• Good day, Stranger! — Are you new to our forums?

    Have I seen you here before? To participate in or to create forum discussions, you will need your own forum account. Register your account here!

A Gateway into the Past

Sir Derf

Adept
@Laurelin

While the knee-jerk reaction to reading your math post, since you mention birthdays, is to assume you're talking about the Birthday Paradox, I don't think that's what you were trying to report. The Birthday paradox has nothing to do with Chaos Theory, and assuming you are correct in your recollection, 10/365 odds is not the typical number to pull out when discussing the Birthday Paradox; 23 people is the number usually mentioned (being the number needed to reach 50% chance there's a matching pair of birthdays in the group). Thirdly, the Birthday Paradox is looking for a pair in a group, which is a distinctly different situation from looking for your match in a group.

I did a quick search, and I did not find your article. Without reading it, I can't talk to the reasoning or conclusions. It sounds wrong. If your recollection is correct, the odds of bumping into a fellow birthday-haver is 10 times more likely than basic probability should be? That sounds like it should be easily testable, easily noticeable, and would be more well known if true.

Oh, and a final issue with the details you recollect about the contents of the article? People with the same Birthday share the same star sign; if the odds of bumping into someone with the same birthday were 10/365, then the odds of bumping into someone with both the same birthday and the same star sign would be the same 10/365.



As to your dice musings, my answer is no, it makes no difference (assuming the dice are fair). Rolling a d100 for a single event 1:100 versus rolling 2x d10 for a double event 1:100, does not make either one more or less likely than 1 in 100 chances.

(BTW, 20x d5 would not represent a 1:100 chance; individual odds multiply to compute the combined odds, so this would produce 95 trillion outcomes. You'd want to use 2x coin flips and 2x d5 to generate 1 in 100.)
 
dbrad000

dbrad000

Alchemist
The event is over, so I present ‘A Tale of Two Elvenar Cities.’ As the title indicates, I have two active cities. My main city, on Arendyll, is at the end of the tech tree (until the new chapter comes out of Beta) and my secondary city, on Felyndral, has completed Chapter 9. For the purposes of this discussion, I will call the city on Arendyll ‘Big City,’ and I will call the city on Felyndral ‘Little City.’

I finished all quests in both cities. Both cities had a fed Ashen Phoenix. On the event board, I used the same strategy in both cities: I only kept and fulfilled requests that provided a 20% chance of getting Lucky Draws. It was obvious from the start that Lucky Draws made a huge difference in advancement during the event. Even when the Lucky Draws did not give event currency, they still provided high level pieces that kept the request fulfillment flowing. I completed a couple of requests at the very beginning of the event outside of my primary strategy just to get a feel for the event mechanics, but the expenditure was minimal. For this event, I wanted the set buildings for Big City; I did not care one way or the other if I finished the set in Little City. Additionally, although I know the set buildings could be optimized without getting the last building of the set, I wanted all of the buildings in Big City so the set would fit into a nice, rectangular package.

Applicable differences between the two cities: I purchased a Stash Outpost for Big City, email rewards went to Big City, and near the end of the event, I used diamonds to purchase extra event currency in Big City to ensure I finished the set. No purchases were made for Little City at any point during the event.

In Little City, it was the best of times. The event pieces from the cups were often high level, the requests often favored the event pieces I already had on the board, and I got Lucky Draw after Lucky Draw. I got the portrait with almost ten days to go in the event, and I was only a hair’s breadth out of Gold when the event ended. All in a city where I did not care whether I finished the set.

Meanwhile, in Big City, it was the worst of times. My luck was completely different. I had to consistently build high level pieces from the lowest level pieces, the requests almost always wanted pieces I simply did not have at the time, and the Lucky Draws were few and far between. It actually became a running joke that I would go long stretches in Big City without getting a Lucky Draw while Lucky Draws were simply falling out the sky in Little City. There were many days after reaching the one quest per day milestone that I could not finish a single request with the currency provided from the daily quest combined with the daily login reward. Despite all of the expenditures listed above for Big City (email, Stash Outpost, and diamonds), Big City and Little City finished with approximately the same progress at the end of the event, with a completed set, the portrait unlocked, and League ranking solidly in Silver.

Therein lies my frustration: my opinion is that this event had too many layers of randomly determined outcomes (which, for the purpose of this discussion, I will call ‘RNG’). Each request was random, the type and level of event pieces necessary to fulfill the requests was random, the level of event pieces pulled from the cups was random, the availability of the overpowered Lucky Draws was random, and the reward gained from each Lucky Draw was random. RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG ad nauseum.

What could have been done to alleviate the RNG? Here are some ideas, in no particular order:

1) Have the cups provide only low-level pieces (say levels 1 to 3) but provide much more event currency from the quests and daily login reward. This way, we would have at least been better able to judge approximately how many clicks it would take to get the pieces we needed, and days where we only had one quest per day would not have felt so devoid of activity.

and/or 2) Normalize the requests. In other words, have the distinct requesters always ask for the same event pieces at the same level (or at least closely similar). By doing so, we would at least know what we were hoping to get if we cycled the requests, and we could work toward the pieces without waiting to see what random request they would come up with next.

and/or 3) Make Lucky Draws less game changing. Lucky Draws were, without question, the main point of delineation between success and failure in this event. The event currency and high-level pieces provided by the Lucky Draws made so much difference that almost nothing else mattered. I would have preferred to have more event currency from quests and daily logins and less reliance on a strictly random element hidden under other random elements.

So there you have it. ‘A Tale of Two Elvenar Cities.’ I hope the read did not exhaust you. As for me, after writing all of that, it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
 
Herodite

Herodite

Forum mod extraordinaire
Elvenar Team
@dbrad000 Thank you for that marvellous piece of feedback! It is really appreciated and always fed back!!!

Kind Regards

Herodite
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top