Guild Wars 2

First I’d like to draw attention to a series of games called Fire Emblem. They are a series of mechanically simple but highly acclaimed turned based strategy games published by Nintendo. What is relevant here is their RNG system: when a character attacks another, she has to roll RNG to see if she hits. Before attacking, the game displays all information, including the chance to hit displayed as a percentage.

Early in the series, when the game said you had a 80% chance of hitting, you actually did have an 80% of hitting. Within a few games, the system changed. In later games, RNG is checked twice. If the game tells you your accuracy is 80%, your actual chance of hitting is in the low 90’s. Conversely, if your displayed odds are 20%, it’s actually much lower than that.

Having a permadeath strategy RPG deliberately misinform you of the odds sounds, on the surface, a terrible idea, but it was deliberately implemented with success. Why? Because the devs came to understand that while RNG’s are great, a raw RNG is a needlessly frustrating experience. Humans by and large can’t kitten odds properly and have an expectation to be lucky. If someone does get lucky and hits a ticket on their first coffer, their satisfaction only lasts until their luck fails them. In fact they have an expectation to be lucky again and in the meantime, any outward joy expressed makes the unlucky people rage (people are like that!). If someone opens 3,000 coffers and doesn’t hit a ticket, they’ll hate you forever. If they do manage to get lucky, they’ll kitten it as “about kitten time”.

Hence, what you should do is moderate the RNG. Make it nigh impossible to hit a ticket in the first few coffers and all but guarantee a ticket at some point. You don’t need to put it in the patch notes. You don’t need to say anything. Hell, you can make everything ten times as rare next time as it is now and watch people throw money at you. Moderating the RNG will temper the amount of rage generated because no extreme dry runs occur and nobody will miss the chance of hitting a ticket on their 20th box because nobody has expectations of that (unless you create it).

Not that I want to encourage Anet to make a profit off human psychology rather than legitimate (if digital) value, but personally I think overall player satisfaction is win-win no matter what the strategy.

I think it would be a good idea to do this to the boxes, and I just started playing FE Awakening, their rng system is good, doesn’t tell you exact odds, but you have an idea of what’s going to happen.