The magic of spire, for me, is picking up a card/relic/potion, and realizing it has an interesting interaction with another card/relic/potion. I’m still discovering unique instances of these interactions 1000+ hours later. If I knew what I was going to get every run, I wouldn’t play this game, nevermind for 1000+ hours and counting.
Dude same. At least 1000 hours for me and I just had a snecko run going and realized if you use apotheosis with a card in your hand that upgrades to reduce cost, it changes that card to the upgraded cost. It may seem obvious but still got me lol
@@bearchaser012 ooh that’s such a good one. I think that happened to me with a pyramid+Snecko (wouldn’t exactly recommend it), and a hand littered with cards that upgraded cost - so good. My favorite combo recently has been setup+sneaky strike as an energy engine
@fivetwoeighty7012 lately I've been trying to get to ascension 10 with all characters with as few losses as possible. You can just play the game however you want and it's always got something new
Super agree regarding why we wouldn't want to let people know about this. Same for any game or hobby when we try to convince the "casuals" why they're not playing "correctly"
this might be useful to know for the speedrunning community, whose members are generally fine with exploiting every glitches and inner workings under the sun. probably not something to make public though. (I regret hearing about clay farming in stardew valley against my will. do not look it up.)
@@selenasilverstep7981 I don't actually know if this would be useful to the speedrunning community. Generally speaking, Spire has two types of speedruns: glitchless, and set seed. In glitchless, this doesn't help, because you're not allowed to get private information about correlated RNG. In set seed, this doesn't help, because you already know what's going to happen from pure iteration.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 It would be useful anyways. If rolling something in a specific event gives you information about what will be the roll of another event, it helps to choose which rolls you want to make.
@@diegocfq Yes, even without tool assistane or access to backlog, you can use it to construct excel tables and correlate events that way to optimize your path. Correlated RNG is generally *useful* otherwise it wouldn't be an issue. However, this is only useful if you want to win 20 runs in a row. If you want to win a single run in sub 20 minutes, it's too much math.
Yeah, the point you make at 5:44 is very relatable for me. There is a variety of games which have a really boring most optimal way to play them. Once you start optimizing your gameplay, there is no way back until you find the exact limit at which you are playing optimal enough, but the game is still fun. And if the game is competitive there can be no limit, sadly
I'm not sure that's precisely what jorbs means by "there's no way back". I think it's more like, for example, once you know for a fact that after a mid-act Shrine in act 2 you are guaranteed a potion on your next combat, you basically have to deliberately grief yourself on your next fight to avoid the advantage of that correlation (to be clear, this example IS fictitious, it is just representative in magnitude to how much correlated RNG can reveal to you). In other words, to use a chess analogy, being aware of correlated RNG and not taking advantage of it isn't like playing with your little brother and calculating less to give him an edge; it is like playing against *yourself* and pretending you don't know what you're planning to do.
@@tudornaconecinii3609I think you’re not taking understanding what they mean. It’s not a matter of just not trying as hard, they also meant knowing the right thing to do but deliberately choosing against it in their example.
Frankly, while I wholeheartedly agree that this is knowledge you can't take back, and knowledge that can truly ruin the game for people who didn't know or want to know about it, I don't believe the solution is to hide it and treat it as a taboo topic. All that serves to do is make the people who *do* abuse it seem mystical and overly knowledgeable and better at the game than the people who don't know about it can ever hope to get. Instead, this system should simply not exist. Do not pressure the community to gatekeep some silly "open secret" where only people who were there for the discussion get to know about it, but rather pressure the developers to fix such an obvious and rookie bug. Don't use the same seed for the dice, don't output the dice rolls, don't leave a stupid vulnerability in your video game. This is 100% on the creators, not on the community, and it reflects very poorly on them. Modding it out is a good start, but not the proper solution for the game. Disappointing if the devs don't want to touch it. To throw in a completely opinionated statement as well to clarify where I stand, this is not a competitive game and trying to gain clout from winning at it is ridiculous.
I don't think it is that easy to point your fingers at the developers and say that they have fault because of something like this. I doubt that very much of the time spent in developing a game is in figuring out what happens when players perfectly understand everything about it. They would much rather spend their time and money to make something fun and interesting, which they have clearly done a wonderful job of with StS. On the other hand, this could be a wonderful case-study example of how to further hone the craft of developing games. We can learn from it and certainly take parts of that into account in the future, or at least be aware of things like this. Besides, a large part of this being a problem clearly lies with certain parts of the community itself. It is perhaps unfortunate then, that it lies also upon the community to take up the mantle of fixing something like this. Again though, I don't think that is directly any one person's fault or anything, these things just happen sometimes. I do agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence though
i agree the information should be openly available, but i think the problem is more when streamers explain correlated rng stuff while theyre playing the game. not rare for a streamer to be like "o yeah i got X enemy as my Yth fight so now i know my act 1 chest will have a potion"
I play games that have significant bugs and usability issues, where the use of live memory editing tools is encouraged. Using these tools fixes some significant bugs, and makes simple tasks much easier by improving UI. However, they also allow me to cheat, aggressively and continuously, and muddy the line between performance optimisation and obviously changing the game for your advantage. Becoming aware of rng like this is quite similar. Once you know, you cant just remove that knowledge from your brain. If you look to make the best plays, you will use the information available to you. You can't just switch it off. And you dont know if those people you're talking to about the game like to optimise the game in this way. So, talking about it (in particular the specifics of it, but many people will look it up regardless) will impact the enjoyment others get from the game.
It will be interesting to see you play with RNG fix mod. Maybe over thousands of hours of playing your subconscious mind already learned some patterns of randomness and fixing it may produce interesting results.
As you've alluded to by talking about modding it out - this is an implementation detail, not an intentional design. It could be patched out entirely with minimal effort without affecting any other aspect of the design or balance of the game. It's easy to draw comparisons with the spreadsheets of enemy moves, or tracking Rare/Potion chances and the like, but those were all intentional design aspects that can be understood as such, as well as tracked without knowledge of internal variables. Making those less predictable would affect the balance of other aspects of the game. It's a minor difference, and definitely less crucial than your overarching point, but I can see it being a sticking point for people who view the way (for example) a Frozen Eye Defect run plays out as comparable to spending an hour mapping out the early-game RNG. If I was serious about playing StS better (I'm not lol) I'd feel no discomfort using a mod that showed the probabilities of various occurrences on the HUD instead of tracking them manually, similar to how in Binding of Isaac I have no qualms using a mod with item descriptions so I don't brainfart my way into confusing two different situations. I don't really view that kind of bookkeeping as important. Anyway good chat, thanks for your time.
I actually like items like Frozen Eye from a game design standpoint, personally. It's the sort of item that indicates to you the devs do *not* intend you to be able to deduce your draw order from first principles. I think games are richer for having those kinds of items in them. Hell, you can even deliberately make the items very underpowered, so their existence doesn't impact the overall balance, so they have a purely teleological role.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 Totally agree with what you're saying, I love to point to stuff like this to glean intent. To be honest though, I'm only replying because I really need to give recognition for the use of "teleological" in a non-annoying way.
I think your points are totally valid. Competitive StS is hard to take too seriously, and sometimes having fun is more important than absolute optimal gameplay. Tbh to play StS optimally you would need a supercomputer and 3 weeks per run, lol.
I think about it like this: If there's a whale bonus that lets me instantly win the run on floor 0, I would never press it. You can say I'm playing 'sub-optimally', or putting 'arbitrary restrictions' on my gameplay or whatever, but I feel a lot of people share this view. Obviously a gross exaggeration of what correlated RNG is, but I think it follows the same principles.
Personally, I agree with you. And in a silly single player game, it would not matter, since all you are playing against is yourself. I think what Jorbs is talking about is specifically for high level play and leaderboards. As an example- if this whale bonus existed, it completely demolished the speed run, as you find a deed with that bonus and menu quickly. When the selling point of you as a creator is ‘won the most games in a row’, and that reputation pays your bills, playing in a way that is not fun but reliable makes sense. What’s more, there is a thing called ‘instrumental play.’ Folding ideas has a great video about it called ‘why it is bad manners to suck at world of Warcraft.’ The idea is that, when someone figures out the way to play that has the best results, people mimic that to find success, even if that makes the game less fun. If you were just getting into STS, and every streamer spent an hour analyzing rng, you could take it as ‘I have to do that too if I want to be successful’ and either bounce off the game, or perpetuate the idea.
I would argue it doesn't follow the same principles, tbh. When you refuse to take Pandora's on whale bonus, you are simply making the game more challenging. It's like pressing Hard instead of Normal on difficulty on an RPG. When you refuse to use a potion in a combat where you know for a fact, through unintentional means, that you WILL get a potion reward, you are deliberately griefing yourself. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't grief yourself (I don't think correlated RNG is intended as a tool in the gameplay arsenal), but the mental motion of griefing yourself does not come naturally, you have to consciously intend it. So when someone knows a lot about correlated rng, he is going to subconsciously make choices that take it into account all the time, whether he wants to fairplay or not. You can't truly turn it off. And this is what makes it an infohazard.
@@tudornaconecinii3609and it’s hard to know for sure what you would have done without understanding correlated rng. Sometimes it’s a choice that you feel could have gone either way so even just deliberately choosing against using the potion might be unfairly detrimental to you.
Correlated randomness is like if you played a chess game against a computer, and realized that (despite there being a range of good moves), it only ever followed one of your moves with a particular move. You don't auto-win, but you 1) get worse at chess, because you no longer need to worry about all the other variations, and 2) you know you can force a line, so if you're tired or worried or (etc), you probably will. It may or may not ruin the game entirely, but it simply makes it worse without any virtues. If you follow the game log or memorize the relationship of 1 RNG-tracked event to a separate one based on seed, you still need to understand how to get through Act 1, 2, 3, think about scaling and blablabla. But you're paradoxically worse at all of that, while succeeding more often.
I now want to know about correlated rng because this game is more fun for me as a thought experiment type thing. I’m not good at it I just like thinking about it.
As a modder for Slay the Spire , the openness of modding has led to awesome mods and a great modding community. But just want to confirm that it would be super easy to subtly cheat if you wanted to. From knowing your draw pile/map nodes, to actively changing card rewards / enemies, it would be easy to create a mod to give yourself an unfair advantage
You can have people confirm their mod list if they want to play competitively. Idk if this is a thing yet but if you want to prevent mod spoofing you can also get the mod manager to generate a checksum for a mod to give it a unique identifier. Tl;dr: there are easier ways to prevent mod abuse than prevent the thing Jorbs is talking about here.
Once upon a time, I was really considering the idea of playing The Elder Scrolls Online. Then I saw high-end gameplay of the game, which, if you don't know, consists of doing a whole lot of animation cancels all the time, so that you can essentially spam abilities, actions, etc. I never ended up playing the game. If the most optimal way for you to play a game is to exploit unintended bugs or interactions in such a way that it essentially "breaks" the game, straying you away from the intended gameplay loop, it's just not fun.
I find this part of STS pretty interesting, but I also fully agree with your points. I would also say, however, that I am not sure that I have the brain power to take the information that the game is giving me and use it for anything. That being said, I do still plan to add the RNG fix mod to my game next time I play, just in case.
I am a super competitive player, since I was 13, I competed online in trackmania, league, hearthstone, Auto chess and have always done well, I now finally settled into playing ironclad until I die for the last 2 years, this breaks my heart, how people would want to get edges in such stupid in my opinion ways, just play the fucking game the way it's supposed to be played. I have nothing against people that play casually or competitively, but if I ever achieve a cool win streak and it gets overshadowed by the fact that I could be cheating, its kinda sad.
Speaking of the cheating in Trackmania (at 10:50), the cheater mentioned is present in www.youtube.com/@Jorbs/channels, maybe UA-cam Jorbs should consider to remove this person's channel from there? It feels weird to me that his channel is being advertised there. On the other hand he was genuinely good player (which makes the cheating even worse in my opinion) and maybe his content is good too (I have no idea, never actually watched any of his videos), so I can understand if others view this differently (or don't care🙂). Not that this bothers me too much (just a little bit🙂), but it is not first time Jorbs mentioned this person in a video so I figured I should ask to clarify this almost meaningless issue🙂.
As I watch this video, I'm also reading your book, and I find myself correlating this video to the line "In such a world, I simply don't think it's a great idea to spend one's life being selfish. I think if we all focus on ourselves our entire species will likely be extinct quite soon." (pg. 136, Before We Go Live) There is an unhealthy pattern in needlessly exploiting available resources to optimize for the self, like using correlated randomness to better win games like Slay The Spire. Perhaps there is a symmetry in selfish behavior like cheating and over-extraction of resources. Great content as always, Jorbs!
As games reach a wider audience and "getting gud" becomes a thing, there is usually a step where the meta devolves into something the creators could not have anticipated. Like some pixel-perfect breakdancing to slide past a combat trigger that was probably supposed to be unskippable, but everyone has to do it because it doesn't count as a "glitch" in the glitchless category. But it's totally not a feature, ugh.
This is the common problem of gaming especially for competitive games. Knowing this info changes the game from Min- Max vs uncertainty to maxing marginal gains against certain future.
I 90% agree, but there is since fun novelty in breaking a game (once). As a peak behind a curtain or video like this I enjoy this kind of thing. Watching a streamer do this instead of playing the game would be mind numbing lt boring. My line is understanding is that if it’s trivial to do this it would bum me out and ruin the game for me. I respect takes about competition because I don’t compete at all
You have brilliantly outlined the philosophically conflicted, and cheatable "quality of play" , or culture, that is born out of correlated RNG. Once social, financial, cultural status can been earned "from playing the game well", what is and what becomes of the core purpose of the game? Who can play the game as intended well, and who can dedicate the most time to optimizing "gameplay". One side might appreciate the quality of play and say it is entertainment, while the other might categorically relate differently to "playing". For this group, the enjoyment, or entertainment, is a more functional, industrious affair. Hmm, failing to find the right terms. Correlated RNG, come to think of it, seems like a really useful analogy for some of the stretching and conflict we are seeing in America and many Western cultures. We cannot agree upon what game we are playing and also we know that there are cheaters in the wings.
Great video. There is a reason why devs keep some information hidden from the player. For me the greatest fun in StS was when I was slowly grinding my way through ascensions while exploring events and figuring out how cards work with each other. If I had a way to know for a fact that certain "?" event is super beneficial for me and that in order to grab it I would need to take certain path for example I would definitely go for it - but that completely nullifies the idea of hiding that information from player. While there is a challenge there is fun, handling RNG with your current knowledge is what makes this game great. Do I take a risky approach and hope I draw hand of greed from 20 cards in deck next turn, or take safer approach ignoring the risk but saving some HP. If I were to know what happens next it breaks down the game to some dull math exercise when I simply need to write down numbers and calculate the best possible outcome while completely ignoring the probability/rng aspect of it.
Making inferences based on things you can observe in game doesn't seem like cheating to me. High level play in a lot of computer games involves exploiting bad PRNGs. Seems impressive if people can do it. I wouldn't want to play like this but I know people who like to crack codes. But I also don't count potion-less rewards and usually don't calculate the odds for future draws either. I wouldn't consider any of these practices cheating yet they all depends on how the game randomizes things, just in a less obscure way. The game log thing does seem like it might be cheating. But I've played hundreds of hours of STS and never seen the logs. If mods or out of game data give you additional information, yes that's cheating.
I can choose to ignore engaging in this behavior even if I have the knowledge. The same case could be made for even knowing about the knowledge. "If I know there is knowledge out there that would boost my winrate and don't actively learn it, I'm not trying my best" or something. If a mechanic destroys my enjoyment I opt out of that mechanic (mostly. It's a sliding scale of how bad it is and what I gain), and I think most people do the same. Interesting analisys, though. I hope most people agree about the unfair advantages of certain mods. Hopefully the RNGfix helps!
i do know a little bit about correlated RNG in the first floors of the game, and since i play primarily on mobile, i can't mod it out. what i know about it doesn't affect my play often bc it's usually not important, it doesn't never affect it. i would prefer for that not to happen. there's a different quirk in how the RNG is coded that makes using correlated RNG without the exact value much easier, but jorbs didn't mention it because it wasn't that relevant to the explanation and knowing about it would reduce some people's enjoyment of the game.
This is new to me as I play on switch. Just wondering, after playing for thousands of hours, do you begin to notice trends even without the roll numbers visible? For example, if you get offered X as a Act 1 boss reward is Y event more likely to occur in Act 2? I'm always looking for trends but am not confident in any!
I read like 2 years ago about how if your first floor is against a cultist, you will get into a combat if you path to a question mark on your second floor. For now, it seems to have worked for me, and has been getting me some questions about the RNG in STS. I haven't been hard tracking it at all, but I have noticed oddities on it. I'm not surprised to find this new information, but it's sad that people are using it to their advantage in a competitive manner.
Pandora's box can't be closed, there's not really any way to try to corral the spread of information. Furthermore, why would you want people to look at players with 99% winrates and believe that's possible rather than let them in on the fact that some exploit exists that they are abusing? It is a shame the spire devs have moved on, it seems like one way to solve this is to fix RNG in a patch, and then only accept runs done on switch hardware if the PC version is too difficult to detect cheats on.
Or just acknowledge that StS is a single player game which you can optimise approximately as much as you want and realise that there actually is nothing to fix.
@@BenoitBataille that's definitely true for 99% of people just playing single player. But I think jorbs does have a point when it comes to people who are choosing to make it competitive. Weight lifting is a single "player" exercise, but we still compare scores, and want to know if someone is abusing insulin or HGH when considering their records.
Wait, is Jorbs trying to teach Twitch chat/UA-cam commenters that different people can have different beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts? Twitch chat is SO not ready for theory of mind.
I think the whole talk is very good. Apart from the cheating and hidden informational leak, correlated rng sounds to me like some speedrun strats that are so obnoxious that the community generally go play in other category because doing it is such a buzz kill. I don't think I will install the rng fix because I simply have no interest in optimizing like that. I don't event track potion chance kkkkk
Pardon the ignorance, because I'm just learning of this game factoid (I mainly speedrun alone, in a dark hole, playing Silent only, I don't know why, Silent isn't even my best character, I just like them) - but for correlated RNG does it follow a guaranteed rolled number, or guaranteed rolled *pattern* - we know it's always going to go 1,2,3,4,5 etc, or 1, higher, higher, lower, higher, lower type thing? Terminal curiosity with no other relevance to my savescumming self.
It's not an issue with the individual sequence of numbers, but because there are multiple sequences of the same numbers for each randomly generated thing (e.g. cards, fights events etc.). Once you learn something about the first number of the sequence, you know that every other sequence will have that exact same property because it's the same number. You can't know what that number is, but you can get the range of that number which can allow you to eliminate options from the other sequences. Lets say the first fight is chosen from 1 out of 4 encounters at equal chance, so 1-25 picks the first, 26-50 picks the second etc. So if you see fight 3, you know the roll was between 50 and 75. This means that each other RNG sequence that isn't the one that generates fights also has a number between 50 and 75 as it's first number, which lets you eliminate possibilities which can either tell you exactly what outcome you will get or greatly improve your understanding of the odds. For example if the first event gets chosen out of 3 events equally, you know you can't get the first event because we know from the fight that the number is between 50-75 and the first event requires a number in the range 1-33. You also know the second event is almost twice as likely than the third event because 50-66 is a bigger range than 67-75. So from knowing what the first fight is, you know: Event 1 can't ever show up. Event 2 will show up about 64% of the time. Event 3 will show up about 36% of the time. So if you were going into the event wanting event 1, you now know there isn't any point. If you wanted event 3 you may consider re-pathing because you don't see it very often. As long as you keep track of each RNG outcome you can massively skew the odds in your favor. You can theoretically do the logic above through the entire run if you're willing to keep track. It's extremely tedious to do so manually, but the start of the run is arguably the most important part and it's very easy to identify common results early and learn them much like how a chess player learns openings and then leverages that opening later on when the game state gets more unique.
@@harshshah6977 He has actually used it in the past some times, but just in the beginning. Like since the first enemy is X, then the next event floor will likely be Y and that has guided a decision. It starts getting more complicated the farther into the run you go.
For Spire with Friends, does everyone need to use RNG fix to solve this? I'm probably going to ignore it because Spire with Friends is plenty buggy already as is, but I'm just curious.
I don’t think correlated RNG is right to be in the StS, but what exactly it is and how can I use it should be transparent to anyone who wants to maximizes his chance to win as long as it’s in a game.
Maybe this is why I've always not liked it when games have "tech", or rather exploits not designed by the devs, and prefer to see any sort of "tech" patched out, even when such tech becomes popular with the player base. If it's a bug it should be removed. If the bug really does make the game better, examine why and solidify it as an intentional design choice. Clearly, correlated RNG is not something that makes the game better, so even if there's a cohort of people who prefer playing with it, it ought to be removed regardless. Thankful for the modding community :)
Correlated RNG is not a bug, it IS an intentional design choice. In a way. What I mean is, the devs did not intend correlated RNG to be a tool players actively use in their runs. But the devs *did* intend the run seed to generate all starting dice. They could have done otherwise. They could have, say, used the starting seed to generate the act maps, then use computer clock parity to generate deck shuffles and enemy attack RNG, then use computer thermometer to generate card and potion rewards, then use a pseudorandom encryption algorithm to generate the contents of shops. And then the game simply wouldn't have correlated RNG. Had they done this, the game would've taken a bit longer to finish, would take up more hard space, and would need more cpu to run. They probably saw those as bigger sacrifices than making the RNG more "fake". Which makes sense, since Slay was never intended to be a competitive game.
I think it depends on if the tech makes the game more fun or not. Like, the seminal example is wavedashing in melee. It's only semi-intended, but it has 2 things going for it. 1) it enhances movement options, by allowing standing attacks to be performed while sliding on the ground 2) it's easy to learn with about 10-20 minutes of practice Because of this, it enhances the game significantly by increasing player freedom and options. It's super fun to blast around the stage at mach speed trading blows between diverse movesets. The movement in post-melee smash games is a lot slower and more restrictive, which feels stifling if you played a lot of melee. But like....... something degenerate like calculating all the RNG in an entire run of slay the spire??? That is 1) really hard to learn how to do and very time consuming, and 2) it doesn't enhance the game at all. It doesn't open up exciting new improvisational deckbuilding strats. It doesn't meaningfully expand on the core gameplay.
never heard about this before and it's interesting, but not interesting enough to torture myself over it 😂 i look forward to seeing the end point of the fully explored potential of this, if presented by someone. otherwise whatever lol
it's sad that valuing having fun over winning has to be emphasized at all. I feel like there's something kind of psychotic about highly competitive mindsets that put that cart before that horse. this applies to even highly competitive games too, but the fact that it affects sts players shows how widespread the brain poison is. it kills me bc slay the spire is extremely fun even if you consistently lose. just seems like a waste.
I agree with everything you say except at 2:07, that's definitely not a bug, it's precisely how it's indended to work because otherwise it would be meaningless to have game seeds if they didn' result in the same outcome every time you loaded them! It would be trivial to have complete pseudo randomness but they chose (wisely if you ask me) not to.
No, the bug is that multiple identical generators are initialized with the game seed, making each have the same rolls. This is what causes the correlation. There are many other ways to do seeded rng in a game that removes this issue. For example, the game could use only a single generator and have every rng call sent to it. This would remove all correlated randomness, but would also make the same seed play completely differently unless you take the exact same actions in each fight. I think the best and easiest solution is to just make each generator in StS different from each other. That way the goals of the seeded run stay the same, but there's no longer any correlation between the rolls
The way to fix this is to have all but the first generator be seeded by the first generator. This allows generators to be independent but consistent when replaying the seed. I believe it is supposed to work like that and works from a2 on, the generators are just bugged in a1.
I don't think that hiding this information would be helping anybody. Knowing that it exists is important for people who think competition is important, so that they can look elsewhere for "their" game. For people who like strategy games but don't like looking at rolls and figuring out what that means for their run, not looking at the details of how it works and not looking at their run log should be enough. I think defining what we mean by "talking about it" would be helpful here. Going to people's streams and telling them that they are getting a portion this floor is obviously different and a different degree of harmful than making the information available in a UA-cam video that somebody would have to choose to click on, right?
You know how everything seems random (like when it rains) until you understand the underlying principles that decide it? There are many correlated things in StS that the moment you notice it then it becomes something impossible to not notice. If you were playing a different game, say monster train, and I told you every time you saw Morsel Master as the 2nd potential unit reward after the first fight then that means your penultimate fight trial is going to be Heaven's Seal wouldn't that 1) Change the way you would want to build your strategy 2) Be more difficult to ignore than not since its right there in front of you? Hiding information on specifics helps those that don't want to participate in it because the moment you know something about the correlated RNG then it is literally near impossible to play without noticing it. Like Jorbs said.
I completely disagree with the tak of hiding information about cRNG in order to "save" others from it. If this is a topic that people want to discuss, they should be allowed to do so. It's up to the players to decide, whether or not they want to use it. As you said, you can't take back the knowledge, but it doesn't necessarily mean that once you know about it you have to use it.
I don't understand why there was a need for separate "dice" for different elements of the game. Like why even have a different die for potions vs card shuffling vs map generation? Every roll should come from a single RNG source based on the seed.
Dice for different elements are needed to have seeds produce the same results. If they all used the same rng then how many times your deck shuffles on A1F1 will affect the event you get in the next room, and if you want daily challenges/to share a fun/crazy seed where you got offered claw in the first 5 card rewards, then you need different rng elements to be not affected by how the player is playing the run
Mostly so that the same seed always has the same fights, same card rewards, same relics, etc etc, regardless of the path you take or the choices you make. I'd say most of the time it doesn't matter, but some people might replay (or speedrun) a seed multiple times, and you want things to be stable when you save/reload the game.
This felt like a 20 minute video treating the fact that most games have imperfect RNG and can be subject to RNG manipulation like the concept of jury nullification. RNG manipulation can be done in almost every game if you know the RNG. That's why you don't get shown the value in the "production" game. If you need to use tools like the output log that isn't part of the game, it's tool-assisted. Tool-assisted runs of games can be very interesting, go watch any tool-assisted speedrun. It's only a problem if they're passed off as regular human play. This isn't a problem unique to Slay the Spire. It's only "cheating" once you misrepresent what you're doing.
That’s true, but within the context of the video this comment really equates to no new information or perspectives. The video isn’t about speed runs or challenge runs, it is about sts and the circumstances of competing for higher win rates and win streaks in the current state of the game. Jorbs doesn’t highlight the value of TAS because sts is a strategy game where tool assisted runs aren’t interesting.
@@quicksilver2923 That just further proves my point though? We didn't need to treat RNG manipulation like it's some secret arcane art when tons of games are vulnerable to it, not just Slay the Spire. And if a tool-assisted run aka using the output RNG values to make choices isn't of value or interesting then the only issue comes when you attempt to pass tool-assisted play off as not. And that issue continues to not be unique to Slay the Spire. And if you can make reasonable deductions from the in game provided information that's also possible in other games too. So I just don't see how that warrants it being talked about as if it were a strictly unique problem with Slay the Spire. The tools are just more accessible than most other games.
@@Swekyde This is a video from the perspective of jorbs, not a meta commentary on TAS. I don't think you understand what jorbs means when he says correlated RNG. Besides, TAS is not the same as what you call RNG manipulation in slay the spire. Using correlated RNG as information to make decisions in game is an unintended mechanic that changes the entire nature/balance of decision making, which is literally the entire game. It is not a tool to boost enjoyment or competition in game. TAS is also not something that already exists in a game, it is made by players.
@@Swekyde I would say it depends what you mean by "reasonable deductions". For example, let's say that I get an explosive pot on my first fight of act 1. This makes it much more likely that I will get a rare in my next card reward. How did I deduce this? Not by any in-game mechanism (the "intended" behavior of potion rewards is they affect future potion rewards and *do not* affect future card rewards.), nor by output log (because I don't use tool assist), but by looking up an excel file I manually constructed through thousands of runs. So was my deduction reasonable?
Many game dev's found out that if given the chance "People will optimize the fun out of the game". This is not optimizing the fun out of the game, this is optimizing the soul of a game like slay the spire where part of the magic is the rng and not knowing what is going to happen next.
Wouldn't it be possible to play competitively if the game was hosted remotely on a 3rd party server over seen by officials? I sorta feel like if the creators are making a sequel and don't want to change too much, that might be the path forward.
Ok hold up, I geniunly thought Jorbs was the best spire player but does that mean he nerf himself !? No seriously, are you telling me it's hard for jorbs to "compete" against player who "abuse" that ? I need some explenation.
he doesn't want to "compete" in this game anymore since it's meaningless if the competition could unknowingly be abusing information they shouldn't know. the "shouldn't know" part is speculation and is the part of the video that is causing discourse.
If you read this comment, you will become a weeb. Most people who are weebs can read, and a proportionally higher percentage of people who can read are weebs than of those who can not. This phenomenom is called correlation. Correlation often indicates a similar cause to separate developments.
I don't agree with the part of playing around correlated RNG is "something completely different from StS". To me playing StS is like a process of maximizing a random variable's expecting value. Adding correlated RNG doesn't make it a different process but altering the sample space a bit.
The process of playing the correlated RNG game is fundamentally different because you go from playing a strategy card game to recreational mathematics. It is different from modifying your plays because you know what odds the enemy has for hitting you with a certain move next turn or changing your path because you know what events you've seen before and would prefer an event over a fight or vice versa. If you were to try to play in a maximized fashion with correlated RNG your plays would be something along the lines of "I saw a potion on floor 3 and fought Jaw Worm in an event, therefore I need to fight 2 more fights and go to an event to get Unceasing Top because I know the dice rolls from my previous observations and know how the game is coded". When your reasoning is based on that, you are, in my opinion, fundamentally not playing StS as a strategy card game. Edit: Just to be clear if you were maximizing the use of correlated RNG in StS all your plays would have a touch of that level of logic to them. Something like "I can afford to stall this fight more because I know the next attack from the enemy is gonna be the debuff tap instead of the big attack because I saw and I need my Pen Nib on exactly 8 so I can turn 2 kill the Jaw Worm coming up in 2 fights before it hits me with a big attack". On the small scale, its StS with a bit of RNG manipulation/understanding, on a higher scale you make all your decisions based on the correlated RNG. Where do you draw the line?
This only works if your experience of slay the spire is exactly as you describe: it's just a black box. However, I believe most players' experience of the game are in fact not a black box. By that, I mean the experience of the moment-to-moment gameplay matters and does not just boil down to an experience equivalent to memorizing and tracking how correlated RNG affects your run.
i didnt know this was a thing and stopped watching at 6:30 my a20 wins are mostly struggles and rarely do i get to kill the heart and im fine with that
This isn't actually anything new nor unique to slay the spire. It's not just the way it is, nor even the way it has to be, it is the ONLY way it can be. Essentially, at the heart of it all, is that there is no such thing as true randomness. 'Randomness' is merely simulated via very fancy and complex algorithms, which even services like Google relies off and other companies like Apple, Intel, etc, that's embedded into security systems. This is why anything and everything is hackable with the right know-how, it's basically all a matter of reverse engineering very complex algorithms in order to then gain acces into whatever system you'd be trying to hack into. Hacking aside, and again, true randomness just ain't real. True randomness to security systems would be what the philosphers stone is to Alchemy.
Wow, so it turns out if you get into the console, you can see what happens next. Wow, it turns out if you know the game ahead of time, it gets boring to play. That's a surprise. I mean, so many people play exactly-- NO. Nobody fucking plays that way. Regular players don't even know how to open the console, they don't even know that there are dice, THE MOST OF THEM DON'T KNOW HOW THE SID WORKS OR WHAT IT IS. It's not about how the rng works. If you get into the code of the game you can find out what is happening now and what will happen next (and it works not only in sts). Only thing is, no one does that. Not even the biggest part knows about savescam. And people who use it, and the console, because of the fact that they will know ahead of time, spend time calculating the truth may lose interest. But that's the problem with people. It's the person who decided to open the console and find out the race, not the game saying "look, here you can find out what's going to happen next, so you won't be interested at all!". Wow, such a serious problem out of thin air.
There were probably some good points here, but I couldn’t get past the tangent on cheating. Jorbs, you should write a script and just stick to it. You sound scatterbrained otherwise.
If you thought the point about cheating was tangential, you misunderstood the video. Which, I guess, is an argument in favor of your case that the video was scatterbrained, so touche XD.
How is that a tangent? From the onset he described this as degenerative for the game. People like a competitive scene in StS but that’s nearly impossible as he stated.
@@yian5165 The first minute or so is pretty solid. He starts to go off the rails at around 1:17 when he says, "the general idea of correlated RNG, by the way, if you don't know what correlated RNG is...maybe you come back to this video and get my opinion that way." Like he didn't finish his sentence lol (ie. correlated RNG is the relationship of the variables between the seed and outcome of various 'dice' rolls). Then he goes on to talk about competition, cheating, and fairness, which is not the title of the video. He moved on to a different topic.
@@yian5165 you can cheat in most computer games and that doesn't make esports impossible. There way bigger things hindering StS from tournaments being a thing, like not really being designed for players competing. The main competitive formats, which do exist, are win streaks and speed runs. Neither would be suited for tournaments since streaks just take for ever to play out and speed runs take for ever to grind to a good seed and and are way too luck dependent.
if u have gotten to this point of the game... u should pay more, cus u got so many hours out of a 20 dollar game in some way u have gone into a vortex and u should move on or u will be sucked into the game universe and cause cataclysmic problems for the feature .....of life....jk
The magic of spire, for me, is picking up a card/relic/potion, and realizing it has an interesting interaction with another card/relic/potion. I’m still discovering unique instances of these interactions 1000+ hours later.
If I knew what I was going to get every run, I wouldn’t play this game, nevermind for 1000+ hours and counting.
Dude same. At least 1000 hours for me and I just had a snecko run going and realized if you use apotheosis with a card in your hand that upgrades to reduce cost, it changes that card to the upgraded cost. It may seem obvious but still got me lol
@@bearchaser012 ooh that’s such a good one. I think that happened to me with a pyramid+Snecko (wouldn’t exactly recommend it), and a hand littered with cards that upgraded cost - so good.
My favorite combo recently has been setup+sneaky strike as an energy engine
@fivetwoeighty7012 lately I've been trying to get to ascension 10 with all characters with as few losses as possible. You can just play the game however you want and it's always got something new
Super agree regarding why we wouldn't want to let people know about this. Same for any game or hobby when we try to convince the "casuals" why they're not playing "correctly"
this might be useful to know for the speedrunning community, whose members are generally fine with exploiting every glitches and inner workings under the sun. probably not something to make public though. (I regret hearing about clay farming in stardew valley against my will. do not look it up.)
@@selenasilverstep7981 lol I feel the same way about clay farming
@@selenasilverstep7981 I don't actually know if this would be useful to the speedrunning community. Generally speaking, Spire has two types of speedruns: glitchless, and set seed.
In glitchless, this doesn't help, because you're not allowed to get private information about correlated RNG.
In set seed, this doesn't help, because you already know what's going to happen from pure iteration.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 It would be useful anyways. If rolling something in a specific event gives you information about what will be the roll of another event, it helps to choose which rolls you want to make.
@@diegocfq Yes, even without tool assistane or access to backlog, you can use it to construct excel tables and correlate events that way to optimize your path. Correlated RNG is generally *useful* otherwise it wouldn't be an issue.
However, this is only useful if you want to win 20 runs in a row. If you want to win a single run in sub 20 minutes, it's too much math.
Yeah, the point you make at 5:44 is very relatable for me. There is a variety of games which have a really boring most optimal way to play them. Once you start optimizing your gameplay, there is no way back until you find the exact limit at which you are playing optimal enough, but the game is still fun. And if the game is competitive there can be no limit, sadly
I'm not sure that's precisely what jorbs means by "there's no way back". I think it's more like, for example, once you know for a fact that after a mid-act Shrine in act 2 you are guaranteed a potion on your next combat, you basically have to deliberately grief yourself on your next fight to avoid the advantage of that correlation (to be clear, this example IS fictitious, it is just representative in magnitude to how much correlated RNG can reveal to you).
In other words, to use a chess analogy, being aware of correlated RNG and not taking advantage of it isn't like playing with your little brother and calculating less to give him an edge; it is like playing against *yourself* and pretending you don't know what you're planning to do.
@@tudornaconecinii3609I think you’re not taking understanding what they mean. It’s not a matter of just not trying as hard, they also meant knowing the right thing to do but deliberately choosing against it in their example.
Frankly, while I wholeheartedly agree that this is knowledge you can't take back, and knowledge that can truly ruin the game for people who didn't know or want to know about it, I don't believe the solution is to hide it and treat it as a taboo topic. All that serves to do is make the people who *do* abuse it seem mystical and overly knowledgeable and better at the game than the people who don't know about it can ever hope to get.
Instead, this system should simply not exist. Do not pressure the community to gatekeep some silly "open secret" where only people who were there for the discussion get to know about it, but rather pressure the developers to fix such an obvious and rookie bug. Don't use the same seed for the dice, don't output the dice rolls, don't leave a stupid vulnerability in your video game. This is 100% on the creators, not on the community, and it reflects very poorly on them.
Modding it out is a good start, but not the proper solution for the game. Disappointing if the devs don't want to touch it.
To throw in a completely opinionated statement as well to clarify where I stand, this is not a competitive game and trying to gain clout from winning at it is ridiculous.
I don't think it is that easy to point your fingers at the developers and say that they have fault because of something like this. I doubt that very much of the time spent in developing a game is in figuring out what happens when players perfectly understand everything about it. They would much rather spend their time and money to make something fun and interesting, which they have clearly done a wonderful job of with StS.
On the other hand, this could be a wonderful case-study example of how to further hone the craft of developing games. We can learn from it and certainly take parts of that into account in the future, or at least be aware of things like this.
Besides, a large part of this being a problem clearly lies with certain parts of the community itself. It is perhaps unfortunate then, that it lies also upon the community to take up the mantle of fixing something like this. Again though, I don't think that is directly any one person's fault or anything, these things just happen sometimes.
I do agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence though
i agree the information should be openly available, but i think the problem is more when streamers explain correlated rng stuff while theyre playing the game. not rare for a streamer to be like "o yeah i got X enemy as my Yth fight so now i know my act 1 chest will have a potion"
“Given the chance players will optimize the fun out of a game” -Christ Dillinger
I play games that have significant bugs and usability issues, where the use of live memory editing tools is encouraged. Using these tools fixes some significant bugs, and makes simple tasks much easier by improving UI. However, they also allow me to cheat, aggressively and continuously, and muddy the line between performance optimisation and obviously changing the game for your advantage.
Becoming aware of rng like this is quite similar. Once you know, you cant just remove that knowledge from your brain. If you look to make the best plays, you will use the information available to you. You can't just switch it off. And you dont know if those people you're talking to about the game like to optimise the game in this way. So, talking about it (in particular the specifics of it, but many people will look it up regardless) will impact the enjoyment others get from the game.
It will be interesting to see you play with RNG fix mod. Maybe over thousands of hours of playing your subconscious mind already learned some patterns of randomness and fixing it may produce interesting results.
As you've alluded to by talking about modding it out - this is an implementation detail, not an intentional design. It could be patched out entirely with minimal effort without affecting any other aspect of the design or balance of the game.
It's easy to draw comparisons with the spreadsheets of enemy moves, or tracking Rare/Potion chances and the like, but those were all intentional design aspects that can be understood as such, as well as tracked without knowledge of internal variables. Making those less predictable would affect the balance of other aspects of the game.
It's a minor difference, and definitely less crucial than your overarching point, but I can see it being a sticking point for people who view the way (for example) a Frozen Eye Defect run plays out as comparable to spending an hour mapping out the early-game RNG.
If I was serious about playing StS better (I'm not lol) I'd feel no discomfort using a mod that showed the probabilities of various occurrences on the HUD instead of tracking them manually, similar to how in Binding of Isaac I have no qualms using a mod with item descriptions so I don't brainfart my way into confusing two different situations. I don't really view that kind of bookkeeping as important.
Anyway good chat, thanks for your time.
I actually like items like Frozen Eye from a game design standpoint, personally. It's the sort of item that indicates to you the devs do *not* intend you to be able to deduce your draw order from first principles.
I think games are richer for having those kinds of items in them. Hell, you can even deliberately make the items very underpowered, so their existence doesn't impact the overall balance, so they have a purely teleological role.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 Totally agree with what you're saying, I love to point to stuff like this to glean intent.
To be honest though, I'm only replying because I really need to give recognition for the use of "teleological" in a non-annoying way.
I think your points are totally valid. Competitive StS is hard to take too seriously, and sometimes having fun is more important than absolute optimal gameplay. Tbh to play StS optimally you would need a supercomputer and 3 weeks per run, lol.
I think about it like this: If there's a whale bonus that lets me instantly win the run on floor 0, I would never press it. You can say I'm playing 'sub-optimally', or putting 'arbitrary restrictions' on my gameplay or whatever, but I feel a lot of people share this view. Obviously a gross exaggeration of what correlated RNG is, but I think it follows the same principles.
Personally, I agree with you. And in a silly single player game, it would not matter, since all you are playing against is yourself.
I think what Jorbs is talking about is specifically for high level play and leaderboards. As an example- if this whale bonus existed, it completely demolished the speed run, as you find a deed with that bonus and menu quickly. When the selling point of you as a creator is ‘won the most games in a row’, and that reputation pays your bills, playing in a way that is not fun but reliable makes sense.
What’s more, there is a thing called ‘instrumental play.’ Folding ideas has a great video about it called ‘why it is bad manners to suck at world of Warcraft.’ The idea is that, when someone figures out the way to play that has the best results, people mimic that to find success, even if that makes the game less fun. If you were just getting into STS, and every streamer spent an hour analyzing rng, you could take it as ‘I have to do that too if I want to be successful’ and either bounce off the game, or perpetuate the idea.
I would argue it doesn't follow the same principles, tbh.
When you refuse to take Pandora's on whale bonus, you are simply making the game more challenging. It's like pressing Hard instead of Normal on difficulty on an RPG.
When you refuse to use a potion in a combat where you know for a fact, through unintentional means, that you WILL get a potion reward, you are deliberately griefing yourself.
And I'm not saying that you shouldn't grief yourself (I don't think correlated RNG is intended as a tool in the gameplay arsenal), but the mental motion of griefing yourself does not come naturally, you have to consciously intend it. So when someone knows a lot about correlated rng, he is going to subconsciously make choices that take it into account all the time, whether he wants to fairplay or not. You can't truly turn it off. And this is what makes it an infohazard.
@@tudornaconecinii3609and it’s hard to know for sure what you would have done without understanding correlated rng. Sometimes it’s a choice that you feel could have gone either way so even just deliberately choosing against using the potion might be unfairly detrimental to you.
Correlated randomness is like if you played a chess game against a computer, and realized that (despite there being a range of good moves), it only ever followed one of your moves with a particular move. You don't auto-win, but you 1) get worse at chess, because you no longer need to worry about all the other variations, and 2) you know you can force a line, so if you're tired or worried or (etc), you probably will. It may or may not ruin the game entirely, but it simply makes it worse without any virtues. If you follow the game log or memorize the relationship of 1 RNG-tracked event to a separate one based on seed, you still need to understand how to get through Act 1, 2, 3, think about scaling and blablabla. But you're paradoxically worse at all of that, while succeeding more often.
Coming back to this video I wonder if STS2 will do something about this.
I now want to know about correlated rng because this game is more fun for me as a thought experiment type thing. I’m not good at it I just like thinking about it.
As a modder for Slay the Spire , the openness of modding has led to awesome mods and a great modding community. But just want to confirm that it would be super easy to subtly cheat if you wanted to. From knowing your draw pile/map nodes, to actively changing card rewards / enemies, it would be easy to create a mod to give yourself an unfair advantage
You can have people confirm their mod list if they want to play competitively. Idk if this is a thing yet but if you want to prevent mod spoofing you can also get the mod manager to generate a checksum for a mod to give it a unique identifier.
Tl;dr: there are easier ways to prevent mod abuse than prevent the thing Jorbs is talking about here.
Once upon a time, I was really considering the idea of playing The Elder Scrolls Online. Then I saw high-end gameplay of the game, which, if you don't know, consists of doing a whole lot of animation cancels all the time, so that you can essentially spam abilities, actions, etc. I never ended up playing the game. If the most optimal way for you to play a game is to exploit unintended bugs or interactions in such a way that it essentially "breaks" the game, straying you away from the intended gameplay loop, it's just not fun.
I find this part of STS pretty interesting, but I also fully agree with your points. I would also say, however, that I am not sure that I have the brain power to take the information that the game is giving me and use it for anything. That being said, I do still plan to add the RNG fix mod to my game next time I play, just in case.
I am a super competitive player, since I was 13, I competed online in trackmania, league, hearthstone, Auto chess and have always done well, I now finally settled into playing ironclad until I die for the last 2 years, this breaks my heart, how people would want to get edges in such stupid in my opinion ways, just play the fucking game the way it's supposed to be played.
I have nothing against people that play casually or competitively, but if I ever achieve a cool win streak and it gets overshadowed by the fact that I could be cheating, its kinda sad.
I was hoping corrolated was a new fun stats thing
Speaking of the cheating in Trackmania (at 10:50), the cheater mentioned is present in www.youtube.com/@Jorbs/channels, maybe UA-cam Jorbs should consider to remove this person's channel from there? It feels weird to me that his channel is being advertised there. On the other hand he was genuinely good player (which makes the cheating even worse in my opinion) and maybe his content is good too (I have no idea, never actually watched any of his videos), so I can understand if others view this differently (or don't care🙂).
Not that this bothers me too much (just a little bit🙂), but it is not first time Jorbs mentioned this person in a video so I figured I should ask to clarify this almost meaningless issue🙂.
As I watch this video, I'm also reading your book, and I find myself correlating this video to the line "In such a world, I simply don't think it's a great idea to spend one's life being selfish. I think if we all focus on ourselves our entire species will likely be extinct quite soon." (pg. 136, Before We Go Live)
There is an unhealthy pattern in needlessly exploiting available resources to optimize for the self, like using correlated randomness to better win games like Slay The Spire.
Perhaps there is a symmetry in selfish behavior like cheating and over-extraction of resources.
Great content as always, Jorbs!
As games reach a wider audience and "getting gud" becomes a thing, there is usually a step where the meta devolves into something the creators could not have anticipated. Like some pixel-perfect breakdancing to slide past a combat trigger that was probably supposed to be unskippable, but everyone has to do it because it doesn't count as a "glitch" in the glitchless category. But it's totally not a feature, ugh.
Great video, didn’t realize this was a thing but I’ve definitely noticed weird RNG behaviour when having to quit the game and restart
6s load time on the act 1 map is insane. What else could that be other than seed searching?
It’s a very simple game, fast load times aren’t surprising. Though the poor console performance is.
This is the common problem of gaming especially for competitive games. Knowing this info changes the game from Min- Max vs uncertainty to maxing marginal gains against certain future.
I 90% agree, but there is since fun novelty in breaking a game (once). As a peak behind a curtain or video like this I enjoy this kind of thing. Watching a streamer do this instead of playing the game would be mind numbing lt boring.
My line is understanding is that if it’s trivial to do this it would bum me out and ruin the game for me.
I respect takes about competition because I don’t compete at all
it's a design flaw. “One of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves.”
They probably never thought people would solve the rng when originally making it
You have brilliantly outlined the philosophically conflicted, and cheatable "quality of play" , or culture, that is born out of correlated RNG. Once social, financial, cultural status can been earned "from playing the game well", what is and what becomes of the core purpose of the game? Who can play the game as intended well, and who can dedicate the most time to optimizing "gameplay".
One side might appreciate the quality of play and say it is entertainment, while the other might categorically relate differently to "playing". For this group, the enjoyment, or entertainment, is a more functional, industrious affair. Hmm, failing to find the right terms.
Correlated RNG, come to think of it, seems like a really useful analogy for some of the stretching and conflict we are seeing in America and many Western cultures.
We cannot agree upon what game we are playing and also we know that there are cheaters in the wings.
Great video. There is a reason why devs keep some information hidden from the player. For me the greatest fun in StS was when I was slowly grinding my way through ascensions while exploring events and figuring out how cards work with each other. If I had a way to know for a fact that certain "?" event is super beneficial for me and that in order to grab it I would need to take certain path for example I would definitely go for it - but that completely nullifies the idea of hiding that information from player.
While there is a challenge there is fun, handling RNG with your current knowledge is what makes this game great. Do I take a risky approach and hope I draw hand of greed from 20 cards in deck next turn, or take safer approach ignoring the risk but saving some HP. If I were to know what happens next it breaks down the game to some dull math exercise when I simply need to write down numbers and calculate the best possible outcome while completely ignoring the probability/rng aspect of it.
Yeah I don’t want to know. Every time I learn about something like this in a game I can’t not use it and it makes me sad.
Title has typo: corrolated instead of correlated
Making inferences based on things you can observe in game doesn't seem like cheating to me. High level play in a lot of computer games involves exploiting bad PRNGs. Seems impressive if people can do it. I wouldn't want to play like this but I know people who like to crack codes. But I also don't count potion-less rewards and usually don't calculate the odds for future draws either. I wouldn't consider any of these practices cheating yet they all depends on how the game randomizes things, just in a less obscure way.
The game log thing does seem like it might be cheating. But I've played hundreds of hours of STS and never seen the logs. If mods or out of game data give you additional information, yes that's cheating.
So no Jorbs at the Olympics, shoulda gotten the carbonated rng.
really like this video. makes me wonder about certian people. really like your style of the game in general. peace.
I can choose to ignore engaging in this behavior even if I have the knowledge. The same case could be made for even knowing about the knowledge. "If I know there is knowledge out there that would boost my winrate and don't actively learn it, I'm not trying my best" or something.
If a mechanic destroys my enjoyment I opt out of that mechanic (mostly. It's a sliding scale of how bad it is and what I gain), and I think most people do the same.
Interesting analisys, though. I hope most people agree about the unfair advantages of certain mods. Hopefully the RNGfix helps!
i do know a little bit about correlated RNG in the first floors of the game, and since i play primarily on mobile, i can't mod it out. what i know about it doesn't affect my play often bc it's usually not important, it doesn't never affect it. i would prefer for that not to happen.
there's a different quirk in how the RNG is coded that makes using correlated RNG without the exact value much easier, but jorbs didn't mention it because it wasn't that relevant to the explanation and knowing about it would reduce some people's enjoyment of the game.
This is new to me as I play on switch. Just wondering, after playing for thousands of hours, do you begin to notice trends even without the roll numbers visible? For example, if you get offered X as a Act 1 boss reward is Y event more likely to occur in Act 2? I'm always looking for trends but am not confident in any!
The relics odds increase solely on the fact that the relics you saw on act 1 are removed from the seed.
I read like 2 years ago about how if your first floor is against a cultist, you will get into a combat if you path to a question mark on your second floor. For now, it seems to have worked for me, and has been getting me some questions about the RNG in STS. I haven't been hard tracking it at all, but I have noticed oddities on it. I'm not surprised to find this new information, but it's sad that people are using it to their advantage in a competitive manner.
@@emilior934 thanks, that makes sense
@@RanetaCroak thanks... It's interesting to understand how it works. Cheers
Thanks for raising awareness to this issue and a possible fix.
Pandora's box can't be closed, there's not really any way to try to corral the spread of information. Furthermore, why would you want people to look at players with 99% winrates and believe that's possible rather than let them in on the fact that some exploit exists that they are abusing? It is a shame the spire devs have moved on, it seems like one way to solve this is to fix RNG in a patch, and then only accept runs done on switch hardware if the PC version is too difficult to detect cheats on.
Or just acknowledge that StS is a single player game which you can optimise approximately as much as you want and realise that there actually is nothing to fix.
@@BenoitBataille that's definitely true for 99% of people just playing single player. But I think jorbs does have a point when it comes to people who are choosing to make it competitive. Weight lifting is a single "player" exercise, but we still compare scores, and want to know if someone is abusing insulin or HGH when considering their records.
i think that the information is public but obviously have a disclaimer that it might ruin the game for them and let them learn about it if they wish
Wait, is Jorbs trying to teach Twitch chat/UA-cam commenters that different people can have different beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts? Twitch chat is SO not ready for theory of mind.
The subreddit def is not
The issue with every card game, be it digital or tabletop.
I think the whole talk is very good.
Apart from the cheating and hidden informational leak, correlated rng sounds to me like some speedrun strats that are so obnoxious that the community generally go play in other category because doing it is such a buzz kill.
I don't think I will install the rng fix because I simply have no interest in optimizing like that. I don't event track potion chance kkkkk
I only play on steam deck so I can't easily look at it. This is kind of funny to me.
Wise words from Jorbs
Can you even see the roll information on console? I play on switch and have never seen it
Pardon the ignorance, because I'm just learning of this game factoid (I mainly speedrun alone, in a dark hole, playing Silent only, I don't know why, Silent isn't even my best character, I just like them) - but for correlated RNG does it follow a guaranteed rolled number, or guaranteed rolled *pattern* - we know it's always going to go 1,2,3,4,5 etc, or 1, higher, higher, lower, higher, lower type thing? Terminal curiosity with no other relevance to my savescumming self.
It's not an issue with the individual sequence of numbers, but because there are multiple sequences of the same numbers for each randomly generated thing (e.g. cards, fights events etc.). Once you learn something about the first number of the sequence, you know that every other sequence will have that exact same property because it's the same number. You can't know what that number is, but you can get the range of that number which can allow you to eliminate options from the other sequences.
Lets say the first fight is chosen from 1 out of 4 encounters at equal chance, so 1-25 picks the first, 26-50 picks the second etc.
So if you see fight 3, you know the roll was between 50 and 75.
This means that each other RNG sequence that isn't the one that generates fights also has a number between 50 and 75 as it's first number, which lets you eliminate possibilities which can either tell you exactly what outcome you will get or greatly improve your understanding of the odds.
For example if the first event gets chosen out of 3 events equally, you know you can't get the first event because we know from the fight that the number is between 50-75 and the first event requires a number in the range 1-33. You also know the second event is almost twice as likely than the third event because 50-66 is a bigger range than 67-75.
So from knowing what the first fight is, you know:
Event 1 can't ever show up.
Event 2 will show up about 64% of the time.
Event 3 will show up about 36% of the time.
So if you were going into the event wanting event 1, you now know there isn't any point. If you wanted event 3 you may consider re-pathing because you don't see it very often.
As long as you keep track of each RNG outcome you can massively skew the odds in your favor. You can theoretically do the logic above through the entire run if you're willing to keep track. It's extremely tedious to do so manually, but the start of the run is arguably the most important part and it's very easy to identify common results early and learn them much like how a chess player learns openings and then leverages that opening later on when the game state gets more unique.
Just change the implementation to have 3 seeds?
Is it possible for you to do a run with the mentioned “exploit”?
Actually nevermind! This would suck for a player, super boring
@@harshshah6977 He has actually used it in the past some times, but just in the beginning. Like since the first enemy is X, then the next event floor will likely be Y and that has guided a decision. It starts getting more complicated the farther into the run you go.
This is a microcosms of the chess cheating going on.
For Spire with Friends, does everyone need to use RNG fix to solve this? I'm probably going to ignore it because Spire with Friends is plenty buggy already as is, but I'm just curious.
I don’t think correlated RNG is right to be in the StS, but what exactly it is and how can I use it should be transparent to anyone who wants to maximizes his chance to win as long as it’s in a game.
Maybe this is why I've always not liked it when games have "tech", or rather exploits not designed by the devs, and prefer to see any sort of "tech" patched out, even when such tech becomes popular with the player base. If it's a bug it should be removed. If the bug really does make the game better, examine why and solidify it as an intentional design choice. Clearly, correlated RNG is not something that makes the game better, so even if there's a cohort of people who prefer playing with it, it ought to be removed regardless. Thankful for the modding community :)
I think this really only makes sense in a case by case basis. Dribbling in basketball was not tech designed by the creator
@@cybren3003 There's a huge difference between what humans are physically capable of and video games.
@@Nikkibuh nah
Correlated RNG is not a bug, it IS an intentional design choice. In a way.
What I mean is, the devs did not intend correlated RNG to be a tool players actively use in their runs. But the devs *did* intend the run seed to generate all starting dice.
They could have done otherwise. They could have, say, used the starting seed to generate the act maps, then use computer clock parity to generate deck shuffles and enemy attack RNG, then use computer thermometer to generate card and potion rewards, then use a pseudorandom encryption algorithm to generate the contents of shops. And then the game simply wouldn't have correlated RNG.
Had they done this, the game would've taken a bit longer to finish, would take up more hard space, and would need more cpu to run. They probably saw those as bigger sacrifices than making the RNG more "fake". Which makes sense, since Slay was never intended to be a competitive game.
I think it depends on if the tech makes the game more fun or not. Like, the seminal example is wavedashing in melee. It's only semi-intended, but it has 2 things going for it.
1) it enhances movement options, by allowing standing attacks to be performed while sliding on the ground
2) it's easy to learn with about 10-20 minutes of practice
Because of this, it enhances the game significantly by increasing player freedom and options. It's super fun to blast around the stage at mach speed trading blows between diverse movesets. The movement in post-melee smash games is a lot slower and more restrictive, which feels stifling if you played a lot of melee.
But like....... something degenerate like calculating all the RNG in an entire run of slay the spire??? That is 1) really hard to learn how to do and very time consuming, and 2) it doesn't enhance the game at all. It doesn't open up exciting new improvisational deckbuilding strats. It doesn't meaningfully expand on the core gameplay.
never heard about this before and it's interesting, but not interesting enough to torture myself over it 😂 i look forward to seeing the end point of the fully explored potential of this, if presented by someone. otherwise whatever lol
it's sad that valuing having fun over winning has to be emphasized at all. I feel like there's something kind of psychotic about highly competitive mindsets that put that cart before that horse. this applies to even highly competitive games too, but the fact that it affects sts players shows how widespread the brain poison is.
it kills me bc slay the spire is extremely fun even if you consistently lose. just seems like a waste.
This should obviously be patched and fixed but why is your stance always timely accusatory?
Information hazard warning?
is this jorbs' version of the basilisk's dilemma?
I agree with everything you say except at 2:07, that's definitely not a bug, it's precisely how it's indended to work because otherwise it would be meaningless to have game seeds if they didn' result in the same outcome every time you loaded them!
It would be trivial to have complete pseudo randomness but they chose (wisely if you ask me) not to.
No, the bug is that multiple identical generators are initialized with the game seed, making each have the same rolls. This is what causes the correlation. There are many other ways to do seeded rng in a game that removes this issue. For example, the game could use only a single generator and have every rng call sent to it. This would remove all correlated randomness, but would also make the same seed play completely differently unless you take the exact same actions in each fight. I think the best and easiest solution is to just make each generator in StS different from each other. That way the goals of the seeded run stay the same, but there's no longer any correlation between the rolls
The way to fix this is to have all but the first generator be seeded by the first generator. This allows generators to be independent but consistent when replaying the seed. I believe it is supposed to work like that and works from a2 on, the generators are just bugged in a1.
@@Elezshar oh the seeding works differently in a1? That's quite the bug
This isn’t that surprising to me StS has spaghetti code. Polished spaghetti but it’s still spaghetti.
What I've learned is the only true way to play StS is to camcord your mobile phones
I dont get it. What this mod is supposed to do? Turn off correlated RNG? If so how the game will work?
The game will work by using non-correlated RNG instead. It will have no influence except make it nearly impossible to correlate events.
This is very relatable as certain streamers look for world records
SPIRESIDE CHAT LETS GOOOOOOOO
I don't think that hiding this information would be helping anybody. Knowing that it exists is important for people who think competition is important, so that they can look elsewhere for "their" game. For people who like strategy games but don't like looking at rolls and figuring out what that means for their run, not looking at the details of how it works and not looking at their run log should be enough.
I think defining what we mean by "talking about it" would be helpful here. Going to people's streams and telling them that they are getting a portion this floor is obviously different and a different degree of harmful than making the information available in a UA-cam video that somebody would have to choose to click on, right?
You know how everything seems random (like when it rains) until you understand the underlying principles that decide it?
There are many correlated things in StS that the moment you notice it then it becomes something impossible to not notice. If you were playing a different game, say monster train, and I told you every time you saw Morsel Master as the 2nd potential unit reward after the first fight then that means your penultimate fight trial is going to be Heaven's Seal wouldn't that 1) Change the way you would want to build your strategy 2) Be more difficult to ignore than not since its right there in front of you?
Hiding information on specifics helps those that don't want to participate in it because the moment you know something about the correlated RNG then it is literally near impossible to play without noticing it. Like Jorbs said.
I completely disagree with the tak of hiding information about cRNG in order to "save" others from it. If this is a topic that people want to discuss, they should be allowed to do so. It's up to the players to decide, whether or not they want to use it. As you said, you can't take back the knowledge, but it doesn't necessarily mean that once you know about it you have to use it.
It absolutely does. You cant unlearn it, so even subconsciously your decisions are affected by it
I don't understand why there was a need for separate "dice" for different elements of the game. Like why even have a different die for potions vs card shuffling vs map generation? Every roll should come from a single RNG source based on the seed.
Dice for different elements are needed to have seeds produce the same results. If they all used the same rng then how many times your deck shuffles on A1F1 will affect the event you get in the next room, and if you want daily challenges/to share a fun/crazy seed where you got offered claw in the first 5 card rewards, then you need different rng elements to be not affected by how the player is playing the run
Mostly so that the same seed always has the same fights, same card rewards, same relics, etc etc, regardless of the path you take or the choices you make. I'd say most of the time it doesn't matter, but some people might replay (or speedrun) a seed multiple times, and you want things to be stable when you save/reload the game.
This felt like a 20 minute video treating the fact that most games have imperfect RNG and can be subject to RNG manipulation like the concept of jury nullification. RNG manipulation can be done in almost every game if you know the RNG. That's why you don't get shown the value in the "production" game. If you need to use tools like the output log that isn't part of the game, it's tool-assisted.
Tool-assisted runs of games can be very interesting, go watch any tool-assisted speedrun. It's only a problem if they're passed off as regular human play. This isn't a problem unique to Slay the Spire. It's only "cheating" once you misrepresent what you're doing.
But he's saying that you don't need the output log, it just makes it easier.
That’s true, but within the context of the video this comment really equates to no new information or perspectives. The video isn’t about speed runs or challenge runs, it is about sts and the circumstances of competing for higher win rates and win streaks in the current state of the game. Jorbs doesn’t highlight the value of TAS because sts is a strategy game where tool assisted runs aren’t interesting.
@@quicksilver2923 That just further proves my point though? We didn't need to treat RNG manipulation like it's some secret arcane art when tons of games are vulnerable to it, not just Slay the Spire. And if a tool-assisted run aka using the output RNG values to make choices isn't of value or interesting then the only issue comes when you attempt to pass tool-assisted play off as not. And that issue continues to not be unique to Slay the Spire.
And if you can make reasonable deductions from the in game provided information that's also possible in other games too. So I just don't see how that warrants it being talked about as if it were a strictly unique problem with Slay the Spire. The tools are just more accessible than most other games.
@@Swekyde This is a video from the perspective of jorbs, not a meta commentary on TAS. I don't think you understand what jorbs means when he says correlated RNG.
Besides, TAS is not the same as what you call RNG manipulation in slay the spire. Using correlated RNG as information to make decisions in game is an unintended mechanic that changes the entire nature/balance of decision making, which is literally the entire game. It is not a tool to boost enjoyment or competition in game. TAS is also not something that already exists in a game, it is made by players.
@@Swekyde I would say it depends what you mean by "reasonable deductions". For example, let's say that I get an explosive pot on my first fight of act 1. This makes it much more likely that I will get a rare in my next card reward. How did I deduce this? Not by any in-game mechanism (the "intended" behavior of potion rewards is they affect future potion rewards and *do not* affect future card rewards.), nor by output log (because I don't use tool assist), but by looking up an excel file I manually constructed through thousands of runs.
So was my deduction reasonable?
Related to doping in sports, imo
Many game dev's found out that if given the chance "People will optimize the fun out of the game". This is not optimizing the fun out of the game, this is optimizing the soul of a game like slay the spire where part of the magic is the rng and not knowing what is going to happen next.
New chat let's goooo!
Wouldn't it be possible to play competitively if the game was hosted remotely on a 3rd party server over seen by officials? I sorta feel like if the creators are making a sequel and don't want to change too much, that might be the path forward.
i dont. think the creators are making a sequel.
I see the ppt, I give a like =)
Ok hold up, I geniunly thought Jorbs was the best spire player but does that mean he nerf himself !?
No seriously, are you telling me it's hard for jorbs to "compete" against player who "abuse" that ?
I need some explenation.
he doesn't want to "compete" in this game anymore since it's meaningless if the competition could unknowingly be abusing information they shouldn't know. the "shouldn't know" part is speculation and is the part of the video that is causing discourse.
@@mrdrprofessorclay7781 not sure how to feel about it. Seems like a dick move to put a vague accusation in the room.
If you read this comment, you will become a weeb.
Most people who are weebs can read, and a proportionally higher percentage of people who can read are weebs than of those who can not.
This phenomenom is called correlation. Correlation often indicates a similar cause to separate developments.
Good chat! I also recommend people do the same. (Not use it)
I don't agree with the part of playing around correlated RNG is "something completely different from StS". To me playing StS is like a process of maximizing a random variable's expecting value. Adding correlated RNG doesn't make it a different process but altering the sample space a bit.
The process of playing the correlated RNG game is fundamentally different because you go from playing a strategy card game to recreational mathematics. It is different from modifying your plays because you know what odds the enemy has for hitting you with a certain move next turn or changing your path because you know what events you've seen before and would prefer an event over a fight or vice versa.
If you were to try to play in a maximized fashion with correlated RNG your plays would be something along the lines of "I saw a potion on floor 3 and fought Jaw Worm in an event, therefore I need to fight 2 more fights and go to an event to get Unceasing Top because I know the dice rolls from my previous observations and know how the game is coded". When your reasoning is based on that, you are, in my opinion, fundamentally not playing StS as a strategy card game.
Edit: Just to be clear if you were maximizing the use of correlated RNG in StS all your plays would have a touch of that level of logic to them. Something like "I can afford to stall this fight more because I know the next attack from the enemy is gonna be the debuff tap instead of the big attack because I saw and I need my Pen Nib on exactly 8 so I can turn 2 kill the Jaw Worm coming up in 2 fights before it hits me with a big attack". On the small scale, its StS with a bit of RNG manipulation/understanding, on a higher scale you make all your decisions based on the correlated RNG. Where do you draw the line?
It just takes away from the beauty of the game man
This only works if your experience of slay the spire is exactly as you describe: it's just a black box. However, I believe most players' experience of the game are in fact not a black box. By that, I mean the experience of the moment-to-moment gameplay matters and does not just boil down to an experience equivalent to memorizing and tracking how correlated RNG affects your run.
@@crazymanmotgreat way to put it. You’re literally not playing a game. You’re looking at numbers and knowing what numbers come next.
The point is that you're not supposed to have that information which can influence your choices
Who cheated?
Humble may have moved onto other games, but this seems worthy of them coming back to fix.
i didnt know this was a thing and stopped watching at 6:30
my a20 wins are mostly struggles and rarely do i get to kill the heart and im fine with that
Life lesson people. No shortcuts in life.
This isn't actually anything new nor unique to slay the spire. It's not just the way it is, nor even the way it has to be, it is the ONLY way it can be. Essentially, at the heart of it all, is that there is no such thing as true randomness. 'Randomness' is merely simulated via very fancy and complex algorithms, which even services like Google relies off and other companies like Apple, Intel, etc, that's embedded into security systems. This is why anything and everything is hackable with the right know-how, it's basically all a matter of reverse engineering very complex algorithms in order to then gain acces into whatever system you'd be trying to hack into.
Hacking aside, and again, true randomness just ain't real. True randomness to security systems would be what the philosphers stone is to Alchemy.
There are still ways of making it random to the point where a human can’t reliably guess the outcome.
Wow, so it turns out if you get into the console, you can see what happens next. Wow, it turns out if you know the game ahead of time, it gets boring to play. That's a surprise. I mean, so many people play exactly-- NO. Nobody fucking plays that way. Regular players don't even know how to open the console, they don't even know that there are dice, THE MOST OF THEM DON'T KNOW HOW THE SID WORKS OR WHAT IT IS. It's not about how the rng works. If you get into the code of the game you can find out what is happening now and what will happen next (and it works not only in sts). Only thing is, no one does that. Not even the biggest part knows about savescam. And people who use it, and the console, because of the fact that they will know ahead of time, spend time calculating the truth may lose interest. But that's the problem with people. It's the person who decided to open the console and find out the race, not the game saying "look, here you can find out what's going to happen next, so you won't be interested at all!".
Wow, such a serious problem out of thin air.
There were probably some good points here, but I couldn’t get past the tangent on cheating. Jorbs, you should write a script and just stick to it. You sound scatterbrained otherwise.
If you thought the point about cheating was tangential, you misunderstood the video. Which, I guess, is an argument in favor of your case that the video was scatterbrained, so touche XD.
How is that a tangent? From the onset he described this as degenerative for the game. People like a competitive scene in StS but that’s nearly impossible as he stated.
@@yian5165 The first minute or so is pretty solid. He starts to go off the rails at around 1:17 when he says, "the general idea of correlated RNG, by the way, if you don't know what correlated RNG is...maybe you come back to this video and get my opinion that way." Like he didn't finish his sentence lol (ie. correlated RNG is the relationship of the variables between the seed and outcome of various 'dice' rolls). Then he goes on to talk about competition, cheating, and fairness, which is not the title of the video. He moved on to a different topic.
@@yian5165 you can cheat in most computer games and that doesn't make esports impossible.
There way bigger things hindering StS from tournaments being a thing, like not really being designed for players competing. The main competitive formats, which do exist, are win streaks and speed runs. Neither would be suited for tournaments since streaks just take for ever to play out and speed runs take for ever to grind to a good seed and and are way too luck dependent.
if u have gotten to this point of the game... u should pay more, cus u got so many hours out of a 20 dollar game in some way u have gone into a vortex and u should move on or u will be sucked into the game universe and cause cataclysmic problems for the feature .....of life....jk