Is the random really random?

[Arnwald]

Does anyone else feel that events that have a low probability (<12%) are disproportionately rare in recent months?

I have only received bonus seahorse food once during the Elvarian Games, although I use almost exclusively 77- and 78-point rings. And it is similar with AWs. I use my Tome of Secrets to produce broken shards for months. I've already got dozens of them without getting the last rune. I have two cities, the situation is the same in both. The only difference is that it started a few months earlier on the EN server. It is as if an update has taken place, which came to the EN servers first.

Has anything changed, or did random choose me to test my patience? Those broken shards suit me quite well, but the fact that I don't get any seahorse food bonus means zero chance of getting all the artifacts.

 

[Gargon667]

It´s just random.

If you want seahorse artifacts the 77 and 78 are close to the worst choice you have this time. Go 21>19>41>51>77>28>78

The shards annoyed me royally, going in after like 3 tries and then having to rebuild the thing, so you´re just lucky there.

 

[Almondum]

Heya Arnwald,

I'm certain you already know, that a true "random" in programming is something very hard to accomplish, an ongoing natural event must be used to accomplish it (the computer uses the event to generate random data).
What is widely used is "pseudorandom", where an algorthm uses a big "spreadsheet of data" to generate "random" values. This pre-determined data is called "seed".

Assuming that your observation is not influenced by "perception", then what could've happened is the Devs changed the "seed" that was used in past events and replaced it with a new one.

Good luck!
Almond

 

[Arnwald]

It´s just random.

If you want seahorse artifacts the 77 and 78 are close to the worst choice you have this time. Go 21>19>41>51>77>28>78

The shards annoyed me royally, going in after like 3 tries and then having to rebuild the thing, so you´re just lucky there.

I'm not talking about whether 77/78 is the best solution or not. I use it for other rewards that suit me better. But when I see there a 6% chance of getting the seahorse food and I know it's very far from reality, I can't be happy with it.

 

[Gargon667]

I'm not talking about whether 77/78 is the best solution or not. I use it for other rewards that suit me better. But when I see there a 6% chance of getting the seahorse food and I know it's very far from reality, I can't be happy with it.

A 6% chance is not very big, so your chance of getting it is very small, not surprising if you don´t get it. Sure statistics says you should get 6 of them if you take it 100 times (which you probably haven´t as that would require you to spend money in addition to never taking a different one). So getting less than 6 is not very unlikely. Even 0 (or in your case 1) is not terribly unlikely. Depends how many you have actually taken.

 

[Sir Derf]

Did someone call for some semi-pointless math?

Odds of getting n out of 100 Seahorse food from a 6% ring = (0.06^n)*(0.94^(100-n))*Combin(100,n)

0​	0.21%​
1​	1.31%​
2​	4.14%​
3​	8.64%​
4​	13.38%​
5​	16.39%​
6​	16.57%​
7​	14.20%​
8​	10.54%​
9​	6.87%​
10​	3.99%​

First observation - nearly equal chance you could get 4, 5, 6 or 7 Seahorse food.

Second observation - About 1 in 20 people following this strategy could expect to see 0, 1 or 2 Seahorse food.

 

[Gargon667]

But that´s out of 100, the average Joe will not be opening 100 of those rings as that would be more than 7k Seahorse power
So the chances for fewer hits will increase in practical gameplay.

Are the numbers for this event similar to last event? Then we´d have to assume 5.5k (?) seahorses. So more realistic would be around 70 rings or less since even @Arnwald in this case didn´t do 100% of them.

 

[Sir Derf]

Picking a few nits...

Nit 1

@Gargon667 , I worked out the odds out-of-100 because you, in the immediately preceding post, described out-of-100 scenarios... so...

Odds of getting n out of 70 Seahorse food from a 6% ring = (0.06^n)*(0.94^(10070-n))*Combin(10070,n)

0​	1.32%​
1​	5.88%​
2​	12.94%​
3​	18.72%​
4​	20.02%​
5​	16.86%​
6​	11.66%​
7​	6.81%​
8​	3.42%​
9​	1.50%​
10​	0.59%​

Most likely 1:5 chance of getting Seahorse food 4 times.
4:5 chance of getting 2-6 Seahorse food.

Slightly higher chance of getting slightly less Seafood out-of-70 than out-of-100, as now slightly more than 1 in 20 people getting only 0 or 1 Seahorse food.

And, since I'm picking nits, Nit 2...


@Almondum , even when assuming that he has a correct recollection that his current experience is worse than his past typical experience, this does not necessarily point to the seed having been changed, as it could just a as easily been that, with the same algorithm and the same seed, that he just naturally got a worse outcome this time than before.

Edit-Corrected two 100s for 70s

 

[Arnwald]

I understand that a 6% probability does not mean that I will definitely get 6 out of 100. I was just interested in the fact that I had a similar experience in my EN city during the previous event too and now I have little success in both my cities.

 

[Sir Derf]

RNG gonna RNG