The salt water is junk. What you really should do is get a dice tower, and roll each dice single about 30 to 50 times recording each roll. Records the results and then plug and chug for you standard dev, mean and average. You can do some work by assigning each result a number value so all blankes are 1 all hits are 5 doubles are 9 and crits are 12.

3 minutes ago, mobow213 said:

The salt water is junk. What you really should do is get a dice tower, and roll each dice single about 30 to 50 times recording each roll. Records the results and then plug and chug for you standard dev, mean and average. You can do some work by assigning each result a number value so all blankes are 1 all hits are 5 doubles are 9 and crits are 12.

So, apart from the fact that this is, just essentially, "roll bunches of times and record"...

What's so junk about the salt water?

FFG's dice are not casino dice. They are not true. Moreover, you almost certainly aren't rolling them into a velvet-lined play area and also replacing them every x throws, so even if they did start true they wouldn't stay that like. Likewise, bouncing them against each other forever in the dice bag you likely have? Yeah, that wouldn't help either.

The normal thing to do is not worry about it. The scummy thing to do is to perform those salt water tests and start purging. But at that point you should step back and ask why you're playing.

4 hours ago, Drasnighta said:

So, apart from the fact that this is, just essentially, "roll bunches of times and record"...

What's so junk about the salt water?

Junk is there no basis to the system.

The roll a bunch is where you take and record the actual results and see if they fall outside the standard range. So as in a red dice where there is a double hit icon on one of the 8 sides, if you rolled 40 times you should average 1 in 8 as a double hit. This is where having a background in statistics comes in handy as you could actually tell if their is a difference in said dice a that received 7 doubles vs one that had 5. Of course the math will alsp tell you if your sample size was large enough and so forth.

2 minutes ago, mobow213 said:

Junk is there no basis to the system.

The roll a bunch is where you take and record the actual results and see if they fall outside the standard range. So as in a red dice where there is a double hit icon on one of the 8 sides, if you rolled 40 times you should average 1 in 8 as a double hit. This is where having a background in statistics comes in handy as you could actually tell if their is a difference in said dice a that received 7 doubles vs one that had 5. Of course the math will alsp tell you if your sample size was large enough and so forth.

I see what you're going on.

The point of the saltwater test is to be quick and simple and good enough to show an inherent weighted bias for people who don't know the math or have a background in statistics.

Because that's not all of us.

Is it perfect? hell No.

Only math can be perfect.

But its good enough .

Especially given all of the variables inherent in such a system.

I have a set of red regional dice that have an uncanny habit of rolling 3-4 blanks at a time. It's becoming a standard joke at my gaming centre ?

10 hours ago, mxlm said:

FFG's dice are not casino dice. They are not true. Moreover, you almost certainly aren't rolling them into a velvet-lined play area and also replacing them every x throws, so even if they did start true they wouldn't stay that like. Likewise, bouncing them against each other forever in the dice bag you likely have? Yeah, that wouldn't help either.

The normal thing to do is not worry about it. The scummy thing to do is to perform those salt water tests and start purging. But at that point you should step back and ask why you're playing.

If you've been losing matches to bad dice rolls for the last 8 months or so, and I mean, good maneuvering, good fleet building, good fighter coverage... literally just wiffing every shot, you have to start questioning why you're playing....

Personally my dice always seem like they're hot. I get great rolls, but my friend is to the point of exasperation his are so bad.... he'll line up first activation double arcs with Mc30s and Demos, that have rerolls, and still only roll maybe 2-3 damage total. It's insane.

How can we be sure that his dice aren't faulty unless we test them? At some point doesn't the number of terrible rolls become an indicator of bad dice?

12 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

If you've been losing matches to bad dice rolls for the last 8 months or so, and I mean, good maneuvering, good fleet building, good fighter coverage... literally just wiffing every shot, you have to start questioning why you're playing....

Personally my dice always seem like they're hot. I get great rolls, but my friend is to the point of exasperation his are so bad.... he'll line up first activation double arcs with Mc30s and Demos, that have rerolls, and still only roll maybe 2-3 damage total. It's insane.

How can we be sure that his dice aren't faulty unless we test them? At some point doesn't the number of terrible rolls become an indicator of bad dice?

This is partly why I own 3 dice packs. I have the pool off to the side and I randomly grab the dice I need. I figure if I have a good and a bad batch, it must offset each other. Unless I grab all the bad dice or all the good dice.

But I can't really complain about my dice rolls. The appear to be average to me.

5 hours ago, Darth Sanguis said:

How can we be sure that his dice aren't faulty unless we test them? At some point doesn't the number of terrible rolls become an indicator of bad dice?

There is a certain amount of human error here.

When my gang was playing the Imperial Assault campaign, for the first 5 or 6 games, it seemed like every time the white die was rolled, it landed on "cancel all damage." It was getting insane. Right before we decided to start burning things, we started tracking it with poker chips. Every time we rolled the die, we put a white chip into a hat if it was the 'cancel all damage," and a blue chip if it was not. Miraculously, the die started behaving better, and we got close enough t o1 in 6 for the rest of the campaign.

8 minutes ago, JgzMan said:

There is a certain amount of human error here.

When my gang was playing the Imperial Assault campaign, for the first 5 or 6 games, it seemed like every time the white die was rolled, it landed on "cancel all damage." It was getting insane. Right before we decided to start burning things, we started tracking it with poker chips. Every time we rolled the die, we put a white chip into a hat if it was the 'cancel all damage," and a blue chip if it was not. Miraculously, the die started behaving better, and we got close enough t o1 in 6 for the rest of the campaign.

I'm sure there is, but I just don't think "human error" represents the majority of his issue. I've seen him play. His rolls are always low. Always. I've never seen him hit mid or high peaks. Here's what makes me think it may not be all him. He went down to a newly opened game store to run the demo for the new owners. He used the dice out of their freshly opened core-set. He sent me pictures of every roll from his neb-b, each one was solid.

So did he suddenly change his dice rolling technique on a whim? Did the location of this gamestore shift the angle of his rolling hand? Or maybe, seemingly more likely to me, during one of the dice pack reprints someone cooked the dice too long or not long enough and sent out bad batches. He bought all but his core dice at the same time... it seems more likely to me that the "human error" was on the production end of the dice and not in how they're rolled, or even the perception of bad rolling.

The weekend approaches, and we'll likely have our answer then, I'm gonna test the dice.

I've tested all my dice, and discarded any that showed bias in any direction. Each die was rolled 640 times, or 800 for red dice. I discarded about half my dice as a result. A typically "biased" black die would be rolling 30-35% blank or Crit.

Red dice, because of the single face acc or double, need a longer baseline to get similar confidence. They also seemed to be more biased. 7/12 did not meet my fairness criteria.

Definitely suggest rotating dice if you don't want to go through the hassle of massive rolls. I.e. you shoot 1 blue AA against 8 squads. Roll 8 separate blue dice, not the same die 8 times.

Don't need to do any of this nonsense if you spent $5 on the ffg dice app

19 minutes ago, Eggzavier said:

Don't need to do any of this nonsense if you spent $5 on the ffg dice app

I dunno man, after I salt water tested the app it cost me a ton to replace my phone...

19 hours ago, mxlm said:

The scummy thing to do is to perform those salt water tests and start purging. But at that point you should step back and ask why you're playing.

It's scummy to not play with the dice that appear to be biased?

2 minutes ago, Ken-Obi said:

It's scummy to not play with the dice that appear to be biased?

I would assume the assumption is that you are "purging only the bad dice".

with "Bad" being "biased to Blanks".

Whereas at the same time, you were also keeping the dice biased to the Doubles....

That would feel kind of scummy to me... But its an assumption I'm making based on outrage.

I won't speak for anyone else but my buddy and I removed all dice that appeared to have biases either good or bad. People tend to remember the tournaments where they got screwed by their dice. My buddy and I have both noticed that we feel our luck has tended to even out since we removed those dice. Of course we could simply now be biased ourselves that we have "normal" dice when they still aren't... but as Dras points out, the test is just to give you "good enough" results.

I read somewhere that the saltwater test doesn't work on d8s, and now I can't find the place where I read that.

For rolling, one can generally get a trend on dice being 'true' or not within a hundred rolls if it's really out of whack (and not just a little bit, as all dice are), though I went to 200 on all of my X-Wing dice to make sure - and actually found two that aren't true, that I made SURE of by going to 500 on those dice. An evade die that never rolled evades (70~% results of blank versus the mean of 37.5%), and an attack die that rolls crits around 40% of the time. Stuffed both of them in the box and haven't let them see the light of day since. No, actually being honest there about the crit dice - and goddammit, it's not for sale, don't PM me. (3 people pm'ed me last time I mentioned it. If I were an *** I could have made a fair bit of money.)

I just recorded each stack of 10 rolls like

hhbbeecbeh

and counted them up at a hundred later each time. Helped that I was marathoning some anime so I wasn't JUST sitting there rolling dice, but rolling dice while something else was going on.

Haven't done that for the Armada dice yet, and probably should. What anime to watch... Re:Creators?

20 hours ago, Ken-Obi said:

It's scummy to not play with the dice that appear to be biased?

You are testing your game components and removing those that don't produce the results you like. If in fact you have identical criteria for the "appearance of bias" both positive and negative and apply them equally, well, you do you. But even then: have you tested your opponents' dice? Likely not. So, if you say "hey, these dice aren't (very) biased let's both use them. Please keep yours well away from the play area so they don't commingle", great, well done. If you don't say that, in a very real sense you and your opponent are not playing the same game, as you have knowledge of and confidence in your RNG that they do not.

4 minutes ago, mxlm said:

You are testing your game components and removing those that don't produce the results you like. If in fact you have identical criteria for the "appearance of bias" both positive and negative and apply them equally, well, you do you. But even then: have you tested your opponents' dice? Likely not. So, if you say "hey, these dice aren't (very) biased let's both use them. Please keep yours well away from the play area so they don't commingle", great, well done. If you don't say that, in a very real sense you and your opponent are not playing the same game, as you have knowledge of and confidence in your RNG that they do not.

IMHO I think you are way overthinking things. I don't play with dice that roll wonky in salt water no matter if they consistently produce good results or bad results. That is the fairest (i.e. reasonably simplest) way for both me and my opponent to have a game. I could ask them to only roll my dice but I already know that my dice still very likely aren't perfect - my dice pool just isn't as unfair as it was before I removed dice. You think that means in a very real sense I'm playing a different game than my opponent? I'm not even sure what that means or why that is scummy.

On 7/12/2017 at 1:54 PM, Darth Sanguis said:

I've seen him play. His rolls are always low. Always. I've never seen him hit mid or high peaks.

I understand that this is what you're saying. And if we hadn't started recording every single die roll, we would have said the same thing about our white die. Maybe he had bad dice. Maybe he didn't. The fact that you claim that he sent you a picture of "every roll" and "every roll was solid" suggests that either both sets of dice are bad, or that it's still a perception error.

Of course, the possibility that he irritated a god, somewhere along the line, should not be discounted. I have simply accepted the fact that, at some stage, I displeased Lady Luck, and she smote my dice unto the third generation. It's just something you learn to live with.