What are the chances that people would test their dice and bring essentially weighted dice to a competitive event?

That's what I do. I have two bags of dice:

One is marked "SHOW TO THE T.O."

The other is marked "DON'T SHOW TO THE T.O."

Subtle.

Just FTR: I actually have never played in a tournament before ... I am one of those "casual" types.

I thought I would sneak in a little Mel Brooks, seeing how the thread discussion has already devolved into Monty Python

All the movies plus the TV series would be a couple of days worth if you didn't sleep more than a couple hours and watched continuously IIRC

People who don't know Monty Python are soooo confused right now

Sadly, I am one of those people. I am thoroughly confused at the moment.

Ah. Please report inmediately to the ministry of silly walks for an argument. Should you decline, you will be assaulted by several men wielding a banana.

Alternatively, inmediately watch;

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

Monty Python "And Now For Something Completely Different"

Monty Python's The Life of Brian

Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl

Do this now. If there are other things you were planning to do with your life in the immediate future, scrap them inmediately. Do not return to the internet until you are properly educated.

Holy **** dude why are you still here?

Go man!

Splitter!

Also, "leave us alone, Mel Brooks!"

Would you believe a Boy Scout with a slingshot?

If this refers to me, its entirely subconscious. I struggle to roll 1s and hit 6s regularly. Its an affliction.

Want to play Axis and Allies sometime ?

I'm also laughing at the forumite who claims to have watched Monty Python in its entirety (recently).

Did you watch all the TV series? Huh? Yeah, right.

My apologies. I was referring to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I had forgotten the other shows also fall under the name Monty Python.

If anyone wants to send me a full set of their regional dice, I will cut them open for you and report back on whether or not they are poorly manufactured pieces of plastic.

I am one who is wise in the ways of science.

If you want, I can even tell you how to employ sheep's bladders to prevent earthquakes.

My apologies. I was referring to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I had forgotten the other shows also fall under the name Monty Python.

All is forgiven!

On a side note - I noticed a large air bubble inside one of my regional dice last night.

I think all of my regionals dice have bubbles in them, I noticed one and checked several others which had the same. I figured they all are just made that way. I might have to take a closer look.

The bubbles seem to be a part of the process. The problem is that since they aren't centered, this causes uneven weight distribution and certain facings will be more likely to end face up.

All of my regional dice have bubbles. So, I float tested them and found the red dice pretty much favored blank faces. I checked my regular dice and they were relatively random.

I then rolled them 100 times each.

There was no significant difference in the outcomes.

That's why I use the app … well I use it because it makes wonderfully silly sounds and it's something completely different and the Sergeant Major said I could in lieu of marching up and down the square with him and it sounds like the dice say Ni Ni Ni Ni Ni Ni sometimes. OH, and they're something completely different.

Now go away or I shall discourse to you a second time!

Balance is easy to test. Float them dice in a bowl of saltwater. If one side is biased to always face up, the die is not balanced.

What also floats in water?

What about the very small rocks? They float don't they?

Balance is easy to test. Float them dice in a bowl of saltwater. If one side is biased to always face up, the die is not balanced.

I have had people tell me this.the. float my d20 only to tell me its garbage and should role low ie 1s, but it produces the most 20s.

I even went so far as to role it over 400 times and record the results, i toss out roleing basis by always setting the dice in the same manner and using a dice tower.

Guess what no statistics difference was seen.

Balance is easy to test. Float them dice in a bowl of saltwater. If one side is biased to always face up, the die is not balanced.

I have had people tell me this.the. float my d20 only to tell me its garbage and should role low ie 1s, but it produces the most 20s.

I even went so far as to role it over 400 times and record the results, i toss out roleing basis by always setting the dice in the same manner and using a dice tower.

Guess what no statistics difference was seen.

In any case check out the other thread. The results are pretty heavily scewed on some dice.

You're never going to get balanced dice playing Armada. Even if via some miracle you acquired dice that are up to casino standards, enough use (or just jostling them around tons in your dice bag) will alter that balance and you'll need another miracle to acquire new Perfect Dice. But in actual practice you're not getting a miracle the first time.

And, yes, some people do test their dice to see which are "better". No, there's nothing you can do to detect them. Yes, if you both use the same dice that problem is eliminated.

@mlxm I agree that these are mass produced dice and not of the quality of professional gambling dice. That said this thread was started because of an observed bias in OP's regional dice. Testing that is being done in the other thread bares out that some of the dice are significantly worse than others.

Some people take their games more seriously than others and may want some way to quickly separate good from bad dice. A die that floats with no or a slight bias can be confidently put in the good pile. A die with a heavy swing to one face may be worth further statistical testing or removal from your set.

Biased dice is only a "problem" if you want it to be. No body is going to judge you for not testing your dice.

Personally I don't obsess over this (yet), but I still find the conversation interesting.

Yeah so I'm a bit OCD and fairness is pretty important to me, so yeah I tested all my dice and heaved more than half of them.

It is important to note that there is a huge difference between a slight imbalance and a heavy skew. I will keep dice with a slight imbalance because the likelyhood of that causing a statistically significant skew is negligible, but when a die with a heavy skew like the one we cut open and found probably 1/5 of the mass of the die missing from the inside it WILL deffinitely cause a statistically significant skew (keep in mind that a D8 needs less tests to find a skew because it has WAY less degrees of freedom than a D20, a couple hundred tests will do for a d8 but a d20 could take a thousand)

I have since purchased 3 more dice packs since and tested one and the one it had 4 great dice 3 passable ones and 2 garbage.

as for dice "changing" as you "jostle them", that is a load of crap, sorry, these things are solid hardened plastic and the reason they are bad in the first place is cavities in the die from bad production, new cavities won't magically appear and existing ones wont magically dissapear from simple handling. The amount they will change from regular handling will amount to statistically insignificant decimal places.

but when a die with a heavy skew like the one we cut open and found probably 1/5 of the mass of the die missing from the inside it WILL deffinitely cause a statistically significant skew

but when a die with a heavy skew like the one we cut open and found probably 1/5 of the mass of the die missing from the inside it WILL deffinitely cause a statistically significant skew

Did I miss the picture of this? I wasn't on over the weekend but would love to see a picture of what this looks like.

I read that most regional dice have a visible bubble, but this was in a standard FFG die?

This was in a standard FFG red die that skewed heavily to blank faces. I didn't post a picture but when I get home I will see if I can find some of the pieces and take a shot to post.

I would like to add that while some people are claiming it's "impossible" to have perfectly balanced mass produced dice I did find that maybe 20% of all the dice I tested were near enough to perfect that a buoyancy test was unable to determine a weighted side (in other words, weighted so evenly that any discrepancy wasn't even enough to rotate the die against the water resistance), the dice would float straight to the surface regardless of which face you turned.

so in summary

20% near enough to perfect

18% close enough to perfect

42% bad enough that I could not use in good conscience

20% Horrible - Including a red die so aggressively double hit it tested my will-power before meeting its end

How I see that comment is-

40% I don't have to worry about

60% that I don't have to worry about as long as I am not floating my dice and finding the good results and tossing the bad.

For me the knowledge that not all dice are created equal just means I need to make a cognizant effort to cycle through my dice and not use the same ones every single throw, in case I have bad (or good, since I won't know the difference) dice lying around.

Of course, now that the fact some dice may be positively or negatively weighted is common knowledge we have the potentiality where every time someone loses a game in competition they can accuse the winning person of using weighted dice and/or use the assumption that everyone is using weighted dice as vindication for doing it themselves to "even the playing field."

How I see that comment is-

40% I don't have to worry about

60% that I don't have to worry about as long as I am not floating my dice and finding the good results and tossing the bad.

For me the knowledge that not all dice are created equal just means I need to make a cognizant effort to cycle through my dice and not use the same ones every single throw, in case I have bad (or good, since I won't know the difference) dice lying around.

Of course, now that the fact some dice may be positively or negatively weighted is common knowledge we have the potentiality where every time someone loses a game in competition they can accuse the winning person of using weighted dice and/or use the assumption that everyone is using weighted dice as vindication for doing it themselves to "even the playing field."

sure, everyone has their own take on it, I would warn that red dice were really bad for me with lots of blank tendency. And Blue dice typically were almost never perfect but lots of mediocre and of the bad ones for some reason they tended to favour crits over hits or accuracy which can suck for the squadron game.

I did find that at the regionals, using my truly balanced dice, I did not have any runs of particularly bad or particularly good rolls. Maybe it was mostly psychological but I had pretty much zero rolls where I was like "WTF??" (for example throwing 4 blacks and getting 4 blanks)

Yes you can fish for loaded dice. Yes if you find sufficiently skewed dice they would make a statistically significant difference to your rolls across a tournament, but honestly out of (now having tested) 15 dice of each color thoroughly 1 out of 15 reds was weighted sufficiently favourably to a favourable face that it would make enough of a difference to raise your game. That would mean that if the same holds true across a sufficiently large sample you would need to buy about 15 packs of dice to have a decent complement of 3 loaded reds. That's about $180 CND and hours and hours of testing and probably another $20 in epsom salts.

If you are willing to spend $200 and 5 hours of your life for a slight statistical advantage on a few rolls per game, being a cheater is probably the least of your psychological problems.

How I see that comment is-

40% I don't have to worry about

60% that I don't have to worry about as long as I am not floating my dice and finding the good results and tossing the bad.

For me the knowledge that not all dice are created equal just means I need to make a cognizant effort to cycle through my dice and not use the same ones every single throw, in case I have bad (or good, since I won't know the difference) dice lying around.

Of course, now that the fact some dice may be positively or negatively weighted is common knowledge we have the potentiality where every time someone loses a game in competition they can accuse the winning person of using weighted dice and/or use the assumption that everyone is using weighted dice as vindication for doing it themselves to "even the playing field."

...

If you are willing to spend $200 and 5 hours of your life for a slight statistical advantage on a few rolls per game, being a cheater is probably the least of your psychological problems.

Totally agree. But then again, if we took one step back from the perspective of someone who hasn't spent a thousand dollars on plastic spaceships, we look pretty crazy too.

It's more so an issue that the trust between opponents, that we approach each other on a level playing field, is damaged by this whole debacle. It is just a pandoras box situation. It probably won't have a huge impact, and I am probably (most definitely) outlining the worst case scenario, it is just sad to me that it exists.

People could do it for a tournament and as far as I know it would be perfectly legal. People could also fish for rulers with a couple extra mm or range (die cut margin or error). It is best not to worry about it. They still need to be a good player to be competitive.

Here is the next question; if a significant portion of stock dice are bad, does removing biased dice from your game give you an edge over players who never tested theirs. Tested die are more predicably unpredictable.

/jk