large amount of game rounds to let skill still shine through, like how Cribbage works

The problem with Mario is that there is a lot of inertia in the movement, so RNG can generate several situations where a bad dice roll can leave you with no way out, even if you are relatively well positioned. This becomes more and more noticeable the worse the gameplay is. For example, Mario Maker 2 is a tragedy, the inertia is huge and there is a natural input lag of at least 4 or 5 frames. In the 500+ hours I've played Mario Maker 2, I've encountered a few situations where I knew death was inevitable because of RNG almost 2 fucking seconds before death.
Usually in games with heavy RNG you'll want to give the player the ability to reposition quickly, as well as give more tolerance for hit boxes or things like that.

>>713310608
mario maker is too slippery and floaty for my liking, i stuck to super mario world

>>713310383
Does this Hack even allow you to bring items in? I know there's many that make sure you can only use the items it gives you.

>>713303208 (OP)
yes. the players inputs and mental/physical capacity should be the only factor and that is the "rng".

>>713310439
That's a fault with how the rng is implemented in that game, true random is impossible but as long as the rng is made unfeasible to predict or manipulate it's good enough.

>>713304620
Literally all tryhard shmups and danmakushit.

>>713313217
false.

>>713303208 (OP)
And then, tide of lava sweeping the whole screen like one of those Rondo of Blood suicidal boss attacks, and also seizure-inducing flashing lights calling the player a fucking faggot retard.

>>713313302
Sounds like I'm correct btw lmao

>>713304226
there are no stupid players confirmed

>>713313701
if a player loses because they're stupid and make a sub-optimal choice then that's just normal real difficulty

>>713304226
so if a player knows about the RNG factors then it's not fake difficulty, got it

>>713303208 (OP)
depends.
>roguelikes
this is generally where i hear the most bitching, and it's understandable. a poorly balanced roguelike will either be too easy consistently, too hard consistently, or swing wildly and unpredictably from impossible to easy 1cc based on rng. the issue is, you need rng in this kind of game to make things work and be interesting, but the line between just right and unplayable is kind of thin relative to other games since it's so heavily relied on to make the formula work.
>most other games
no. RNG is fine so long as it stays within reason.
>multiplayer FPS
RNG should never be applied. if it is, that is immediately fake difficulty.

>>713313768
Yes but no human being would make suboptimal choices in a game they understand. No one would choose Rock if they know their opponent likes to pick Paper. The theory that stupid players exist is moot when difficulty is reduced to optimization.

>>713307614
what are some shitty non-turn based roguelikes that are popular?

>>713303208 (OP)
I was going to say this is too masochistic but I can see the care put into the design. Gameplay and lore-wise. Looks kinda fun.
>>713304226
Also, based and true

>>713314025
>Yes but no human being would make suboptimal choices in a game they understand.
That's not true at all. People can make mistakes for a variety of reasons even if they have accurate information. For example, in a non-turn based game such as mario, they might make a mistake due to not reacting fast enough, or failing to notice something clearly visible, or momentarily forgetting something, or lacking in dexterity and doing an input wrong, or getting distracted, or making a math error in an RPG, or failing to account for a factor that doesn't come up often.
These are all reasons a person might fail in a well designed game despite having perfect information.

>>713314297
But that wasn't the original argument. The thesis was related to difficulty being fake precisely because optimization exists.

>>713304226
Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable take.

>>713314364
Your complaint is incoherent.
My original thesis is that a games difficulty is fake if theoretical perfect play doesn't win 100% of the time. You seem to be inferring the inverse, and talking about the meaning of unskilled players, which I never made any mention of.
I use a theoretical perfect player as the standard because it gives the most possible leeway for the game design. I don't think it's fair to make a blanket statement that calls a game bad unless you make it as narrowly applicable as possible.

>>713303208 (OP)
no, managing RNG elements is a skill that can be very real difficulty

>>713314635
That's pretty sad that you're changing your original statement.

>>713314736
I'm not though? From the start you simply interpreted it a way I didn't intend, and honestly, I still don't fully understand what your interpretation even is.
If the misinterpretation you had seems nonsensical to you, then you should simply discard it because nobody was ever holding that opinion you made up in the first place.

>>713303208 (OP)
Combat RNG probably still represents the sudden change of decisions during tense moments

>>713314904
Your original argument stated difficulty is fake if a theoretical player made perfect choices every game, and could not win. I corroborated that with the point of optimization hollowing out player skill, which you did not agree with. Which again, you still don't agree with; so I think a game with optimization as its only meta does not really create stupid players. Which again you disagreed with twice. It's impossible for a game with optimization as its only meta to create dumb players, players will invariably choose better things every time, even at the cost of a couple mistakes.

>>713315103
Are you ESL? Your sentence structure is weird and it's kind of hard to understand what you're trying to say.

Anyway, you seem to be reading into things more than I intend and trying to talk about something different than I am. Over the course of this thread, I've only tried to express two concepts; and before you say it, no I'm not changing what I said. From the beginning, these are the only things I've tried to say.

1: A game is "fake difficulty" if it can be failed through no fault of the player. This is what I mean by saying a perfect player should always win. For example, if there was a game and every 1 second there was a 50% chance you would just instantly lose for no reason, that would be obviously bad design.
2: Sometimes players lose even if a game is well designed, and that's fine.
that's really all I've said.

>>713315641
Bro are you seriously trying to lie about the quality of posts on 4chan in front of the mods?

>>713313975
>>multiplayer FPS
>RNG should never be applied. if it is, that is immediately fake difficulty.
Is bullet spray RNG?

>>713303208 (OP)
It fucks shitty players far more than good players, so no, as much as the retards beneath you try to argue otherwise it is very much real difficulty.

>>713304226
I agree. I will also go further and say being able to mitigate the effects of RNG and adapt to what it gives you is an actual skill despite people acting like it's not.

>>713309803
LLM bots would probably be more creative than anons spamming the exact same threads and the exact same arguments and the exact same screencaps at this point.