Math and Spawn Rates

[Vayder]

What I really want to see after this thread is the correlation between enchanters, warriors, and a love of statistics.

[Sirken]

its random. and 5% = 5/100 or 1/20

that being said, it's random. if u have a 5% chance, you essentially are rolling a 100 sided die and hoping for a 1,2,3,4,5. but its a new roll each time. so its no really like you are improving your odds with each ph kill, as they do not get you closer to popping a mob like Quillmane for example,

for example, i've seen the AC in oot pop 4 times in 6 spawns, and i've watched people kill the PH and never see the AC.

embrace your random number generator

[falkun]

I, for one, welcome our new

Originally Posted by Sirken [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

random number generator

overlord.

[Nlaar]

I remember speaking with a friend circa summer 2010 about the RNG and how it was his and his guild's belief that sometimes the RNG "got stuck."

In other words, when clearing a plane (Hate for example) one would note that the same rare item would drop with increased frequency, all within a single raid e.g., cleric legs dropping 3 times in one raid or the shaman bp dropped twice in one raid. I don't raid as much as these days, but I remember examples of this sort of thing happening very frequently during planar clears.

So when one hears about AC popping 4/6 times for some people and "never" for others it's hard not to think that the RNG is "bursting" at some points and "off" at others leading one to question the reliability of the RNG.

However, do I have any actual evidence? Of course not, that would be to convenient!

[Briscoe]

I think we've all had times where we felt like the RNG is just running off of the RANDU algorithm, amirite guys? (Expecting at least Loraen to laugh at this).

[Sirken]

Originally Posted by Nlaar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I remember speaking with a friend circa summer 2010 about the RNG and how it was his and his guild's belief that sometimes the RNG "got stuck."

In other words, when clearing a plane (Hate for example) one would note that the same rare item would drop with increased frequency, all within a single raid e.g., cleric legs dropping 3 times in one raid or the shaman bp dropped twice in one raid. I don't raid as much as these days, but I remember examples of this sort of thing happening very frequently during planar clears.

So when one hears about AC popping 4/6 times for some people and "never" for others it's hard not to think that the RNG is "bursting" at some points and "off" at others leading one to question the reliability of the RNG.

However, do I have any actual evidence? Of course not, that would be to convenient!

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[Tanthallas]

Originally Posted by Snagglepuss [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This way, your actions that have positive expected value will pay off over time...

This is highly misleading. The conditions that have to be met in order to calculate the probability of events in terms expected value are extremely unrealistic and in most cases make the calculation itself moot.

Best way to think about it is like Sirken said. It doesnt give you a practical answer because there is no practical answer.

[zanderklocke]

Game of luck, EverQuest is. Sure, it helps to know people who can get you into camps like Fungi, but all drops and spawns are at the mercy of the random number generator. The only thing that is for certain is that not trying a camp/mob at all will always yield no results.

[Snagglepuss]

Originally Posted by Tanthallas [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This is highly misleading. The conditions that have to be met in order to calculate the probability of events in terms expected value are extremely unrealistic and in most cases make the calculation itself moot.

Best way to think about it is like Sirken said. It doesnt give you a practical answer because there is no practical answer.

Well, that was an anecdotal reference to an infinite poker game / casino game where you could calculate expected value. I was using it as a "lede" to discussing the concept of gambler's fallacy or independent outcomes. The idea that we've all been at a camp and said to ourselves,

"It's gotta spawn; I've been here so long. Just one more round... I'll set the alarm a little later in the morning...".

Once on a cruise ship, I observed a roulette wheel show black 15 times in a row. Man, you should have seen the looks on some of those poor gambler's faces!

It's fascinating how sunken costs play a huge role in our decisions. "I've already been at this camp for 6 hours! What's another 5! i'm not leaving until it's mine!"

[August]

Originally Posted by Sirken [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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No need to be patronizing. A random number generator, based on implementation, can very well get 'stuck', or atleast provide very non-random outcomes with regularity

I'll give an example. I work at a pretty nice software firm that suffered a problem whenever running... things through other things.

See, the test in question always got hung and no one could figure out why. It was a series of logic steps that required a Random() call 10 times. It just so happened that if a certain number hit during this random jump, then the test would enter into an infinite loop. Shoddy programming, and the fix was easy. The strange part, however, was the frequency in which it happened.

See, the calculated frequency of this happening was below 1% if you went by pure odds. However, we noted that on 33% of our runs this would happen.

But, August! you say, what if you used the same SEED -- of course it would happen over and over! And so I investigated and found that seed was taken off of milliseconds of the current time -- 'random' to the 1000 chance, I suppose.

So, I made a little program that does the same thing as the test without the encumbrance, of, say, the test. And then I printed the results out with the different seeds, the random numbers generated, etc.

I found a couple of things upon parsing:

1) The same seed repeatedly got used when I ran the test -or rather, the same 'set' of seeds got cycled over and over. We were just taking milliseconds, but the same 3 digit seeds kept popping up. This could be a problem in numerous places, but maybe the system clock!

2) When we modulo'd by our bound there was the dreaded value in about 1/3 of these sets of numbers. Hence our near 33% hang rate. I then went and force-seeded all 1000 millieseconds and found that in around 23% of them, the first 10 rands on our modulo would produce a hang-result by random 10.


So, what can we learn?

1) Nothing is random
2) Implementation is everything

The OP may be unlucky, or there may be something wrong w/ the code behind it, or the OP may be doin something wrong -- I don't know.

But let's not call people tinfoil hatters when there could be a logical explanation. Programmers aren't perfect, and nobody that I'm aware of has ever created a truly 'random' implementation in software.