Complaints about bad luck are a long-standing tradition going way beyond x-wing. Just roll with it (pun intended). Agree and maybe be sympathetic but not patronizing (if you can manage it).

26 minutes ago, jonnyd said:

I like to show people lists that have 0 dice rolling in them, or very minimal. Things like a double ghost and y wing, all with autoblasters and accuracy correctors on the ghosts. Do an exercise in what dice can and can't do, show them that they are subject to luck and risk. And then suggest that they buy new dice. If you don't like the dice aspect of the game, take the dice out of it. Its pretty boring without the dice factor.

After tracking my own dice over a few casual weeks, I learned I rolled way more green dice than red dice (and that the regular FFG dice were pretty fair over that "small" sample). I learned I shouldn't put myself in those situations as often as I did. Suggest they do the same thing? Sometimes, your dice really are trying to kill you. But its probably a very minimal number of games over a year.

Learning where variance lies and when to pursue it versus not is also a key skill. When you start Gitting Gud, those high variance lists that are so fun can start looking less and less attractive in the average club game, where your greens can desert you for an irksome loss against a complete novice with a terrible list. Going low variance is a risk:reward decision - if you really think you outskill everyone else, and you can beat them with your play, playikng low variance is the way to go. Rely on being better than them, and leave as little as possible up to the dice.

If you think you don't outskill everyone, going high variance might be more rewarding. If you don't think you stand much chance of victory against the field, then going for trip aces (well, before spike damage and bombs killed that archetype anyway) might be a better option - sure, you stand a higher chance of losing, but when you win, you win well, and if variance goes your way, you can carry the day on it potentially.

So you might think for instance about taking something high variance to Nationals, but taking something relatively low variance to club nights, as long as you can handle those occasions during Nationals when variance IS actually against you.

The prize structure is also something to bear in mind but that's a more complex discussion than I feel qualified to have as I mostly don't care that much about the plastic, I go to tourneys to sling spaceships.

One of the things that I like about playing on Vassal is that your can log your dice (and your opponents). I usually go to http://sozin.pythonanywhere.com/new to analyze my dice results (I'm a bit of a math guy). I've had several losses where both I and my opponent felt my dice had let me down. It turned out that I had rolled average over the course of the entire game. The dice had just failed me in a couple of key encounters. The same has also been true of the opposite.

We aren't wired very well to process the data from an entire game. It can be very humbling to find out that the problem wasn't the dice at all.

3 hours ago, Yearfire said:

My question is how do you deal with it in a friendly manner? If I loose, I (for the most part) have no problems saying against it: it wasn't bad luck, but some gameplay mistakes, but it's harder to tell someone who just lost that it was their own fault. I you don't want to just say "fly better"/"git gud" and show them the middle finger, what do you guys usually say?

For the most part, I just roll with it. The dice may have been hot or cold at certain parts of the game, but for the post-match talk I'll try to focus on actual decisions and tactics.

In the end, if someone wants to blame the dice, then they'll miss the opportunity to learn and improve their game.

3 hours ago, Yearfire said:

Lately I've become more and more irritated by some players tendency to complain about dice and bad luck in their games, and in general try to explain their results by talking about bad luck or good luck, when dice modifications, or lack of such, has a lot to do with it.

Whether we like to admit it or not, this is a dirty dice game . I've certainly won and lost tournament games due to bull**** dice skew. That's how it goes sometimes, and in the end you just hope the dice are more with you than against you.

Sometimes people's complaints about dice are illegitimate, but sometime they are legitimate, and that's probably worth remembering. If someone is always complaining/blaming dice, odds are that they're just salty or have a poor grasp of probability--pointing out either to them is unlikely to go over well, change their behavior, or increase their sportsmanship. But, sometimes, games are won entirely undeservedly because of dice swing. In those cases, I'm fine with a player pointing out the dice anomaly (whether it helped or hurt them).

I just played in a Store Championship where I'd say I outflew my opponent throughout the game. He soundly out-rolled me, though. For instance, across four defense rolls with one ship he rolled 3/3 Evades, 3/3 Evades, 2/3 Evades, 3/3 Evades pre-modification... there's literally nothing you can do differently to deal with such a high proportion of natural evade results, and it basically skewed his ship to have 6.5 more Evade results than would be expected on those twelve dice, basically being worth like six-and-a-half free HP (nearly a 20point value). It's also just as statistically likely that he would have rolled 1 Evade out of those twelve dice, in which case the game would have swung the exact opposite way. The dice skew continued though good arc-dodging by my ships kept me in until the end game, where his final surviving ace with with 2 Hull left took a major explosion which didn't trigger, then he ran over an asteroid which didn't take his last hull, and then he tanked a Range1 TL+F shot against his 1 Hull no-token Ace by me rolling only 2/4 hits after TL+F and his rolling 2/3 Evades naturally. Then he wins the Final Salvo by rolling Hit-Hit against my Hit-Miss. This was a game I lost through dice. Had my opponent been like "well you could have done this or this differently..." I probably would have become quite miffed, as I'd make the exact same decisions again.

2 hours ago, LagJanson said:

Some of us really don't know what we did wrong. Dice probably still aren't to blame, but tactically we don't see our blunders and dice are nice and visible with bright red and green colours.

This is a really good point. A new player is not likely to "see" the game like experienced players. But the dice results are very visible.

Quote

How to answer dice complains?

Paul Heaver.

11 minutes ago, Koing907 said:

For the most part, I just roll with it. The dice may have been hot or cold at certain parts of the game, but for the post-match talk I'll try to focus on actual decisions and tactics.

In the end, if someone wants to blame the dice, then they'll miss the opportunity to learn and improve their game.

That's been my strategy for the most part as well, but when that is their conversation after almost every game, I feel like they devalues the skills and accomplishment of other players as well.

I'm thinking I need to start recording some of my fun night matches and going back later and reviewing... Heck, I'd love to locate somebody to counter review it. Need to be more videos of tactical analysis done. Some live streams provide a little, but it's not been reliable enough as a learning tool.

A lot of the time I just ignore a flippant rationalization - we all do this on occasion so the odd venting comment is fine.

If someone is really persistent though, I generally will ask them what they think the expected result was from the relevant situation. Most of the time people complaining actually just have the wrong notion of the math in their heads for whatever reason. Ex. "Ugh I miss every shot on your IG88 w/ my TLT"... well...

And when the outlier rolls do happen it's worth acknowledging them as such, but also pointing out that even in these case often they are still within the 5-10% window of probability, in which case you're actually likely going to even get one or two happening *every game*. Even 1-2% stuff is going to come up more often than people assume given how many times dice are rolled.

It's also worth pointing out to people that we all intrinsically cherry pick the games where we rolled below average and forget the ones that we rolled above average. Ex. sure you may have "lost to dice" in that championship game, but you wouldn't have even been there if it wasn't for good dice in previous games, etc. That's just the nature of the game.

So yeah there's no silver bullet and realistically we're all guilty of complaining about variance at some point or another, but for the folks who do it habitually I find steering the conversation into some actual education about expected dice results and probabilities tends to diffuse it fairly quickly.

"In god we trust, all others bring data." -Edward Deming

Beyond what everyone has already said about tokens and modifications, dice follow the law of averages. Unless they have imperial data that shows their dice are consistently bad then they need to accept that over all the rolls of a game/tournament dice will equal out. Sometimes in a crucial moment they will be better or worse, sometime over a span of rolls, but in the end the dice are just.

Dice will always involve luck, but you can build different amounts of luck into your list. If he constantly complains about bad luck, yet builds a list that depends on good luck, you could point that out. As already mentioned, this is sometimes referred to as high variance.

High agility ships have a higher dependence on luck than lower agility ships with higher hull/shield values. More attack dice that are unmodded depend more on luck than fewer but modded dice. A naked interceptor for example depends a lot on the luck of the dice, with 3 agility as its main defense (ignoring repositioning) and no target lock for a native attack reroll. Compare that to a naked B Wing, where its reliance on shields/hull over agility and its target lock + focus attacks make results both attacking and defending far more reliable, predictable, and less vulnerable to bad luck.

There's lots of list changes someone can do to reduce variance, and as such reduce bad luck, and even ways you can fly the same ships with no changes.
* Taking evade actions instead of focus for defense (evade is guaranteed while focus is pure chance)
* Choose lower agility ships with thicker skin, like Quickdraw instead of Soontir
* Choose upgrades that either guarantee results or mod results, like Accuracy Corrector or Expertise
* Try not using target locks as soon as you get them, instead saving them for when you can also focus
* Try replacing luck based defense upgrades like Stealth Device with something more reliable

51 minutes ago, Analogkid said:

they need to accept that over all the rolls of a game/tournament dice will equal out. Sometimes in a crucial moment they will be better or worse, sometime over a span of rolls, but in the end the dice are just.

This is the counter-fallacy. People tend to swing so far against tales of bad luck that they actually come to the wrong conclusions in the other direction.

(1) Over the course of a game, the dice are far more likely to favor one player over another player than to end up "fair on both sides." In a small, but significant, number of games, the favoring of one player has a serious impact on the outcome of the game -- which, I personally, define as being "more than a standard deviation from the mean."

(2) Even in those cases where -- over the course of an entire game -- the results turned out to be statistically average, when the results occur can have a big impact on the game. If your red dice are hot early, and my green dice are cold early, you eliminate a ship. If it this reverses ... I'm still down a ship, and will simply be throwing fewer red dice. Luck early has a much bigger impact than luck late.

The lesson?

Don't overestimate the effects of luck ... but don't underestimate them, either. It's not smarter. It's just a different mistake.

7 hours ago, Yearfire said:

just say "fly better"/"git gud" and show them the middle finger,

I think you've answered your own question.

Whenever my opponent wins, it was due to their great fleet building and flying skills, whenever they lose, it was due to luck. I like game night best when everyone's happy, and this game has an even amount of skill and luck, so I'm okay with telling a tall tale once and a while to make my opponents feel better.

Sometimes someone gets a little too smug when winning and they face the wrath of my math - I will occasionally run the statistics for them and demonstrate quantitatively just how lucky they were. I also run statistics on extremely unlikely plays if I think my opponent will find it interesting.

For the most part though, I'm a compulsive people-pleaser! I really don't want my FLGS to turn into a fussy nerd-barfight.

Funnily enough I played a test game on sunday where the 0.2% chance happened on the very first shot of the game - Bossk vs full token Jake with autothrusters on range 3.

We rerolled that damage because such an extremely low likelihood would skew any meaningful conclusions that I wanted to draw from the game. I'm well aware that it can happen in a tournament, and I have no problems in accepting it there. But for the test game... naah. The alternative would have been to restart and fly the 2 turns again to first shot.

Dice variance can be hard.

Dice usually averages out throughout the game. Players remember the super bad times and forget when the dice was really good. In my game versus K-3PO at this most recent store champ we had huge sequences where the dice luck impacted the momentum swings, but it averaged out through the entire game. In my Top 8 game, I had some poor dice luck, but I made a bad play and that bad play is what costed me the game because it gave me no time for the dice to average out. My opponent kept his foot on my throat and finished me off and played great.

Players just have to breath and relax, it's one thing to jokingly say dice was what caused the game, but another thing to actually get mad. Why you heff to be mad? It's just game.

Complaining about the dice is a good way to vent frustration. In a tournament situation its very easy to get down on yourself because of some mistakes you made, sometimes its helpful to have another thing to blame besides yourself. As long as you are aware of those mistakes and attempt to learn from them it can be a lot less devastating to think "i made some mistakes but the dice did not roll well for me anyways, i will fix my mistakes and the dice should roll better next game" then "i really screwed up that play and this loss is entirely on me". The dice excuse can help shield from the straight up self blame and defeatist attitude that can arise.

Remember your opponent just lost a game they tried very hard to win, try not to get bitter about how they vent that frustration.

Finally remember, "When you loose its the dice's fault, but when you win it was all skill."

Idk ive (rarely( won by dice before

It's adifferent kind of suck bevause youre still not really playing a game just craps, but hey better him than me

My two matches in my SC v scouts basically came down solely to dice. First i got ****** over by an immortal rau amd x7s that couldnt roll nonblanks for ****, and next game Backdraft decided he wouldnt be taking ****

But sometimes it comes down tobplayers not realizing what luck Is

Had a final match in a local tournie v vader cheri amd i try to burn cheri but Ryad (predator + focus) has a ramge 3 obstructed **** on vader

Vader had no mods due to tl +focus on braft and then acted surprised when Vader lost his shields

I've started to think that my dice are bad. Not bad that they roll crap all game every game, they average out reasonably fine. But bad that they roll crap/ good at the worst moment.

I've been running a lot of Expertise since it got released (In an attempt to remove "bad dice"). Before Green dice get involved I should expect 75% hit results thanks to expertise, I'll get 1-2. No target lock available due to repositioning effects.

Then, in other games, with Expertise and Target Locks available frequently getting 75+% hits without the need to use the dice mods.

or

How about, 1 hit coming in, 4+Green with Focus... I get hit

I get those 3+ hits without mods mentioned above? Full Evade or the ship had only 1 Hull left anyway

That is the "bad luck" I get.

8 hours ago, Azrapse said:

(...) overpowered ships that are able to equip so many abilities that modify their dice.

It can be because they can equip astromechs on top of (...)

R3 sees what you did there, lol.

Fact is, DICE can ruin a game! Last round (round 6) of a big tournament.

My Vessery had to kill a 1 hull Pure Sabacc (pushed to PS9) - it was really important that this little ****** don´´´t get a second shot with 6 to 7 dice on my list.

What happend? Attack with Ion Cannon, No hits, TL from Vessery AGAIN no hits!!! (evade i took already to survice the 6 hit onslaught from Sabacc)

Ok, then I finish him with Primary - I thought at least. I even had Crackshot. How could he possibly survive? I tell you. I blanked the next 6 dice too.

So instead of getting in the top 6 I dropped from this lost game to 17 or so so (of 28 if I remember correctly).

I'm also of the opinion that dice effect on games should neither be under- or overestimated.

In many games it doesn't matter . Either one guy outfiles the other by a large enough margin, or dice are just average, or the swings don't matter (rolling 3/3 crits vs a 1 hull Ghost isn't very helpful for example).

However there are a few games that are close enough to be decided by an unlikely dice roll at a key moment.

Biggest problem with xwing re dice is that the range of values is so narrow that it's so extreme

Armada sports far more ships rolling far more dice, making it FAR more difficult to get consistently hot or shite dice

9 hours ago, FTS Gecko said:

^

this.

Also, there's no guarantee that modification will affect/improve dice results. Dice are dice.

I saw a guy at the Euros roll a five dice, focused Miranda homing missile and after spending the target lock for rerolls, they still only had the grand total of one hit. Dice are a thing, bad luck is a thing, it happens.

The inverse of this being the the guy I played Saturday getting 8 natural hits + crits, no mods, with his stressed Dengar's attack and counter attack. Dice are going to dice.