Everchosen and oft cheating?

[Icegoat]

I've cheated in probably every game I've ever played not just warahmmer board games card games everything. It only ever gives a slightly helpful slight advantage. Miniscule. Usually. 

I do think using this though I could really get some great results. Tournaments I would hope apply a sensible non cheating way of doing it but on my local scene I could easily get a great advantage most games. Its a great rule. And for GW it Encourages sales of their 100 pound freak mutant not dragon not drogon model. 

[Skreech Verminking]

Well now that I am thinking about it.

what exactly would happen if two ever chosen armies with an archaon each would meet each other, how exactly will the one roll take turn ability then work?

especially when both are trying to cheat to get the next turn (😂)

[Dolomyte]

I think cheating has tiers. 

common tier - forgetting or misremembering rules, while I’d like to believe it’s often just forgetfulness it’s still technically cheating. 

Occasional tier - Quick rollers ( I counted 50 hits on those 70 4up to hit attacks in 2 seconds and am already on to the wound roll), slow players, measurement fudgers.

rare tier - loaded dice, fudged rulers, Ben affleck (it was Jennifer garner ffs, how can you cheat on her with the barely noticeable nanny)

I see common tier all the time, occasional has one or two at most GTs, rare I’ve seen confirmed only 3 times.

I was playing someone at a Kings of War GT and he would switch dice for attack rolls and morale checks. One set rolled high the other quite low. I asked if he would not mind using my dice since I had hundreds and he need not switch anymore and he declined, after the round I said I liked how pretty his dice were and offered to buy them after the event for $150. He declined saying they were out of print. It was the fourth round so I told the TO who knew him and vouched for him, but I am still confident his dice were loaded. 
 

At my tournaments now I require players to only have one set of dice. If someone attempts to use different dice for different rolls I bring chessex packs they can use for rest of event. 

[Dead Scribe]

Rare tier I will encounter typically once every large-scale tournament.   For local tournaments, rare tier usually comes up once a month or so.  For regional tournaments I'd say one out of every two has a rare tier encounter.

Mostly with rules arguments and forgetting rules intentionally and then afterward playing the same rule in the opposite manner and arguing it.  That is, by the way, why the team I am on has drills to argue rules both ways.  Not to do it ourselves, but to be skilled enough to counter that person that does employ it.

Dice tricks are the other common one that most of you probably don't even realize.  There are ways to roll dice that aren't loaded to get the results you want.  (then of course there are actual loaded dice).  I'm of the opinion that tournaments should give out dice and not let people bring their own in but thats a pipe dream.

[RuneBrush]

2 hours ago, Dolomyte said:

forgetting or misremembering rules, while I’d like to believe it’s often just forgetfulness it’s still technically cheating. 

For me cheating is about intention.  Did somebody intentionally go out to gain an advantage or was it just a mistake that may have gained them one.  One is cheating the other is a mistake - not saying that either is "OK", but I think to label somebody as cheating who may be inexperienced is a little harsh 😉

2 hours ago, Dolomyte said:

At my tournaments now I require players to only have one set of dice. If someone attempts to use different dice for different rolls I bring chessex packs they can use for rest of event. 

That's interesting as I tend use sets of ten dice (same size, but different styles) to help me quickly count out when I need to roll a lot.  Not sure if you've tried it, but you can test dice in a glass of water - if they're loaded they'll always float one way up.

[Dolomyte]

31 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

For me cheating is about intention.  Did somebody intentionally go out to gain an advantage or was it just a mistake that may have gained them one.  One is cheating the other is a mistake - not saying that either is "OK", but I think to label somebody as cheating who may be inexperienced is a little harsh 😉

That's interesting as I tend use sets of ten dice (same size, but different styles) to help me quickly count out when I need to roll a lot.  Not sure if you've tried it, but you can test dice in a glass of water - if they're loaded they'll always float one way up.

True, intent is key, but hard to judge, especially if your the player who loses due to mistakes made by your opponent. At a GT level you should accurately know your rules. 

I totally get the groups of dice to speed up math, and I don’t think you are wrong for liking that, but it has bad optics in certain situations. For instance if you use three specific sets for attack and wound and save rolls and you have a different set for morale. That is shady. 

I am hesitant to water test people’s dice, I feel it’s a major slap in the face that Would spoil Someone’s weekend regardless if they are cheating or not.

[Overread]

Dice is always a bit of a problem and the debates/arguments on how they should be rolled and what kind of shape they should be etc.... are legion. Honestly the only way to get fair random rolls would be to use a computer based dice rolling system. No weighting, no tricks of the wrist to roll them a certain way and any bias is universal for all players. 

However we come to a physical game because we like that physical aspect. It's more rewarding for most to roll dice than it is to simply watch their phone screen bleep out the results. 

 

Events could use their own event dice, but chances are they'd end up using whatever dice were affordable, which would typically mean they'd not be "of the highest grade". That is unless the price of entry included dice purchases (at which point those with armies that generate a lot of dice all at once would complain there's never enough and those with much smaller dice rolling might even argue that they are paying for too many dice that they don't need). 

 

Heck I'd wager a lot of standard and even GW dice might fail the water test without the owner ever realising it had a bias. 

[Dead Scribe]

Heck I'd wager a lot of standard and even GW dice might fail the water test without the owner ever realising it had a bias. 

It is fairly common to obtain a lot of GW dice or other chessex dice that are legit and to roll them thousands of times to choose the ones that roll higher most of the time.  Unless the dice are precision dice or casino dice (which GW and chessex dice are not) they all have a bias due to casting blemishes.  

That way you are not using loaded dice, but you are picking the dice that have the best bias.  

This is something that I know many many people to do in private, so those dice would still pass the water test.

[Dolomyte]

10 minutes ago, Dead Scribe said:

 

 

It is fairly common to obtain a lot of GW dice or other chessex dice that are legit and to roll them thousands of times to choose the ones that roll higher most of the time.  Unless the dice are precision dice or casino dice (which GW and chessex dice are not) they all have a bias due to casting blemishes.  

That way you are not using loaded dice, but you are picking the dice that have the best bias.  

This is something that I know many many people to do in private, so those dice would still pass the water test.

I really prefer that in a game both players use the same dice, I think that makes it easier and honestly makes the game more social, not to mention quicker. Player one rolled his hit and wound rolls, then player two just picks up the wound dice and rolls his saves. If the dice are loaded or off kilter won’t matter since both sides are using them

[amysrevenge]

22 minutes ago, Dead Scribe said:

This is something that I know many many people to do in private, so those dice would still pass the water test.

I don't think that's how it works.  If it is fair enough to pass the water test, it doesn't have a bias.  If it is weighted enough to have a bias (even accidentally, or as a factory fault), it fails the water test. 

Everything else is just confirmation bias and people not understanding how probability works - a properly random distribution of results doesn't look random to someone checking the numbers, as there will be streaks and clumps.  But there should be streaks and clumps.

Edited December 13, 2019 by amysrevenge

[Overread]

1 hour ago, Dead Scribe said:

That way you are not using loaded dice, but you are picking the dice that have the best bias.  

This is something that I know many many people to do in private, so those dice would still pass the water test.

In theory if a dice has no internal bias toward a number then it should pass the water test (which is honestly only a crude test).

At which point if you've "pre-rolled" the dice a billion times to get the perfect dice that should, in theory, roll the perfect result - it will still be just as fair. A lot of gamers do the whole "rolling out the 1s" and such mostly like people cross their fingers for good luck rather than to actually create better luck.

 

Of course there's likely dice right on the fringe of having a bias and being balanced which means they pass the water test but have a tiny bias in them. Honestly with regard to the method of rolling dice its likely that this level of inaccuracy in production is pretty much moot in actual use. 

[gjnoronh]

1 hour ago, amysrevenge said:

I don't think that's how it works.  If it is fair enough to pass the water test, it doesn't have a bias.  If it is weighted enough to have a bias (even accidentally, or as a factory fault), it fails the water test. 

Everything else is just confirmation bias and people not understanding how probability works - a properly random distribution of results doesn't look random to someone checking the numbers, as there will be streaks and clumps.  But there should be streaks and clumps.

I think it's not that simple.    You could have a weighted dice that passes the water/salt test which has only limited accuracy.

However the 'I rolled the dice to see which ones roll well' test has even less accuracy.  To get enough rolls to separate random chance from  an actual bias in a visually intact dice is pretty hard to do.   You roll a single dice 100 times and write down the distribution of results you might start finding groups of dice with a statistical anomaly but your statistical error rate is still pretty high particularly given that you are quite commonly using 40-50 dice in a game of AoS.   

Just because people try and find 'lucky (or broken)' dice doesn't mean they are as successful at it as  they think.   But  dice sharing is probably for the best as it reduces the likelihood of problems (and even with that there are lots of ways to cheat if you are determined. . . as some folks in this thread clearly are!) 

 

 

[amysrevenge]

Sure, I don't know that much about the science of avoiding being caught with loaded dice, but I would imagine that the effectiveness of a loaded die would be related to how easily it fails testing - the more significant the skew, the more likely to fail the test, and the slighter/less significant the skew, the more likely to pass the test. 

So if someone rigorously tests a thousand dice and finds one that hits a 6 16.669% of the time instead of 16.666...% of the time and passes whatever mechanical testing you put it to, good job I guess?  But I would hope (again, not knowing anything about the science of testing dice) that if it hits a 6 45% of the time, it would fail testing.

[gjnoronh]

So the reason we're talking about this kind of imbalance and how to detect it is some dice sets have significant bubbles inside the plastic that weight one side or the pips are so heavily gouged out of one side it throws off the balance.    

The issue with the dice/water/salt technique is you have to have the liquid be isodense with the dice to have the dice 'float' at the sweet spot so bias tendencies  are clear. 

For example a really heavy dice (i.e. a metal one) will just sink to the bottom of any water sodium chloride solution.  You can't add enough salt to make it isodense with steel.   

You can get to the right density with salt and water with many but not all plastic dice.    You can also get a sense by cutting a dice in half.   Some poorly made dices sets reportedly have big bubbles you can see.  

And really who is checking dice in salt and water at an event or cutting them in half.    It's talked about on the internet far more often then it is done.. . .unless you  belong to a club that is apparently trying to do everything they can to cheat the system. 

 

 

[Moldek]

To be honest I understand that people want to take Warhammer really seriously and thrive to be as good as they can, but it seems like an especially hard choice for a hardcore competitive hobby. Between the buckets of dice, constantly changing rules, huge range of models, ease of cheating etc. I agree the designers should strive to limit the obstacles to competitiveness, but it's important to keep in mind that that's not actually the primary aim of the game. It's designed to be playable by 10 years old and up, with or without the myriad of supplement and faqs, and have a decently fun game with some tactical challenges if you're so inclined.
In the case of this archaon rule, clearly it was designed to have that feel of revealing what Archaon saw in the future. It may be clunky but 90% of players will use it in their garage with their friends. I'm sure it could be improved though! Just saying that hardcore tournament play is not the focus of the rules.
In my opinion GW games don't really work without a gentlemen's agreement. This impedes competition, but also fosters great social bonds. That's why I'm not too thrilled when I hear people that want to see an e-sports scene, cash prizes and such. If organizers want that kind of competitiveness, the ideal to me would be that they write their own tournament comps and refereeing process. I'd rather the "official" way to play stay friendly.

Sorry for going a bit off topic, and of course I understand not everyone will agree with me

[Sleboda]

7 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

I'm of the opinion that tournaments should give out dice and not let people bring their own in but thats a pipe dream.

Back when we first got the US GTs going, we provided all the dice, tape measures, and templates.

That lasted for a few years.

[Sleboda]

4 hours ago, Dolomyte said:

I really prefer that in a game both players use the same dice, I think that makes it easier and honestly makes the game more social, not to mention quicker. Player one rolled his hit and wound rolls, then player two just picks up the wound dice and rolls his saves. If the dice are loaded or off kilter won’t matter since both sides are using them

There are plenty of gamers I don't want touching my dice. Eww.

[gjnoronh]

33 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

Back when we first got the US GTs going, we provided all the dice, tape measures, and templates.

That lasted for a few years.

 

29 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

There are plenty of gamers I don't want touching my dice. Eww.

I do that D6's at Blood Bowl tournaments I run but that costs me $1 a competitor to give them a pair of custom event dice.   Would be hard to do at current price tags for dice for AoS where 40 dice in a roll is possible.

Purell at every table may make  sense.

Depends if we are really worried that someone is trying to cheat and to what extent we want to deal with it.

1 hour ago, Moldek said:

 
In my opinion GW games don't really work without a gentlemen's agreement. This impedes competition, but also fosters great social bonds. That's why I'm not too thrilled when I hear people that want to see an e-sports scene, cash prizes and such. If organizers want that kind of competitiveness, the ideal to me would be that they write their own tournament comps and refereeing process. I'd rather the "official" way to play stay friendly. 

Agree entirely  well I love tournament AoS treating it as a cut throat winner take all, cheat until they catch you,  literal battle is going to lead to all sorts of long term negatives.