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Re:How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games by Benjammer on Thursday January 12, 2017 @06:05PM (#13386988)
The "pseudo-random distribution"[1] used in Dota2 comes to mind as well.

[1] http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Pseudo-random_distribution

Re:How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games by tavrobel on Thursday January 12, 2017 @10:03PM (#13388082)
An interesting side-effect of this style of RNG is that if you need to get a particular RNG roll to win a PVP conflict, you can 'farm' up the roll by waiting until you've gotten sufficiently unlucky during PVE, then go to PVP where you will have a much higher chance of getting one right away.

I'm not sure if Dota2 has mitigations against that, but I've certainly seen it in other games.

Re:How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games by n0w on Thursday January 12, 2017 @10:47PM (#13388267)
This is actually a strategy in game.

Go and hit a neutral unit so that you have 2+ hits in a row without your ability/item proc'ing and then save the next hit for an enemy player since your next hit is likely to have a higher chance of proc'ing.

Re:How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games by eterm on Friday January 13, 2017 @07:04AM (#13390167)
In league of legends you could previously "auto-cancel", and critical hits have different recognisable animations. So if you were about to crit a minion you could cancel the auto-attack and "store" the crit to hit an enemy with it.

I think that's been patched now but it was there for a good while.

Re:How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games by derivagral on Friday January 13, 2017 @09:19AM (#13390919)
This existed in Dota2 for some time as well; one could use an (illegal) mod to quickly start/stop attacks until it found a crit animation.
Re:How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games by obstinate on Friday January 13, 2017 @02:38AM (#13389115)
It would be best to have a random state per target, but I don't know if they do.
Re:How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games by wnevets on Thursday January 12, 2017 @06:20PM (#13387063)
Which IMO is done well and makes the game less random.