The in-game actual odds of forcing locks on chests

goatlyonesub17_ESO · March 2021

The chance to force a lock on a chest is, in the game, stated to be

simple - 85%
intermediate - 80%
advanced - 75%
master - 70%

In real practice, however, I have been getting failures on first-attempt forcings at rates higher than those just stated. Not only are single failures very common (much more so than is indicated by the game), double and triple failures to force locks are not uncommon.

The chance of a single failure (i.e. lock is forced successfully on the 2nd attempt), according to the game UI, are

simple - 15% (about 1 in 7)
intermediate - 20% (1 in 5)
advanced - 25% (1 in 4)
master - 30% (about 1 in 3)

My experience shows that the odds of failure are higher than those. (And, with simple locks, much higher.)

The chance of a double failure (i.e. lock is forced successfully on the 3rd attempt), according to the game UI, are

simple - 2.25% (about 1 in 44)
intermediate - 4% (1 in 25)
advanced - 6.25% (1 in 16)
master - 9% (about 1 in 11)

Again, the odds of double failure seem greater than these.

The chance of a triple failure (i.e. lock is forced successfully on the 4th attempt), according to the game UI, are

simple - about 1/296
intermediate - 1/125
advanced - 1/64
master - about 1/37

I had two triple failures on simple and intermediate chest locks during my last gold-farming session in Crimson Cove.

The chance of a quadruple failure (i.e. lock is forced successfully on the 5th attempt), according to the game UI, are

simple - about 1/1975
intermediate - 1/625
advanced - 1/256
master - about 1/123

I have had three of these quadruple failures, most of them on simple chest locks, since I switched my practice over from picking to forcing, in late 2020.

I'd like that someone in Zenimax check the code, or statistically analyze the outcomes, to see whether the game UI is being honest with us players, or whether it is misreporting the odds and luring us players into bad game playing choices.

GreenHere · March 2021

% chance accuracy aside, I've always wished that completely maxing out your lock picking skill would guarantee force picks for Intermediate chests, and 3/4 should guarantee Simples.

I get not wanting to completely eliminate the randomness for harder difficulty chests (kind of), but c'mon... can't they let us just feel like we've "mastered" picking the easy chests, at least? I HATE failing Simple/Intermediate chests 3, 4, 5 times in a row. Feels like a kick in the *** every time.

Slyclone · March 2021

This is why I manually pick since day 1.

VaranisArano · March 2021

Hey, somebody else is doing the math. Yay!

Here were my results for 2000 chests: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/413835/double-checking-zos-force-lock-percentages

And Rittings, who inspired me to test: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/390876/force-lock-percentage-is-incorrect-not-working-as-intended

GreenHere · March 2021

Slyclone wrote: »

This is why I manually pick since day 1.

(off-topic)

Bruh... You gotta put your forum signature in a [ spoiler ] tag or something asap, @Slyclone. Your sig is like 9 times longer than your reply!

Nestor · March 2021

Failing at a pick is the easiest way to use up all those extra picks i get looking for recipes.

Slyclone · March 2021

I don't dictate what others should or should not do. I pay thousands of dollars for the priviledge of giving feedback. There is an option to hide signatures in the settings.

Bruh.

Casul · March 2021

GreenHere wrote: »

Slyclone wrote: »

This is why I manually pick since day 1.

(off-topic)

Bruh... You gotta put your forum signature in a [ spoiler ] tag or something asap, @Slyclone. Your sig is like 9 times longer than your reply!

Slyclone wrote: »

I don't dictate what others should or should not do. I pay thousands of dollars for the priviledge of giving feedback. There is an option to hide signatures in the settings.

Bruh.

Someone should have put the /S

xaraan · March 2021

I've always wondered if the 'odds' they show in the game are true because more often than not it doesn't seem close to what they show. I'll fail four or five times in a row on an 80% chance for example. And it's not as if I go hundreds of successful locks picked between those fails. Just one day of paying attention on a couple dozen simple locks showed a closer to 60% success rate.

Samadhi · March 2021

I'm normally in on my first force, rarely need a second
Lockboxes on the other hand break 2 or 3 before getting in, but it's easier than losing track of NPCs while picking

phaneub17_ESO · March 2021

Whether you're using KB/M or gamepad, its easier to pick the lock. The only time I have trouble with picking a lock is when playing with Stadia, on my phone with a razer kishi, while on the toilet or lying in bed as there's always a bit of input lag, advanced and master chests are basically impossible.

cynicalbutterfly · March 2021

I always wondered if the lock chances were correct or if it was more about good old fashioned luck. I have noticed that it doesn't seem to matter what chance of success it is. I either get lucky and get the lock the first time or I waste a few lockpicks to failures. Even at say 80-100% success rate I still have a 50/50 shot of failing the force. Sometimes I'll go through multiple failures before I get a success. I don't really mind because I've got plenty of lockpicks to waste anyway LOL.

GreenHere · March 2021

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Whether you're using KB/M or gamepad, its easier to pick the lock. The only time I have trouble with picking a lock is when playing with Stadia, on my phone with a razer kishi, while on the toilet or lying in bed as there's always a bit of input lag, advanced and master chests are basically impossible.

TIL that some of the people I see running around in Tamriel are actually pooping on the other side of the internet!

What a strange & wonderful time to be alive!

jircris11 · March 2021

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

The chance to force a lock on a chest is, in the game, stated to be

simple - 85%
intermediate - 80%
advanced - 75%
master - 70%

In real practice, however, I have been getting failures on first-attempt forcings at rates higher than those just stated. Not only are single failures very common (much more so than is indicated by the game), double and triple failures to force locks are not uncommon.

The chance of a single failure (i.e. lock is forced successfully on the 2nd attempt), according to the game UI, are

simple - 15% (about 1 in 7)
intermediate - 20% (1 in 5)
advanced - 25% (1 in 4)
master - 30% (about 1 in 3)

My experience shows that the odds of failure are higher than those. (And, with simple locks, much higher.)

The chance of a double failure (i.e. lock is forced successfully on the 3rd attempt), according to the game UI, are

simple - 2.25% (about 1 in 44)
intermediate - 4% (1 in 25)
advanced - 6.25% (1 in 16)
master - 9% (about 1 in 11)

Again, the odds of double failure seem greater than these.

The chance of a triple failure (i.e. lock is forced successfully on the 4th attempt), according to the game UI, are

simple - about 1/296
intermediate - 1/125
advanced - 1/64
master - about 1/37

I had two triple failures on simple and intermediate chest locks during my last gold-farming session in Crimson Cove.

The chance of a quadruple failure (i.e. lock is forced successfully on the 5th attempt), according to the game UI, are

simple - about 1/1975
intermediate - 1/625
advanced - 1/256
master - about 1/123

I have had three of these quadruple failures, most of them on simple chest locks, since I switched my practice over from picking to forcing, in late 2020.

I'd like that someone in Zenimax check the code, or statistically analyze the outcomes, to see whether the game UI is being honest with us players, or whether it is misreporting the odds and luring us players into bad game playing choices.

Yet i can forcelock 6 out of 10 master chests on average. Simples seem to be almost all the time aroun 9/10 inter is the same. But its only on my master thieve. On my dk i sware her odds are 1/10 no mater the chest difficulty lol.

goatlyonesub17_ESO · March 2021

I'm wondering whether the chance of failing to force a lock is greater when there's someone standing behind you waiting to take the chest for himself after you fail.

PizzaCat82 · March 2021

Picks are cheap. Its faster than manual, so I'm going to do it regardless of the time needed. My mental energy is better spent elsewhere.

robertthebard · March 2021

I've never actually tried to force a lock, so I haven't noticed. I just pick 'em, and, from earlier experiences from back when I first started, and people would try to distract me with AoEs and such trying to force me to fail, I take as long as possible on every lock, just in case they show up again, so I can make 'em waste their time.

Athan1 · March 2021

Odds work just about right for me. Pickpocketing odds are problematic.

Eiagra · March 2021

90% odds of success don't mean 100% -- especially if you roll in that 10% fail range almost exclusively. Pray harder to RNGesus?

Of my own anecdotal evidence, I almost always force the lock open on the first try, and rarely need a second, on most any chest/difficulty I try. I might need a third for Master chests or something. It hasn't been a big deal to me, though, so I haven't had cause to worry about it.

M_Volsung · March 2021

It's been my personal experience that waiting a few seconds before forcing it seems to make success more likely.

virtus753 · March 2021

Eiagra wrote: »

90% odds of success don't mean 100% -- especially if you roll in that 10% fail range almost exclusively. Pray harder to RNGesus?

Of my own anecdotal evidence, I almost always force the lock open on the first try, and rarely need a second, on most any chest/difficulty I try. I might need a third for Master chests or something. It hasn't been a big deal to me, though, so I haven't had cause to worry about it.

If the odds are 90% of success and you roll in the fail range "almost exclusively" on enough tries, that means there is something wrong with the stated odds. If you tell me a coin is unbiased but get 90% heads on 10,000 flips, I'm going to tell you your coin is not unbiased. The chance of an unbiased coin producing those results technically exists, but it's so exponentially unlikely to be the result of random chance that I would not accept the coin as a fair 50-50.

But we have a data set for forcing locks in which Varanis recorded over 1,000 attempts and found the chance of forcing a simple lock was close to the stated value. Or at least in 2018 it was.

If a new set of data were to suggest something has gone awry since then, then we would be well within our rights to ask ZOS to check the programming.

See, for example, the results being posted in the threads on Plentiful Harvest. At max it claims to give a 50% chance of doubling resource nodes. But the odds of pulling 175 single nodes out of 272 total 50-50 pulls is suggestive of a potential problem. And similar results are happening to quite a few people just among the forum population alone. As we get more data, we'll be able to be more certain about whether there is a bug, as it seems there might be, or whether those are just examples of very poor RNG.

trackdemon5512 · March 2021

GreenHere wrote: »

% chance accuracy aside, I've always wished that completely maxing out your lock picking skill would guarantee force picks for Intermediate chests, and 3/4 should guarantee Simples.

I get not wanting to completely eliminate the randomness for harder difficulty chests (kind of), but c'mon... can't they let us just feel like we've "mastered" picking the easy chests, at least? I HATE failing Simple/Intermediate chests 3, 4, 5 times in a row. Feels like a kick in the *** every time.

But then those with maxed out legerdemain would be unstoppable and face no risk. When you pick a lock your skill can guarantee it unlocking or not. In overworld this ensures you get an item versus someone else.

With force lock you take a risk. If you fail you're on lock pick cool down and in the overworld someone can come in there and swipe the chest from you. Seems fair seeing as you gambled and lost by going the speedy route and they succeeded from your failure and by choosing to actually pick the lock without risk.

Ackwalan · March 2021

ZOS and math have never met. All % values are way off actual % chance. It's been that way since the beginning.

Pyr0xyrecuprotite · March 2021

@goatlyonesub17_ESO, I'll echo @M_Volsung in advising you to wait 4-5 seconds between accessing the chest and forcing the lock. There seems to be a hidden "charge-up" phase when forcing locks, whereby your chance of success increases (up to the nominal maximum chance) by about 15% per second after you open the lockpicking interface. Clicking immediately on the R to force the lock has something like a 50% or more chance of failure regardless of how high you have levelled your lockpicking passive.

omnidoh · March 2021

Nah, it's more like the "random" number generator they claim they use for statistical percentages is never based upon a realistic sample size. It's based on a pseudo-random number generator that has no basis in reality.

For example, if I have a 25% chance to do <x>, then realistically, that's 1 in 4.
But purely mathematically, 25% chance could also mean that I fail 750 times, but then succeed 250 times.
A logically realistic sample rate would mean that if I fail 3 times, I should definitely succeed on the 4th, since 3 failures and 1 success would be a 25% chance to succeed out of 4 total attempts.

That's not how they write their math, so yes, it's possible to "fail" 3 or more times in a row with an 85% chance, which as we all know, is just <insert expletive here>,

zaria · March 2021

omnidoh wrote: »

Nah, it's more like the "random" number generator they claim they use for statistical percentages is never based upon a realistic sample size. It's based on a pseudo-random number generator that has no basis in reality.

For example, if I have a 25% chance to do <x>, then realistically, that's 1 in 4.
But purely mathematically, 25% chance could also mean that I fail 750 times, but then succeed 250 times.
A logically realistic sample rate would mean that if I fail 3 times, I should definitely succeed on the 4th, since 3 failures and 1 success would be a 25% chance to succeed out of 4 total attempts.

That's not how they write their math, so yes, it's possible to "fail" 3 or more times in a row with an 85% chance, which as we all know, is just <insert expletive here>,

Pseudo-random number generators works well outside a few cases like generating tons of data to analyze.
And ESO has another randomizer build in. Other players RNG is used to determine crit and probably in mob AI in addition to loot from all sort of mobs. In short its multiple RNG calls in a second so you will not get the next number in the sequence picking locks. I don't think I have had 3 fails in an row outside then on alts who don't have the force lock passive.

goatlyonesub17_ESO · July 2021

GreenHere wrote: »

% chance accuracy aside, I've always wished that completely maxing out your lock picking skill would guarantee force picks for Intermediate chests, and 3/4 should guarantee Simples.

I get not wanting to completely eliminate the randomness for harder difficulty chests (kind of), but c'mon... can't they let us just feel like we've "mastered" picking the easy chests, at least? I HATE failing Simple/Intermediate chests 3, 4, 5 times in a row. Feels like a kick in the *** every time.

Record for me is six failures in a row while trying to open an intermediate chest. Sneek! Sneek! Sneek! Sneek! Sneek! Sneek! Click... finally.

goatlyonesub17_ESO · July 2021

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

I'm wondering whether the chance of failing to force a lock is greater when there's someone standing behind you waiting to take the chest for himself after you fail.

Or even nearby. Or monsters are about to spawn within aggro range.

SeaGtGruff · July 2021

I started forcing locks because it was faster.

Then I realized that forcing a lock is guaranteed to break the lockpick, but I had so many lockpicks that I didn't care much.

Then I realized that forcing a lock doesn't give you XP. Now that CP above 810 matters, I've taken to picking locks so I get the XP for it, unless there's some strategic advantage to forcing the lock to save time.

Folkb · July 2021

I forgot you could even force them. I just manually pick them.

RevJJ · July 2021

Athan1 wrote: »

Odds work just about right for me. Pickpocketing odds are problematic.

As frustrating as it is to fail an intermediate chest four times in a row, it’s even more annoying when I get caught on a “100% success” pickpocketing attempt. This seems to be mostly in Vvardenfell.