90% chance my butt

OrphanHelgen

SolidusPrime wrote: »

The frequency of pickpocket failures at a 90% success chance in Vvardenfell seemed like it was way off, so I started collecting a little data. Any time an NPC displayed a 90% chance to succeed at pickpocketing, I would record rather the attempt was a success or failure on a spread sheet. This character has maxed out Legerdemain. All attempts were made while the NPC was standing still, from a close enough distance that my character did not move when initiating the attempt.

300 attempts
103 failures
197 successes

I'm going to collect another 300 results while my friend does Hew's Bane. I never seem to have this many failures outside of Vvardenfell though, and I've been stealing since the Thieve's Guild was released. Think I'm just unlucky or what?

Ye I noticed this as well while I did the pickpocket achievement a while back. I did report it tho but idk how serious they took it.

Skullstachio

That's why I use a khajiit nightblade.

All passive with thieves guild, dark brotherhood & khajiit racial skills along with medium armour.

Both night mothers embrace & night terror make for an interesting combo, it was because of it that I unlocked two master safe boxes in the bank of evermore without being detected at all, and without breaking a single lockpick (turtle beach headsets make it easier to listen for audio cues.)

Night mothers embrace in deshaan as a droppable set.

Night terror in Stormhaven as a droppable set.

danno8

SolidusPrime wrote: »

The frequency of pickpocket failures at a 90% success chance in Vvardenfell seemed like it was way off, so I started collecting a little data. Any time an NPC displayed a 90% chance to succeed at pickpocketing, I would record rather the attempt was a success or failure on a spread sheet. This character has maxed out Legerdemain. All attempts were made while the NPC was standing still, from a close enough distance that my character did not move when initiating the attempt.

300 attempts
103 failures
197 successes

I'm going to collect another 300 results while my friend does Hew's Bane. I never seem to have this many failures outside of Vvardenfell though, and I've been stealing since the Thieve's Guild was released. Think I'm just unlucky or what?

Looks like your results are 65%.

Are you using the green *ding* value when stealing? Is the low value 65% by chance, while the green high value is 90%? If so it looks like the green value may not be working properly.

Alexandrious

SolidusPrime wrote: »

The frequency of pickpocket failures at a 90% success chance in Vvardenfell seemed like it was way off, so I started collecting a little data. Any time an NPC displayed a 90% chance to succeed at pickpocketing, I would record rather the attempt was a success or failure on a spread sheet. This character has maxed out Legerdemain. All attempts were made while the NPC was standing still, from a close enough distance that my character did not move when initiating the attempt.

300 attempts
103 failures
197 successes

I'm going to collect another 300 results while my friend does Hew's Bane. I never seem to have this many failures outside of Vvardenfell though, and I've been stealing since the Thieve's Guild was released. Think I'm just unlucky or what?

Sorry op, but yout character was born with a negative quirk.

Butterfingers.

Time to reroll!

method__01

Mojmir wrote: »

Simple chest, 80% chance to force lock
Failed 3 out of 4 times
Lol

so im not the only with a bad cloud over his head all time?good to know
cause i find impossible to fail 4 times in an advanced/intrem chest with 80% of success rate

danno8

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

eso_nya wrote: »

I_killed_Vivec wrote: »

Silly, it's 90% for 90% of the people who aren't you!

Though to be serious, we all have a skewed view of RNG because we only see our own results. In the time that it took you to make 300 attempts there could have been over 300,000 attempts game-wide, which makes your personal experience insignificant.

Think of it as an allegory for life. You might be an individual, unique, but you are only one of 7 billion on this planet, circling a star that is one of 200 billion in a galaxy, which is one of at least 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe.

Now that's true insignificance. Yet we are all bothered about perceived unfairness in the RNG in a video game...

While i totally agree on the human insignificance, what u write above is not how rng works.

A sample of 3 x 100 attempts is a very good mesurement for a 90% chance. "Very unlucky" would be ~50 or 60 failures. The more likely assumption would be, that the light fingers passive isnt working as intended.

No, it is working perfectly as intended for a server side RNG calculation.
Your specific pickpocket attempt is only one of thousands of attempts on the servers. So you may have a 90% chance, but the odds of the server side RNG rolling a number in that 10% range of failure is much higher due to your roll actually being 1/1000 or worse. That makes your 10% range actually 100 out of 1000 RNG rolls. If that goes up to 10000 attempts then 10% is 1000 failure rolls. It's not exactly that way, but it essentially is pretty horrible.
You're not the only one picking random numbers from the same RNG. The good numbers may have already been picked by other players.

This is utterly incorrect and is not how the RNG system works at all. You truly believe the server is sitting there with a pool of lucky numbers selected based on chance for every 100 rolls made by the player base and that the winning numbers can get "used up" leaving only non-winning number left for those who roll last?

How did you even come up with this?

The RNG in the game can be annoying, but it has been shown many times through actual collected data to be pretty much accurate.

The case in this thread is most likely that some passive or the bonus "green" chance for pickpocketing is not working properly.

BlanketFort

Maxed out ledgermain, DB and TG passives, 7 medium with Night mother's and Night terror.
It has been off for me, as well. Especially frustrating getting caught at 100% and completely hidden. Many times. I usually quit the game for a smoke afterwards because that is just broken.

Like many others, I go for 100%, and Stab for anything lower. Sometimes I take the risk at 90%, but more often than not it's a fail, EXCEPT guards... for some reason, I have yet to be caught by a guard at 90%.

Same goes for chests, failing more than 3 times in a row for intermediate (recently just ruined a perfect heist run) but almost always a success on master chests? Seems wonky.

Also why is it not possible to Blade of Woe a target going down a slope or stairs?

Sleep

my butt too

SFDB

Information on the nature of RNG and its use with a computer program. In effect, there's two ways, one that simulates random numbers, one that actually generates real numbers.

https://www.random.org/randomness/

I find it's important to keep in mind when the RNG seems wonky. For instance, people would defend the shuffling algorithm in Magic Duels (which frequently gave either no lands or all lands) by saying that people can't accept true randomness, but it's actually the reverse, MD used a primitive RNG algorithm that gave bad results (probably contributing to the discontinuation of updates for the game, easier to build a new working game than fix the old one).

I'm not sure whether the games RNG is true or pseudo (you'd think with Crown Crates it'd be necessary to have true randomness because of the gambling nature, but perhaps pack-based software doesn't have a standard like online gambling does), but I know I've seen the OPs point often enough to grumble "90% means a coin toss."

phileunderx2

I love having the blade of woe because any npc that objects to my characters hands or paws their pockets gets a quick introduction. Heh heh

SolidusPrime

Sorry for the delay, it was a busy week at work.

I've collected 300 more attempts in Vvardenfell, the results were:

Vvardenfell -
Attempted: 300
Failed: 89
Succeeded: 211

Hew's Bane -
Attempted: 300
Failed: 73
Succeeded: 227

For the purposes of this testing, we took our time, and would only take the attempt at 90% if the NPC was standing completely still, and only after it had dinged to the green 90%. If the result was in question at all - for instance if the NPC moved, the character moved while attempting, or the percent dropped before the attempt was made, we would not count the result. So all of the recorded attempts had to meet all of those requirements. I know it is not the most clean-cut, controlled environment, but I thought it was sufficient to demonstrate my point.

I know a lot of us have learned to just adapt to this and deal with the bounty and the system, and we've "gotten over it" . The point of my post is not so much to complain, but to show that there is more to this than just our hunches, and it makes me wonder what other systems in the game are displaying one number but using a different one.

Thanks for the contributions to the thread, and for keeping it civil.

danno8

SolidusPrime wrote: »

Sorry for the delay, it was a busy week at work.

I've collected 300 more attempts in Vvardenfell, the results were:

Vvardenfell -
Attempted: 300
Failed: 89
Succeeded: 211

Hew's Bane -
Attempted: 300
Failed: 73
Succeeded: 227

For the purposes of this testing, we took our time, and would only take the attempt at 90% if the NPC was standing completely still, and only after it had dinged to the green 90%. If the result was in question at all - for instance if the NPC moved, the character moved while attempting, or the percent dropped before the attempt was made, we would not count the result. So all of the recorded attempts had to meet all of those requirements. I know it is not the most clean-cut, controlled environment, but I thought it was sufficient to demonstrate my point.

I know a lot of us have learned to just adapt to this and deal with the bounty and the system, and we've "gotten over it" . The point of my post is not so much to complain, but to show that there is more to this than just our hunches, and it makes me wonder what other systems in the game are displaying one number but using a different one.

Thanks for the contributions to the thread, and for keeping it civil.

The problem, if it is that the passive or the green bonus is not working properly, must be on a per character or per account level, because I just went ahead and finished a couple Thieves Guild quests on an alt, and pickpocketing at 95% every time resulted in a 100% success rate for me. Sample was only 20, but if it was the default 70% chance I should have seen roughly 6 failures on average, and at least 1 failure if I was extraordinarily lucky.

Korah_Eaglecry

Chronicburn wrote: »

Something feels fishy about the 90%-95% picks to me also ... even in other zones. Thanks for compiling the stats on this. I'd be interested to see your next 300.

For me, I just assume I'm gonna get caught, so I have a dedicated thief character. I just fill my pockets, run up a bounty, and then log until the bounty is gone. The fence limit is daily anyway so it's no big loss...

Been noticing a lot of failures in Ebonheart myself. Its not as bad as OPs but I would say its definitely not a 90%-95% either.