Guild Wars 2

To be perfectly honest, I would have RNG Luck over standard ordinary character assigned “luck” any day of the week.

RNG Luck is when you see a player with a lower “luck” rating than yourself get consistent drops of exotics every day – sometimes three to four a day. Whereas yourself on the other hand are fortunate if you get one a month (OMGWTF!!! I just for Arc after nothing for 6 weeks!! no lotto ticket for me this week……).

You’ll know the scenario. They run the same WB’s at the same time as you, they don’t do anything differently to what you do, yet as their RNG Luck is higher than yours, your chat is ringing with the “look at what I picked up! [stupidly expensive axe of head-choping]” as your marvel over the collection of crap in your loot (YAY, yet another worthless moto tiara and a bunch of green sigils and blue armour to vendor off for 15coppers).

You fight a WB or a Champ but as your RNG Luck – well for want of a better word “sucks” – you get nothing but blues, maybe a green and a sole rare in the daily box.

Now the voice in your head tells you “I grinded to get my luck up high so that after much hard work I have 114% Luck and my GB and food is pumping that up over 130%!! Why am I getting such crap drops all the time, every day, week in and week out!!”

But pfft, that is just worthless “Luck” – good only for getting an additional mat from an orrian truffle spawn.

What you really need to concentrate on is the luck that is generated by the Random Number Generator – the one that gives you two exotic drops in a single WB encounter, or four to five exotic drops a day. Or better yet, the RNG Luck amount that gives you not one, not two, but three precursor drops in the space of a week!

I just wish I could find the magic that allows the RNG Luck to start accumulating for my character.

Because after running WB’s each and every day, running dungeons, JP’s, invasions and champion zergs (and every other type of activity in the game), I have so far failed to gain any RNG Luck for my character.

Heck, I’d be happy for one exotic drop a month.

Maybe there is a magic ambient that you have to kill at a certain time in a certain place and that affects your RNG Luck amount ….. or maybe if you kill too many ambients your lose your RNG Luck o_0.

My ‘RNG’ luck is very simple…its not you, its never going to be you, don’t even bother cause its not dropping for you ever…

Honestly…its that bad…completely given up on loot/drops in modern day games, not just GW2…its NEVER going to be you…

I put a troll doll on each end of of my monitor, then rub the keyboard counter clock-wise before each kill.

I feel your pain tho I must be among the “lucky” few who really do drop cool stuff from time to time. I never had full MF gear but I did get exotics and T6 in large quantities and it made me stop linking stuff in/g chat coz I felt my guildies are starting to hate me.

I always ran in MF gear, then crafted celestial (when it had MF)

Yeah, for the most part my luck suck.

Grr. I did finally break through the RNG to get a good drop from my fractal daily chest and get a fractal torch “skin” and an ascended weapon chest….but that’s likely where that’ll stop. Because shortly after that it was "Oh you want to salvage an exotic light shoulders you got? Here’s a single silk scrap. " Facepalm

khani.4786:

I always ran in MF gear, then crafted celestial (when it had MF)

Yeah, for the most part my luck suck.

Grr. I did finally break through the RNG to get a good drop from my fractal daily chest and get a fractal torch “skin” and an ascended weapon chest….but that’s likely where that’ll stop. Because shortly after that it was "Oh you want to salvage an exotic light shoulders you got? Here’s a single silk scrap. " Facepalm

I hate that feeling so much, you salvage an exo (or even a rare) and get 1 measly T5 material that sells for 10c.

Then again, I still feel like a boss when I salvage and get 3 ecto, 3 dark matters, sup rune and T6 material.

Sooo … is there really something like a higher luck number if you haven’t logged in for a while or are those only rumours?

This topic got me thinking, actually. I think I know what the problem is.

Speaking of luck, I got a BLC Key from a random bandit in Queensdale the other day. That’s after a year or so of on-and-off play. Turns out they DO drop like the description says! Except almost never.

Draco.2806:

This topic got me thinking, actually. I think I know what the problem is.

Speaking of luck, I got a BLC Key from a random bandit in Queensdale the other day. That’s after a year or so of on-and-off play. Turns out they DO drop like the description says! Except almost never.

Yeah, I also got my first ever key drop from a mob not too long ago.

I’ve played close to 2000 hours now and only ever saw 1 key drop in all that time. They do drop from any mob, but extremely rare, probably same chance as a precursor.

I wore full magic find gear since the first week of the game (my first exotic set). 2000 hours into the game is when I found my first dropped exotic.

fyi, magic find only affects drops from creatures, so world boss chests, champion chests and everything else, is not affected by your luck.

I’ve never seen such a broken RNG system in my life to be honest. If you can play 3000 hours like I did, and only get one exotic drop, then there’s something majorly wrong with that system.

I did finally break through that a couple days ago when I got 5 exotic drops and an ascended weapons chest in about 7 hours of champion farming. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I got the exotics, and then I just plain out refused to believe that I actually got the ascended chest.

Since then, I salvaged about 14 rares, and I’ve received not a single ecto. Somehow I managed to get the crappiest mats from those rares though. There’s some RNG for you.

I’ve completely given up hope on looting a precursor.

Rouven.7409:

Sooo … is there really something like a higher luck number if you haven’t logged in for a while or are those only rumours?

You know, I’m starting to believe that more and more. Every time I start to get fed up with Anet and their stupid decisions, I’ll stop playing the game for a month or two, then come back to see if it’s any better (it’s usually not), and lo and behold, I’ll get some decent drops right off the bat after returning. Then my crappy RNG kicks back in and I won’t get kitten for drops again.

Having said that though, I still have yet to get what I would consider a “good” drop in this game. I’ve played since BWE1, and have put thousands of hours into the game, and farmed both with and without MF gear on everything from fractals, to dungeons, to world bosses, to champions, to jumping puzzles….you name it, I’ve done it. Multiple times. Over and over. And in all that time, the absolute BEST drop I’ve EVER gotten is a Cobalt….after I had already given up on getting one and bought one off the TP -_-. kitten you RNG, kitten you.

This game is by far, the absolute WORST game I have ever played in terms of RNG and loot. You can’t tell me it’s ok for someone who has invested as much time, money, and effort into a game like this and gotten almost NOTHING to show for it. Especially when I personally know of some people who have gotten 3 or 4 precursors to randomly drop for them. I mean seriously! 3 or 4 precursors for one person and ZERO for me!?!?! WTF!? I’m getting so kittening sick and tired of dealing with Anet’s bullkitten. I’m just about to hang up my GW2 hat for good, unless something drastic changes in the next few months. Otherwise I’ll be spending all my game time playing the new MMOs coming out in 2014 and saying “kitten you” to Anet for good.

The only reason why a precursor wont drop for me is because Lady RNG knows I am going to use it to make a legendary and then make her look really bad.

Galtrix.7369:

I’ve never seen such a broken RNG system in my life to be honest. If you can play 3000 hours like I did, and only get one exotic drop, then there’s something majorly wrong with that system.

I did finally break through that a couple days ago when I got 5 exotic drops and an ascended weapons chest in about 7 hours of champion farming. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I got the exotics, and then I just plain out refused to believe that I actually got the ascended chest.

Since then, I salvaged about 14 rares, and I’ve received not a single ecto. Somehow I managed to get the crappiest mats from those rares though. There’s some RNG for you.

I’ve completely given up hope on looting a precursor.

Your Magic Find isn’t high enough.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Your Magic Find isn’t high enough.

Why…

Okay, whatever. But it still needs a reminder: Magic Find has an absolutely pathetic impact on your chances of getting good loot.

Let’s say there’s a Rare item that rarely drops from mobs. Let’s say a 1 in 1,000 chance, or 0,001%. Let’s say you get your Magic Find up to a full 300%. Congratulations! It’s now a 0,003% chance. Feel any better about it?

There is a simple explanation as to why one person can be so much “luckier” then another even when doing the exact same things on a CONSISTENT basis. This would happen if the random number generator used in GW2 was a pseudo random number generator using a FIXED seed versus a random seed.

RNGs with a fixed seed will return a repeating set of results and will start at the beginning of those results each and every time the rng is restarted. So if you log in today and the first 1000 returns on your list of returns based on your seed number are lousy rolls you will get the same 1000 lousy rolls when you log in tomorrow!

From the number of people that have posted such a disparity in “luck” between people my guess is GW2 employs a fixed seed pseudo rng but they would never admit to that for it would open one nasty can of worms.

Draco.2806:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Your Magic Find isn’t high enough.

Why…

Okay, whatever. But it still needs a reminder: Magic Find has an absolutely pathetic impact on your chances of getting good loot.

Let’s say there’s a Rare item that rarely drops from mobs. Let’s say a 1 in 1,000 chance, or 0,001%. Let’s say you get your Magic Find up to a full 300%. Congratulations! It’s now a 0,003% chance. Feel any better about it?

It’s actually 0.004%. You now have four times more chance to get the item. That’s why I’m aiming to max my MF.

Edit –
100% MF = 0.002
200% MF = 0.003
300% MF = 0.004

Theftwind.8976:

So if you log in today and the first 1000 returns on your list of returns based on your seed number are lousy rolls you will get the same 1000 lousy rolls when you log in tomorrow!

I know it’s easy to scold ANet for doing bad things, but that would be a bit too much. I really doubt that could be the case.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

It’s actually 0.004%. You now have four times more chance to get the item.

Yeah, you’re right.

The problem is, four times almost nothing is still almost nothing.

Yea, MF is better now that it’s account bound. But better is by no means awesome.

From what I understand, your MF% is only for items that drop from monsters. So all those loot boxes we get from champs…double-clicking them is not affected by MF%. Is that true??? Our MF% influences our chances of getting better bags/boxes but doesn’t affect the stuff that comes out of them?

Draco.2806:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

It’s actually 0.004%. You now have four times more chance to get the item.

Yeah, you’re right.

The problem is, four times almost nothing is still almost nothing.

That’s true for the ultra rare items. Once you start to hit 100%+ MF, people who farm are reporting a noticeable difference (or at least think there is).

There’s “luck”, "RNG luck, and then there’s a failure to understand statistics and probability.

I would like to see a limit on bad luck with RNG…

For example give everyone a guaranteed 100% exotic or better drop every 50 hours played. Ideally the way it would work would be a ingame bar that fills up with time played, must be moving/in combat to accumulate time. If before the 50 hours played a exotic drops then the bar resets and starts to fill again, you just got lucky. No exotic drop by 50 hours played, automatic exotic drop.

What this would be is a hard cap on how unlucky any individual player can be, well still allowing players to be lucky with drops.

Currently 1 player could have 6 exotic drops in 100 hours play, that player is very happy and loves GW2.

Another, can play a 1,000 hours and get 0 exotic drops, that player is very, very unhappy and hates GW2, calls it KITTEN and gives up playing permanently.

Tamaki Revolution.3548:

I put a troll doll on each end of of my monitor, then rub the keyboard counter clock-wise before each kill.

Quit giving away the trade secrets!

Or, instead of invoking all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories, you could actually take the time to learn about modern random number generators, realize that only really old games used RNG’s that were so weak as to be game-able, understand that the developers aren’t out to get anyone because that would be defeating their goal of getting people to like their game, and take a course in statistics and realize that given the sheer number of people playing the game it is entirely expected that there are players who have not had a single exotic drop and other who have had 30 of them drop.
Have you people not heard of a normal distribution?! Just look at it some time. The people in the middle are the people experiencing the average rate of some event, but there are still outliers at both ends in the 0.001 percentile and people up in the 99.999 percentile. Just due to random chance and the size of the sample set, there will be people who get shafted and people who win the lottery just due to random chance even over the course of many hours played per person.
Say it with me now:
Random is Random!
If you need some one to blame, blame the universe and its physical laws for being or seeming probabilistic instead of fixed and determinate.

I used to be like that but then I got 3 exotics over the course of 2 weeks, so everything is cool.

Random being random I can understand, and even taking into account axioms of probability you can sort of excuse the current system – but the overall experience of the system (from myself and others) has the feeling that the randomness is generated once per account, after which you are stuck with that forever.

This may explain why someone gets precursor after precursor and exotic drops almost daily, whilst others get sweet FA even after 1000’s of hours of game time.

It does seem to be that the “random” element is not really that random afterall, but is in fact a one time “roll of the dice” at the start of the very first character creation and whatever number you happened to get, is from that point on your lot in life.

I know people who have extremely high achievement levels (talking >11k) that almost never get exotics, get crap from champ boxes but instead have to buy everything to acquire it. I also know others who barely manage to scrape together a couple of thousand achievement points and are on their 4th Legendary.

Sure, “random can be random” and statistically speaking such instances can be valid – if highly improbable, however the consistency of these occurrences goes against any such statistical probabilities.

Sure, statistically speaking someone out there will flip heads on a coin toss 100 times out of a 100 and another will flip 0 out of a 100, but given the player base numbers and the probabilities being mentioned, the numbers in these ranks should be in the low single digits.

Personally I think the system is borked and is based on a single one time generated roll – it’s the only thing that can account for the skewed nature of drops.

If this is the case though, Anet have a serious game breaking issue on their hands.

Medieval.1679:

Random being random I can understand, and even taking into account axioms of probability you can sort of excuse the current system – but the overall experience of the system (from myself and others) has the feeling that the randomness is generated once per account, after which you are stuck with that forever.

This may explain why someone gets precursor after precursor and exotic drops almost daily, whilst others get sweet FA even after 1000’s of hours of game time.

It does seem to be that the “random” element is not really that random afterall, but is in fact a one time “roll of the dice” at the start of the very first character creation and whatever number you happened to get, is from that point on your lot in life.

I know people who have extremely high achievement levels (talking >11k) that almost never get exotics, get crap from champ boxes but instead have to buy everything to acquire it. I also know others who barely manage to scrape together a couple of thousand achievement points and are on their 4th Legendary.

Sure, “random can be random” and statistically speaking such instances can be valid – if highly improbable, however the consistency of these occurrences goes against any such statistical probabilities.

Sure, statistically speaking someone out there will flip heads on a coin toss 100 times out of a 100 and another will flip 0 out of a 100, but given the player base numbers and the probabilities being mentioned, the numbers in these ranks should be in the low single digits.

Personally I think the system is borked and is based on a single one time generated roll – it’s the only thing that can account for the skewed nature of drops.

If this is the case though, Anet have a serious game breaking issue on their hands.

Almost every single things you said beyond your first paragraph is wrong. Yes, it can give the feeling that it is rigged. But please try to understand that your personal experience does not a statistically significant sample size make. And before you say “but I’ve seen all these people on the forums saying the same thing”, even seeing 50 people saying the same thing does not mean much considering that there are roughly 3 million players and the probability of a precursor dropping is so low.

But lets break it down.

“This may explain why someone gets precursor after precursor and exotic drops almost daily, whilst others get sweet FA even after 1000’s of hours of game time.”

No, no it doesn’t. Probability and drop rates explain it perfectly. Now, there isn’t much good date for drop rates for GW2 because there are no mods, so lets look at rare drops from another game. I played world of warcraft for thousands of hours. I never had a single epic drop out in the open world even though regular mobs of the right level can drop them. Let’s look at the Krol Blade:

http://www.wowhead.com/item=2244

If you look at the drop rates, it seems that in regular drop tables, this item had about 1/100,000 chance of dropping. This means that if you wanted a 90% chance to get this drop from farming normal mobs in the right level range, you would have to kill 230257 mobs. And this would only get you a 9/10 shot at it. If you wanted that to be a 99% chance, you would on average need to kill 460514 mobs. Even if you only wanted a 50/50 shot at it, you’d on average have to kill 69314 mobs.

Let’s put that in perspective. If you can kill 1 mob every 10 sec, it would take you 8 days of straight farming to kill those 69314 mobs just to get a 50/50 shot at it. If you wanted that 99% shot at it, it would on average take you 53 days of straight farming just to get 1.

Now we don’t have great drop rate data for precursors, but I would estimate that the drop rate for them is in the same ballpark. But you probably don’t spend all your time farming at 1 mob per second. In fact, you probably average much lower than that. I would estimate that it’s probably somewhere between 1 per minute and 1 per 5 minutes considering all the down time in game. So at one per 1 minute, if you’ve played 1000 hours on your account, you’ve killed about 60,000, at 1 per 5 minutes, you’ve killed roughly 12000. Which if you were going for the Krol Blade back in WoW, you’d only have had an 11% chance of having gotten one.

But this does not even consider the fact that not everything is even capable of dropping a precursor. How many of your kills have been mobs that don’t drop anything? Or mobs killed while leveling that weren’t high enough level. Even if there is a 1/100,000 chance of a precursor on mobs that can drop them, you’d have much less than an 11% chance at one given 1000 hours of gameplay. And for all we know, the precursor drop rates are even lower than 1/100,000.

“It does seem to be that the “random” element is not really that random afterall, but is in fact a one time “roll of the dice” at the start of the very first character creation and whatever number you happened to get, is from that point on your lot in life."

It may seem that way. But psychology has taught us that people’s brains are ill equipped for large data collection, inference based on large numbers or infrequent events, and are biased towards only remembering data if it confirms our theories and forgetting data that flies in the face of it. You may have heard of that one guy with all the drops, but you have also heard about the people that win the lottery. Do you believe that people who buy lottery tickets have their tickets cursed buy the lottery organizers, doomed never to win anything? Or can you grasp that the chances of winning were just so low in the first place, but someone was bound to win because there are so many people entering?

And why does a “one time roll” of the dice make so much more sense to you. A one time roll of the dice, and a ton of rolls on even more weighted dice can have the same likelihood of resulting in a good outcome for you.

“I know people who have extremely high achievement levels (talking >11k) that almost never get exotics, get crap from champ boxes but instead have to buy everything to acquire it. I also know others who barely manage to scrape together a couple of thousand achievement points and are on their 4th Legendary.”

Yes, most people don’t get exotics very often. They aren’t as rare as precursors, but having on a handful drop for you over the course of a year is as expected.

I know some people get precursor drops with very little play, but you are clearly exaggerating with your “couple of thousand achievement points and are on their 4th legendary”. Even if they got 4 precursors day 1, it takes a lot of work playing the game and farming karma and the like to actually craft 1 if you are not just buying it straight off the TP.

“Sure, “random can be random” and statistically speaking such instances can be valid – if highly improbable, however the consistency of these occurrences goes against any such statistical probabilities."

No, it doesn’t, see the rest of the post as to why. What you mean to say, is it goes against your understanding of what is statistically probable, and what I’m telling you is that your intuitions are incorrect.

“Sure, statistically speaking someone out there will flip heads on a coin toss 100 times out of a 100 and another will flip 0 out of a 100, but given the player base numbers and the probabilities being mentioned, the numbers in these ranks should be in the low single digits.”

That you used this example and claimed it was likely to happen to someone is proof that your intuition is out of whack. Do you actually know what the probability of flipping heads 100 times in a row is? Perhaps you think it’s like 1/1000, or maybe you think it’s like 1/50,000,000; something like the odds of winning the lottery. If you thought these, you are WAAAAAY off. The probability of flipping 100 heads in a row is:
1/1267650600228229401496703205376

Really, it is lower than you can probably imagine. Suppose you were just flipping sets of 100 coins at a time. And you could flip these sets of 100 coins at 1 set per second. It would still take 4 * 10^22 years before you should expect to have gotten all heads in a set. Or what if all 7 billion people on the planet could flip 1 set of 100 coins every second? Then it would only take 5.7 * 10^12 years of everyone flipping for it to be likely for one person to have gotten 100 heads. That’s 5.7 trillion years. That is 407 times as long as it’s been since the big bang and roughly 30 million times as long as humans have existed.

“Personally I think the system is borked and is based on a single one time generated roll – it’s the only thing that can account for the skewed nature of drops.”

I disagree, and in order to confirm such a theory, you would need access to all the drop rate for every player and do some serious math on it. And you neither have the data nor would you know what to do with it in order to confirm you guess. Your guess is based on just your experience, a small set of anecdotal evidence, and failure to fully appreciate big numbers, small numbers, and the need for sufficiently large data sets and actually doing the math.

“If this is the case though, Anet have a serious game breaking issue on their hands.”

Sure, if it were actually the case, they would. Good thing they don’t.

This is like complaining that the dude on the slot machine next to you won more money. However if you were to both keep playing the slots long enough it would eventually even out. The sample sizes of just you and your friend are just too low to be able to show any fault the RNG code.

Deniara Devious.3948:

It is possible that the random number generator (RNG) of Guild Wars 2 is borked.

WARNING: Very Technical Stuff ahead.

…

Good god, please post a topic about this.

I mean, I know ANet doesn’t seem to be very active on the forums, but they’d have to see this if it’s a possible issue.

www.arena.net > there’s a job application page. If you’re really as good as you claim, that’s your approach angle. If not, you should post on the forums.

You don’t give source code examples and assume everyone believes you. On that complete lack of proof, but with an implied degree of authority you try to make us believe the RNG is botched. For trolls and haters, that would suffice. Unfortunately I do know what you’re talking about and I need a little bit of proof, not just hyperbole and hearsay.

Credentials do matter in this thread. Do you have linkedin?

Deniara Devious.3948:

It is possible that the random number generator (RNG) of Guild Wars 2 is borked.

WARNING: Very Technical Stuff ahead.

I actually wouldn’t be surprised if it were. This is the only game where I actually felt being shafted by RNG at a consistent basis irregardless of what I do. From kitten poor exotic drops while friends rain on it, to not having any progress at all in fractals by not getting ring whatsoevers while first timers and the like got theirs (this was before they implemented getting the tokens for the rings.) Every aspect of the game I feel like im fighting agaisnt the underlying mechanics of the fight rather than the actual fight.

Draco.2806:

Deniara Devious.3948:

It is possible that the random number generator (RNG) of Guild Wars 2 is borked.

WARNING: Very Technical Stuff ahead.

…

Good god, please post a topic about this.

I mean, I know ANet doesn’t seem to be very active on the forums, but they’d have to see this if it’s a possible issue.

He’s only saying that it is possible, not that anyone here has the data or has done the analysis to show that it is actually likely. A few player’s “feelings” and anecdotal evidence is still not statistically significant. And even if there were a flaw in the RNG it is not necessarily the case that it would produce the kinds skewing that people are concerned about.

Theftwind.8976:

There is a simple explanation as to why one person can be so much “luckier” then another even when doing the exact same things on a CONSISTENT basis. This would happen if the random number generator used in GW2 was a pseudo random number generator using a FIXED seed versus a random seed.

RNGs with a fixed seed will return a repeating set of results and will start at the beginning of those results each and every time the rng is restarted. So if you log in today and the first 1000 returns on your list of returns based on your seed number are lousy rolls you will get the same 1000 lousy rolls when you log in tomorrow!

From the number of people that have posted such a disparity in “luck” between people my guess is GW2 employs a fixed seed pseudo rng but they would never admit to that for it would open one nasty can of worms.

THIS. ^ makes sense to me. We’ve been playing since launch and our luck has been consistently the same. Hubby and I will play together (doesn’t matter which characters we are on) and if I get a green, he gets a rare, if I get a rare, he gets an exotic. He usually at least always gets blues and greens. Me? I get those silly wigs, or porous bone or those white salvage items.
Hubby doesn’t have a decent RNG luck compared to his guildies (that receive exotics every day/week), but he at least is getting better drops than me, so he doesn’t feel as discouraged as I do. :-)

Shufflepants – you said exactly the same thing I said except that you used about 2000 words more and dressed it up like it was some form of logic. Please spare us the dime-store logic and lay off the googling of statistics and probabilities – you just embarrass yourself.

marnick.4305:

www.arena.net > there’s a job application page. If you’re really as good as you claim, that’s your approach angle. If not, you should post on the forums.

You don’t give source code examples and assume everyone believes you. On that complete lack of proof, but with an implied degree of authority you try to make us believe the RNG is botched. For trolls and haters, that would suffice. Unfortunately I do know what you’re talking about and I need a little bit of proof, not just hyperbole and hearsay.

Credentials do matter in this thread. Do you have linkedin?

And you are talking from what sort of authority?

The details that he has offered do actually check out (if you had bothered to read them – but going by your response we can all see that you haven’t). You on the other hand have offered nothing by way of firm rebuttal but have instead resorted to a rather weak form of character aspersion.

Please consider this constructive criticism as you are essentially doing the exact same thing as you accuse that poster of doing.

Maybe in future you should refrain from hitting the submit key until you actually have a clue what you are typing.

It’s all in the numbers. Have you ever seen four numbers next to your account name? No? There ya go. Yes, yes! I am wearing my advanced handmade hat out of 100% purified tin, foiled and shaped and all!

7 – years of playtime until the first precursor drop
4 – max amount of characters that will drop anything (randomly selected)
0 – magic find modifier
9 – the mystery number! no one knows what it does! the number of times I have to dance around the computer before looting?!?!

Disclaimer: Unread the above if you are avert to satirical theories that could be possible, but are not very probable due to the very unstable nature of programming. The author knows that “the code” exists and that the “spoon” doesn’t.

I’ve always liked Mersenne Twikittener, downside it’s slower and possibly, jukitten possibly mind you, it may impact performance due to the shear number of random numbers generated every second in the game. Of course if that’kittenhe case they could kittenill use it only for loot drop rolls, MF forging and the like.

Edit: Honekittenly? Every words with the letter pair kitten is getting kittened? Jukitten isn’t a bad word. kittenill isn’t a bad word. Arrgh!

Edit 2: AAAAAHHHH!!!

Medieval.1679:

Shufflepants – you said exactly the same thing I said except that you used about 2000 words more and dressed it up like it was some form of logic. Please spare us the dime-store logic and lay off the googling of statistics and probabilities – you just embarrass yourself.

I googled nothing. I did the math myself. Perhaps Aberrant’s analogy was more succinct, and my essay was rather long winded, but I was afraid without breaking it down and providing more concrete examples you would brush it off once again without learning anything. I disagree that I said the same thing you said because your conclusion was that you think that there is something wrong with the RNG in the game. I’m sorry that you feel my degrees in mathematics and computer science were wasted, but if you could refrain from calling my reasoning “dime-store logic” and refrain from insulting me without at least pointing out where and how my reasoning or math was incorrect, that would be appreciated. I could show my work, but that would have made it much longer.

Behellagh.1468:

I’ve always liked Mersenne Twikittener, downside it’s slower and possibly, jukitten possibly mind you, it may impact performance due to the shear number of random numbers generated every second in the game. Of course if that’kittenhe case they could kittenill use it only for loot drop rolls, MF forging and the like.

Edit: Honekittenly? Every words with the letter pair kitten is getting kittened? Jukitten isn’t a bad word. kittenill isn’t a bad word. Arrgh!

AHAHAHAHA

Wow, thanks for the laugh. Good grief.

What the the heck, mods?

Shufflepants, there are different types of RNG used in the gaming industry such as what Deniara stated above. As someone with a degree in mathematics you should also know that by their very design some of those generators will result in a better random distribution then others.

So yes random is random when you are tossing a non-loaded, 6 sided die from a cup but weight that die on one side and it is no longer quite as random. What people are saying here is that depending on what type of rng is being used in Gw2 and exactly how that specific rng has been implemented that the die you are tossing could very well be weighted on one side. Now if you have the first die and I am using the weighted die would our results over 1,000 rolls be the same?

Theftwind.8976:

Shufflepants, there are different types of RNG used in the gaming industry such as what Deniara stated above. As someone with a degree in mathematics you should also know that by their very design some of those generators will result in a better random distribution then others.

So yes random is random when you are tossing a non-loaded, 6 sided die from a cup but weight that die on one side and it is no longer quite as random. What people are saying here is that depending on what type of rng is being used in Gw2 and exactly how that specific rng has been implemented that the die you are tossing could very well be weighted on one side. Now if you have the first die and I am using the weighted die would our results over 1,000 rolls be the same?

I already was aware of that. But that’s not my point. My point is that even if there actually were a faulty RNG, it would not necessarily produce the kinds of results people are claiming, and because many players experience normal drop rates, the number of players is so large, the intended drop rates are so small, it would take a sizable proportion of the ALL of the drop data for ALL players and some in depth analysis on that data in order to spot that there actually is a problem. But all we have in this thread is people bringing up their “feelings” which mean next to nothing in this context. I am not saying it is impossible that there is a faulty RNG, I’m saying that it is far more likely that people’s expectations and intuitions are incorrect than it is that there is a faulty RNG, and that it is completely unreasonable to think that there is one given the extremely small amount of data we as players have access to.

To give an analogy, conspiracy theories are not dumb because the scenarios claimed are impossible, they are dumb because they have cherry picked data, shaky reasoning, and the actual evidence at hand makes them incredibly unlikely.

I remember when at work we got into cellular automata, this was the 90s, during lunch and I tried using the default RNG in the compiler we were using to seed a screen with “food” for little agents to eat and reproduce with mutation. Now instead of getting a visibly random series of dots on the screen, as in some are in clumps, some far apart, let it run long enough and the screen gets filled, a repeating pattern formed on the screen, a series of diagonal strip of dots.

That’s one of the problems with some random number generators, consecutive calls (one to get an X position, one for Y) showed that the “spacing” between the two “random” numbers fell into a pattern easily determinable when used to paint a 1600×1200 screen. Seed didn’t matter as the pattern always emerged. That’s when I first started looking into alternate RNG algorithms.

Shufflepants.9785:

My point is that even if there actually were a faulty RNG, it would not necessarily produce the kinds of results people are claiming

But it might.

Draco.2806:

Shufflepants.9785:

My point is that even if there actually were a faulty RNG, it would not necessarily produce the kinds of results people are claiming

But it might.

And maybe I’m a secret government robot who is learning how to take over the world by lurking in game forums.

Shufflepants.9785:

And maybe I’m a secret government robot who is learning how to take over the world by lurking in game forums.

What, like the fifty cent squad? Who knows.

Actually I was trying to imply that you are, for some reason, taking a side in an argument where the correct answer to “Does it do this, or that?” is “We don’t friggin’ know.”

“I don’t know” is such a simple phrase, but for some reason most people have trouble with it.

Draco.2806:

Shufflepants.9785:

And maybe I’m a secret government robot who is learning how to take over the world by lurking in game forums.

What, like the fifty cent squad? Who knows.

Actually I was trying to imply that you are, for some reason, taking a side in an argument where the correct answer to “Does it do this, or that?” is “We don’t friggin’ know.”

“I don’t know” is such a simple phrase, but for some reason most people have trouble with it.

It is “I don’t know”, but it’s the kind of “I don’t know” that is almost certainly a “definitely not”. You don’t know know for sure that there’s not a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in your backyard, but I doubt you’re gonna go dig up your backyard looking for it. We do know that in addition to the handful of people complaining about drop rates, it seems as though most people do not notice any problem or else there would be thousands of people posting on the forums complaining about it. “I know” and “I don’t know” are not necessarily binary outcomes. It’s about the level of certainty. While I can’t conclusively prove that there isn’t something wrong with the RNG, the data at hand points to the conclusion that it is overwhelmingly likely that there isn’t.