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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1324 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video Game Thread

What are you playing?

Only a couple hours of Deus Ex this week:

Paul is alive and Jaime has joined us too. Maggie Chow was electro-shocked and chopped to bits with the Dragon's Tooth inside the Universal Constructor area. :) Soon after I ran into a bug back in NYC where the Illuminati contact, Stanton Dowd, wouldn't talk to me. Later discovered I had to shoot him in the head with a firearm. That actually worked. Next up, the Naval base.

Then I started a new Civ V game, intending to go wide. I finished the Liberty tree and ended up having only 3 cities by midgame. Whoops.

XCOM 2, Commander Ironman mode, of course.

My strongest memory: Missing 95% chances at point blank range is a bunch of bs.

I wonder how much frustration could be mitigated by listing the odds as 1/20 chance of failure rather than 95% success. I notice I subconsciously round anything 90% or higher to 100% and get mad when RNG fails me. The fraction reminds me that I will fail the "almost guaranteed hits" from time to time.

I don't know if XCom does this, but I've heard the Fire Emblem games will tilt the displayed vs. actual odds to be closer to how players mentally perceive chance... i.e. if the game says you have a 75% chance to hit, you're going to hit more than 3 out of every 4.

Older Fire Emblem games imply a roll of 1d100 in the user interface, but actually use 2d100 ÷ 2, resulting in a bell-shaped distribution. Newer ones use even more complicated rigmarole.

XCOM 2's RNG is biased toward the player (and does not match the user interface) on all difficulties except the hardest one.

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