Counter appears to be halved versus AoE--discuss

Eris_Discordant

I have a Counter team and have watched a lot of iterations* of its occurrence and non-occurrence.
My team's Counter chances (I'm only lvl 50) are 55%, 50%, 35%, 35%, 35%.
Therefore the chances that they DON'T Counter are: 45%, 50%, 65%, 65%, and 65%.

When shot by AoE (no one ever dodges, so 5 hits) the chance that NO ONE COUNTERS is:
.45 x .5 x .65 x .65 x .65 = 6.1% or about 1 in 16 times.

I feel like I see it about 1 in 2 times, but I'm human and biased for my team. So let's say I'm doubling my heartache...then it's really only about 1 in 4.

Sounds possible to me...but it's not any better than that. There is just NO WAY that I'm observing 6% or 1 in 16. I've watched hundreds of AoE attacks and it's just not possible that my observations randomly clustered at 1 in 2 when the real occurrence should be 1 in 16, not even factoring in bias.

That difference is like expecting to see Heads-Heads-Heads-Heads-Tails (repeat 100 times) but instead you are seeing Heads-Tails-Heads-Tails-Heads-Tails. If you observed 100 of those sequences, random chance could not be the culprit.
(Of course I only THINK I'm seeing Tails-Heads at 1 in 2; I understand it's more like Tails-Tails-Heads-Heads.)

If Counter chances were HALVED versus AoE, then the chance to Counter (NOT Counter) is:
27.5% (72.5%) , 25% (75%) , 17.5% (82.5%) , 17.5% (82.5%) , 17.5% (82.5%)

Against AoE, therefore, the chance that no one counters is:
.725 x .75 x .825 x .825 x .825 = 26.8% or about 1 in 4!

* I don't sim if I have allies available (for Ally points), so I watch about 99% of all battles.
When I manual play I like to take down only the single-target enemies, in order to allow the AoE enemies to fire as much as possible, so that I can get more AoE iterations.

Eris_Discordant

Of course the best way to test this theory (or find out if there's an exception made for him) would be to have Count Dooku, which I do not.

Another theory is that something else factors into Counter other than a straight percentage, perhaps my Potency or my enemies' Tenacity.

Qeltar

There are 100 threads a day posted here about people suspecting that odds are wrong about something or other. They nearly always turn out to be a case of either confirmation bias or "red light syndrome".
What characters are these? I run a lot of counter-attackers myself and I don't see this.
You might be right. You might not. The only way to substantiate this sort of theory is to actually do many fights and record the results.
Don't forget that if a character dodges an attack, it will not counter.

Eris_Discordant

I'm considering logging the results.

But here's the thing: If someone in one of those hundreds of threads did that, would you then believe them?
Nope.

Eris_Discordant

Qeltar wrote: »

What characters are these? I run a lot of counter-attackers myself and I don't see this.

Why would it matter which characters...are some of them known bugs?

Qeltar

Unless the person gave me some reason not to believe them, I would. There are a couple of people who post nearly every day complaining about odds; aside from them I don't see any reason why someone would lie.
What usually happens is that people ask for them to do this, and they disappear and we never hear another word. Then a week later they come back again angrily complaining, and still with no data.
I can test it myself easily enough as I have Dooku, Fives and Kylo at high levels and FOST at lower level.

Qeltar

As it happens, the tank challenge is today, and two of my counter-attackers are tanks, and most of the enemies in this are AoErs. So I wasted an hour trying it out.

My Fives has a 70% counter chance and my FOST 35%.

Results...
Fives: 66 out of 100, 66%
FOST: 37 out of 101, 37%

Looks about right to me, sorry.
You have to remember that random numbers are prone to streaks. I did this in two batches of about 50. The second batch of 50 started out with both guys going 0 for 5. Then Fives got 15 counter-attacks in a row. Put those together and it's 75%, about right, but it wouldn't appear that way without both streaks added up. That's how it goes, and why large sample sizes are important.

Mephisto_style

I have noticed that on the first turn Sid's aoe doesn't trigger Han's ally meter gain.