Does "Easy" give you better Luck in Mario Party?

For the perspective of a game designer here. Most of these games likely predetermine which lever, rope, or door will contain what value before the game even starts. So in browsers big blast the game predetermines that this round the green lever will explode and so on and so far. Where this question can get interesting is, if the computer characters are programmed to have access to this value and choose the wrong answer on purpose. So its more about how long the game lasts over how often you win. Like how many times to computers actually make it to the end of the hall or how many rounds of BIg blast you have to redo.

“Peach chooses her own color, and therefore automatically loses.” Meanwhile him: chooses his color 20 times.

This is a really interesting idea. But I have to say as someone who does a lot of statistics, 10 games per category is so small a sample size that most of the results are probably not statistically significant. The editing is pretty slick, tho.

i think that the little timmy effect would have an effect on PARTIAL luck based games more so then on fully luck ones as it tries to get you to win even when you’re doing bad, and the little timmy effect also appears on the board, which is not accounted here

"Proving" is a rather strong choice of word for a sample size of 10 but this was interesting nonetheless

To be fair: 10 is not the best amount to usually use. There is this phenomenon in probability that the more you repeat the experiment the more accurate the result becomes. Tho I can totally understand just going with 10. Other numbers would just take too long.

This was great! And editing was 10/10! I do have one criticism about the methodology: For Bowser's Bogus Bingo, wouldn't you want to test against an Easy and a Master Bowser as well? As Bowser's part is also entirely random, I wonder if Bowser somehow does better (say, with fewer duplicate rolls) on Master compared to Easy. He's more of your "adversary" in that minigame than the other CPUs, though comparing against the CPUs was also important to experiment on.

This video was really, really well done. Concept pulled me in cause I was genuinely curious about the subject, and then you got all intellectual with the test pools and graphs. Good job with the script and editing too!

This was a fun test! I think we can agree that this doesn’t prove a lot, but it seems to be that the chances are quite equal or at least very close to equal.

You really should have kept track of placement, not just wins. You want the average placement in the average match to see anything of note. Looking only at the extremes says nothing. Remember, second place also gets coins, and third sometimes gets a pity coin. Only 4th is a true loss

Interesting video! If you do more with this I would like to see deeper dives into a single game, since I don't think it makes much sense to average different games together. For example, maybe you could save and reload one turn over and over to see how it plays out, or compare how often things spawn near you in games like Dizzy Dancing. In Bogus Bingo, I don't think it makes much sense to compare "winning" or "losing" vs the CPUs, since you're all on the same team. It would probably be more interesting to play as Bowser and compare how many hearts they lose on Easy vs on Expert. Fun vid! A lot of this is hard to prove without actually looking at the game's code, but it's cool to see someone experimenting.

When considering games such as hide and seek, changing AI is probably just affecting things like grouping chance, which is the chance for the CPU to group up in one hiding spot.

So to all you saying he needs to do more research,, yes 10 is not statistically significant to pull any solid conclusions on, however across all 5 games, he never did worse on easy than expert, and with the variation I would expect, especially with such a small sample size, I would have expected at least once across the games for him to do worse on easy than normal if his theory were false. More research definitely needs to be conducted, however, there is definitely merit to the hypothesis I would also like to see, rather than 1st place or bust, how many of the loss games you got 2nd, 3rd, or last, and if that data would change anything....

Great video. However, I do just want to remind people of the fallacy of small numbers. Sample size is way too small to make any real conclusions.

I had a theory about hide ans seek when I was a kid. When the curtains are closing you can see where the individuals are going, and they have an opportunity for ONE more input to mix it up. My theory is that on easy mode the CPUs were more likely to simply end up at where they were headed when curtains closed (If it appeared they were going for mushroom house at end, they probably were) While the Extreme CPUs were more likely to input an extreme juke and go to a completely different set piece than it appeared they were going to at curtain close.

In Mario Party DS there is a minigame called Cheep Cheep Chance That minigame is AWFUL and is completely based in luck with RNG It's unfair in few words

I'm coming back at work after a long disease. It's very hard. Tired. Anxious. ... It's night and I'm feeling so Bad. Then there's your video. Thank you. Love your editing btw

I'm a math major, and I'm telling you that you might actually have enough evidence to conclude that you have better luck playing with easy cpus than with hard ones. You won 21 games against easy cpus and 15 games against hard cpus. According to my calculations, if the difficulty level didn't affect your luck, then there would be a 0.57% chance that you would win at least six more games against easy cpus than against hard ones. Generally, in statistics, we say there's sufficient evidence if that number is less than 5%, so this does seem to support the Little Timmy theory. There are a few caviats. One is that Bowser's Bogus Bingo isn't entirely luck based because there is some skill involved in picking your card, but that was actually one of the games where you won the same number against each difficulty, so I don't think that's an issue. Another is that my calculations assumed that you have a 25% chance of winning each minigame, which is not the case for Hide and Seek, and it's also not the case in Mecha choice because it's possible for multiple players to win. However, I don't think the results of the calculations would've been much different if I had accounted for those things. Finally, the fact that you had a pattern for the choices you made in each game might suggest that those particular choices are just more likely to be the right choice when he cpus are on easier levels, but I don't think that's likely. I think you have a strong case.

A collab with game theory with this would be amazing. We know Matpat can get huge numbers with his followers when it comes to surveys, so why not do it again with this experiment. Fantastic concept, but like others I agree more trials would help and this could possibly fix that concern. Just because I find it fun, I say random number generator to make decisions

8:22 I love how he says "it's a boo!"