Guild Wars 2

So we’ve all heard the “my friend has better RNG than me stories”, and most of us know that computers cannot actually create random numbers, and there must be a ‘random seed’ based off something. And if we put 2 and 2 together, it looks like some accounts have better RNG due to some sort of innate calculation tied to their account.

So the question is this: are we just wearing tinfoil hats, and the fact that my friend with 900 hours in the game has 4 precursors and 2 unlimited bank access contracts. compared to my zero anything over 4.5k hours, is just to be chalked up to RNG? I get that. But how many people can relate to this story? Yes, we all know about biases. But how long are we going to say things like “random is random” (which we know it isn’t), and “your sample size is low” (which by this time, is not), and “you’re not factoring in other variables” (which we are)?

When are we going to actually look at “lucky” accounts (and I use quotes there because we know computers can’t generate random numbers)? Can we start talking about things like “is it right”, and “how can we level out this uneven distribution of wealth through drops?” When can we stop insulting each others’ intelligence, and address the issue at hand?

There is no such thing as unlucky or lucky accounts. There is nothing in your account that dooms you to bad RNG and nothing in your friend’s account that blesses their account with good RNG.

You can not say that the system does not work like ANet states without proof. Anecdotal evidence is weak at best and can’t be used as definite proof. Due to evolution, we’re more likely to remember negative things because they’re things that in the past we’ve had to avoid. “Oh, I got sick from eating those berries. I shouldn’t eat those berries again.” or “Johnny died from eating that plant. I shouldn’t eat that plant.”

Also, you can’t ask in the title if accounts have luck and then say you aren’t accepting any answers except “yes”. Nor can you stop those of us who answer “no” from answering your post.

Yes, due to RNG some accounts will tend to have bad luck and others good, but nothing in your accounts makes it so and tomorrow your lucks could switch or become average.

Look up confirmation bias, the bell curve, how people remember what happens to them and how they perceive randomness then go off and think about it a while.

Starter article to get you going: Human find the concept of randomness hard to understand

First off, no RNG ever made can be truly random. To ask for true randomness will be like asking roll a zero or seven(or any number that’s not 1~6) with a standard six face dice, which you know it’s impossible due to limitation of the tool/device.

Second, “someone I know is luckier than me”, well, guess what? That’s exactly how randomness work, do you honestly think randomness distribute reward evenly or base on probability of any sort?

Not saying randomness is a good way to distribute reward, but I just find it funny every time people made the argument that RNG is flawed because it is not truly random, while what they actually ask for is to have less randomness rather than more.

Every event is it’s own individual event. There is no such thing as “lucky” there is just probability. And probability says that some accounts will get more than others because that’s what random means.

The higher the odds of succeeding in RNG the more tries you would need to make to approach actual average of the RNG. In the case of Precursor and other extremely low chances, when you have lots of people who have made relatively few attempts at the RNG (compared to the chance of success) there IS going to be a huge variance in the success rate.

There is nothing on your account that makes is any less “Lucky” than his.

There’s a saying I have in life: “Luck is for other people”.

The thing is, when someone gets lucky they shout it to the skies. When the 1000 other people don’t get lucky, they say nothing.

Well, I have 92% luck so far. sorry I read the title and figured you must be talking about luck find which is raised by consuming luck you aquire from breaking down gear with salvage tools.
I’m not sure how exactly it works in regards to the rng , btw rng means random number generator. Its the computers equivalent of rolling a 100 sided dice and giving you loot based on that number and an internal numerical value associated with the given loot on a table per mob or type of mobs.
it is random in that the list is populated with all possible loot that a given mob can drop and then assigned a number, the Random Number Generator then rolls the dice, the number you get, assigns the loot you receive…

Seera.5916:

There is no such thing as unlucky or lucky accounts. There is nothing in your account that dooms you to bad RNG and nothing in your friend’s account that blesses their account with good RNG.

Actually they where proven to exist early on. Accounts that could solo events and still got only got bronze achievement and kitten loot. Anet didnt admit they existed and swept it under the rug.

But either way, we know that RNG and DR has been broken since launch, especially DR. You can log on, go to Orr and do a single event for a couple of minutes and during that event suffer very noticable DR (that will stick when your character moves to another zone) – Anet has always said thats impossible, its supposed to take a while before it happens. Then of course another day you can log on and get great loot for 30 minutes across 3 zones.

I understand and accept the claims of biases and memory flaws. I’m proposing that given we have a large community with years of data perceived, perhaps we can identify patterns and trends and use this empirical evidence to come to some sort of conclusion, rather than dismissing these claims with the usual statements such as the ones above. We have no proof that accounts can be lucky, you say, aside from anecdotal evidence. Well, we also have no proof that accounts can’t be lucky.

Again, I understand and accept the flaws of the human brain, but I propose that we look past those flaws, and look at the actual evidence at hand. Perhaps there is more at work than just “RNG”.

How can you guys accept that over 1000’s of hours and 100’s of exotic drops (using precursors as an example), the results vary so much. How can some people reliably get upwards of 20+ precursors in the time that others get none? You can’t call that variance, over 1000’s of hours and 100’s of drops. That is quite a large sample size. And even going farther than that, most “lucky” people have gotten more drops than “unlucky” players who have played 10x longer.

Whether or not you want to face the truth of it, your lucky friend is going to continuously be lucky. He’ll keep on getting the better drops, and you’ll keep using “random chance” to explain it, even though you can predict reliably that it’s going to happen. The odds of one person winning a coin flip 100 times in a row (starting from the first flip) are astronomical, so how is it that we see that happen so often? Perhaps with a pool of 10,000 people, you could say I only notice the outliers. However in my small circle of 30 people in my guild, why are the outcomes of these drops so kitten predictable?

I feel like so many people have been trained to just spit out the same answers that they take as fact, and don’t consider the fact that perhaps the drop system is flawed. Why can’t you even consider that? Do you really think ANet is so incapable of making a flawed system, that you ignore the evidence in front of you?

Say whatever you want. I’ve got a veteran in my first guild, has been playing (quite frequently btw) since the start – not a single precursor drop, everything he got cost him hours of grind. And here is my friend I play with, getting spark and zap within 10 mins from the same event and then opening like 20 encryptions each day and getting 2 aetherized hammers within a week. Yeah, Anet? Why not I guess.

Except no evidence exists.

To make any accurate comparisons, everyone needs to be doing roughly the same thing. Are they playing similar hours?
Are they playing similat content?
Are they playing more content which involves chests or ranking up?
Are they playing the forge more?
Are they in higher level areas more?
Is magic find equal?
Are players lying and linking chat codes? ( very very common tactic)

There are so many factors at play, it is very easy to dismiss lucky accounts. At the end of the day, it is in the best interest of the game and the devs for a system not to exist. The devs see the data, so if such a flaw exists or existed, it would have been picked up and corrected long ago

There likely are “lucky” and “unlucky” accounts. However, in all likelihood, they’re not what the OP thinks — even if we refuse to accept ANet statements saying that loot bias for accounts (what the OP is really implying) is not a thing.

What happens in GW2? We have massive loot tables. We have players whose activities lead to the game “rolling” on those tables for their loot. This can be drops, chests, Mystic Toilet, etc. Usually, you get a metric ton of common items and only rarely something good.

There is a very low percentage chance to get a lucky result. This means that, in a normal distribution most “rolls” result in items that are unexciting. However, there’s still a chance for that something good. With this type of table, over time, a normal distribution would result in a preponderance of common results, and some small number of lucky results.

But wait a minute. While the random loot tables are not truly random, they do reset each time you roll. The game doesn’t care if you’ve rolled once or one million times since the last time you got something great. The minuscule chance to get that lucky result doesn’t change.

With so many accounts out there, there are going to be accounts that get more than the average amount (whatever that might be) of good stuff and others that will get less, or none. That’s how “average” is derived. These accounts are outliers. Their existence is a function of the way loot is rolled for in these types of games. This is an expected result given what we know about loot distribution. Thus, attributing the phenomenon to loot bias tied to certain accounts is unnecessary to explain the observations.

Curo.2483:

Whether or not you want to face the truth of it, your lucky friend is going to continuously be lucky. He’ll keep on getting the better drops, and you’ll keep using “random chance” to explain it, even though you can predict reliably that it’s going to happen. The odds of one person winning a coin flip 100 times in a row (starting from the first flip) are astronomical, so how is it that we see that happen so often? Perhaps with a pool of 10,000 people, you could say I only notice the outliers. However in my small circle of 30 people in my guild, why are the outcomes of these drops so kitten predictable?

You should record every single attempt when you do something where rng is involved. Of course you have to choose something where there are no “magical” things like MF and DR. Let’s say you make rare weapons from level 75-80 masterwork weapons in the mystic forge where the chance of promotion is 20%.

You expect to get 1 rare from every 5 attemps. But the reality is that sometimes all 5 will be rare and more often none of them. Sometimes you will have 20+ attempts without a single rare. If your sample is big enough you can even see 30+ attempts without a single rare.

Try it, make 5000 attempts. Record them all in an excel spreadsheet. You will be really close to 20%. Ask your lucky friends to do the same and compare your results.

As people already noticed, a computer can not generate a true random-generator, the pharses about “luck” are not that true. The system tries to be as close as possible, whatever that means.

First of all, there are two types of processes in the game: server- and computer-processes. To keep the servers function almost 24/7/365 they already splitted up the work. We have authentification-servers, login-servers, we have world-servers and there should be (even if not on official lists) npc and item-servers.

On our computer, we do most of the calculation-process. This includes damage, jumping, and most of the drop-mechanics. As well as graphics, sound and tons of other stuff.

The far distance between both systems, we close with the internet-connection. As most of you have noticed, a road long enough to make some mistakes.

As you may figure out, our computers are very busy. They do tons of parallel processes, thanks to multicore it gets done in a part of a second. Although things go extremely fast, our computers still have to order the processes and solve them one by one – luckyly not visible for us. The assortment-system is mostly based on relevancy, but in the end, if you have two or more processes of the same relevance, it goes down to the process-ID. At this point, machines are stupid and irrational, because they always select the process with the lowest ID to execute first. Which ID a process gets depens on when it was created, so broken down to the basics: “birthright.”

Now if you take a look on the other posts of the people, this special condition should not exist xD. But it does exist inside our system.

I’m a simple man, with only basic knowledge, far away from understanding the game-mechanics in detail. But if you keep in mind what I wrote above (and appeared to you to be totally useless), you may think of a small connection between process IDs, account IDs, and many many other IDs and how we get random loot.

So to end this quickly. According to what I wrote, I do think some players are blessed with more or less luck, due to their IDs which however persuade the random-generators to be more helpful than usual.

~ here ends the theoretical stuff ~

On the other hand, it is a reflection of life. When we are born, noone of us knows where we will go. Some of us are born in rich families others in the poorest regions of the planet. Some can ascend, some can descend the majority remains where it started.

When we walk arround, even in the same society, we see people who are haunted by luck and people who don’t.

Back to GW2 I’m also playing for a long time now and haven’t seen one single precursor so far. I do not farm, which lowers my chances. But even if I ever get one by drop, I will give it away.

The lack of luck gives us great opportunities. We seek for knowledge and try to understand things to achieve our goals. I would even go far enough to say, luck blocks progression and innovation.

HnRkLnXqZ.1870:

As people already noticed, a computer can not generate a true random-generator, the pharses about “luck” are not that true. The system tries to be as close as possible, whatever that means.

“Anyone who considers arithmetic methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.” – John von Neumann, 1951

If you really care about true randomness you can use this:

http://www.idquantique.com/random-number-generation/quantis-random-number-generator/

Short story: accounts don’t have luck; each of us has the same chance to get awesome loot today (however, that “same chance” is just very low). Since hundreds of thousands of people (perhaps millions) play the game regularly, it’s not surprising that we see someone bragging about getting results that have a million-to-one odds. That is annoying and sometimes depressing, but it doesn’t mean that they have a “better account” — it just means that they were exceptionally lucky — there’s always someone who is.

Even shorter story: people win 100 million dollar lotteries all the time; that just means someone is lucky and everyone else wasn’t.

Curo.2483:

So we’ve all heard the “my friend has better RNG than me stories”,

We’ve heard them, but until people publish results controlled experiments on 1000s of drops on different accounts, there’s no actual evidence of people having better luck over the long run. Of course, over any short run, people will get different drops. Typically, we don’t notice average drops or even better than average; we pay special attention to any bad runs and a little attention to really good ones. That means, most of us don’t really realize when we are getting just average results.

Curo.2483:

and most of us know that computers cannot actually create random numbers, and there must be a ‘random seed’ based off something.

That’s a misunderstanding. On a technical level, computers aren’t 100% random. However, they are so close to random that for any practical purpose involving human behavior (including video games), the results can’t be distinguished from random.

In other words, computers create random results just fine for MMOs.

Curo.2483:

And if we put 2 and 2 together, it looks like some accounts have better RNG due to some sort of innate calculation tied to their account.

The problem is that it’s actually 0 & 0, not 2 &2. There’s no reason to believe that some accounts are lucky and some are unlucky, other than it makes us feel better to have an explanation as to why one player got 2 precursor drops out of the Forge on the same day and someone else didn’t get any after 500 attempts.

Of course, if you think that some accounts have better luck than others, then it’s worth spending some time running controlled experiments to test. It’s not difficult, it’s just tedious and boring. I’d be happy to help you set them up and collate results, should you think it’s worth doing.

Curo.2483:

I feel like so many people have been trained to just spit out the same answers that they take as fact, and don’t consider the fact that perhaps the drop system is flawed. Why can’t you even consider that? Do you really think ANet is so incapable of making a flawed system, that you ignore the evidence in front of you?

I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility that there’s an issue, just as soon as someone publishes results of 1000s of drops across controlled conditions.

Of course ANet screws up all sorts of things. And we collect evidence, publish it, vet it, and ANet reviews it. In this case, there’s no evidence at all that there’s an issue. All anyone offers is stories about this person who never got a precursor and that person who got three. That doesn’t mean there’s an issue; it just means one person got 3 and the other didn’t.

Dawdler.8521:

Seera.5916:

There is no such thing as unlucky or lucky accounts. There is nothing in your account that dooms you to bad RNG and nothing in your friend’s account that blesses their account with good RNG.

Actually they where proven to exist early on. Accounts that could solo events and still got only got bronze achievement and kitten loot. Anet didnt admit they existed and swept it under the rug.

But either way, we know that RNG and DR has been broken since launch, especially DR. You can log on, go to Orr and do a single event for a couple of minutes and during that event suffer very noticable DR (that will stick when your character moves to another zone) – Anet has always said thats impossible, its supposed to take a while before it happens. Then of course another day you can log on and get great loot for 30 minutes across 3 zones.

I’ll tell You my DR fractal story. Before HoT I was hunting for fractal dagger. Of course I was dropping everything but no dagger at all. But that’s not even a problem, game doesn’t know what I want to drop (or does it?) So I was doing 20,30,40,50 daily. And here comess DR. Every time when I had a break from the game for few days, on coming back my loot was better. One day (returning day) I had 2 ascended boxes and 2 skins. On non-returning days my loot was drastically worse. By drastically I mean no single ring for 4/5 days (spreadsheets said that before hot ring was ~~40%) . Tell me that this game doesn’t hate some people and I’ll lol at You. Loud as kitten.
After HoT I’m doing 3×50′s once in 2/3 days. Better loot than doing 5 achievements daily. Consider changing Your loot DR system anet. Really. Which is something I can’t understand – create DR on loot.

Identical base luck for all accounts makes sense. However, I’m confident that Anet’s RNG is more complex than a single percentage roll.

Will they admit to it or tell us exactly what hidden variables and calculations there are? Of course not, because someone out there will use that info to exploit the system.

/powergamerseverywhere

I have several accounts and I have seen that they do have different kind of “luck” with them. It was good measure to do in Silverwastes when I was hunting with all of them that Carapace Coat Box. So you got a lot of boss bags in there and if you are lucky you will get that Coat Box too. Here is results:

1st account: 111 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains more blue ones than green items. I have got only 14 exotics over 3 years. I can only dream about precursors with this account. No precursor. (Bad luck account)

2nd account: 3 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains green and yellow or exotics items, rarely blue ones. I have got over 200 exotics over 3 years. No precursors either. (Lucky account)

3rd account: 15 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains blue, green and yellow items. I have got over 100 exotics over 3 years. No precursors. (Mid lucky account)

4th account: 50 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains more blue items than green ones, rarely yellows. I have got over 50 exotics during 3 years. No precursors. (Mid lucky account).

5th account: 25 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains more green ones than blue ones. I have got over 75 exotics over 3 years No precursors. (Mid lucky account).

6th account: 2 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains more yellow and green ones. I have got over 250 exotics over 3 years. 1 precursor. (Very lucky account).

7th account: 125 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains more blue ones than green items. I have got only 5 exotics over 3 years. I can only dream about precursors with this account. No precursor. (Bad luck account)

8th account: 40 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains equally green and blue items. I have got about 50 exotics over 3 years No precursor. (Mid lucky account).

9th account: 25 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains equally green and blue items. I have got over 75 exotics over 3 years. No precursor. (Mid lucky account).

10th account: 100 rounds to get all 3 coat boxes. Boss bags usually contains more blue ones than green items. I have got only 10 exotics over 3 years. I can only dream about precursors with this account. No precursor. (Bad luck account)

11th account: after 200 rounds I quit to hunt to that last coat box. Boss bags usually containts blue ones rarely green ones. I have got only 1 exotic over 3 years. (Very bad luck account)

If you wonder how I know amount of exotics, I have booklets with every accounts where I have written all exotics what I have got and counter in there if I have got more than once same one.

I think this is only basic RNG what I have had with these accounts. But I have named them with “lucky” accounts and “bad luck” accounts.

Sinope.5630:

I think this is only basic RNG what I have had with these accounts. But I have named them with “lucky” accounts and “bad luck” accounts.

Your sample size is 696, not bad but still seems to be too few. If I am correct you have got 32 boxes. It means you have ~4.6% chance to get one in 1 round (not sure what you mean by round as it seems you can get multiple boxes from 1 round, but I just want to show you chances).

There is 30.8% chance that you won’t get any box from 25 rounds.
There is 9.5% chance that you won’t get any box from 50 rounds.
There is 0.9% chance that you won’t get any box from 100 rounds.

None of these are unbelievable.

I would like to add this, some science

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2ecb9z/i_opened_10k_champion_chests_for_science/

Given that the RNG in this game, like all software is really a PRNG, where pseudo is a critical issue as no software-only RNG can ever be truly random, it requires a seed value.

Now, there are certainly some games where the seed is generated when the character is, and since a PRNG is never truly random it’s entirely plausible that a PRNG seeded from a value created per-character CAN appear to be biased towards some characters as compared to others.

I don’t believe Anet have ever stated how/when their seed values are generated so we can’t know if GW2 could theoretically suffer from this.

Until Anet produce the mathematical ‘fingerprint’ of their PRNG’s output we can’t know how good (or bad) it is in this respect: and of course they never will, no MMO developer has ever done so and so all MMO forums have posts arguing the PRNG in that game is ‘biased’.

Milkshake.4038:

Sinope.5630:

I think this is only basic RNG what I have had with these accounts. But I have named them with “lucky” accounts and “bad luck” accounts.

Your sample size is 696, not bad but still seems to be too few. If I am correct you have got 32 boxes. It means you have ~4.6% chance to get one in 1 round (not sure what you mean by round as it seems you can get multiple boxes from 1 round, but I just want to show you chances).

There is 30.8% chance that you won’t get any box from 25 rounds.
There is 9.5% chance that you won’t get any box from 50 rounds.
There is 0.9% chance that you won’t get any box from 100 rounds.

None of these are unbelievable.

I would like to add this, some science

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2ecb9z/i_opened_10k_champion_chests_for_science/

Well, if you are lucky enough, you will get 2 coat boxes in one hit, as my luckiest account did. 1 is coming from Achievement “Mordrem Vinewrath Killed” and one from reward when you open the Vinewrath Chest after Vinewrath event. So it is quarantee, that you will get at least one box/ account. If you want to get all armor types with those coat boxes you need to have 3 of them.

And yes, you are correct, I have 32 boxes, I still miss that one box and I won’t go back to that unlucky account anymore

One round is when you have beaten up The Breach and started to do Vinewrath event and finish that event with success and you can open that event’s Vinewrath Chest. Boss bags are extra rewards from bandit chests, The Breach and Greater Nightmare Bod in Hidden Depths.

It’s a random guess, but probably, the seed value is simply the 4 digits that comes after your account name.
I guess my account is one of the “worst luck” account. I’m always playing with someone who has arround the same playtime as me arround 2 years.
He gots 2 precursors, 5 ascended boxes
I got 0 precursor, 0 ascended box…
I go to Lion’s Arch someone said I looted 7 precursors on mob
I go to Lion’s Arch someone said X guys got 2 precursors at mystic forge in 10 minutes
I go to Lion’s Arch someone said I have a tab full of ascended boxes..
What a sad account I have…

Well, let’s just accept for a minute that somebody really got 4 precs in around 1k hours of gameplay. Quite lucky, not impossible. I have three precs with around 3k hours of gameplay. One in the first 500, the other two around the 2700 and 2800 hour mark – I however did not get a single RNG Ascended Gear Box in all that time. – Just saying.
But what if you and your friend both play on, until you both are at 10k hours.
You do not get another precursor until 6k hours, while your friend gets one at 1,5k hours – but then, you get one new precursor constantly every 1000k hours, while your friend gets nothing from 1,5k to 10k hours – now who would be the one with the lucky, and who’d be the one with the cursed account?

See, there always IS a chance of getting a prec – it’s just utterly small.
Throw a dice 10 times. The chance that you get a 6 on every roll is slim – but it can happen. Now imagine the same with 100 d20. There still is a chance of you getting 100 20s in a row – extremely slim, but not impossible.
So in the end, whether it is a perfect randomnes, or a system meant to at least simulate randomnes by complicated algorithms – it just comes down to personal luck.

And let’s not forget that my example with the 10k hours was just about you two playing just PvE. Loot from enemies and events. But as someone above said, you still have to factor in the things a person does in the time he spends in the game. A person constantly farming silverwastes will have a whole lot more drops than somebody doing 100% world exploration on every character over and over. Because it’s just way more efficient. You also don’t get nearly as much stuff playing WvW or PvP.
And of course, there’s the mystic forge. I can roll a new account, whip out my credit card, buy gems on end, convert them to gold, buy rares and exos from the tp and go wild with flushing down the things, hoping to get a prec every now and then – and I’d probably had more precurses if I do that stuff for 4k hours than any sane person playing the game in a “normal” way.
Just my thoughts on the topic.

Curo.2483:

So we’ve all heard the “my friend has better RNG than me stories”, and most of us know that computers cannot actually create random numbers, and there must be a ‘random seed’ based off something. And if we put 2 and 2 together, it looks like some accounts have better RNG due to some sort of innate calculation tied to their account.

So the question is this: are we just wearing tinfoil hats, and the fact that my friend with 900 hours in the game has 4 precursors and 2 unlimited bank access contracts. compared to my zero anything over 4.5k hours, is just to be chalked up to RNG? I get that. But how many people can relate to this story? Yes, we all know about biases. But how long are we going to say things like “random is random” (which we know it isn’t), and “your sample size is low” (which by this time, is not), and “you’re not factoring in other variables” (which we are)?

When are we going to actually look at “lucky” accounts (and I use quotes there because we know computers can’t generate random numbers)? Can we start talking about things like “is it right”, and “how can we level out this uneven distribution of wealth through drops?” When can we stop insulting each others’ intelligence, and address the issue at hand?

That’s not how coding works, An Account would be described as an Account entity which has no knowledge or state associated with luck.

http://neurope.eu/article/does-luck-exist-or-it-state-mind/

Basically, “luck” is a matter of perspective.

“Randomness” doesn’t really exist. One simple variable, like a drop in a pond, can cause other effects that will lead to a certain result. The moment you press the button on the MF to get a new item, is the moment endless effects come to a conclusion. It might be the time (to the nanosecond), the number of people in that moment online and pressing or not pressing, the processor of your pc doing a calculation… anything imaginable, all possible ‘effects’ will contribute to the exact calculation of the “RNG”.
Press one nanosecond later and you get a different rng.

The number of possibilities are endless, but we only “percieve” them as random or semi-random, and any conclusion to them we call lucky or unlucky.

I’ve gotten 2 pre’s within 5 minutes of eachother, is that luck ? I’ve fallen down some steps and bruised 3 ribs , is that unlucky (i didn’t die of a head injury) ? (true facts for me btw)
It’s a result of a humanly (even with super computers) impossible to achieve calculation of near limitless ‘events’ that contribute to those results. You might as well say that God (or another deity of your choosing) has granted you that.

I simply say : if you don’t get it, suck it up. If you do, good for you.

Randomness kinda feels unfair sometimes. As Apple said concerning their shuffle option, “We’re making it less random to make it feel more random." Maybe Anet should do the same

Riss.1536:

It’s a random guess, but probably, the seed value is simply the 4 digits that comes after your account name.
I guess my account is one of the “worst luck” account. I’m always playing with someone who has arround the same playtime as me arround 2 years.
He gots 2 precursors, 5 ascended boxes
I got 0 precursor, 0 ascended box…
I go to Lion’s Arch someone said I looted 7 precursors on mob
I go to Lion’s Arch someone said X guys got 2 precursors at mystic forge in 10 minutes
I go to Lion’s Arch someone said I have a tab full of ascended boxes..
What a sad account I have…

The idea that a random number generator requires a seed causes different accounts to have a fixed lucky or unlucky state really doesn’t make sense. If you start the same random number generator with the same seed and make the same sequence of rolls, you will always get the same results. Typically, RNG is seeded using the current date and time to ensure you always get a sequence you haven’t seen before. If each account has a personalised seed, you’d probably see one of two effects:

1. The RNG starts from 0 each time: players would start to see patterns emerging in their loot drops, patterns that repeat every time they log in if they if they go to the same areas each time.

2. The RNG starts from where it left off last time: veteran players would start to see lag before their first loot drop, lag that will get worse over time, as the RNG has to repeat and discard all the rolls it has previously made for that account.

No-one seems to be reporting either of these situtations, so personalised RNG seems unlikely.

A far simpler and more sensible way to implement it is a single server-based RNG that everyone uses, and it gets seeded on startup with the current date and time so that each time the servers are reset, it starts a new sequence no-one has seen before.

In other words, we’re all rolling with the same dice, and if they’re loaded, they’re loaded the same for all of us.

Stitch.1794:

1. The RNG starts from 0 each time: players would start to see patterns emerging in their loot drops, patterns that repeat every time they log in if they if they go to the same areas each time.

Well this does exist, but as I said DR is sporadic and unpredictable at best (DR being the droprate reduction which GW2 employs).

You can see the pattern if you do any event. I have logged on, instantly gone to do the melandru event and for the first couple of minutes you get a couple yellows and green… 8-9 out of 10 items being something other than greys. Then shortly after it start to go blue and then a few minutes later after that – right about the time the defense event start it will just cut right out – spikes, greys and nearly nothing else. Just grey kitten and maybe 1 out of 10 things being the “rare” blue. That’s really heavy handed and noticable DR.

If you dont see this… Congrats you got a lucky account, lol.

Dawdler.8521:

Stitch.1794:

1. The RNG starts from 0 each time: players would start to see patterns emerging in their loot drops, patterns that repeat every time they log in if they if they go to the same areas each time.

Well this does exist, but as I said DR is sporadic and unpredictable at best (DR being the droprate reduction which GW2 employs).

You can see the pattern if you do any event. I have logged on, instantly gone to do the melandru event and for the first couple of minutes you get a couple yellows and green… 8-9 out of 10 items being something other than greys. Then shortly after it start to go blue and then a few minutes later after that – right about the time the defense event start it will just cut right out – spikes, greys and nearly nothing else. Just grey kitten and maybe 1 out of 10 things being the “rare” blue. That’s really heavy handed and noticable DR.

If you dont see this… Congrats you got a lucky account, lol.

That’s not what I meant. I mean you’d get the same blue, followed by the same green, etc. Not a general pattern of x blues and y green in the first 10 drops, but the exact same drops in the exact same order.

Nobody but the people who created the loot system know. Maybe even those don’t know for sure. And while there is no evidence because that would take forever to accumulate and surely be dismissed as insubstantial sample size seeing how there’s millions of accounts and ongoing drops, there’s just anecdotes at times that seemingly must go beyond simple distribution and statistics.

Like the one person I know who literally got 13 Fractal Warhorn skins from Fractals back then, and no other skin. He would only ever drop Warhorn skins.
Or the other person who got around 13 precursors in 1.5 years of playing (PvE only), compared to others who play since release and have yet to get a single one.
Or the person who keeps dropping Ascended Chests in PvE without doing Fractals or world bosses at a rate of maybe once every 2 weeks.

It’s not so much the fact that those things drop, but that those things drop and accumulate on single accounts that makes me wary. In the end it doesn’t matter though. 99,9% of all drops on GW2 are salvage trash anyway, so what gives.

And on that note, ever since hitting 175% magic find the first mob I kill on any map after logging in consistently drops a rare item for me.

To those that say it’s all RNG. You have to remember that Anet has acknowledged that there are outlier accounts on both ends (some get lots, some virtually nothing). There is a thread here . Nothing has ever come out of it that would address the issue. In a lot of cases it’s just RNG . However, some players are really extra happy or sad depending on what kind of outlier they are. Once you have one you are stuck with it though.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/RNG-as-a-concept-Discuss/first

You are wrong about computers not being able to generate random numbers. Sure, from a mathematically robust point of view, but to ALL intents and purposes then generating a random number is trivial for a computer and has been for a very long time. This is not the problem.

More likely the problem is humans not understanding probability, we are really bad at it and think there is some notion of everything will be equal in the end. Run the numbers enough times and this notion may approximate to true, but in the end may be 900,000,000 hours rather than 900.

Of course there are lucky accounts. That’s a consequence of randomness.

With randomness comes unequal distribution. Looking at cumulative results over time, you will have outliers for whom the dice either fell really, really well or really, really terribly.

That’s not a problem of “marked” accounts though, but just the consequence of having randomness.

Also, when people bring up the people who seem to get good drops all the time, I tend to wonder if these lucky people don’t just play a lot more and generate far more rolls of the dice.

Blude.6812:

To those that say it’s all RNG. You have to remember that Anet has acknowledged that there are outlier accounts on both ends (some get lots, some virtually nothing). There is a thread here . Nothing has ever come out of it that would address the issue. In a lot of cases it’s just RNG . However, some players are really extra happy or sad depending on what kind of outlier they are. Once you have one you are stuck with it though.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/RNG-as-a-concept-Discuss/first

No, you’re not stuck with being an outlier. Each drop is independent of the last. Your drops don’t know if you’re an average or an outlier.

There is nothing saying that an outlier can’t become average or move to the other side of the bell curve. And average accounts can become outliers.

And all accounts will tend toward the average as they get more and more drops.

Because that’s the law of large numbers.

And none of us here are saying that there aren’t accounts that have had bad or good luck with drops. Just that there’s nothing in their account that made them have bad or good luck before they even started playing.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Of course there are lucky accounts. That’s a consequence of randomness.

With randomness comes unequal distribution. Looking at cumulative results over time, you will have outliers for whom the dice either fell really, really well or really, really terribly.

That’s not a problem of “marked” accounts though, but just the consequence of having randomness.

Also, when people bring up the people who seem to get good drops all the time, I tend to wonder if these lucky people don’t just play a lot more and generate far more rolls of the dice.

Well, there are two sides to a bell curve for outliers. The really good side and the really bad side. You can’t say there can exist people who get bad drops only and then deny there are people who get good drops only.

It’s like rolling Heads or Tails. If you say getting Heads is like getting a good drop and Tails is like getting a bad drop, then it’s easy to see how both sides can exist. If 100 people flip a coin 100 times, most will be relatively near to 50/50. But a few will likely have mostly Tails. And a few will likely have mostly Heads.

Just due to RNG coin flipping.

Seera.5916:

Manasa Devi.7958:

Of course there are lucky accounts. That’s a consequence of randomness.

With randomness comes unequal distribution. Looking at cumulative results over time, you will have outliers for whom the dice either fell really, really well or really, really terribly.

That’s not a problem of “marked” accounts though, but just the consequence of having randomness.

Also, when people bring up the people who seem to get good drops all the time, I tend to wonder if these lucky people don’t just play a lot more and generate far more rolls of the dice.

Well, there are two sides to a bell curve for outliers. The really good side and the really bad side. You can’t say there can exist people who get bad drops only and then deny there are people who get good drops only.

It’s like rolling Heads or Tails. If you say getting Heads is like getting a good drop and Tails is like getting a bad drop, then it’s easy to see how both sides can exist. If 100 people flip a coin 100 times, most will be relatively near to 50/50. But a few will likely have mostly Tails. And a few will likely have mostly Heads.

Just due to RNG coin flipping.

Except it’s not a coin flip. Good is defined by rarity coupled with desire for an item, whether it’s a precursor or something else for which players will pay a lot. Rarity does not have two opposite diminishing possibilities. Only the stones very close to the top of the pyramid are good; all the other stones are bad. Outliers are determined only by presence or absence of good drops, not presence/absence of bad ones. Bad drops occur for everyone, in abundance. No one gets good drops only.

Seera.5916:

Blude.6812:

To those that say it’s all RNG. You have to remember that Anet has acknowledged that there are outlier accounts on both ends (some get lots, some virtually nothing). There is a thread here . Nothing has ever come out of it that would address the issue. In a lot of cases it’s just RNG . However, some players are really extra happy or sad depending on what kind of outlier they are. Once you have one you are stuck with it though.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/RNG-as-a-concept-Discuss/first

No, you’re not stuck with being an outlier. Each drop is independent of the last. Your drops don’t know if you’re an average or an outlier.

There is nothing saying that an outlier can’t become average or move to the other side of the bell curve. And average accounts can become outliers.

And all accounts will tend toward the average as they get more and more drops.

Because that’s the law of large numbers.

And none of us here are saying that there aren’t accounts that have had bad or good luck with drops. Just that there’s nothing in their account that made them have bad or good luck before they even started playing.

We will disagree then. In my experience once you are an outlier, you are always one. But quite bluntly no one knows, not you, not me. We are both speculating. Anet will never make public their RNG. Mathematical ‘law’ may be a fact, but if the generator has a programming flaw, no ‘law’ will change it.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Curo.2483:

I feel like so many people have been trained to just spit out the same answers that they take as fact, and don’t consider the fact that perhaps the drop system is flawed. Why can’t you even consider that? Do you really think ANet is so incapable of making a flawed system, that you ignore the evidence in front of you?

I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility that there’s an issue, just as soon as someone meets my impossible standards

Fixed that for you.

Neural.1824:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Curo.2483:

I feel like so many people have been trained to just spit out the same answers that they take as fact, and don’t consider the fact that perhaps the drop system is flawed. Why can’t you even consider that? Do you really think ANet is so incapable of making a flawed system, that you ignore the evidence in front of you?

I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility that there’s an issue, just as soon as someone meets my impossible standards

Fixed that for you.

Those are not impossible standards. You cannot prove anything without collecting enough data.

Personally I have 5 excel spreadsheets with tons of data. I would create a “kitten rng” thread if there was something wrong.

I don’t think anyone know the answer.

But there are people who get 5 precursors a month, because they literally throws in 5000 gold a month.

so results may vary depends on what you do.

John Smith.4610:

There isn’t such thing is some accounts getting stuck lucky. Yes there’s an RNG, yes it’s random and there are streaks and outliers and an even aggregate distribution.

John Smith.4610:

wwwes.1398:

John Smith.4610:

There isn’t such thing is some accounts getting stuck lucky. Yes there’s an RNG, yes it’s random and there are streaks and outliers and an even aggregate distribution.

Can you confirm whether it is an RNG that uses some sort of value from the user’s account or whether it is purely random/session based? I have a friend who swears that smack-talking an anet dev during a beta weekend pvp match doomed his account to poor rng for life.

Absolutely it does not use anything to do with a user.

John Smith.4610:

Here’s the premise. RNG is evenly distributed on aggregate. On an individual level this means that while almost everyone falls into a reasonable range in the middle, there are outliers on each side of the distribution that are either highly rewarded or not rewarded at all. These individuals become sample cases and spotlights for experiences that maybe shouldn’t exist.

Accounts have magic find http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_Find#Account_bonus

The higher it is, the higher your chances are of getting rare or better items. This is why some players seem to have better luck than others in some cases.

Notes at the bottom of the wiki page:

A Q&A session with Isiah Cartwright revealed the way Magic Find works: “Everytime you kill a monster you roll on a number of tables, inside these tables are different rarity categories. Magic find increases the chances you will get higher categories. For example if there is a 1 in 10 category, and you have 200% magic find you will have 3/10 chances to get that category. This improves not just the rarity of the items you get but can also improve your chances at getting trophies and rare crafting materials like lodestones.”

Because there’s always someone to do this kind of thing : This thread reminds me of Asheron’s Call’s Wi Flag.

http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag

Curo.2483:

So we’ve all heard the “my friend has better RNG than me stories”, and most of us know that computers cannot actually create random numbers, and there must be a ‘random seed’ based off something. And if we put 2 and 2 together, it looks like some accounts have better RNG due to some sort of innate calculation tied to their account.

Except you are trying to get 4 by putting apples and color blue together. No, it may “look like” this to you, but actually your conslusion is in no way based on your starting assumptions.

Curo.2483:

So the question is this: are we just wearing tinfoil hats

Yes.

Curo.2483:

and the fact that my friend with 900 hours in the game has 4 precursors and 2 unlimited bank access contracts. compared to my zero anything over 4.5k hours, is just to be chalked up to RNG?

Yes.

Curo.2483:

But how long are we going to say things like “random is random” (which we know it isn’t), and “your sample size is low” (which by this time, is not), and “you’re not factoring in other variables” (which we are)?

Until you brush up on math and actually try to learn about what you’re talking about. Then you’ll stop talking that way.

Curo.2483:

I understand and accept the claims of biases and memory flaws. I’m proposing that given we have a large community with years of data perceived, perhaps we can identify patterns and trends and use this empirical evidence to come to some sort of conclusion

We’ve already done that. It’s just there are always new pwople that don’t want to believe it, because they’d rather be unlucky due to some bug or nefarious Anet plot than due to pure chance. Because the former can be fixed, but latter is outside anyone’s way to influence.

Curo.2483:

How can you guys accept that over 1000’s of hours and 100’s of exotic drops (using precursors as an example), the results vary so much.

Because we understand how the math works. In fact, if the results didn’t vary, that would be a clear sign of some manipulation going on.

Curo.2483:

How can some people reliably get upwards of 20+ precursors in the time that others get none?

Read up on Gaussian distribution.

Curo.2483:

You can’t call that variance, over 1000’s of hours and 100’s of drops. That is quite a large sample size.

You seem to have some weird assumption, that rng averages out over long time for everyone and makes outliers disappear. That assumption is wrong. Oultiers will always exist, and over time differences between high and low ones are only going to get bigger.

Riss.1536:

It’s a random guess, but probably, the seed value is simply the 4 digits that comes after your account name.

If you really think that Anet is using a separate seed and separate rng thread for every player account, i’d really not want you to have anything to do with programming. You can’t even imagine the cost it would have, when you can get better effects with a single rng process that is generating random numbers for every situation (and player) that needs it.

Blude.6812:

To those that say it’s all RNG. You have to remember that Anet has acknowledged that there are outlier accounts on both ends (some get lots, some virtually nothing).

…yes, that’s expected in a properly working RNG.

Curo.2483:

When can we stop insulting each others’ intelligence, and address the issue at hand?

The first move is, i’m afraid, yours.

I’m glad we got some real discussion going. From my observations, people tend to experience patterns of similar drops. Coincidence? Maybe. But I know where my “luck” is, and I milk that.

Over 4k hours and never a precursor, BUT I get an ascended box from daily fractals on average once every 3 days. I’ve heard guildies say they went 30+ days without seeing an ascended box. So at least I’ve recognized how the flawed system can be manipulated in my favour. Just random chance you say? That’s fine, I’m going to keep farming fractals every day and keep getting my ascended boxes reliably, and you can label it with whatever statistical lingo you want. The results are there in front of me.

“So the question is this: are we just wearing tinfoil hats, and the fact that my friend with 900 hours in the game has 4 precursors and 2 unlimited bank access contracts. compared to my zero anything over 4.5k hours, is just to be chalked up to RNG? I get that. But how many people can relate to this story?”

It isn’t a bias that’s your problem actually; what is happening is, simply put, the result of millions of rolls. There is no such thing as a “lucky” account but there is such a thing as the “millionth” account. I can explain quite easily with a personal story; I was playing this game, not GW2, and made 4 characters of classes etc. and noted that my magic class just was so much luckier than my warrior or whatever.

I had a think and thought to myself about how likely it was to be “lucky” and in reality it’s really, really likely. If you have a drop for instance with a 1/1,000,000 chance that sounds absurdly low but the only way for it to be absurdly low is to look at the number of dice being thrown as well. If you have a one in one million chance but there are 10m people playing and each of them is opening 100 containers an hour suddenly the odds of someone getting “that thing” go through the roof and become not only notably reasonable but actually not even surprising.

Now because this game runs on a loot table it’s not the loot itself but the range that is in question so your friend getting 1000 out of 1000 on the loot table is not crazy and him getting a random pick from that loot table and getting it twice is also likely not crazy because the range itself is tiny and then you have a limited pool within the range itself of say 10 items.

So his true odds would be after hitting the 1000 1/10 or 1/20 (5%) of getting the same thing from that table. I’m sure this was boring but it’s math and sometimes that’s boring. So it’s not a bias, no, it’s the “Millionth”.

Astralporing.1957:

You seem to have some weird assumption, that rng averages out over long time for everyone and makes outliers disappear. That assumption is wrong. Oultiers will always exist, and over time differences between high and low ones are only going to get bigger.

Actually that is true. Random number generation systems (since none are “truly” random) do tend to show a mean and do tend to average out in the middle or around specific numbers. This is seen with pennies. The odds of one side or the other are equivalent but the odds of them actually being equivalent go up, not down, with every iteration supposing a base set greater than probably 1,000 trials.

Interestingly enough this is also seen with the lottery. Some numbers do actually come up more than others. In a lottery system such as this it isn’t crazy to assume that most of your rewards will fit a distinct set. That is not to say that it explains great luck or horrible luck but instead to express that outliers over time do indeed disappear things tend to shift to the inside.

We call it a bell curve, or as you put it, Gaussian Distribution.

DGraves.3720:

Astralporing.1957:

You seem to have some weird assumption, that rng averages out over long time for everyone and makes outliers disappear. That assumption is wrong. Oultiers will always exist, and over time differences between high and low ones are only going to get bigger.

Actually that is true. Random number generation systems (since none are “truly” random) do tend to show a mean and do tend to average out in the middle or around specific numbers. This is seen with pennies. The odds of one side or the other are equivalent but the odds of them actually being equivalent go up, not down, with every iteration supposing a base set greater than probably 1,000 trials.

Interestingly enough this is also seen with the lottery. Some numbers do actually come up more than others. In a lottery system such as this it isn’t crazy to assume that most of your rewards will fit a distinct set. That is not to say that it explains great luck or horrible luck but instead to express that outliers over time do indeed disappear things tend to shift to the inside.

We call it a bell curve, or as you put it, Gaussian Distribution.

You’re basically agreeing with me. I haven’t said that an account that is an outlier today will be an outlier tomorrow. I said that there will always be outliers, and the more “rolls” we make, the greater the difference between low and high outliers will be.