This one is about a little experiment I did about maxing the heroes special.
I expected some funny numbers out of it, but what I found is far beyond anything I expected.
Setup: take a 3* hero/costume on 3/50 but special not maxed.
Loop: train so that the chance is between 50% and 80% ( random packages of 10 1* heroes).
Result: after 23 runs the special hasn‘t moved a single time.
Being not a maths person or developer, I only heard that RNG is hard to handle, but the following result would really be off-scale. So I guess I just did it wrong?
Assuming all runs would have been at 50%, the chance for this is about 1:4.200.000?
If you calculate it with 80% (20% chance of special not moving!) you end up with 1:2.400.000.000.000.000. Which would be ridiculous.
Nothing wrong you did. Just a wrong expectation out of a small data set.
If you have a 50% of a skill ascension, it is, most likely is implemented as: hey, computer, give me a random number between 0 and 100. If the number is greater than 50 skill will be ascended.
You did it 23 times and all generated numbers happened to be less than 50 or even 80.
Next time you might get a better luck and max skill in say 10 attempts.
I believe @JonahTheBard was attempting to create a debate thread (never actually happened that I know of?)… the idea was to take a bunch of us regular forum posters and assign us a random stance on a relatively neutral debate topic.
Excellent concept that never actually happened… unless they went and did it in secret behind my back, but I believe the reason it never happened is because good old discobot assigned an overwhelming majority of us to option 2. So much for 50/50 odds, huh? Guess he was tossing a weighted coin at the time.
While this is of course possible, think of the probabilities. What the OP is saying is true - it’s very unlikely what happened to him as of course while there is a 50% chance of it happening each time, the chance of it happening twice would be 50%*50% =25% and do this all the way up to 23 times in a row and you are getting into the tiny probability of 1 in 4 million odd as he mentioned.
Try flipping a coin 23 times and see how long it takes you to get 23 heads in a row, it will take a very long time! These odds 50% are the same based on what the OP said. Same as doing the same leveling he did but getting a special level every single time…
Again, you are right that with a small sample size, you can get anomalies and to create a meaningful analysis you need much more data however op is definitely right to say what he got is way out of expectation assuming all done correctly. If it happens again then something is definitely wrong because the odds on that would be astronomical.
Pseudo RNG will use seed numbers and a formula to create a distribution of outcomes that are in line with what you would see if you did a truly random event, except that you could recreate the outcome of you know the seed number. Therefore although this is only pseudo RNG the outcome as described should still be programmed via the formula used to happen once every 4m times. So you could be very unlucky, you could have misinterpreted something when setting up your experiment or, if you can recreate a potential bias with loads and loads more data, you could start to say the RNG could be wrong, or at least wrong on the assumption it was designed to mimic pure randomness…
I was just surprised about the odds when I calculated it.
The RNG topic is just not made for the human brain It‘s easy to go with wrong expectations.
Of course it‘s easy enough to circumvent this specific case with mono colored feeders using 100%, which I typically do with 3* costumes that tend to remain incomplete. SG introduced the 5x chance exactly to address this.
Playing a game that uses chance more often than not is not always satisfying but very addictive.
Just remember that probabilities are not realities. People who hit jackpot on the powerball lottery didn’t previously play 292,201,338 times. It’s entirely probable you went on a bad streak in this regard, but the RNG doesn’t care that you were only looking at this set of data, and in the meantime it was also calculating many other things for you (starting boards, damage on each hit, dodge percentage rolls, loot tables, etc), and those numbers weren’t all crap.
The problem with measuring one specific slice of an rng is that the RNG isn’t separated by function, it just knows to produce a number when called. There were billions of calls made between your two level up attempts between you and other players, so there’s no way to say the RNG is stuck because you just don’t have access to what had happened in between. You just get to see this very thin sliced of data.
This is also why some people seem to get every hotm with minimal effort, where others of us are several years in counting our hotms on one hand despite significant investment.
Yes, it may take a long time. But as @pinkymadigan said, this particular sequence of 23 attempts is one among millions of others and it is not one randomly chosen, because it wouldn’t be a reason to create a topic otherwise. If ascension had happened in, say, 10 attempts, it would have passed unnoticed as it does for most players.
Not only that, but it’s also important to point out that the RNG used in games is not the same as the sort of randomness that one might find in the real world.
In the real world, you flip a coin 100 times, it lands on heads X number of times, tails Y number of times. Very rarely is it 50/50, more likely 40/60, less commonly 30/70, very rarely 20/80… anything approaching 10/90, something is probably wrong, with either the coin itself or the person flipping it.
But in the case of PRNG - results like 10/90 or 90/10 are not nearly as uncommon as they would be in the real world.
posters and assign us a random stance on a relatively neutral debate topic.
It‘s easy to go with wrong expectations.