Probability Explained (Salty Style With Weird Examples)

Even just cursory tests show that Fizzbang is not actually 50/50 explode versus buff. Not for me, not for the AI, never has been. Explode I’d put at at least 2/3, possibly even 3/4 of the time, but I haven’t gathered enough hard data to confirm. The description is just not clear on this, and most people assume since the text says explode OR buff random stat that each one has equal chance to happen. Spooky Imp is an example of where they have done this before with another OR spell, as the description states it will transform a random enemy OR give all allies magic, but is actually 2/3 magic buff and 1/3 transform.

(source: Knight Time - #40 by Sirrian)

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Oh shit, really? I had always assumed that when a spell says X or y that the odds are equal between the 2. Had never considered that it might be stacked one way or another. Damn!

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My issue is more about the variance/deviation than randomness or whatever.

  • why one player gets one Mythic with 10 Glory keys?
  • why another player doesn’t get one Mythic with 1000 VIP keys?
  • so in short, why the deviation is so high?

People take notice of — and report — extreme events. People who feel exceptionally lucky (or unlucky) are much more likely to brag/complain about it than people who fall right at expectation. If all you go by is what people self-report, you will see a skewed distribution that doesn’t reflect reality.

How many news reports have you seen talking about people who lost the lottery?

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As far as I understand the issue - because math scares me - Salty states that yes, Mythic drops is an highly improbable event that’s perfectly random.

So we osserve a lot of pseudo-patterns, as the human mind’s job is to find and recognize patterns it tries to do so even in senseless sequences.

Outside of our minds, perfect randomness is clumpy. I get a Mythic in 50 chests then nothing for six months, and I could get nothing for six years at that.

Heck, I went to church raffles all my life and never won a thing. Here is the same randomness, only with a lot more tickets.

On the other hand there’s an actual human being that actually won a national lottery twice.

Opposite that, RNGesus isn’t perfectly random. It’s a good thing, we wouldn’t like to have a board that’s solid Skulls or having 30 yellow falling from the sky or never getting a Purple in an entire battle. And it would happen, randomness is chaotic that way.

When I grow up…I want to be Ron Swanson.

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Yeah you could be right. But there are not so much players coming from nowhere posting their low/high luck and disappearing. And I’m not sure that players are fully aware of their real status (i.e. unlucky/normal/lucky).

So many players reported that they didn’t drop the mythic here (i.e. lost the lottery)… So what do you want to say with this analogy?

But I agree that what I said wasn’t based on 1,000 known trials, as everything that can be said by one player about this game…

It could be also an issue with the pseudo-RNG. Or how devs define their distribution.

The difference is that devs can choose the deviation of the distribution.

Before this topic that was created by Salty and will eventually be locked by Salty. Here are some key points to remember.

  • With a raffle there is a guarantee to be at least one winner. And you can increase your odds of winning by buying more tickets.
  • With the lottery, eventually, there will always be a winner. And you can increase your odds of winning by buying more tickets.
  • With GoW chests… There’s no guarantee that a Mythic will be won by anyone. And whether you open 10 chests or 1000. The odds won’t change at all.

So a better analogy would be…

arcade-claw-machine

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I think it’s better to stop with analogies when we want to have a serious discussion.

Skills can be so much important with crane machine (but maybe it’s something due to the special crane machines available in Japan)…

In a raffle, or if you like in a national lottery, there is a finite number of tickets and a finite number of prizes. In GOW chests, that are infinite, there is an infinite number of prizes.

Every time you use a key, somewhere, a thousand sided dice rolls.

You might get something interesting.

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This topic was started with a pony and rainbows analogy.:thinking:

My apologies sir… The claw machine analogy was clearly over the line.

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claw machines usually have set pay out rates ie turn 1-20 weak claw turn 21 claw is strong enough to pick up prize then resets

This conversation didn’t exactly go where I expected it too, which in hindsight I should have expected.

If it gets to heated or “illuminati confirmed” I will close it.

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Hmm… Sounds a lot like VIP chests. Jk


I put a “jk” there so devs think I’m joking.

I don’t blame the devs anymore for “bad luck”. I blame the AI… It’s clearly become self aware like Skynet.
Before you know it… You’ll have to match 4 gems to start your car in the morning. And if you ever might get laid off from your job one day through no fault of your own. “Just RNG man” is what your boss will say is the reason for your termination.

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Maybe next week you can start a topic about how “Goblins work as intended”. Or “Which religion is the best religion”. You know… light hearted topics like that.

The last person who talked about the “illuminati” got banned from the forums. It’s going to be my new safe word in real life.

There are a lot of voices of reason in this thread.

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I swear the last person who brought up illuminati was me only recently! :laughing:

@Courtaud is right, lots of reasonable humans.

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I’m sorry I helped derail a well meaning topic.

RE: “Oh but what about when something low-probability I don’t want to happen happens a lot, hmm? If this were true the RNG would have to be broken!”

There’s no probability fairy that flies around the universe and makes sure the odds are enforced. If the RNG is NOT broken, then you ought to be able to open 100,000 gem chests and never see a mythic.

If it upsets you that you are playing a game that does not guarantee certain outcomes over time, then it’s more productive to ask for the RNG to “cheat”. It is not impossible to write an algorithm that behaves like this:

if (tries > pity) {
    giev_shiny()
    tries = 0
} else {
    giev_random()
    if (prize_dropped) {
        tries = 0
    } else {
        tries += 1
    }
}

That’s an algorithm that will use random chance to drop troops until the number of tries without a “prize” like a mythic reaches some pity threshold. After you reach the pity threshold, you get the “prize”. There are games that use this, it’s not hard to implement.

But it’s a matter of opinion whether it’s appropriate for GoW. I think, slow as it is, having the Soulforge negates the need for it. It’d be neat to know if you spend some number of keys you get what you want, but it’s also not so neat to be able to get everything in a hurry. We think it is, but studies show we really like to be frustrated.

I gripe about the ethics of gambling, but in general if the game isn’t rigged in favor of the house even people without addiction issues do NOT find it fun.

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