Ok, so as was discussed in another thread, I have decided to start testing my Armada dice

Here is the methodology:

Materials:

1 - Dollar Store chip Bowl

2 - Cheap brand Epsom Salts (4kg)

3 - Many dice

Fill bowl with water, salt until die floats.

Now, put a die in the water and flick, spin and roll it at least 10 times and try to observe any tendency.

Edit: once a tendency was suggested, I held the die with that face to the bottom of the bowl. Bad dice would flip as they rose to show the prefered face, good dice rose straight up regardless of orientation. Several orientations while being held to the bottom were tried with each die and the difference between good dice and bad dice was immediately apparent.

So far I have tried 1 black die and something becomes quickly apparent:

In an 8 sided die, the "spin" tends to favour not 1 face, but 2 adjacent faces (the balance axis is like a rod through 2 pyramids joined at the base)

After testing 1 die (black) I have found it very clearly favours a pair of adjacent faces (one is a blank and one is a Hit/Crit) out of 10 spins of various descriptions, these 2 faces came out 7 times and a regular generic hit came out 3 times. Since we know a regular hit has a random chance of 50% and a Hit/Crit 25% and a Blank 25% this already points to a skew.

Second black die spins far more randomly and has a tendency to surface on a Point or Edge before settling on a face. the difference from die #1 is striking

Third black die is basically set to blank. You could just erase all the other faces for how often they come up

Black Dice:

8 out of 12 black dice presented as significantly random, 4 are clearly miss-weighted. It really isn't rocket science to see which ones are bad and good, when you see the bad dice do underwater acrobatics to present the light face while the good dice surface on a point before rotating to a final face.

Blue Dice:

Blue dice were utter garbage 3/12 are good. a majority of my blue dice are weighted towards crits (6) 2 weighted towards hits and 1 weighted towards accuracy. I guess this explains why I can't seem to buy blue acc when I need one from my ISD 1s. I literally have to go buy another pack of dice to play now because of this. Found one that was so aggressively weighted to one half that it sat upright in the water like a top. The half it was favouring was a 2hit/2crit, probably almost never see a natural accuracy on that thing.

Red Dice:

Well, I was hoping the blue die were an outlier, but it looks like my black dice were the oddballs. My reds are as bad as my blues. 3/12 good again. a full 5 out of 12 were weighted towards blanks, one of them notably aggressively, 3 of them quite heavily and one shared the weighting about half with a hit face. the other bad ones represented the other faces (1 crit, 1 hit, 1 2hit and 1 accuracy).

In conclusion I am extremely disappointed with the balance quality of these dice. out of 36 dice 14 are random. 38% of a product performs as it should...quite sub par

Wow so hum... that's a reason to be concerned

Epsom salts are never cheap, or at least not real epsom salt. I bet that stuff you have is fake and I ask you to remove such slander.

Yours

Someone who grew up on by the Derby Racecourse.

Epsom salts are never cheap, or at least not real epsom salt. I bet that stuff you have is fake and I ask you to remove such slander.

Yours

Someone who grew up on by the Derby Racecourse.

You can get a big batch in most pharmacies

the initial results are disturbing but 10 tries is no where near enough to draw a conclusion. you need at least 100 samples but more would be better.

Epsom salts are never cheap, or at least not real epsom salt. I bet that stuff you have is fake and I ask you to remove such slander.

Yours

Someone who grew up on by the Derby Racecourse.

You can get a big batch in most pharmacies

Nasty knockoffs.

Epsom salts are never cheap, or at least not real epsom salt. I bet that stuff you have is fake and I ask you to remove such slander.

Yours

Someone who grew up on by the Derby Racecourse.

You can get a big batch in most pharmacies

Nasty knockoffs.

Well it is magnesium sulfate.

the initial results are disturbing but 10 tries is no where near enough to draw a conclusion. you need at least 100 samples but more would be better.

no

not really, its not a ROLL i'm evaluating, its the WEIGHTING.

The way im verifying is simple, if one face seems to bob up after spin i hold the die at the bottom with that face touching the bottom, when I let it go the die does a full 180 to end up on that face at the surface, but floats straight up when that face held up. Simple science = the die is misweighted.

A "good" die will sometimes continue spinning while at the surface since the weighting isn't determining its facing

I am currently piling the "bad dice" in one pile and the "good dice" in another and will test average rolls after

Dammit this is why I titled my thread the way I did. You're just asking for trouble now.

Also, I'll probably do this myself soon.

One thing that would have made dice-weighting less likely is to have split given results into opposing pairs. So, on a blue die, have one accuracy be face down when the other is face up & so on. With the exception of the Accuracy/Double faces on red dice, all results come in pairs..

One thing that would have made dice-weighting less likely is to have split given results into opposing pairs. So, on a blue die, have one accuracy be face down when the other is face up & so on. With the exception of the Accuracy/Double faces on red dice, all results come in pairs..

not sure I follow.

If you look at the Blue Die, you'll see that all four Hits are on one "Pyramid".

Which means teh 2 Accs and the 2 Crits are next to each other.

He is suggesting that all images be opposites to each other, much the same as the 1 and 6 are on a D6... (or rather 1 and 8 should be on a D-8)

You got it, Dras.

So, hold the die like Dras suggests - 4 hits upward. Hold it in front of you, so it's level with your eyes. Spin it slowly around the vertical axis until the accuracies are to the right bottom, and the crits are to the left bottom.

Now, if the die is biased towards the top, it's more likely to give you hits, and if it's biased towards the bottom, it will give you crits/accuracy more often.

If it's biased left, hits/crits are more common, right leads to hits/acc's.

If it's biased towards or away from you, no effect, since each pyramid is 2 hits, 1 crit & 1 acc.

top and bottom etc are just perceptions. I'm just checking weighting using buoyancy.

Ideally the die should have no preference or heavy side. this is not impossible as 38% of my die behaved properly.

Placing symbols on opposite points just helps if the symbols themselves are inherently unbalancing...

But for the most part, we'r enot dealing with Casino dice here...

Of course, with my "Red Die Hell", I probably have a bad batch. But I can't exactly afford to replace 'em until they work, now

Placing symbols on opposite points just helps if the symbols themselves are inherently unbalancing...

But for the most part, we'r enot dealing with Casino dice here...

Of course, with my "Red Die Hell", I probably have a bad batch. But I can't exactly afford to replace 'em until they work, now

Ha!

well, I was floored how many of my red dice were weighted towards blank.

I mean, I KNOW that weighting won't guarantee a face but it WILL increase the likelyhood of a face turning up more often, especially if it is aggressively off balance, so across a high enough sample of rolls you will notice a deficiency.

I observed some of the dice roll to the prefered face almost lazily, sometimes not quite making it before surface tension stopped it, but some of them whip around so hard that once they broke the surface if it wasn't on the prefered face it would still flip, surface tension be damned. I bet a bunch of your reds are like that lol.

Ok, so as was discussed in another thread, I have decided to start testing my Armada dice

Here is the methodology:

Materials:

1 - Dollar Store chip Bowl

2 - Cheap brand Epsom Salts (4kg)

3 - Many dice

Fill bowl with water, salt until die floats.

Now, put a die in the water and flick, spin and roll it at least 10 times and try to observe any tendency.

Edit: once a tendency was suggested, I held the die with that face to the bottom of the bowl. Bad dice would flip as they rose to show the prefered face, good dice rose straight up regardless of orientation. Several orientations while being held to the bottom were tried with each die and the difference between good dice and bad dice was immediately apparent.

So far I have tried 1 black die and something becomes quickly apparent:

In an 8 sided die, the "spin" tends to favour not 1 face, but 2 adjacent faces (the balance axis is like a rod through 2 pyramids joined at the base)

After testing 1 die (black) I have found it very clearly favours a pair of adjacent faces (one is a blank and one is a Hit/Crit) out of 10 spins of various descriptions, these 2 faces came out 7 times and a regular generic hit came out 3 times. Since we know a regular hit has a random chance of 50% and a Hit/Crit 25% and a Blank 25% this already points to a skew.

Second black die spins far more randomly and has a tendency to surface on a Point or Edge before settling on a face. the difference from die #1 is striking

Third black die is basically set to blank. You could just erase all the other faces for how often they come up

Black Dice:

8 out of 12 black dice presented as significantly random, 4 are clearly miss-weighted. It really isn't rocket science to see which ones are bad and good, when you see the bad dice do underwater acrobatics to present the light face while the good dice surface on a point before rotating to a final face.

Blue Dice:

Blue dice were utter garbage 3/12 are good. a majority of my blue dice are weighted towards crits (6) 2 weighted towards hits and 1 weighted towards accuracy. I guess this explains why I can't seem to buy blue acc when I need one from my ISD 1s. I literally have to go buy another pack of dice to play now because of this. Found one that was so aggressively weighted to one half that it sat upright in the water like a top. The half it was favouring was a 2hit/2crit, probably almost never see a natural accuracy on that thing.

Red Dice:

Well, I was hoping the blue die were an outlier, but it looks like my black dice were the oddballs. My reds are as bad as my blues. 3/12 good again. a full 5 out of 12 were weighted towards blanks, one of them notably aggressively, 3 of them quite heavily and one shared the weighting about half with a hit face. the other bad ones represented the other faces (1 crit, 1 hit, 1 2hit and 1 accuracy).

In conclusion I am extremely disappointed with the balance quality of these dice. out of 36 dice 14 are random. 38% of a product performs as it should...quite sub par

Not sure if your experiment has any relevance other then saying it is not perfectly balanced- we know the paint and die cut outs may change the symmetric properties. Roll it a thousand times and record the results- that would be interesting and a natural progression of your experiment. Will a slight mis-weight effect performance? meh. Without any performance data, there is not enough to be concerned about your results.

Ok, so as was discussed in another thread, I have decided to start testing my Armada dice

Here is the methodology:

Materials:

1 - Dollar Store chip Bowl

2 - Cheap brand Epsom Salts (4kg)

3 - Many dice

Fill bowl with water, salt until die floats.

Now, put a die in the water and flick, spin and roll it at least 10 times and try to observe any tendency.

Edit: once a tendency was suggested, I held the die with that face to the bottom of the bowl. Bad dice would flip as they rose to show the prefered face, good dice rose straight up regardless of orientation. Several orientations while being held to the bottom were tried with each die and the difference between good dice and bad dice was immediately apparent.

So far I have tried 1 black die and something becomes quickly apparent:

In an 8 sided die, the "spin" tends to favour not 1 face, but 2 adjacent faces (the balance axis is like a rod through 2 pyramids joined at the base)

After testing 1 die (black) I have found it very clearly favours a pair of adjacent faces (one is a blank and one is a Hit/Crit) out of 10 spins of various descriptions, these 2 faces came out 7 times and a regular generic hit came out 3 times. Since we know a regular hit has a random chance of 50% and a Hit/Crit 25% and a Blank 25% this already points to a skew.

Second black die spins far more randomly and has a tendency to surface on a Point or Edge before settling on a face. the difference from die #1 is striking

Third black die is basically set to blank. You could just erase all the other faces for how often they come up

Black Dice:

8 out of 12 black dice presented as significantly random, 4 are clearly miss-weighted. It really isn't rocket science to see which ones are bad and good, when you see the bad dice do underwater acrobatics to present the light face while the good dice surface on a point before rotating to a final face.

Blue Dice:

Blue dice were utter garbage 3/12 are good. a majority of my blue dice are weighted towards crits (6) 2 weighted towards hits and 1 weighted towards accuracy. I guess this explains why I can't seem to buy blue acc when I need one from my ISD 1s. I literally have to go buy another pack of dice to play now because of this. Found one that was so aggressively weighted to one half that it sat upright in the water like a top. The half it was favouring was a 2hit/2crit, probably almost never see a natural accuracy on that thing.

Red Dice:

Well, I was hoping the blue die were an outlier, but it looks like my black dice were the oddballs. My reds are as bad as my blues. 3/12 good again. a full 5 out of 12 were weighted towards blanks, one of them notably aggressively, 3 of them quite heavily and one shared the weighting about half with a hit face. the other bad ones represented the other faces (1 crit, 1 hit, 1 2hit and 1 accuracy).

In conclusion I am extremely disappointed with the balance quality of these dice. out of 36 dice 14 are random. 38% of a product performs as it should...quite sub par

Not sure if your experiment has any relevance other then saying it is not perfectly balanced- we know the paint and die cut outs may change the symmetric properties. Roll it a thousand times and record the results- that would be interesting and a natural progression of your experiment. Will a slight mis-weight effect performance? meh. Without any performance data, there is not enough to be concerned about your results.

He's not rolling the dice, he's checking the weight distribution. If he was rolling the dice he'd roll them on a table thousands of times. He's checking the weight by floating the die. If the die is heavier on one side (more likely to be on the bottom) that side will roll to the bottom of a floating die.

An unbalanced die will have a tendency, however small, to roll with the heavy side on the bottom, which can skew dice results significantly.

He's not rolling the dice, he's checking the weight distribution. If he was rolling the dice he'd roll them on a table thousands of times. He's checking the weight by floating the die. If the die is heavier on one side (more likely to be on the bottom) that side will roll to the bottom of a floating die.

An unbalanced die will have a tendency, however small, to roll with the heavy side on the bottom, which can skew dice results significantly.

Oh really, can skew dice results significantly? I'll repeat,

" Without any performance data, there is not enough to be concerned about your results. "

He's not rolling the dice, he's checking the weight distribution. If he was rolling the dice he'd roll them on a table thousands of times. He's checking the weight by floating the die. If the die is heavier on one side (more likely to be on the bottom) that side will roll to the bottom of a floating die.

An unbalanced die will have a tendency, however small, to roll with the heavy side on the bottom, which can skew dice results significantly.

Oh really, can skew dice results significantly? I'll repeat,

"Without any performance data, there is not enough to be concerned about your results. "

Clearly you don't know a lot about physics, or dice.

Let me ask you this way then:

If you had a choice between a red die you knew via buoyancy testing was well balanced and random and a die that via the same testing showed a clear and egregious weighting towards rolling blanks, which die would you take to regionals or nationals?

Unless you are seriously just in here to troll and cast aspersions for no other reason than to argue on the internet like a real keyboard hero your honest answer would be the true random die.

If you are too lazy to check your own dice or just don't care enough to do so, I'm not going to tell you to go do it. I'm also not in here posting speculations about how much of a skew it is for a given die accross a thousand rolls because thats pedantic and I don't work for FFG QA.

Fact of the matter remains, Physics is a real thing and so is gravity, if a die is poised on the edge of 2 faces an imbalance will cause it to skew. For myself, and my game, I now know that the dice I kept are the most true and random I had. The red die that skewed double hits went into the trash right alongside the dice with the blank skew.

You can do what you want!

Although now that more than one doubter of basic physics has said similar things I think I might take a die that skewed and one that showed true and roll it a bunch of times, but what might be equally useful is a quick video showing how a bad die rolls underwater like an alligator to show the same face over and over and then floats straight up when you hold the favoured face up, and if you don't think that kind of weighting affects the roll significantly, well, good luck to you my friend!

Epsom is a place. Epsom salts shoild be from Epsom. People used to travel from miles to drink Epsom salts to cure constipation.

Magnesium sulphate does not make them from Epsom, just makes them similar....

I think we need to see your roll tests. Try to do at least 30 or so?