Відео

Now imagine this was with actual money with a mobile game

I am somehow not surprised that it would be kinda predetermined.. but I *am* surprised that the percentages are a weird threshold thing.. like I was wholly expecting the example was gonna be "yeah I had to go up to 100% to force the game the actually give me something" like it was an even worse scam.. but it sometimes *actually* being 100 is just evil

I once betted with a 95% chance of getting a new figurine and still got a repeat. I almost screamt

This doesn't change anything for a typical player. The results are effectively the same.

The instant I saw the repeats on the rewinds my first thought was that it was set when I entered the room, with the worst case scenario being a need for a full game reset to reset the figure & threshold. Now, I wasn't sure if exiting and reentering the room would reset it, but yeah "rewind to before entering the room" is where my instincts went lol

Had anyone done a check of what the game is actually doing in the code?

I mean, even if the game did exactly what it said on the tin and you had a 20% chance with 1 shell, and a 21% chance with two… it’s still a rip off to use 2 shells. You have MUCH higher odds with two 20% chances than one 21% chance. So it doesn’t really change anything.

Tbh i loved this quest

Smart man

Comment for the algorithm, I have nothing clever to say

Basically, it's the difference between a scratch-off ticket or a lottery ticket. The fact that the numbers are already on the ticket when you decide to buy is not something people hold against scratch-offs. There isn't anyone who uses that reason to call them a scam. The odds work in exactly the same way, regardless of whether you or the vendor chooses first.

How about this then? Make a save state just before you enter that room. Now enter the room. Make a pull with just one shell. Now make 9 more pulls. Check your results. Save again if you got good results, otherwise load up your saved file. Now try again. Make 10 pulls with just one shell for each pull. See how that differs. Do you get 10 Rollobite or what do you get? It might be just like you say...but it might also get changed every time you pull the lever.

I don't agree at all with your conclusion that this makes the game rigged OR a lie. The odds are _exactly_ what the game tells you they are. The only difference it makes is that you can't cheat the system via savestates. Your other conclusion, that you should always bet one shell, is correct - but the game already makes that clear by showing you the odds.

Really cool cover! I love the voice too

Ya know, now that we know EXACTLY how this works, people who have save states can just blow through it much easier, and there has to be a way to beat the system other than just bet 1 shell at a time. If we could find an average number select by using the data in this video we could find out the perfect number for % to keep to get through this side quest for 100% completion even faster. Obviously this would probably include using save states to find the number it landed on approximately 100 times for data. And then graphing that data to find the median number. If the number was truly random, it should be close to 50%. However speedrunners can't cheat and need to prioritize speed and efficiency, which means if they can find this % that gaurantees the better chance on a weighted coin flip, you bet they'd take it.

Needs more evidentiary proof, but the precursory evidence is rather astounding.

i always knew something was screwy when adding shells perfectly incremented the odds by the same number

And the amazing thing is that I was digging for this sidequest to cite about its awfulness to punctuate how stupidly handled Power collection in Kid Icarus Uprising, making it harder to have all options from *_AN IMPORTANT MULTIPLAYER MECHANIC_* unlocked. It says something that the way KIU's Power collection is handled is STILL worse than this, and it shows with a 100% completion stream series having to focus on this so actively. Good job making the Figurine Collection your shedog. We need to find the RAM address that dictates the RNG number selected and we'd be able to either make a code for setting it to always be 1 (we could need to toggle it if the address is used for other purposes), or simply put it on RAM Watch on VBA-RR. Of course, this would only do so much for Switch VC version players, but at least we could get something going.

17:23 I was like "why would you waste your time firing the cannon?" imagine my surprise when it actually hit. Worst part is, neither of them noticed.

All these years, all those attempts, all the times people said I should just bet 1 shell and I ignored them because I thought "But it's percentage based". So much pain and it was all for nothing.

i like when people reveal that there is 'no reason to play' a game. The Yugiho card game online.. the AI draws the best card from its deck it needs, on its turn. So the cards 'drawn' in its hand mean nothing. It 100% cheats, having 'deck crawl' or whatever you call it,100% of its turns. Therefore I realized there is no reason to play because if the right card exists in the computer's deck to counter you, it will play it... guaranteed. and if it doesn't, means you got lucky and chose those cards before the match.

What you're describing doesn't change anything though. When you spend more shells to increase your odds, you're doing so with no knowledge of where that random number landed. It doesn't actually matter when the number was generated as long as you've made your choice without any additional information. You choose how big to make your "basket" and the rng decides where its going to land. Now the actual reason it's a scam to increase your odds is because unless you're down to 1% for 1 shell, the amount that you increase your odds is not proportional, and you would net more wins over time by spending only one shell. That's because the first shell is worth however much, say 20%. If you spend an additional shell on the same roll, it's worth 1%, but if you save it to spend on a second roll, then the second shell is worth another independent 20% or 19% if you won previously

Man, I replayed this within the last year I think? And actually did this sidequest for my first time thanks to the savestates. Thing is, it still might have been easier if I'd realized simply leaving the room and coming back would reset the value. I did what I guess could be called RNG manipulation, inspired by what I'd seen of it in other Zelda games, just swinging the sword or using different items random amounts of times or rolling, etc. In testing that I did notice there was a sort of consistency even to that in what I'd end up getting, though I'm really not knowledgable enough to say for sure how exactly it works. I'd just count every two sword swings, for example, or every four, six, etc. depending on the amount of shells I bet. Very weird but for sure the worst sidequest in a Zelda game.

Porky 34 pulled out its schloppy! Lucas felt even more traumatized.

Me as a kid in middle school, no save states, just literal saving and restarting your gameboy advance, no soft reset method like in pokemon, this sucked... this is my favorite Zelda game but this quest just sucked dude

I'm a little confused as to what you're upset about. The game picks a random number and you set the odds of getting a new figurine. So what if it picks the rng before you set the odds? It doesn't affect the odds themselves. If you set the probability to 75% than you have a 75% chance of meeting/beating the randomly generated number. It seems to me like that's working as advertised. That being said, the real issue with this mini-game is that it's mathematically inefficient to bet more than 1 shell at a time, but that's not because of the inner mechanics of the game, it's just due to the fact that betting one or two shells give almost equal odds of getting a new figurine but betting two shells literally cuts your possible number of attempts in half. And this only gets worse the more shells you bet. You have to pay an exorbitant amount of shells to make any meaningful difference in your odds that it's just mathematically better to only bet one shell at a time.

Without save states this is functionally the same.

Thats just how Random number generators works. Given the same seed(which is likely set when you start the game) It will always give the same sequence of numbers. I repeat: RNG will ALWAYS give the same number sequence for the same seed. In this case it will get 2 numbers from the RNG, one to check if it is a new figurine or repeat and another to check which one it will be. So yeah, nothing wrong with that. Thats why is called pseudo random, not random

Comment

This is why save scumming this sidequest is always okay.

One fo the problems that causes this issue is how the GBA generates random numbers. Generating random numbers is in and by itself hard to do for a computer. If you ask a computer to generate a number between 1 and 100, it will always give you a number like, for instance, 3 and 5. It will never give you "1", nor "10", nor "55", etc. In this case, it will be always between 3 and 5. So, how do games achieve some level of randomness and generate seemingly random numbers? By using a seed. As seed is a program that adds more randomness to the computer so that it can generate "true" random numbers. That is, if you insert a seed in the previous example for generating a number between 1 and 100, you will get results like "1", nor "10", or "55", or other random numbers, instead of jsut a number between 3 and 5. Well, so everything can be fixed with a seed right? So, by adding a seed to Zelda: Minish Cap, I could get random figurines instead of the 2 fixed ones that were shown in this video, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The GBA was a really limited console, so it was really hard to create a seed for its games. A common way of creating a seed is by using the computer's clock. A clock can generate 86400 random numbers within a day, which corresponds to every second that there is within a day (24 hours is the same as 86400 seconds.) So, if you have a clock-based seed, you could get generate a different random number depending on the hour of the day. In simple terms, if you had a clock-based seed for Zelda: Minish Cap, you could generate a different figurine depending of the time of day in which you bought the figurine. But then, what is the problem? That the GBA doesn't have a clock. So, it can't generate a clock-based seed. So, you cannot use the clock-based seed method that i mentioned earlier to generate a random figurine. And just like you can't use a clock-based seed for a GBA game (in general), you cannot use other complex seeds. Why? Because the GBA had quite a lot of limitations. It doesn't have enough power to generate good seeds.

So, savestate before going in the room so you'll get a reroll each time?

I don't understand how the odds are mathematically or in practice different than stated though if you're not rewinding. You say when the game tells you there's a 20% chance for a new figuring at the base, "This actually makes our odds higher than 20%." Okay then what are the real % odds?

If you're interested; please do a video on Pokemon Stadium 2. Because you can't cheese that game nearly as easily as Stadium 1 on Switch Online with savestates. Plus one thing I noticed is that the game LOVES to screw you over with giving the CPU a crit hit/status effect (moves like thunderbolt) on your Pokemon, as well as giving the CPU pokemon favorable rolls with held items such as the quick claw and focus band.

I agree with the math, however it should also be noted that, if you're in the situation where the base 1 shell gives you a 20%, and betting 2 gives you 21%, even assuming the game worked with actual percentages of success, it would still be pointless to bet 2, you're doubling your shells spent for a mere 5% (multiplicative) increase in success.

Even if the RNG worked perfectly and actually did just randomly pick somehow, game theory math would clearly show it to be a horrible design. The math simply doesn't favor any increase in shells until you are well into single digit percentages. A better system would have involved a proportional increase of diminishing returns, such as by reducing your chance of failure by one tenth rounded up to a whole percentage. For example, with 20% success rate as your start, one extra shell might drop it by one tenth of 80%, or 8%, raising your probability to 28% instead of 21%. This still would be quite as good as betting 1 shell twice (that gives you a 36% chance), but it is still far better and offers greater incentive to bet more for expediency. You could also use a proportional multiplication instead of subtraction, the easiest simply being to square the failure chance. Either way though, a fixed percentage increase of 1 per shell is only ever an advantage over one at a time betting at 1%, and that by only the slimmest of margins.

So we are essentially rolling a d100 against the game EVERY TIME WE TRY TO GET A FIGURINE regardless of what the percentage says our chances are.

Man really just went, "Your game sucks and I can prove it mathematically"

As I recall it it was the same with the Smash Melee trophies!

You know I'm starting to think that Nintendo made this entire heart piece shell quest to teach Children about the dangers of a gambling addiction

Programmer here: I'd bet money they generate a seed for you when you enter the door, try exiting and re-entering and I'll bet you get something different.

That explains a lot

Minish Cap is not one of the best 2D Zeldas

My guy... the fact that the roll happens at the moment you enter the room versus when you press "yes" makes no difference. If I gave you two copies of the game, one where it rolled on entering the room, the other rolling when you press "yes", it would be LITERALLY impossible for you to distinguish which is which, without cheating with save states. If this video was just displaying a cool factoid about how rng works behind the scenes, cool. But the way it's portrayed as a negative thing is weird when it does not affect gameplay in any meaningful capacity.

Couldn't it just be that the randomization seed is being turned back when you rewind?

oh wow... the video had a sequel and I didn't know! Still, I can see myself as a kid enjoying this side quest...and if I knew this quirk back then, I'd probably farm 999 shells just to get 100% every time lol. (Cuz like, I was one of those kids that somehow maxed out on 9999 E-Crystals in Megaman Zero 3, and I wasn't familiar on any farming methods! I can't even remember how I did it, I guess I just... played the damn thing until I somehow was maxed out 💀)

So this is why Scott the Woz hasn't finished The Minish Cap yet!

I'm quite surprised that Game Theory never did an episode on this.

This isn't a rigged game, this is a perfectly valid way of calculating the odds, and doing all the other stuff, it does get a bit weird when you start doing impossible things, but you are doing impossible things

This sidequest was the reason I couldn't beat the game