Were ascension orbs removed from rewards?

I am not smart enough to enlighten anyone on math. If you have already realized that Vegas does not exist in Krystara, then perhaps the following link will help.

And remember: Elves are not your friends. It is claimed that because Elves are Santa’s little helpers, they must be good. Spoiler alert: Santa is like the Orc Hero Class.

Thank you @Ashasekayi for the title info.

Orbs of Ascension have a very low chance to appear. For instance, from Cedric in Vault, there is only a 2.8% chance to get a Minor Orb of Ascension (~27.7% chance to get a Minor Orb from Cedric, and 11% chance for that Minor Orb to be Ascension, so overall 2.8% chance).

For Major Orb, there’s only 24.8% chance from Cedric, and of those Major Orbs, 6% are Ascension, for overall 1.4% chance.

Those are extremely low odds, and likely they are the same odds for Event rewards.

But think about it: Growth Orb replaces Souls. Wisdom replaces Traitstones. But Ascension Orbs replace entire Troops. So they SHOULD be rare. You’re essentially bypassing needing to get specific troops from chests.

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No, just honest. Some seeds in GoW code must have mutated to digital form of GMO.

You claimed that everything is kushty and and you are aware of the maths. Still you failed to mention why they don’t disclose the drop rate.
Listen young man when anyone doesn’t disclose something means there is hidden agendas or a crime.
Them disclosing such information doesn’t effect their coding or put the code at risk from hackers.
Her alias is salty for a reason

So many defence attorney’s working for free for GOW :mask: (Wear your spine when you speak plz)

What I claimed was that the response of the devs would be the same as it always is, and then I used quotes “working as intended.” I could have the court clerk read back what I said, like in that movie where Tom Cruise was a lawyer. Cuisine? Is that what it was called? Was Tom Cruise a lawyer in Cuisine?

I don’t have any control over the randomness of events. I can only control how I react to said events. I apologize if I gave you the impression that I have no spine. In truth, I have collected several since 20 Sep 2019, when I declared a War of Guilds upon 505 and their XBox allies. Which would you prefer I wear? Elven? Fey? I think I might even have a troll spine or 2 around here some place.

This is the particular post in question: Short testing of resurrection rates - #7 by akots

This user has a long posting history of stuff that required me to actually go read math books to understand, and any time I tried to pull out, “Well this test isn’t applicable because…” my research only confirmed their wisdom. I really wanted to disagree because I really really really like proving people who look smart wrong, but I never actually caught them making a mistake and in the end I learned to respect them.

There’s also a long line of people who don’t read the math books, haven’t even taken a community college stats class, but still dismiss it as “intellectual masturbation, I know how the RNG feels”. It’s one thing to be stupid and not know it, but it’s kind of disgusting when people claim ignorance gives them authority. That’s the smell of these replies and I am in no mood to deal with it. I think that’s why we stopped getting these posts. It’s en vogue today to assert you know more than a person who has studied a topic.

They painted a pretty clear picture that something is fishy in the GoW RNG. It’s also notable that while TDS had held that “wrong” trait for nearly a year with no mention of a fix in sight, within an update or so of that post coming out TDS got a different trait. The devs are better at painting over problems like this than solving them.

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Thank you for finding and sharing that post. 2017 was before my time in the forums, but I did play the game back then. I basically switched between two teams: Beasts and Goblins, before Heroes got their buff. And I was certainly frustrated every time the TDS rez’d. Infernal King too. If memory served correctly, they were both 25% chance. I’ll have to double check, but I don’t believe the Infernal King now spawns as an empowered baby dragon.

You make quite a few assumptions in your second paragraph. I don’t believe math is racist, but it can be biased. Too many unknown variables…does the ai get a buff on Infernal King respawn percentages? I don’t know, I guess that makes me stupid. Small brain, large fists, Orcses is da best.

Peace be with you. May you find the satisfaction you seek.

M not a math guy and m not insulting anyone. This is the way I talk in 4D/real life.

Ok in math : Uncertainty

For example, the term error, as used here, means the difference between a measured value and the true value for a measurement and that’s considered an error in math.
No such thing and this GOW RNG math doesn’t make sense.
And please if anyone speaks of math then demonstrate what you mean with numbers otherwise you just repeating what you heard without facts.
I say again that m not a math guy but m sure math doesn’t leave or give you uncertain value at the end :thinking:

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This paragraph was beautiful. I was wrong about you and I am glad I was wrong, even if it means I owe you an apology.

I think the way to read what I remember of akots’ posts is not that specific things like TDS / Infernal King have boosts, but that the RNG itself is flawed. They were careful to keep their conversation to the things that had been measured, but occasionally they’d wander and say something interesting off-topic.

For example, they once implied that there’s something unique about how the RNG is used that is possibly introducing the bias. The implication is the devs aren’t just asking the RNG for a number, but instead getting a result and doing more calculations with it. They never really talked about this again and it was a vague, 2-3 sentence statement. I got the feeling they’d looked at the disassembly but again, they didn’t say enough to make me feel they were making a firm statement to stand behind.

But if it were true, it’d mean whether we see a bias and what kind of bias we see could vary. Perhaps sometimes the pure RNG output is used and we get good results. Perhaps other times we get a bias, and the bias might go either way. There could be a bias in the orbs as we have observed with treasure drops.

But I think that person is gone for the same reason it won’t even matter if we gather data about the orbs: even though they did Big Brain Math, it never got an official response out of the devs and only got chuckles and jeers from players. I haven’t seen them in a long time, and I can only assume they went somewhere else to be more appreciated. It doesn’t feel good to do all that work and get nothing.

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Thanks for the reply.

So this morning I’m rolling thru Amanithrax, when the ai rips off a skull cascade on 2nd to last room before Titan can cast Earth’s Fury…4 seperate hits and he’s gone. My Highking’s roll to devour is 65%, but he misses x2 before devouring enemy team. Then next room vs Gobtruffle misses 2 more times, ballgame. 4/5 times missed at 65%. Stoopid rng, lol. I’ll get my revenge, tho it might have to wait until Monday. I’m heading to Vegas. My luck is bound to turn around.:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

gl hf

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I’ve gone 3 months without a single one
I’ve gone 2 days and got 4 out of 4
And everything in between

It’s streaky and random, nothing more nothing less

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They do exist…

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Okay wow, I’m just going to pop in and say that the drop rates of Orbs of Ascension have not been changed. We have not altered them behind the scenes, and they are still being found by players.

In the short term, it is not uncommon for RNG to look streaky. The amount of data players have access to is very small in comparison to us. It’s an individual or a few people versus us looking at the results of thousands upon thousands of players. Over time and large numbers it evens out.

I’ve spoken at length about the RNG and our drop rates in the past, and I don’t believe there is more to be gained from my continuing this conversation. If you choose to do so, please remain civil and treat each other with respect.

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@Ghaleon your comment reminded me of this TV commercial :laughing:
image http://i.imgur.com/awQTbct.gif

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I don’t feel like actually tagging Salty because I’m not exactly looking to drag her into this, but what she said is exactly what Akots’ math proved. Her conclusion is wrong and if the devs believe the RNG has a tendency to streak in the short term they should fix it because it is unfair to individual players and implies that not all players are equal.

Asterisk: an RNG is a volatile thing, and in general small trials are not a good way to measure it. I will address this further below. The problem here is applying “common sense” instead of “the kind of mathematics you spend more than four years working with to get a degree”.

The concept of “an RNG can look streaky in the short-term” is incorrect in the wide sense of how we expect an RNG to work. We expect that if 5,000 players flip a coin 10 times:

  • Half of the players will get 5/5.
  • 25% of the players will get 6/4.
  • 12.5% of the players will get 7/3.
  • The other 12.5% will get either 8/2, 9/1, and 10/0.

What a player has proved, via statistical analysis that has been accepted by people with math doctorates for at least a century, is that the GoW RNG displays a bias in the short term that works out in the long term. The test used in this particular case was specifically designed by math academics to figure out from small trials if a sequence displays abnormal out-of-expectation streaks while still displaying the expected curve in large trials.

This can be an undesirable quality in an RNG if you expect it will be frequently used for short streaks, like “a player opening 10 chests”. Imagine if 5,000 players flip a coin 10 times but:

  • 30% of players get 5/5.
  • 30% of players get 6/4.
  • 21% of players get 7/3.
  • 10% of players get 10/0.
  • The remaining 9% of players will get either 8/2 or 9/1.
  • If you add up all of the results, you’ll find them very close to 25,000/25,000.
  • (These numbers are imaginary and meant to indicate what “streaky short-term but OK long-term” might look like. Akots proved the GoW RNG does this in a post I linked above, and Salty admitted it. [Though I think Salty meant to “confirm a common sense opinion” which is incorrect, not “confirm a developer design goal”.])

This is a curve that streaks in the short-term, but works out in the long term, and it is unfair. In the original setup, exactly 50% of players get “lucky” or “unlucky”. In this setup, 70% of players are “lucky” or “unlucky”, with no guarantees about which side the RNG is tilting towards. It turns out, in this case, if you got the expected probability of 50%, you’re not lucky because you theoretically had a higher chance of better than 50%. But if the numbers shake out just right, if you look at “all pulls from all players” like the devs do, the RNG looks fine. 50,000 coins were tossed, and 25k were winners. Who cares if 70% of the players won, right?

That’s why the assertion above is very wrong. “It works out over 100,000 pulls” does not reflect that the 100,000 pulls are technically thousands of players’ individual trials. I don’t get to take some of Mithran’s lucky pulls to “make up” for my bad pulls: if I get 2 wins and 8 losses then I lose and that is permanent. So accepting “over the short-term it has a tendency to streak” means you are admitting that “it is designed to be unfair in the most common use case”.

So in a way, Salty just pointed out if you are getting the published probability in your pulls, you are unlucky because technically you should expect to be most likely to get something 2 steps away from the published rate, be it lucky or unlucky. The only way this could balance out for players is if we were able to open “as many keys as we want”.

But they’ve always fought hard to keep us from opening keys except in short batches. And you can only open chaos portals in short batches of 10. You can only open chaos orbs in short batches of roughly 1-4. But it’s OK, because the RNG is only unfair in short batches. Funny how that lines up, right? Weird how “it’s only rigged in short trials” and short trials are the only thing we can do.

This is why a lot of people hate math. Common sense does not apply. There are different rules, and it can take years to unlearn common sense so you can truly understand how probability works.

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TL;DR version:

  • The RNG is only unfair if you do like, 10 or fewer trials.
  • You can only open 4 chaos orbs or 10 chaos portals at a time, thus you can’t expect the posted rate because the RNG is unfair.
  • It’s very hard to tell if this system balances “fair” because instead of “more people get 50/50 out of a coin than any other result”, it has a weird concept of “Well, less people get 50/50, but more people get 60/40 and 40/60 so it’s OK!” That actually means the coin is rigged and doesn’t represent a 50% probability, it represents something far more complex than a simple number can represent. It also means it’s more likely an attacker can deduce things about the RNG to exploit streaks.
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Instead of having RNG, we should have different Orbs each time. To be short, you should not get a duplicate of two, same kind of Orbs, regular and major one. Would be better, if you ask me.

Personally I’d rather a currency system, where you win some kind of filthy lucre in events then you trade them in for orbs. I’d be fine with “rarer” orbs like ascension orbs costing more, or randomized chaos orbs being sold at a discount. Then players could decide what orbs they want and move at a pace metered only by their guild or personal progress.

Instead we have, “It’s fair, but it only looks fair if you can see the numbers we can’t show you, and actually if you try and use math it’s not really fair.”

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This topic has been discussed ad nauseam in the past, and while academically interesting, unlikely to produce any real traction. I’ve worked as a game developer in various capacities, and here are some things to note:

  1. You don’t generally use true random number generators when you write game code. They’re way too slow, and the requirements for “true randomness” are simply not there. Instead, you use pseudo-random number generators (pRNG), which are essentially just fancy math that produces results that feel random to humans. This is good enough for just about everything but (real-money) gambling scenarios, where a harder degree of randomness is mandated by law.
  2. You don’t generally create your own pRNG. Almost all development frameworks and programming languages come with built-in pRNG libraries. If there is fault here, it is usually in those libraries.
  3. The game client was written in C# (language) and Unity (framework), both of which have built-in generators that have passed muster for thousands of applications and games. Client-side pRNG is used for things like in-battle randomness (% chance to activate a skill, how the gems are seeded in skydrops, etc.)
  4. We know nothing about the language that the servers were written. All bets are off there. Server-side pRNG is used in things like chest opening, PvP matchmaking, and the like.
  5. Streakiness isn’t ideal in a pRNG, and there are tests that measure it in various ways. It’s almost unavoidable that some streakiness will exist in any given implementation. When I researched this in the past, C#’s pRNG measured quite favorably. It’s possible that this has changed, though unlikely.
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To address that:

  1. I’m only writing this because someone I respect did math I respect that found problems with the GoW RNG, which:
  2. We know nothing about, and isn’t client-side, so isn’t necessarily guaranteed to be the built-in C# or Unity pRNG.
  3. Further, we don’t know how the RNG output is being used in the game code and there are various manipulations or interpretations that can accidentally contribute to a bias.

I generally agree with you and trust the C# RNG for most things, but we’re looking at very strange numbers that suggest an RNG with a more severe bias than the one you’re reassuring us is OK. So like, uh, sure. The possibly different RNG you’re defending is fine, I’m not quite sure I believe its output is being used unmolested by GoW.

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