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i am discovering incredible new lows that can come from playing mahjong.
#additionally the mald of grinding for something when you dont necessarily want to be doing it that much anymore#and rolling on gacha to get trash resources#but i know how to make hands sorta
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my favourite metric for evaluating gacha games is the eizen scale. eizen is a character from the game tales of berseria who is essentially cursed to always lose the coinflip, which means that "can eizen play this game and not have a horrendous time" is a very easy way to determine how "generous" any given digital casino actually is and how robust its rng safety nets are. for purposes of the eizen scale this is how eizen's luck works:
1) eizen has the worst possible luck that statistics allow for. if he flips a coin a million times he will get tails a million times. if he has a 99.9% crit chance he will not crit. if resource gathering involves random drops he will always get the lowest possible amount of drops. he will roll the worst most useless possible result from the gacha every time. eizen's only path to obtaining anything useful in the game is through guarantees, handouts, and pity mechanics. going by his actual canon luck the game would crash repeatedly the moment he hits pity and then his account gets banned for suspicious activity before he gets to see the result but for purposes of the eizen scale we assume the game itself works properly.
2) eizen’s bad luck does not affect his friends’ luck, and he often relies on his friends to push through his bad luck. you can get caught in the fallout of eizen's bad luck if you throw your lot in with his (like going on a sea voyage with him and inevitably getting caught in a storm), but just having him around doesn’t keep you from getting heads on your own coin flip. this means ease of access to luckier friends’ resources is one of the metrics on the eizen scale. combined with point 1, if a game for example has a support unit system that shows you a random selection with no guarantee that at least one of those will be your friends, it's completely useless to him because it will only show him randos with trash units.
3) eizen’s bad luck does not affect the choices other people make. this means the game’s content release schedule will not contort itself into ridiculous patterns just to deny eizen the chance to obtain game resources, because its run by people who have other goals than making eizen specifically suck at their game.
some video games are fundamentally unplayable to eizen because the core gameplay premise is about performing and then working around feats of rng, like roguelikes for example, so a bad eizen score is not necessarily a bad game. but this man is the canary in the coalmine of exploitative monetisation, and if he can't play the game then maybe you shouldn't either
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