People don't need to understand statistics for games, people understand what's fun. And that mechanic wasn't fun no matter how much you "well akshually" it.

There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.

Doesn’t the new xcom still have percentage to hit based on distance to the target?

Having an RNG hit chance is fine as long as the probability “feels right”. “Point blank” should have a 100% chance.

We're talking about X-COM: Enemy Unkown, the Firaxis game, right? I had so much fun with this game that I don't even remember that RNG issue as being an issue. Most likely, if I failed a "certain to land" shot and the squad was in a really, really tough spot, I'd just shrug and re-load a save [1]. I mean, it's not Nethack, is it? [2]

In any case, I really don't get it. So you point your gun at an alien and you see a chance to hit at "85%". What do you do? Do you think to yourself "oh, cool, that's a certain hit"? It's not: there's a 15% chance to miss.

I think ragequtting over that is just the standard phenomenon, in both strategy games and real life, that people never make contingency plans, they just make one plan and assume there's no chance of failure because they're so smart to plan ahead and the competition is clearly too dumb to have any plans of their own. In my book, any plan where one imagines themselves emerging triumphant after beating all the odds like the dice are loaded in their favour by the gods is not so much a "plan" as a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

And I, for one, don't find those fun. YMMV, but let's not assume that everyone enjoys the same things, in games or in life.

P.S.:

>> There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.

You mean, they still have hit chances but they don't tell you what they are so they can tweak them behind your back, so you win enough to buy their next game? Oldest trick in the book [3].

____________

[1] I hate losing men.

[2] There's an "Iron Man" mode but that turns out to only play the Black Sabbath song in a loop.

[3] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

  They wanted Mel to modify the program 
  so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
  they could change the odds and let the customer win.

I was referring to the interpretation of «ridiculous» as "it is preposterous", not at that which means "it is frustrating".

And personally, in front of "UFO: Enemy Unknown" I lived the pleasure of the masterpiece, not the balanced game - some of us have little taste for the win-and-lose. We learnt assembly when we were kids to make those sides of the gameplay adapt to our will - and went on hacking since.

Of UFO/XCOM, one particularly stubborn subsystem to change was having the "radars" not missing any new alien ship.