See also:
(in which the total sample between all of them was much smaller, showed a trend, was investigated, was determined to not be working correctly, and subsequently “fixed” but the fix was not specified)
There is also a precedent of them accidentally leaving an entire kingdom off the tribute table for several months (it was impossible to tribute from that kingdom, skewing the values).
We could see a trend away from expectation with any given data set, no matter how big, it just becomes increasingly unlikely and eventually enough to be called “statistically impossible”. So the while the sample isn’t conclusive, there is no way we’d be able to get that kind of data from our end either way. At the same time, this isn’t the 415th post of someone complaining about AI resurrects, devours, explodes, cascades, or anything else supplying anecdotal evidence and not actually recording anything. We have 1000 samples here. Not 1000 coin flips. 30,000 independent trials grouped into 1000 sets of 30 consecutive trials each, grouped into smaller sets of 100 that show a trend. I think this deserves a bit more scrutiny than “yeah, but it could still happen because random is random so everything is working fine as is, but if you showed me a million samples, then we’ll talk”.
This isn’t the same as the 415 other threads complaining about RNG or AI bias because they have a “feeling” or they saw that one time that one extremely improbable event happening or a bunch of “bad” events happening more than they think they should but without recording any hard data, or with them starting with skewed data by recording the edge case first and ending on another arbitrary number where they got a result confirming their assertion. If it was, I’d be right there siding with the skeptics. I think this warrants investigation, or at very least a response. That way, when the next person comes up claiming they “feel” their tributes are slightly lower than the expected 26%, I can just say “yeah, but its actually 24.8% because they are rolled independently but you can’t double tribute the same kingdom. Here is the dev response. Assuming that, these numbers are now much closer to the expected values”, and save them from either thinking the game is somehow “cheating” them or gathering 1000 tribute samples (months of data gathering, mind you) and have it just brushed aside by “yeah, RNG is RNG, what can you do?”.