If I am desperately looking for a new character name, I look into one of my books on my shelf. There are a lot of names in them. Don’t look at the main characters, since they might be too well known for popular books, but look at all the other ones. Mangle the names a bit, shuffle characters, shorten/combine parts of the names.
An example is my forum name, which is also the name of my main GW2 char. I looked into my book shelf and found the Silmarillion from J.R.R. Tolkien. I shortened it a bit, so I got “Silmar”. “Alech” on the other hand is the short form of my first name and exchanged “x” for a greek “ch”. Put together, they are a good character name for a computer game. And even I don’t know how to pronounce it.
The complete story behind my name is a bit longer than this post, though
(edited by Silmar Alech.4305)
If you give every person who sends a pathping.txt 5 giant wintersday presents, imagine the huge number of files you will get!
GW2 Client Running Over 1.4 million memory
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: Silmar Alech.4305
(edited by Silmar Alech.4305)
(edited by Silmar Alech.4305)
(edited by Silmar Alech.4305)
How can a RNG with an even distribution of its numbers be highly subjective? From a mathematical point of view it is absolutely fair, because every member has the same chance of getting a success on each roll. Each roll, over the complete lifetime of the game.
Unfortunately, if you distribute items this way, there are always people who are left out, although the chances are equal. Statistics tell us, that people definitely exist who will not get an item, because their play time is less than the time it is required to get a hit. It’s this “definitely” that makes this method unfair again, although it seemed fair in the first place.
By chance, I made a diagram of the probability to get all 19 fractal skins after x runs a few days ago. You see that the majority of players (66 percent) will get their skins after about 630 runs. But 5 percent of the players will not get the skins even after about 950 runs. And 1 percent still not after 1230 runs.
If there are 100 people reading this thread, 66 of them will have the skins after 630 runs. 90 people after 950 runs. But one individual will not have all the skins even after 1230 runs. It is he, who then will post his complaint here.
If the ordinary player quits playing after 500 fractal full runs, only 39 percent (or 39 people from the above crowd) will get all fractal skins – 61 percent will not get them. That’s somewat unfair, in my opinion, because I cannot influence if I will be within the 39% or the 61%.
If you are curious how to get the data for the graph: The probability of 11.7% is from the research sheet from [KING]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18IHVJao5j85KOp6lBTOgO8qs4VYD3Xty-jKPZo8o-Q4/pubhtml
And the data is from a little simulation program I wrote. It simulates the outcome of the roll if a fractal skin drops and the second roll which skin actually drops for 2500*1000000 runs. There is of course an exact mathematical formula to compute this distribution as well, but my knowledge in this field from my university studies unfortunately has vanished, so I had to resort to this “brute force” method. It is still as valid as the exact formula because of the strong law of large numbers.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use warnings;
use strict;
my $p_skin = 0.117; # probability for skin drop per run
#my $p_skin = 0.07375; # probability for skin drop per run
my $num_skins = 19; # number of skins
my $num_tries = 1000000;
my $num_runs = 2500;
my @runs; # count tries with equal number of runs
my @skins; # list of skins 0..18
srand;
$runs[$_] = 0 for 0..int($num_runs/10)-1;
for (my $try = 0; $try < $num_tries; $try++) {
$skins[$_] = 0 for 0..$num_skins-1;
my $different_skins = 0;
for (my $run = 0; $run < $num_runs; $run++) {
if (rand() <= $p_skin) {
my $skin = int(rand($num_skins));
$skins[$skin]++;
if ($skins[$skin] == 1) {
$different_skins++;
if ($different_skins == $num_skins) {
$runs[int($run/10)]++;
last;
}
}
}
}
}
my $sum = 0;
for (my $i = 0; $i < int($num_runs/10); $i++) {
my $promille = $runs[$i] / $num_tries * 1000;
$sum += $runs[$i];
my $s = ($i+1)*10 . ";" . $promille . ";" . $sum / $num_tries * 1000;
$s =~ s/\./,/g;
print "$s\n";
}
#print "sum=$sum\n";
I bet there is a similar diagram in the fractal skin concept documentation of Arenanet
Attachments:
(edited by Silmar Alech.4305)