(edited by ColinJohanson.2394)
(edited by Draco.2806)
(edited by Behellagh.1468)
It is possible that the random number generator (RNG) of Guild Wars 2 is borked.
WARNING: Very Technical Stuff ahead.
I have worked in the games industry and also read the source code of open source game projects. It is not unusual to find game code where the RNG is implemented badly. Sometimes the programmers have used a good algorithms from e.g. Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP). While this book has efficient algorithms, they have several times been botched by incompetence or mistake of the game programmers. The programmers sometimes do some “magic” stuff to the pseudo random number returned by the RNG and do not realize that you have be extremely careful not to botch it up. Sometimes the RNG implementation has minor programming mistake. It will give you random numbers, but their distribution is far from random.
A lot of programming languages, for example C, C++ and Java, are using linear congruentatial pseudo-random number generator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator
As these as inbuilt into the popular programming languages, it is not surprising that many games use them. Guild Wars 2 is probably written in C++ and it might use this as well. I really hope it doesn’t!
Linear Congruential Generator is very fast way to get pseudo-random numbers. Unfortunately the random numbers aren’t very random at all. Depending on the seed value it is possible to get degenerate cases, where every second number is even and every second is odd. The programmers then often do tricks like discarding the lowest bits to get more randomness. This is NOT a good. Instead they should use a better RNG, like Mersenne Twister.
You need a good expert proficient in both mathematics and programming to analyze whether the RNG is working as it should. I worked for an organization (yes, not a company
) which is making money game machines (slot machines, video pokers etc). They had a person, who was responsible to the true randomness of the RNG. It is vital for such organization to make sure that the numbers are truly random and nobody is able to predict them. Despite all this one game programmer had added one line of C code, which just limited the number of random numbers from a huge number of randoms into smaller set of numbers (very typical thing for programmers to do, to get random numbers of just certain numerical range). As result some numbers became 20% more common than others. Luckily our internal testing measures caught that error before that money game machine was placed in public.
Without access to GW2 source code we can just speculate whether their RNG is borked or working as it should.
PS. Over 2000 hours of GW2. All 8 professions played to level 80, except guardian, which is still level 62. Only few random exotic drops, no precursors (despite using the Mystic Forge with tons of level 80 rare weapons), 2 random ascended rings (1 from fractals, 1 from many hundred WXP chests). I have never gotten an item (dye, rune, sigil, exotic) worth even 10 gold. Every single drop in game has been worth less than 10 g.
Thanks for this info.
It should be quite helpful for ANet’s bug crew when they get around to it.
In the meantime, if you are desperately trying to unlock the Rogue Mask skin, I know for a fact that the karma helm bought from Magister Kathryn in Dredgehaunt Cliffs (she’s at Tribulation Rift) works for unlocking the skin.
(edited by Mark Katzbach.9084)