I remember reading something from Sid Meier about odds in Civilization, saying that odds need to be faked in games. If you make it fair, people will accuse it of being fixed. You need to cheat in the player's favour. It's done this way in games like XCOM too.
People just don't understand statistics and probabilities. Our brains just aren't built for it. So, a fair 25% chance feels way more unlikely than it really is.
Playing Balatro for months and I swear that card has hit maybe one time in all the times I've tried it (which is significantly more than 4 times, to be clear).
This will be one of those things where some time from now the Wheel of Fortune rate fix will quietly show up in a changelog.
It’s not hard to see why people get bothered by Wheel. When you play a Wheel card it’s a 1 in 4 chance in the way that it’s like rolling a 1 on a d4, always the same no matter how many you play. But physiologically it feels like it should be like drawing a spade from a deck of cards, the odds should get higher as you draw non-winning cards.
Fun fact, there are some games that actually cheat for you by progressively increasing your chances during a series of failures until you win. Then this resets to the actual probability displayed.
Plus, I think because people don't play it often (as in maybe a few times each game at most) it feels more often than it is. Like you see it twice and pass, but and use it twice and it fails, it would be easy to misremember it as buying four times. Then if that happens every time you might begin to think "this never works!" When in reality you're not playing it as often as you think you are.
The trick isn’t to play the Wheel for its stated function, what the Wheel is for is to increment tarot_played without altering the deck state in a negative or unhelpful fashion. If it activates, that’s just a bonus.
Imagine you're playing Russian Roulette. 6 chambers one bullet. One way to play is to spin the cylinder after every turn. This makes every turn a 1 in 6 chance of "winning" and you could theoretically continue having turns forever without a winner. This is how wheel works.
Another way to play is to not spin the cylinder after every turn. This guarantees there will be a "winner" within 6 shots. This is how people wish wheel worked.
The probability of each play are independent so you always have a probability of 0.75 of failing, doesn’t matter if you have one or one hundred previous failed outcomes.
People usually don’t understand probabilities and randomness, and even when understanding them, it still doesn’t feel right.
I’ve seen your comment thousands of times by people discussing why martingale works when playing roulette (no, it doesn’t since the probability of losing is greater of winning).
You’ve switched the original problem of losing once to losing 8 times in a row, yeah, the probability of losing 8 times in a row is low, but the probability of losing 7 times in a row and winning the 8th time is lower.
Let’s check probabilities:
7 loses and a losing again is 0.75^7 * 0.75 = 0.10
7 loses and wining the 8th is 0.75^7 * 0.25 = 0.03
Again, previous outcomes doesn’t condition the next outcome, yes, the probability of 8 consecutive loses is lower of 3 loses and a win, but 4 loses is more likely than 3 loses and a win. And 1000 loses seems like impossible, but still more probable than 999 loses and a win, because the probability of losing never changes.
That’s the thing about rng, you need a large sample size to accurately determine the odds. 8 isn’t enough, bad luck like hitting 8 75% rolls in a row is bound to happen.
Guys, you can just return to main menu before the animation finishes and pick a different card (this doesn't change the result of the WheelOfFortune tarot).
Do this, and every Wheel of Fortune becomes an added bonus!