On RNG - better RNG on certain characters?

jaws343

ImmortalCX wrote: »

People who say "its all RNG" are taking the position that you can't prove its not an equal distribution, that every character has the same chance. Thats a pretty easy position to defend. Kinda like saying "God does not exist", because there isn't any tangible proof. This is a great argument for people who want to be right.

Proving that RNG is biased is more difficult.

One thing I'd like to mention is that there is obvious logic surrounding RNG. For instance with antiquity leads. When you already have an open lead, you wont get that same lead again until you complete the original one.

So somewhere in the code, at a bare minimum, there is a line that checks to see.. if character has lead, then don't grant character this lead. Unknown if this check happens before the roll or after.

That is actually just false. You will continue to get the lead to drop, you just won't be able to pick it up without it destroying. I've had multiple leads drop multiple times while I had one in my inventory, they just wouldn't duplicate in my inventory.

ImmortalCX

jaws343 wrote: »

ImmortalCX wrote: »

People who say "its all RNG" are taking the position that you can't prove its not an equal distribution, that every character has the same chance. Thats a pretty easy position to defend. Kinda like saying "God does not exist", because there isn't any tangible proof. This is a great argument for people who want to be right.

Proving that RNG is biased is more difficult.

One thing I'd like to mention is that there is obvious logic surrounding RNG. For instance with antiquity leads. When you already have an open lead, you wont get that same lead again until you complete the original one.

So somewhere in the code, at a bare minimum, there is a line that checks to see.. if character has lead, then don't grant character this lead. Unknown if this check happens before the roll or after.

That is actually just false. You will continue to get the lead to drop, you just won't be able to pick it up without it destroying. I've had multiple leads drop multiple times while I had one in my inventory, they just wouldn't duplicate in my inventory.

Oh, ok. But the logic is still true for crown crates and unique items. It doesnt invalidate the argument.

jaws343

ImmortalCX wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

ImmortalCX wrote: »

People who say "its all RNG" are taking the position that you can't prove its not an equal distribution, that every character has the same chance. Thats a pretty easy position to defend. Kinda like saying "God does not exist", because there isn't any tangible proof. This is a great argument for people who want to be right.

Proving that RNG is biased is more difficult.

One thing I'd like to mention is that there is obvious logic surrounding RNG. For instance with antiquity leads. When you already have an open lead, you wont get that same lead again until you complete the original one.

So somewhere in the code, at a bare minimum, there is a line that checks to see.. if character has lead, then don't grant character this lead. Unknown if this check happens before the roll or after.

That is actually just false. You will continue to get the lead to drop, you just won't be able to pick it up without it destroying. I've had multiple leads drop multiple times while I had one in my inventory, they just wouldn't duplicate in my inventory.

Oh, ok. But the logic is still true for crown crates and unique items. It doesnt invalidate the argument.

Unique items still drop from crown crates too. If you already know the emote or momento or pet or mount it converts it into gems right in front of you.

ImmortalCX

jaws343 wrote: »

ImmortalCX wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

ImmortalCX wrote: »

People who say "its all RNG" are taking the position that you can't prove its not an equal distribution, that every character has the same chance. Thats a pretty easy position to defend. Kinda like saying "God does not exist", because there isn't any tangible proof. This is a great argument for people who want to be right.

Proving that RNG is biased is more difficult.

One thing I'd like to mention is that there is obvious logic surrounding RNG. For instance with antiquity leads. When you already have an open lead, you wont get that same lead again until you complete the original one.

So somewhere in the code, at a bare minimum, there is a line that checks to see.. if character has lead, then don't grant character this lead. Unknown if this check happens before the roll or after.

That is actually just false. You will continue to get the lead to drop, you just won't be able to pick it up without it destroying. I've had multiple leads drop multiple times while I had one in my inventory, they just wouldn't duplicate in my inventory.

Oh, ok. But the logic is still true for crown crates and unique items. It doesnt invalidate the argument.

Unique items still drop from crown crates too. If you already know the emote or momento or pet or mount it converts it into gems right in front of you.

Doh!

peacenote

I continue to believe that certain people have luckier characters while also making fun of myself for doing so.

Two thoughts on this.

There WOULD be a kind of business reason to have some "luckier" characters out there. It would be to give the rest of us hope. If drop rates are very low but there are, say, 3% of characters out there much more likely to obtain rare drops, it ensures at least a few folks will get the rare items while keeping them much rarer than increasing the probability for everyone.

It is probably pretty subjective though. The game does not know you are running dungeon x for niche build y so the fact that other folks always get icy conjurer sash but you haven't seen one drop in 100 runs... other people who probably don't need that piece would never notice or feel lucky when they get a sash each run. This theory (likely untrue) only really works if you limit the concept to things that pretty much EVERYONE would find valuable. Such as if one of your characters always gets a large amount of nirnhoned mats while farming in Crag compared to others.

My main feels unlucky because she never ever seems to get gear from chests. It is extremely common for me to be the only person that does not get equipment from a chest. I ran a vKA the other day and received nothing from any of the chests. Does this really happen to me more than others? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably I will never know!

Lysette

peacenote wrote: »

I continue to believe that certain people have luckier characters while also making fun of myself for doing so.

Two thoughts on this.

There WOULD be a kind of business reason to have some "luckier" characters out there. It would be to give the rest of us hope. If drop rates are very low but there are, say, 3% of characters out there much more likely to obtain rare drops, it ensures at least a few folks will get the rare items while keeping them much rarer than increasing the probability for everyone.

It is probably pretty subjective though. The game does not know you are running dungeon x for niche build y so the fact that other folks always get icy conjurer sash but you haven't seen one drop in 100 runs... other people who probably don't need that piece would never notice or feel lucky when they get a sash each run. This theory (likely untrue) only really works if you limit the concept to things that pretty much EVERYONE would find valuable. Such as if one of your characters always gets a large amount of nirnhoned mats while farming in Crag compared to others.

My main feels unlucky because she never ever seems to get gear from chests. It is extremely common for me to be the only person that does not get equipment from a chest. I ran a vKA the other day and received nothing from any of the chests. Does this really happen to me more than others? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably I will never know!

I guess you underestimate how high the chance of ongoing failure can be - an example

Let's say something has a drop rate of 1% - in average one would expect to get the item within 100 attempts. But actually the chance to fail 100 times with this and not getting anything is 0.99^100 and about 36.6% - pretty high isn't it. Now you might think to fail with this 200 times, whereas others got 2 or more of those items already would be low - 0.99^200 is about 13.4%, it still can happen to 2 out of 15 people. Now you might think, well but failing 300 times in a row is highly unlikely, let's check it out 0.99^300 is roughly 4.9% - so this still can happen to about 1 out of 20 people to fail 300 times - surprising, isn't it?

Minyassa

It certainly feels that way, doesn't it. I play most of the time on my main and I don't get recipe drops or any of the really good stuff with him. I play my healer once in a blue moon and just about every dungeon he'll find some sort of rare motif page or a purple recipe or an aetherial dust or something. It's bizarre.

Lysette

Minyassa wrote: »

It certainly feels that way, doesn't it. I play most of the time on my main and I don't get recipe drops or any of the really good stuff with him. I play my healer once in a blue moon and just about every dungeon he'll find some sort of rare motif page or a purple recipe or an aetherial dust or something. It's bizarre.

Yeah but on the other side of the coin are people like me - on PC NA I got 1 crate for free - had a dwarfen guar in it, an apex mount, Not very likely to happen, but I got extremely lucky with this - or not, depends on how you see it, because I play normally on PC EU and there it would be much nicer to have it - so in a way that was bad luck combined with extreme luck.

volkeswagon

rng that's all

Raudgrani

First off, I'm no ninth grader that needs introduction into law of averages, rule of thirds, mathematics of probability and whatever; even though probably not meant that way - it's frankly quite insulting to be honest.

What many of you seem to forget, is that this isn't real life - it's a video game. They OPENLY admit to altering the RNG in many ways, it's not a normal/equal drop rate for a lot of things. Like recently, saying they "lowered the over all droprate on paintings from treasure chests". We also have passives like "Treasure Hunter", supposedly increasing your chances of better loot - specifically showing that you can get a better spot at the loot table. We don't have a loot table all wild and chaotic like the universe itself - fair but cruel - it's being controlled by "god" (i.e. devs).

Doing VMA for example, is hardly like pulling a card from a deck of cards; the results you get can easily be altered. Basically, to make you run more, or even to encourage you to run magicka toons if you do it on stamina ones, or the other way around (to make you play more and try different approaches!).
It's pretty obvious that you lean towards getting magicka weapons (i.e flame/shock staves) on stamina toons, and the other way around (i.e the BOW) if you do it on magicka toons. All the other junk like dw, 2H, Ice staves, resto staves etc. - seems to have a pretty normal drop rate for both. These don't really count here.

What I mean is: The droprate of a lot of things are not just "random", but altered. So there's an obvious possibility for it. I am not sure how the RNG works in relation to your specific character, i.e. when you loot a chest together with others in a group - what decided what each of you get? If in any way the loot is "randomized" in relation to for example your character ID, it could affect what you get. We have no idea as we don't have access to server side code.
Someone saying I'm all wrong here has the burden of proving me wrong, like I've been asked to do a number of times (which is just rhetorics - they know I can't).

Btw., it seems my Stamplar somehow found out about me putting him down here, so he decided to pull a Shivering Cheese out of a lockbox last night. ;-)

Minyassa

Lysette wrote: »

Minyassa wrote: »

It certainly feels that way, doesn't it. I play most of the time on my main and I don't get recipe drops or any of the really good stuff with him. I play my healer once in a blue moon and just about every dungeon he'll find some sort of rare motif page or a purple recipe or an aetherial dust or something. It's bizarre.

Yeah but on the other side of the coin are people like me - on PC NA I got 1 crate for free - had a dwarfen guar in it, an apex mount, Not very likely to happen, but I got extremely lucky with this - or not, depends on how you see it, because I play normally on PC EU and there it would be much nicer to have it - so in a way that was bad luck combined with extreme luck.

@Lysette I know what you mean. I also get extreme bad-good luck; the only apex mounts I ever pulled out of crown crates are bears, and out of all the mount types, bears are the only ones I hate and will never ride. Literally any other type of mount would make me happy but the RNG knows this so it gives me bears so I can get all excited for a second thinking I've won a great mount and then cry when it's a bear. Pretty sure my personal RNG demon feeds on tears.

Raudgrani

newtinmpls wrote: »

Mindcr0w wrote: »

this thread is still full of people espousing nonsense

Pish and tosh.

This thread is espousing a fun discussion about some characters are consistently luckier than others. And they are. Which does not go against RNG in any way, since if people have "random" luck, then some by chance will be luckier or unluckier.

I have a particular character, Vos, who (long backstory short) was an accountant and is now learning to be a "Pirate" (running the thieves guild quests). Vos is a High Elf, so he doesn't have the benefit of lovely racial passives, as does his friend. However, just looking at the displayed % chance on the screen, RNG claims he has a "75%" of pick-pocketing someone. And fails 3 times out of 4. Heck I've even seen him fail twice in a row where it was supposed to be a 100% chance.

My beloved husband, who also plays (and runs the "friend" noted above) finds this hilarious - he's looking at my screen, with his character "encouraging" mine, and then cackles when Vos completely F's it up.

Vos's inability to pick the "easiest" of pockets has become humorously legendary with our group, and it's fun.

Then there is another friend of mine, who has one character in particular who the RNG gods just won't stop blessing. Finds Nirn about every 5 nodes, gets drops that I drool at. The totally hilarious part of this is that the PLAYER is an agnostic, but the CHARACTER is quite reverent and continually throws out comments about how he has found/been blessed with such-and-so "Praise Akatosh".

I have some friends who have been thieving since like the start of the game, two fully grown adults - and they know like everything there is to know about pickpocketing, lockpicking and what not. They are 100% (not 93,7%) convinced, that the percentual chance you are shown is actually lower than displayed. If you have a 85% chance to force a lock, and roughly fail every third time, this is probably not true.
As for pickpocketing, it's probably a tad bit lower too, but roughly the same. I don't know how many times I have got caught pickpocketing with 95% chance, I mean... It's a pretty high chance, right? But it feels more like 75% or even 65% chance. You simply don't walk around and fail like every third or forth target, with a 95% chance. It's bulls**t.

Raudgrani

DreamsUnderStars wrote: »

"It's also an old "truth", that RNG should be better on Sorcerers than on others"

Fascinating. Never heard of this before. Why do you think it is?

I don't know, and I have neither anecdotes or facts to back that up, it's simply a claim circulating. You come across it every now and then in discussions at this forum. It seems like a pretty well established idea.

Raudgrani

ImmortalCX wrote: »

Raudgrani wrote: »

ImmortalCX wrote: »

One possibility here, is that they recognize that an account with many alts, if they all have "good" luck, the player will too easily get everything.

So perhaps they reduce the luck of many characters so that the account doesnt get too much stuff.

Dunno really. If there's anything like a luck factor at all, I guess it would be kind of random(?). I only have like 1½ "lucky" ones, out of 18 possible. None other have stood out in any particular way, of course I find an occasional good item etc. on some of the others, but not over and over again. :-)

I know an older woman who's in a guild I'm in also, and we do trials every now and then. And she seems to be stupidly lucky with one of her toons, her "main" I guess. I don't think she has too many characters at all, but she's always (quite literally) having the good/rare gear people want from trials, and have motifs and such all the time. She's frankly not a very good player, but she's always more than very welcome, because of this particular weird luck.

Are trial drops to the whole group and then divvied up, or are you saying that bringing her along helps everyone else's luck?

Hers, not everyone's. She uses like some really weird "secure old fart" build (like Lunar Bastion and Beekeeper!? Something like that! On a DD!), and never keeps anything. Either she gives it away, or deconstruct things. If someone has like AY daggers/jewelry for example, it's her. She gave others in group a full jewelry set and FOUR daggers in total back in the days, over the course of like 10 trial runs. I say ten not to exaggerate, but I actually think it's fewer.

preevious

It's an interresting thread. A very interresting one, too.

It all boils down to the vast mathematic field of probability.
Some people seem luckier than other, true. And other seem to have trouble landing even the most basics of items, indeed.

Should it happen if RNG was really fair? Sadly, yes.


Let me elaborate on 2 points :

1. Firstly, the proponents of the "luck seed" theory are making the fatal mistake of looking at individual variances (characters or players) instead of looking on the population as a whole. There will be outliers, in a population as vast as one from a MMO. It would be statistically extremely unlikely that every players gets the same luck, even in a completely fair RNG. You can't make arbitrary groups in a string of events and expect all groups to behave the same in a random environment.
2. Confirmation bias. A player thinking he's unlucky will disregard any event proving otherwise while inflating the importance of events that proves it. It's a common flaw in human psychology. We are ALL affected by it. Saying otherwise is either being deluded or lying.

So, yes. I'm sorry for the unlucky folks out there, but you are not victims of a biased RNG. You're victims of statistics and human nature.

daemondamian

Raudgrani wrote: »

What I mean is: The droprate of a lot of things are not just "random", but altered. So there's an obvious possibility for it. I am not sure how the RNG works in relation to your specific character, i.e. when you loot a chest together with others in a group - what decided what each of you get? If in any way the loot is "randomized" in relation to for example your character ID, it could affect what you get.

I have the lootlog add-on that shows what loot I or others I'm grouped with get.

Maybe it's a coincidence or a false perception but I've found that if I'm the last to access a chest (in a group dungeon) I get generic or low value items whereas players who 'opened' it before I did get set items.

I thought that that better chance of getting an item from a set was the reason why many players try to get to & open a chest before anyone else does.

Raudgrani

preevious wrote: »

It's an interresting thread. A very interresting one, too.

It all boils down to the vast mathematic field of probability.
Some people seem luckier than other, true. And other seem to have trouble landing even the most basics of items, indeed.

Should it happen if RNG was really fair? Sadly, yes.


Let me elaborate on 2 points :

1. Firstly, the proponents of the "luck seed" theory are making the fatal mistake of looking at individual variances (characters or players) instead of looking on the population as a whole. There will be outliers, in a population as vast as one from a MMO. It would be statistically extremely unlikely that every players gets the same luck, even in a completely fair RNG. You can't make arbitrary groups in a string of events and expect all groups to behave the same in a random environment.
2. Confirmation bias. A player thinking he's unlucky will disregard any event proving otherwise while inflating the importance of events that proves it. It's a common flaw in human psychology. We are ALL affected by it. Saying otherwise is either being deluded or lying.

So, yes. I'm sorry for the unlucky folks out there, but you are not victims of a biased RNG. You're victims of statistics and human nature.

I'm not really talking about players, as much as I talk about characters. In general I don't really see myself as "lucky", but I can see a weird and frequent occurrence of good loot on one specific character, and another I play a lot rarely has anything special - just as an exception to prove the rule, he managed to steal a Shivering Cheese last night (really, the only mindblowing loot he has ever had since 2016).

If this "lucky toon" thing is actually real, it's not like a 100% thing 100% of the time, of course. But something is obviously "off". Sometimes when I have lots of spare time, I tend to go to a number of different locations with some 3-5 different characters, farming for motifs and furnishing plans.

It goes like this: People who regularly do this, believe that there's a cooldown of some 20-30 minutes, on finding blue and purple pages. Most say they have an individual cooldown, while a few say they share it - most people doing this, will log out/change character once they find a blue or purple page, and keep looting the same place with another toon in the same location. This is how it's done, to laugh at that - would be to laugh at these guys who make millions out of the motif/furnishing plan business. it works. It's that simple.

When I do, I can clearly see that a few of the toons I bring there (among them my master crafter), are merely "dead load" - i.e. to be used while my more useful characters cooldowns are reached. The two ones who usually find good things, have like no crafting skills at all. The level they've reached, is from reading random books (i.e. level 3-4 or something like that).
All of these have the same Treasure Hunter passives active, which btw. shouldn't even affect what you find in urns and such. Of course the "clumsy nogooders" find an occasional good thing too, but it's pretty damn obvious that in particular one, and roughly two, indeed are mosre useful than the others at this. "Bias" or not, this is the way it is for me. I can't help that.

preevious

Raudgrani wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

It's an interresting thread. A very interresting one, too.

It all boils down to the vast mathematic field of probability.
Some people seem luckier than other, true. And other seem to have trouble landing even the most basics of items, indeed.

Should it happen if RNG was really fair? Sadly, yes.


Let me elaborate on 2 points :

1. Firstly, the proponents of the "luck seed" theory are making the fatal mistake of looking at individual variances (characters or players) instead of looking on the population as a whole. There will be outliers, in a population as vast as one from a MMO. It would be statistically extremely unlikely that every players gets the same luck, even in a completely fair RNG. You can't make arbitrary groups in a string of events and expect all groups to behave the same in a random environment.
2. Confirmation bias. A player thinking he's unlucky will disregard any event proving otherwise while inflating the importance of events that proves it. It's a common flaw in human psychology. We are ALL affected by it. Saying otherwise is either being deluded or lying.

So, yes. I'm sorry for the unlucky folks out there, but you are not victims of a biased RNG. You're victims of statistics and human nature.

I'm not really talking about players, as much as I talk about characters. In general I don't really see myself as "lucky", but I can see a weird and frequent occurrence of good loot on one specific character, and another I play a lot rarely has anything special - just as an exception to prove the rule, he managed to steal a Shivering Cheese last night (really, the only mindblowing loot he has ever had since 2016).

If this "lucky toon" thing is actually real, it's not like a 100% thing 100% of the time, of course. But something is obviously "off". Sometimes when I have lots of spare time, I tend to go to a number of different locations with some 3-5 different characters, farming for motifs and furnishing plans.

It goes like this: People who regularly do this, believe that there's a cooldown of some 20-30 minutes, on finding blue and purple pages. Most say they have an individual cooldown, while a few say they share it - most people doing this, will log out/change character once they find a blue or purple page, and keep looting the same place with another toon in the same location. This is how it's done, to laugh at that - would be to laugh at these guys who make millions out of the motif/furnishing plan business. it works. It's that simple.

When I do, I can clearly see that a few of the toons I bring there (among them my master crafter), are merely "dead load" - i.e. to be used while my more useful characters cooldowns are reached. The two ones who usually find good things, have like no crafting skills at all. The level they've reached, is from reading random books (i.e. level 3-4 or something like that).
All of these have the same Treasure Hunter passives active, which btw. shouldn't even affect what you find in urns and such. Of course the "clumsy nogooders" find an occasional good thing too, but it's pretty damn obvious that in particular one, and roughly two, indeed are mosre useful than the others at this. "Bias" or not, this is the way it is for me. I can't help that.

Yes, I get your point, but wether you speak of player or character is irrelevant. Both are arbitrary groupings. You're looking at variances in streams of unrelated event, and that's why you get that impression.

I'll elaborate a bit more.

let''s take a rare item : aetheric dust. Also, let"s invent a drop rate, since I don't know it : 1 in every 10.000 compatibles nodes.

The ONLY thing to consider is the event itself : opening a compatible node.
The character that does it is irrelevent, he is just launching an event.
Even the cp passive that double drops is irrelevent .It just mean that sometimes 2 events will be launched instead of one.

So, let's consider a typical day in eso : 4.000.000 nodes will be opened (again, it's a made up average). It means that in a typical day, 400 dusts will be generated. Those 4.000.000 event are to be considered as a whole, you can't make groups, players or characters. There is no justice in probablility. The players that open the most nodes will not necessarily be the players that get rewarded. It's quite possible that someone who only open 2 nodes will get 2 dusts. It's just unlikely.

Even my group of a "day" is flawed. A period of time is also an arbitrary group, and they wont behave the same (there's be "good" days and "bad" days) , that's why in the field of probablity, we takes large periods of time, for probabilities to even out. And even that is not optimal, since a large period is also an arbirary group (there'll be "good" large periods and "bad" large periods).

What I'm saying is that there is no hidden variable to create luck. Probability does it pretty well on it's own.
There'll be "good" characters and "bad" characters. Same with "good" days and "bad" days. "good" costumes and "bad" costumes
A character or a costume, or, let's say, percentage of damage of the head piece worn when farming are not a less arbitrary group than a day. All groups of single events are invalid. All are at the same level or arbitrary.

Yes, probabilities are weird. It's at the same time one of the easiest branch of math to grasp, but one of the hardest to wrap one's head around.

English is not my first langage, so, I'm sorry if I explain badly and have trouble getting the point accross.

Raudgrani

preevious wrote: »

Raudgrani wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

It's an interresting thread. A very interresting one, too.

It all boils down to the vast mathematic field of probability.
Some people seem luckier than other, true. And other seem to have trouble landing even the most basics of items, indeed.

Should it happen if RNG was really fair? Sadly, yes.


Let me elaborate on 2 points :

1. Firstly, the proponents of the "luck seed" theory are making the fatal mistake of looking at individual variances (characters or players) instead of looking on the population as a whole. There will be outliers, in a population as vast as one from a MMO. It would be statistically extremely unlikely that every players gets the same luck, even in a completely fair RNG. You can't make arbitrary groups in a string of events and expect all groups to behave the same in a random environment.
2. Confirmation bias. A player thinking he's unlucky will disregard any event proving otherwise while inflating the importance of events that proves it. It's a common flaw in human psychology. We are ALL affected by it. Saying otherwise is either being deluded or lying.

So, yes. I'm sorry for the unlucky folks out there, but you are not victims of a biased RNG. You're victims of statistics and human nature.

I'm not really talking about players, as much as I talk about characters. In general I don't really see myself as "lucky", but I can see a weird and frequent occurrence of good loot on one specific character, and another I play a lot rarely has anything special - just as an exception to prove the rule, he managed to steal a Shivering Cheese last night (really, the only mindblowing loot he has ever had since 2016).

If this "lucky toon" thing is actually real, it's not like a 100% thing 100% of the time, of course. But something is obviously "off". Sometimes when I have lots of spare time, I tend to go to a number of different locations with some 3-5 different characters, farming for motifs and furnishing plans.

It goes like this: People who regularly do this, believe that there's a cooldown of some 20-30 minutes, on finding blue and purple pages. Most say they have an individual cooldown, while a few say they share it - most people doing this, will log out/change character once they find a blue or purple page, and keep looting the same place with another toon in the same location. This is how it's done, to laugh at that - would be to laugh at these guys who make millions out of the motif/furnishing plan business. it works. It's that simple.

When I do, I can clearly see that a few of the toons I bring there (among them my master crafter), are merely "dead load" - i.e. to be used while my more useful characters cooldowns are reached. The two ones who usually find good things, have like no crafting skills at all. The level they've reached, is from reading random books (i.e. level 3-4 or something like that).
All of these have the same Treasure Hunter passives active, which btw. shouldn't even affect what you find in urns and such. Of course the "clumsy nogooders" find an occasional good thing too, but it's pretty damn obvious that in particular one, and roughly two, indeed are mosre useful than the others at this. "Bias" or not, this is the way it is for me. I can't help that.

Yes, I get your point, but wether you speak of player or character is irrelevant. Both are arbitrary groupings. You're looking at variances in streams of unrelated event, and that's why you get that impression.

I'll elaborate a bit more.

let''s take a rare item : aetheric dust. Also, let"s invent a drop rate, since I don't know it : 1 in every 10.000 compatibles nodes.

The ONLY thing to consider is the event itself : opening a compatible node.
The character that does it is irrelevent, he is just launching an event.
Even the cp passive that double drops is irrelevent .It just mean that sometimes 2 events will be launched instead of one.

So, let's consider a typical day in eso : 4.000.000 nodes will be opened (again, it's a made up average). It means that in a typical day, 400 dusts will be generated. Those 4.000.000 event are to be considered as a whole, you can't make groups, players or characters. There is no justice in probablility. The players that open the most nodes will not necessarily be the players that get rewarded. It's quite possible that someone who only open 2 nodes will get 2 dusts. It's just unlikely.

Even my group of a "day" is flawed. A period of time is also an arbitrary group, and they wont behave the same (there's be "good" days and "bad" days) , that's why in the field of probablity, we takes large periods of time, for probabilities to even out. And even that is not optimal, since a large period is also an arbirary group (there'll be "good" large periods and "bad" large periods).

What I'm saying is that there is no hidden variable to create luck. Probability does it pretty well on it's own.
There'll be "good" characters and "bad" characters. Same with "good" days and "bad" days. "good" costumes and "bad" costumes
A character or a costume, or, let's say, percentage of damage of the head piece worn when farming are not a less arbitrary group than a day. All groups of single events are invalid. All are at the same level or arbitrary.

Yes, probabilities are weird. It's at the same time one of the easiest branch of math to grasp, but one of the hardest to wrap one's head around.

English is not my first langage, so, I'm sorry if I explain badly and have trouble getting the point accross.

My English is very bad too! ;-D But I understand.

I think we speak of different things, at least somewhat. What I mean is, it seems to me that at least one of my characters is favored by some kind of hidden stat, that gives a higher drop chance of obviously attractive loot. Only thing she has not been ale to give me, is the golden lead from Blackheart Haven. I have run it like +20 times, on various characters, on different days - nothing. But that's another story.

I'm seeing this the most, as in the example described above. Farming for motifs/plans in the same place, at the same time, with multiple different characters. She and a dunmer magblade guy, tends to get the most (if any) purple and blue ones. I had a half pronounced thought, that high crit would be behind it, but that would probably be too obvious. But when you see this time after time, you can't help but wonder what's behind it. It feels (yes, feels) too frequent to be coincidental.

Lysette

[snip]

Absolutely not, I have no intention to ridicule you and I'm as well sorry, that you felt that way when I made some example about probabilities of ongoing failure and such. You would wonder how many have a wrong understanding of probabilities This was not necessarily directed at you anyway, but a comment to something you said - and in this case the idea of changing probability by bringing someone along reminded me of lucky charms and strange habits some people have, when they hope to raise their luck with lucky charms and rituals - I'm sorry that you felt insulted, it was not my intention at all.

[edited to remove quoted content]

Raudgrani

Lysette wrote: »

Absolutely not, I have no intention to ridicule you and I'm as well sorry, that you felt that way when I made some example about probabilities of ongoing failure and such. You would wonder how many have a wrong understanding of probabilities This was not necessarily directed at you anyway, but a comment to something you said - and in this case the idea of changing probability by bringing someone along reminded me of lucky charms and strange habits some people have, when they hope to raise their luck with lucky charms and rituals - I'm sorry that you felt insulted, it was not my intention at all.

Problem is that you try to apply "natural science" on a video game, which has its very own set of rules - a set of rules that don't necessarily follow the general rules of "randomness". So to insinuate I'm some sort of superstitious person using lucky charms and weird OCD type rituals - wearing "lucky socks" or whatever - simply proves you either don't get what I'm trying to say, or that you are narrow minded.

I own and have read quite a few books on the topics of causality/synchronicity and such, which is all interesting and so on - but this is an artificial universe, not necessarily subject to that kind of science. It's openly admitted from time to time, that "RNG" has been altered to increase or lower drop chances of certain types of loots, there are passives to increase chances of the same, and there's quite obviously "cooldowns" on certain types of loot like blue/purple crafting and motif pages. So it is NOT random, not in any way actually.

So intentionally or not, there's like nothing in the way of some characters with higher chances of higher level loot, you just can't prove it either way.
As to why someone would do such a thing? Well. First off, it might be unintentional. If intentional, it could very well just be to add some more immersion to the game, and perhaps even to instigate social discussions such as these.

preevious

Raudgrani wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

Raudgrani wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

It's an interresting thread. A very interresting one, too.

It all boils down to the vast mathematic field of probability.
Some people seem luckier than other, true. And other seem to have trouble landing even the most basics of items, indeed.

Should it happen if RNG was really fair? Sadly, yes.


Let me elaborate on 2 points :

1. Firstly, the proponents of the "luck seed" theory are making the fatal mistake of looking at individual variances (characters or players) instead of looking on the population as a whole. There will be outliers, in a population as vast as one from a MMO. It would be statistically extremely unlikely that every players gets the same luck, even in a completely fair RNG. You can't make arbitrary groups in a string of events and expect all groups to behave the same in a random environment.
2. Confirmation bias. A player thinking he's unlucky will disregard any event proving otherwise while inflating the importance of events that proves it. It's a common flaw in human psychology. We are ALL affected by it. Saying otherwise is either being deluded or lying.

So, yes. I'm sorry for the unlucky folks out there, but you are not victims of a biased RNG. You're victims of statistics and human nature.

I'm not really talking about players, as much as I talk about characters. In general I don't really see myself as "lucky", but I can see a weird and frequent occurrence of good loot on one specific character, and another I play a lot rarely has anything special - just as an exception to prove the rule, he managed to steal a Shivering Cheese last night (really, the only mindblowing loot he has ever had since 2016).

If this "lucky toon" thing is actually real, it's not like a 100% thing 100% of the time, of course. But something is obviously "off". Sometimes when I have lots of spare time, I tend to go to a number of different locations with some 3-5 different characters, farming for motifs and furnishing plans.

It goes like this: People who regularly do this, believe that there's a cooldown of some 20-30 minutes, on finding blue and purple pages. Most say they have an individual cooldown, while a few say they share it - most people doing this, will log out/change character once they find a blue or purple page, and keep looting the same place with another toon in the same location. This is how it's done, to laugh at that - would be to laugh at these guys who make millions out of the motif/furnishing plan business. it works. It's that simple.

When I do, I can clearly see that a few of the toons I bring there (among them my master crafter), are merely "dead load" - i.e. to be used while my more useful characters cooldowns are reached. The two ones who usually find good things, have like no crafting skills at all. The level they've reached, is from reading random books (i.e. level 3-4 or something like that).
All of these have the same Treasure Hunter passives active, which btw. shouldn't even affect what you find in urns and such. Of course the "clumsy nogooders" find an occasional good thing too, but it's pretty damn obvious that in particular one, and roughly two, indeed are mosre useful than the others at this. "Bias" or not, this is the way it is for me. I can't help that.

Yes, I get your point, but wether you speak of player or character is irrelevant. Both are arbitrary groupings. You're looking at variances in streams of unrelated event, and that's why you get that impression.

I'll elaborate a bit more.

let''s take a rare item : aetheric dust. Also, let"s invent a drop rate, since I don't know it : 1 in every 10.000 compatibles nodes.

The ONLY thing to consider is the event itself : opening a compatible node.
The character that does it is irrelevent, he is just launching an event.
Even the cp passive that double drops is irrelevent .It just mean that sometimes 2 events will be launched instead of one.

So, let's consider a typical day in eso : 4.000.000 nodes will be opened (again, it's a made up average). It means that in a typical day, 400 dusts will be generated. Those 4.000.000 event are to be considered as a whole, you can't make groups, players or characters. There is no justice in probablility. The players that open the most nodes will not necessarily be the players that get rewarded. It's quite possible that someone who only open 2 nodes will get 2 dusts. It's just unlikely.

Even my group of a "day" is flawed. A period of time is also an arbitrary group, and they wont behave the same (there's be "good" days and "bad" days) , that's why in the field of probablity, we takes large periods of time, for probabilities to even out. And even that is not optimal, since a large period is also an arbirary group (there'll be "good" large periods and "bad" large periods).

What I'm saying is that there is no hidden variable to create luck. Probability does it pretty well on it's own.
There'll be "good" characters and "bad" characters. Same with "good" days and "bad" days. "good" costumes and "bad" costumes
A character or a costume, or, let's say, percentage of damage of the head piece worn when farming are not a less arbitrary group than a day. All groups of single events are invalid. All are at the same level or arbitrary.

Yes, probabilities are weird. It's at the same time one of the easiest branch of math to grasp, but one of the hardest to wrap one's head around.

English is not my first langage, so, I'm sorry if I explain badly and have trouble getting the point accross.

My English is very bad too! ;-D But I understand.

I think we speak of different things, at least somewhat. What I mean is, it seems to me that at least one of my characters is favored by some kind of hidden stat, that gives a higher drop chance of obviously attractive loot. Only thing she has not been ale to give me, is the golden lead from Blackheart Haven. I have run it like +20 times, on various characters, on different days - nothing. But that's another story.

I'm seeing this the most, as in the example described above. Farming for motifs/plans in the same place, at the same time, with multiple different characters. She and a dunmer magblade guy, tends to get the most (if any) purple and blue ones. I had a half pronounced thought, that high crit would be behind it, but that would probably be too obvious. But when you see this time after time, you can't help but wonder what's behind it. It feels (yes, feels) too frequent to be coincidental.

Feels, indeed. Of course, any feeling is perfectly valid. After all, you don't fake feels, it's something within you.
Ultimately, I just think that there is not hidden stats. Random probability does exactly what an hidden stat would do, with less work from the dev, and less strain on the servers. Such an hidden variable would ultimately be useless.

I agree with you, however. It feels wrong. I have also entertained that thought, since I seem to have a "good" char as well. (though I struggle, sometimes). It's hard (for me, at least, it took a lot of thinking for me) to accept that we are just drifting pieces of wood in a big sea of probabilities.
But still, your lucky char is just that : an outlier. it's a "good char". All is happenstance, no hidden variable.

vesselwiththepestle

Keep in mind that achievements can influence the RNG, like having researched traits and learning styles improves your chance of getting master writs from daily crafting writs.

IIRC it even said in patch notes at some point that achievements might increase your chance to get certain style pages from treasure chests in Hew's Bane, Gold Coast and Vvardenfell.

It wouldn't be impossible for ZOS to integrate such mechanics into other areas of play without telling the players.

Lysette

Raudgrani wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

Raudgrani wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

It's an interresting thread. A very interresting one, too.

It all boils down to the vast mathematic field of probability.
Some people seem luckier than other, true. And other seem to have trouble landing even the most basics of items, indeed.

Should it happen if RNG was really fair? Sadly, yes.


Let me elaborate on 2 points :

1. Firstly, the proponents of the "luck seed" theory are making the fatal mistake of looking at individual variances (characters or players) instead of looking on the population as a whole. There will be outliers, in a population as vast as one from a MMO. It would be statistically extremely unlikely that every players gets the same luck, even in a completely fair RNG. You can't make arbitrary groups in a string of events and expect all groups to behave the same in a random environment.
2. Confirmation bias. A player thinking he's unlucky will disregard any event proving otherwise while inflating the importance of events that proves it. It's a common flaw in human psychology. We are ALL affected by it. Saying otherwise is either being deluded or lying.

So, yes. I'm sorry for the unlucky folks out there, but you are not victims of a biased RNG. You're victims of statistics and human nature.

I'm not really talking about players, as much as I talk about characters. In general I don't really see myself as "lucky", but I can see a weird and frequent occurrence of good loot on one specific character, and another I play a lot rarely has anything special - just as an exception to prove the rule, he managed to steal a Shivering Cheese last night (really, the only mindblowing loot he has ever had since 2016).

If this "lucky toon" thing is actually real, it's not like a 100% thing 100% of the time, of course. But something is obviously "off". Sometimes when I have lots of spare time, I tend to go to a number of different locations with some 3-5 different characters, farming for motifs and furnishing plans.

It goes like this: People who regularly do this, believe that there's a cooldown of some 20-30 minutes, on finding blue and purple pages. Most say they have an individual cooldown, while a few say they share it - most people doing this, will log out/change character once they find a blue or purple page, and keep looting the same place with another toon in the same location. This is how it's done, to laugh at that - would be to laugh at these guys who make millions out of the motif/furnishing plan business. it works. It's that simple.

When I do, I can clearly see that a few of the toons I bring there (among them my master crafter), are merely "dead load" - i.e. to be used while my more useful characters cooldowns are reached. The two ones who usually find good things, have like no crafting skills at all. The level they've reached, is from reading random books (i.e. level 3-4 or something like that).
All of these have the same Treasure Hunter passives active, which btw. shouldn't even affect what you find in urns and such. Of course the "clumsy nogooders" find an occasional good thing too, but it's pretty damn obvious that in particular one, and roughly two, indeed are mosre useful than the others at this. "Bias" or not, this is the way it is for me. I can't help that.

Yes, I get your point, but wether you speak of player or character is irrelevant. Both are arbitrary groupings. You're looking at variances in streams of unrelated event, and that's why you get that impression.

I'll elaborate a bit more.

let''s take a rare item : aetheric dust. Also, let"s invent a drop rate, since I don't know it : 1 in every 10.000 compatibles nodes.

The ONLY thing to consider is the event itself : opening a compatible node.
The character that does it is irrelevent, he is just launching an event.
Even the cp passive that double drops is irrelevent .It just mean that sometimes 2 events will be launched instead of one.

So, let's consider a typical day in eso : 4.000.000 nodes will be opened (again, it's a made up average). It means that in a typical day, 400 dusts will be generated. Those 4.000.000 event are to be considered as a whole, you can't make groups, players or characters. There is no justice in probablility. The players that open the most nodes will not necessarily be the players that get rewarded. It's quite possible that someone who only open 2 nodes will get 2 dusts. It's just unlikely.

Even my group of a "day" is flawed. A period of time is also an arbitrary group, and they wont behave the same (there's be "good" days and "bad" days) , that's why in the field of probablity, we takes large periods of time, for probabilities to even out. And even that is not optimal, since a large period is also an arbirary group (there'll be "good" large periods and "bad" large periods).

What I'm saying is that there is no hidden variable to create luck. Probability does it pretty well on it's own.
There'll be "good" characters and "bad" characters. Same with "good" days and "bad" days. "good" costumes and "bad" costumes
A character or a costume, or, let's say, percentage of damage of the head piece worn when farming are not a less arbitrary group than a day. All groups of single events are invalid. All are at the same level or arbitrary.

Yes, probabilities are weird. It's at the same time one of the easiest branch of math to grasp, but one of the hardest to wrap one's head around.

English is not my first langage, so, I'm sorry if I explain badly and have trouble getting the point accross.

My English is very bad too! ;-D But I understand.

I think we speak of different things, at least somewhat. What I mean is, it seems to me that at least one of my characters is favored by some kind of hidden stat, that gives a higher drop chance of obviously attractive loot. Only thing she has not been ale to give me, is the golden lead from Blackheart Haven. I have run it like +20 times, on various characters, on different days - nothing. But that's another story.

I'm seeing this the most, as in the example described above. Farming for motifs/plans in the same place, at the same time, with multiple different characters. She and a dunmer magblade guy, tends to get the most (if any) purple and blue ones. I had a half pronounced thought, that high crit would be behind it, but that would probably be too obvious. But when you see this time after time, you can't help but wonder what's behind it. It feels (yes, feels) too frequent to be coincidental.

Of course it is possible that there is a hidden stat - we cannot really prove that in just a relatively small sample size. @preevious made that example with 4 million events and a drop rate of 0.1% and said that it is unlikely to happen that someone gets 2 good results in 2 attempts - but in the large number of events there are likely 4 players every day in this example to whom exactly that is likely to happen - by plain unaltered randomness.

Ekzorka

A loot from crown crates from daily rewards was always better at NA than at EU.
Now there's only Ouroboros so there is nothing to compare with.
I noticed that you can get a blueprint or something like this pretty quickly if you playing with a character that you haven't played for a long time.

krayphysh

I get that RNG is supposedly random, but I def know people with awesome luck and others whose luck is so terrible that I'm not sure why they even sign on to play. I don't think the system is fair at all. I read a dev forum recently about RNG. I don't know what system ESO uses, but in the post that I read, the dev stated that each account has a unique character ID assigned to it during creation. You'd have to Google the subject as I don't recall all details of the post, but he mentioned that your unique ID and RNG were tied together. If that is the case in this game, it would be fair and sensible to swap these ID's regularly to prevent some from having consistent good luck and others from having terrible luck. I don't know the author of the post personally so he could have been full of crap, but if his post was true, that would explain why some people have all good luck, some are semi-lucky, and others have horrible luck.

Raudgrani

vesselwiththepestle wrote: »

Keep in mind that achievements can influence the RNG, like having researched traits and learning styles improves your chance of getting master writs from daily crafting writs.

IIRC it even said in patch notes at some point that achievements might increase your chance to get certain style pages from treasure chests in Hew's Bane, Gold Coast and Vvardenfell.

It wouldn't be impossible for ZOS to integrate such mechanics into other areas of play without telling the players.

Yes, that's a bit of my point. It's admitted there are factors that affect what you will find. And ZOS are pretty secretive about most things, which is actually something I kind of like. It might very well be that past achievements, crucial decisions in quests (if someone should die or not, for example) will all sum up to something increasing or even decreasing your "luck". They would never tell us no matter what.

Lysette

Raudgrani wrote: »

Lysette wrote: »

Absolutely not, I have no intention to ridicule you and I'm as well sorry, that you felt that way when I made some example about probabilities of ongoing failure and such. You would wonder how many have a wrong understanding of probabilities This was not necessarily directed at you anyway, but a comment to something you said - and in this case the idea of changing probability by bringing someone along reminded me of lucky charms and strange habits some people have, when they hope to raise their luck with lucky charms and rituals - I'm sorry that you felt insulted, it was not my intention at all.

Problem is that you try to apply "natural science" on a video game, which has its very own set of rules - a set of rules that don't necessarily follow the general rules of "randomness". So to insinuate I'm some sort of superstitious person using lucky charms and weird OCD type rituals - wearing "lucky socks" or whatever - simply proves you either don't get what I'm trying to say, or that you are narrow minded.

I wasn't saying any of this about you at all - I responded to something you said which reminded me of lucky charms, not saying with it that you would believe into those nor was my comment directed at you personally.

In a small pen&paper rpg group I would eventually alter "luck" as a game master, but then again I wouldn't even roll a dice about the matter but decide this based on the flow of the story. But why would ZOS do something like this? Where would be the benefit to make someone unlucky or lucky? This would create more harm than good.

What I was about to say is that plain normal randomness can and does create results which look like being lucky or unlucky, even they are well inside the confidence interval nevertheless - to prove that it is outside of normal randomness it would take a large number of samples, because one would have to show that results tend to get persistently outside the confidence interval (more than 3 times the standard deviation) and even then one couldn't be certain about it, but it would be likely.

Lysette

Raudgrani wrote: »

vesselwiththepestle wrote: »

Keep in mind that achievements can influence the RNG, like having researched traits and learning styles improves your chance of getting master writs from daily crafting writs.

IIRC it even said in patch notes at some point that achievements might increase your chance to get certain style pages from treasure chests in Hew's Bane, Gold Coast and Vvardenfell.

It wouldn't be impossible for ZOS to integrate such mechanics into other areas of play without telling the players.

Yes, that's a bit of my point. It's admitted there are factors that affect what you will find. And ZOS are pretty secretive about most things, which is actually something I kind of like. It might very well be that past achievements, crucial decisions in quests (if someone should die or not, for example) will all sum up to something increasing or even decreasing your "luck". They would never tell us no matter what.

it's possible - but where would be the benefit in this for ZOS? With rewards from writs it is clearly tier based, dependent on the skill I have, I will get an appropriate reward - nothing fishy about it. And imperials will get a few more coins - that is due to their race passive.

krayphysh

I couldn't locate the original post I was referring to, but found another that is very comparable. It states,

"You need to write code to generate the random numbers and code is NOT random. (It's deterministic)

You wind up starting with a "Seed value(s)" that is picked at "Random" (usually the current time stamp) then use it in an algorithm to start generating numbers. But the entire set of is based off the original Seed value!

If you run your code again with the exact same Seed value(s), you will get the EXACT same SET of numbers! How can any reasonable person call that random?"

It's efficient enough for video games, and it's cheap.

Unfortunately we don't know what type of RNG system that ESO uses, but I'd imagine they use the cheapest option they can. I doubt they own quantum computers or anything capable of producing truly random numbers.