Lucky Find, Iron Mining Surplus and Two Iron in One skills are mutually exclusive.

I set up one of my geologist with all possible iron skills. Lucky Find lv1 with 15% chance. Iron Mining Surplus lv3 with 24% chance. Two Iron in One lv3 with 24% chance. My goal however was not to make an iron deposit skills overloaded geologist, but to find the extra iron deposit. I tried for 1 month, then I wrote ticket to support and I was not explained the skills are mutually exclusive and I was told just to "try harder". So I did and I noticed why Lucky Find skill is not functioning and why notoriously I can not find the extra iron deposit.

When I had one iron deposit cleared and sent geologist, then more or less 24% of the times I had in mail 30-50 iron ores. This was Iron Mining Surplus skill in work. I never found a single extra iron deposit.

When I had two iron deposits cleared and sent geologist, then more or less 24% of the times I found 2 iron deposits instead of 1 iron deposit. This was Two Iron in One skill in work. I never found a single extra iron deposit. I never also received any found by geologist iron ore in mail.

So it looks like, when you skill your geologist with Iron Mining Surplus skill, then you can not find the extra iron deposit with your Lucky Find skill. When you skill your geologist with Two Iron in One, then you need to have exactly 1 iron deposit left to discover for Lucky Find to function.

I dunno why it is so, but it is so. I would assume all skills on geologist should work, once I have them skilled up on a geologist, but it is not so. Apparently you can not have one skill with another skill. You have to pick one iron skill only for that skill to work for iron deposits. I have no idea if this is a planned game mechanics or a bug, but I found over last 2 months this is exactly how it works and nobody bothered to tell me about it or explain it anywhere. Re-skilling geologist costs 1550 gems or alternatively on re-skilling geologist you will lose around 5 manuals, 5 tomes and 6 codex. It is a costly mistake to fix.

Interesting, no wonder I have never yet found the extra iron mine despite running a solid iron chain depleting all iron mines every two days for nearly two years. I feel a moan coming on...Ravel dear could you ask the devs to clarify the situation please?

This is still being looked into. Please post any details you might have that you believe will help.

Another reason why a free skill reset event is much needed...

Mine has 2 in 1 Iron (max.lvl.) , find mined iron (max.lvl.) and look for the extra iron and marble, and I have found the extra iron mine with him

I was sending recently my geologist to find marble deposits. No extra marble deposits found either. I logged in with bb ticket about those "lucky find" issues 07.07 and they asked then devs to investigate if there are any issues with my island. Next tickets I filled returned "no issues with island" and "no issues with how skills work". This is 3rd month "lucky find" going on now and still not a single extra marble or a single extra iron deposit found on my island with "lucky find" skill. I even reskilled my geologist to lose "2 in 1" and "mining surplus" skills and keep only "lucky find" for no improved result on "lucky find" skill.

I asked few players in Newfoundland's server global about "lucky find" skill issue and quite few had zero results like I did and then some had no issues at all finding extra deposits. Those who had zero results like I do called "lucky find" skill as utterly useless and called RNG (random numbers generator) used in TSO as "extreme" in not much changing random results they were getting from it, even when adventure loot was concerned.

So, I am concerned that maybe RNG is somehow fixed for some players like me in TSO to never or almost never roll those 15% chances. For example for last 2 years I did during events and sometimes daily outside of them adventure known as "Bandit Nest" in hope to receive in loot the adventure "return to bandit nest". For last 2 years and this is around 1.5% chance I have got 5 such bonus adventures. Also despite doing for last 4 years many of the dark knight, roaring bull and so on epic adventures I received only once in loot one single Dark Castle. I think calling RNG "extreme" in few players cases, like in mine, is fully substantiated.

What I am worried about is if BB actually did not rigged RNG for some players in the Settlers Online to always consistently roll unlucky.

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Originally Posted by The_Sarmatian

So, I am concerned that maybe RNG is somehow fixed for some players like me in TSO to never or almost never roll those 15% chances.

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I would consider it beyond belief that the company would go out of its way to 'fix' things for selected players. Not only would this be incredibly unethical but if it got out (and such things always do) their reputation would be permanently trashed and players would leave in droves from not only this game but anything BB is associated with. And all that risk to avoid giving someone a virtual item that has no real value and costs them nothing. That would make no sense at all on any level. I seriously hope you are making some kind of a joke.

It's amazing how often the discussion of what "random" means comes up, and how so many people misunderstand the ideas of probability theory.

I feel your pain Sarmatian but have to agree with Xibor. I often feel the devs are secretly manipulating my own game to get back at all the bad things I've written about them over the years here in the forum and on the test site. In reality though I think they have better things to do, even when some of the bugs that arrive would indicate that they are not utilising that time to for the best.
I do think however that the very low % of some things in loot and skills are not balanced against the rng in a fair or balanced way for a good experience for the average player. We have also seen that BB can change drop rates ( thinking back to some event items, and first few weeks of new content ;) ) across the servers, very quickly when they have an agenda. However we do have a forum to express ourselves when we see it, as often its not subtle.
With skills, which are an `expensive' part of the game, especially regarding time to achieve, there should be much higher success of those skills on application. There should be far less occurrence of booby prizes as well ( thinking rarity search finding coal with 15 recyclers...doh, sounds like a wasted education! )

Well, it could be also some mysterious and undiscovered bug. Bug that affects quite few players on Newfoundland server. If I cant find for last 3 months any extra deposits with "lucky find" skill and I send my "lucky find" explorer on searches every day and quite few times too, then there are only 2 possibilities.

In the first case maybe devs are not even aware of this bug. Maybe someone managing tickets is scrapping complaints about "lucky find"'s results for some other reason. After all some players do find those extra deposits and other lucky things rather consistently. Then devs simply have no idea there is a problem on a larger scale with RNG and those 1.5% roles on adventure loot and 15% rolls on "lucky find"skill for some group of particular players on Newfoundland server.

In second case devs know very well there is nothing wrong with my island, the skills and the RNG. Exactly, as I am being told in all those tickets I've sent for last 30 days. It could still be of course bad luck with RNG rolls. However it is surprising how a quite large group of players on Newfoundland server consistently rolls badly. Something, which is maybe not obvious with adventure loot, but obviously sticks out with "lucky find" skill, which never ever finds any extra deposits of either marble or iron.

Once again the spectre of players who think they know something about how random number generators work rises it's head.

Lets look at the known facts.
With the on-going contest if you do some digging in that thread you can find out the exact make and model of RNG used to pick a winner. Armed with that information it does not take long to discover that particular RNG is flawed as it fails the industry standard tests. However this tells us nothing about the RNG used by the game all it does is lowers our confidence in the games RNG.

What we cant see from players posts is if they are making a fundamental flaw in their assumptions. One of these assumptions is the rules of real world chance do not apply in game.

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Originally Posted by Dorotheus

Once again the spectre of players who think they know something about how random number generators work rises it's head.

Lets look at the known facts.
With the on-going contest if you do some digging in that thread you can find out the exact make and model of RNG used to pick a winner. Armed with that information it does not take long to discover that particular RNG is flawed as it fails the industry standard tests.

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Where did you come up with that information? I couldn't find much in the way of criticism about random.org who is used to generate the random numbers for the wishing well (there is no way to know if that is used for in-game use, but I doubt it because I expect the return time for the hundreds of thousands of necessary random numbers coming from an external site would not be practical. So more on that later).

random.org is headed by Dr Mads Haahr, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland - this according to their web page. According to their site they use some factor of atmospheric noise to determine the random number instead of the typical programmed way (again more on that later). I wouldn't understand the science of the picking up of atmospheric noise and turning it into a seed value for a random formula but conceptually it sounds more random than how it's normally done.

I could only find one blog about someone saying that generator is skewed. They generated some numbers between 1 and 10 and kept track of the results. They found some numbers picked more than others.

Do you know what the sample size (iterations) was? 100. I nearly fell out of my chair. That is such a statistically insignificant amount that it's beyond laughable. I can't believe he posted it as valid information. You need thousands of iterations at least to have enough of a sample to have any idea of the distribution.

Now concerning random number generators. And with a disclaimer of not knowing exactly how atmospheric noise is used in this case. It's always been that the proper phrase was pseudo random number. This is because a computer is not capable of generating a true random number. It always requires a seed value to the formula and that seed value can be predictable and if you could 'freeze' every bit and reproduce it you would get the same random number. It's a calculation which doesn't change, only the seed value does depending on how you want to approach it the seed is changed every time or only periodically. I've written my own random number generators several times for the programming exercise, and I found it very interesting.

Usually the microseconds are taking from the computer clock and then ran through a modulus formula. This results in a predictable range of values but no (practically) predictable exact value. I used different modulus parameters in experiments and found they all pretty much worked on the same more-or-less. But I used thousands of repetitions sometimes letting the computer run all night doing it and found that I could get a very even spread across the range. Of course it would never be 100% even but it sure was close enough for computer games.

Based on my research and experience I see nothing that tells me you can't trust random.org. And concerning the core BB code I expect they are using a standard bif (built in function) inherit to the language which would have been well tested before the compiler or dll's or whatever programming structure is being used before BB incorporated it. Of course any idea of how the code might be structured is pure conjecture but I'd bet they didn't hand-write a pseudo random number generating routine from scratch.

Which leads to a quick (hopefully) mention of probabilities because this thread has elements of that. Remember there are two distinct questions that some people try to make the same question.
1) What is my chance of getting my 5% drop this time?
2) What is my chance of getting at least 1 5% drop if I play the adventure x times?

They are not the same question. Question 1 is easy. 5%. Each time you open the mail to see your loot it's 5%. It will never change.

Question 2 is about a sample over time where only 1 out of x needs to work. Just to keep it simple as you increase the number of attempts the chance that one of those attempts will have dropped what you wanted. And as you make x bigger the chance gets bigger. But it will never reach 100%. It just can't. Why? because in every pass there is a chance it won't drop. Therefore no matter how many attempts are made you will never be 100% sure to get one. If you could manage to make hundreds of thousands of attempts you could get to 99.99999999% but there will always be that .000000000000001 that will trip you up.

Put it this way. What's my chance of flipping a coin and it coming up heads? 50%. easy.
Let's say I flipped a coin 9,999 times and by some miracle they were all heads. What' my chance of flipping the coin and it coming up heads. 50%. That hasn't changed.
But if I ask "what's my chance of flipping a coin 10,000 and always getting heads" - that's a very different question and the odds are very much against it.

Hope any of this helps or at least might have been interesting on some level :)

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Originally Posted by Xibor

But if I ask "what's my chance of flipping a coin 10,000 and always getting heads" - that's a very different question and the odds are very much against it.

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Odds are very much against it? Well, not with TSO RNG it seems. I have even received in mail following information from BB:

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"It can happen that one of the skills doesn´t trigger for weeks on end without any fault in the game mechanism. This has been checked several times."

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How about for months on end? Was it checked for months too? Now I would be very curious about answer to this for "lucky find" skill, as this is 3rd month I still see no results from using this skill.

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Originally Posted by The_Sarmatian

Odds are very much against it? Well, not with TSO RNG it seems. I have even received in mail following information from BB:



How about for months on end? Was it checked for months too? Now I would be very curious about answer to this for "lucky find" skill, as this is 3rd month I still see no results from using this skill.

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Something I didn't include in my posts is the basic axiom that past events do not have any relevance for future probabilities. How many times it has not happened has no bearing on the odds of it happening in the future.

I know for a fact that lucky find works because I have the achievement for finding all the gold mines, therefore it must have worked at some point. I'm also not going to say that bugs can't show up without apparent warning, but the fact that there is one marble quarry that just doesn't want to be discovered could easily just be bad luck on my part and nothing else. Which reminds me I haven't been looking for that extra one for a while...

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Originally Posted by Xibor

Something I didn't include in my posts is the basic axiom that past events do not have any relevance for future probabilities. How many times it has not happened has no bearing on the odds of it happening in the future.

I know for a fact that lucky find works because I have the achievement for finding all the gold mines, therefore it must have worked at some point. I'm also not going to say that bugs can't show up without apparent warning, but the fact that there is one marble quarry that just doesn't want to be discovered could easily just be bad luck on my part and nothing else. Which reminds me I haven't been looking for that extra one for a while...

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I am sorry, but this not proof that the skill is working. I too have the achievement and I never had the skill. The achievement is awarded when you first step on the archipelago and you discover for the first time the 800 units iron deposit.

Find all the usual iron mines, build them and turn them off, then keep sending the lucky find geos out to find iron mines and they will eventually find the extra mine no matter what other skills they have. Took my geos 3 runs to find it.

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Originally Posted by Amazony

I am sorry, but this not proof that the skill is working. I too have the achievement and I never had the skill. The achievement is awarded when you first step on the archipelago and you discover for the first time the 800 units iron deposit.

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No I am sorry, because I'm specifically referring to the "find all gold mines" Achievement which I did before the archipelago and as the achievement indicates you must have the lucky find skull to do it. Therefore, it is proof that at that time the skill was necessary and did work.

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Originally Posted by Xibor

No I am sorry, because I'm specifically referring to the "find all gold mines" Achievement which I did before the archipelago and as the achievement indicates you must have the lucky find skull to do it. Therefore, it is proof that at that time the skill was necessary and did work.

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There are 2 achievements, first is Lay of the land, it requires you to find 55 deposits ( there are only 54 on main island with no skill) so when you reach archipelago with the first iron mine you get the achievement, no skill required , despite the fact that it is hinting for the Lucky find skill. Second achievement Glittering prizes require you to discover 8 gold deposits, no problem, all 8 are on main island. ( and Lucky find works with marble and iron only, not with gold)

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Originally Posted by lordloocan

Find all the usual iron mines, build them and turn them off, then keep sending the lucky find geos out to find iron mines and they will eventually find the extra mine no matter what other skills they have. Took my geos 3 runs to find it.

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I have 2 iron mines s4, 2 iron mines s5, 5 iron mines s8, 4 iron mines s6 and 3 iron mines (one of them is frozen mine) s3. On small islands I have 1 iron mine on gem bought islands and 3 iron mines on bean bought islands. All those I had before getting "lucky find" skill btw. So I have sent today my geologist with "lucky skill" 2 times to find marble. I build up all iron deposits with mines, turned them off and sent geologist 10 times to look for extra deposit of iron and as a result I found no extra deposits either of marble or iron. As it happens all the time for last 3 months.

As I understand the skill, it suppose to work, when it looks for an empty iron deposit.

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Originally Posted by Amazony

There are 2 achievements, first is Lay of the land, it requires you to find 55 deposits ( there are only 54 on main island with no skill) so when you reach archipelago with the first iron mine you get the achievement, no skill required , despite the fact that it is hinting for the Lucky find skill. Second achievement Glittering prizes require you to discover 8 gold deposits, no problem, all 8 are on main island. ( and Lucky find works with marble and iron only, not with gold)

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Interesting - usually when I'm in the forums I'm unable to also be in the game forcing me to work from memory (if the Wiki isn't specific enough, and in this case it wasn't) - and working from memory is a liability for me at times.

It appears we are both correct. Finding all the gold mines does not require the skill so you are correct in that and the skill does not affect gold, so you are correct again. I thought it did.
Finding the 55 deposits does, and I did that long before the archipelago, therefor I am correct that at that time the skill was required and did work.

So now going forward that skill may not have the value it once did and leaving it a mystery of what now exactly "one more than the maximum" means.

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Originally Posted by BB_Ravel

This is still being looked into. Please post any details you might have that you believe will help.

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Session based issue (ie fast-forward failing)?

After few weeks trying on marble deposits my geologist with "lucky find" skill, I did find extra marble deposits. 3 times actually in 2 different spots in sector 9 and sector 4. So skill works on marble deposits without many issues. I still am unlucky finding extra iron deposit.

So I was wondering what differs my marble deposits from iron deposits. There were 2 factors. 1st was the arctic mine with 8k iron ore, so I depleted it and let it collapse. 2nd is me having 4 more iron deposits on additional small islands. I have no way to abandon those small island sectors. The mechanic of the game is not allowing demolishing the last storage in sector.

I think this is bug. Serious bug, which was introduced with new island map updated with the small islands. So why devs can't fix it on my island?

It is like 4th month I am sending my geologist with "lucky find" skill and not discovering any extra iron deposit at all.

It is 5th month now. Still "Lucky" find geologist did not find the extra iron deposit. :(

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Originally Posted by The_Sarmatian

It is 5th month now. Still "Lucky" find geologist did not find the extra iron deposit. :(

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Five months is a little on the long side when it comes to RNG. I've forwarded your findings about this issue to the devs - thank you for your continued feedback.

Hi!

I skilled about half year ago one of my jolly geologists with "Lucky Find" skill. From this time I am using it exclusively in my daily searches for new iron deposits. However I never found the extra iron deposit that suppose to be located in sector 8. For period of 2 weeks I used the same "Lucky" geologist to search for marble, because I was under impression the skill does not work at all, but it did. It found me 3 extra marble deposits in 2 extra locations. The support, which I contacted told me the "barren" periods of searches with "Lucky" skill can be max 2-3 weeks, but in my case it is more like months then weeks. Recently I checked on few players, who can constantly find the extra iron deposit in sector 8. They either did not conquer the small islands or did not buy all small island sectors so...

Can anyone, who bought with beans and gems all small island sectors like I did, confirm, that the extra iron deposit in sector 8 is still possible to discover with "Lucky Find" skill?

Merged.

It is 6th month now. Still "Lucky" find geologist did not find the extra iron deposit. :'(

I've talked with people on my server, who can't find extra iron deposit. Like me they have bought the sectors on small islands for gems. They have noticed that not only extra iron deposit is failing to show up. There is also another discrepancy. On small islands there is one sector (it is bought with beans) with 3 iron deposit slots in which 2 iron deposits interchangeably appear. After purchasing the 3 extra small island sectors for gems, the 2 iron deposits are showing up constantly in only 2 out of those 3 iron deposit places. It is like 1 of those deposit places was disabled for iron deposit to show up in. On my island I never found iron deposits in all 3 of those iron deposit places. Only in 2, but then my first sectors on small island I bought mostly with gems.

I have a problem with finding third iron deposit in new S2:
http://prntscr.com/d6fvqs

I was able to find it only once, but after that - no luck.Does anyone knows what is the catch.
I have explorer with ability to find extra iron deposit, no success.

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Originally Posted by mrnjau

I have a problem with finding third iron deposit in new S2:
http://prntscr.com/d6fvqs

I was able to find it only once, but after that - no luck.Does anyone knows what is the catch.
I have explorer with ability to find extra iron deposit, no success.

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was removed from game some time ago

OMG I FOUND THE EXTRA IRON DEPOSIT!

Yes. I started my adventure with "Lucky Find" like at the end of April last year. It took like 11 months, but finally I found it. It is beautiful 500 iron ore deposit in sector 8. Now I will place there industrial mine... and all iron ore refill i can find and pray it never runs out... It was a long wait! But I found it! finally!

YAY!

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Originally Posted by The_Sarmatian

OMG I FOUND THE EXTRA IRON DEPOSIT!

Yes. I started my adventure with "Lucky Find" like at the end of April last year. It took like 11 months, but finally I found it. It is beautiful 500 iron ore deposit in sector 8. Now I will place there industrial mine... and all iron ore refill i can find and pray it never runs out... It was a long wait! But I found it! finally!

YAY!

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Congratulations Sarmatian! Now never let it exhaust... ever! :P

Well I guess my problem is from the same opera - or similar. Two of my geologists finished simultaneously iron search. One of them has shown one message, and the other - two messages - he found two mines at once (and I had more to find). Well... there were only two mines noted on the map to build.