Is there some sort of limit on how many adventures are available in a server?
I have 3 explorers and I send them out on adventure hunts all the time. I used to get at least 1 adventure out of the three, occasionally 2 and very rarely 3. Now, since the CQ started, all I get is map fragments. I know that more people needed adventures during the CQ, but does this mean that there are fewer adventures to go round?
Yeah, your not the only 1 who is experiencing this but remember it is all down to luck if u find any. 74% chance u will get mf's on the easy adventure search. Basically u need 4 explorers to find 1 adventure through each search. Not great odds!
I feel u there guys, the drop rate of adv from explorers and granite from adv loots are very very very low chance of getting now, am lucky if i find a adventure a week with 5 explorers, and when i do its either sons of the veld or seculeded experiments, and loot is worse, i'd be happy with exotic logs but ll i get is titanium ore and saltpeter, granite or logs i only get 2 out of 10 adv,
Can't say I'm having the same issue with granite. As a level 33 player I'm in no need for granite yet, but I tend to keep finding it.
For the advantures though, I also have the feeling there's a limit: as soon as got 5 adventures in store, all I found was 3 map fragments.
There´s no limit to the number of adventures you can own, and the number does not influence the explorers search. Neither does how much granite you own, or anything else you can think of. It is amazing how superstitious the human mind gets when facing absolute randomness. We just can´t accept it, and will try to influence it in any way imaginable, or start fantasizing about the conspiracies behind our bad luck.
If in doubt, ask a roleplayer or wargamer about dice... :P
I cannot be absolutely sure that bb cannot in some way manipulate the searches, but I veery much doubt it.
Did you ever read a thesis on "random behavior"? I read several and I can tell you that you didn't use the best example.
Rolling a dice (IN REAL LIFE) is not as random as you would think, since there are quite some things influencing the outcome:
- how do you keep the dice in hand before rolling it; always with the 6 up?
- are you always rolling it on the same table with limited lenght/width?
- do you always use about the same strength to roll it?
Professionals for sure will pay attention to such details, herewith making the absolute randomness less absolute.
So, this bring us back to the non-real life, where computer programmers use mathemetical random generators. Did you ever try to understand the formulas behind the random generators? I did; I even checked and programmed the formulas described in a few thesis. Differences are huge; some were even not resulting in randomness at all.
So in the end it all comes down to how the settler development team programmed it. Did you try to get absolute randomness? And if so, did they use the right formula for doing so?
A decidedly non-technical take:
It is difficult, in real life, to find a "perfectly spherical chicken" but I think, as an RL example, Harald_Villraade hit the proverbial nail on its head.
We like patterns, a lot, and if there isn't one to find we will often create one simply because it makes more sense to us. In-game, much like in RL we tend to notice things only when we seek them specifically or when they behave in a manner that disagrees with how we feel they should behave and the conclusions we draw from what we notice don't always reflect how things truly are.
This conversation comes up fairly often here, the first Crisis Quest with its insane requirements to "get lucky" filled the forum with posts and eventually gave us the delightful: Nostril Methodand I remember many conversations about the useless abundance of Exotic Wood, back when very few people were a high enough level to need it. Now that many of us do need it our simply using it instead of stockpiling it is often read as a change in the game's programming. Too, while I know many people who've done SFtR hundreds of times and found no Castle, I also know people who've done it once and found one and one friend has five.
Back to the "technical":
Goodness only knows what goes on in the minds and fingers of The Powers but my Explorers go out and come back with... things. Sometimes stacks of pretties, sometimes exactly what I want, and many sometimes's nothing I feel is useful which seems to be exactly what the numbers predict. I have a silly number of Adventures and yet they bring them and I've done SFtR many times and have no Castle but that taken with all those who do have them seems also to fit. Though I may not like it much.Originally Posted by MrBranch
Did they manage absolute randomness (within the listed percentage chances)? I'm afraid I've no idea but I do agree wholeheartedly with this:
Edit: There are times the chances for things do change, like recently when the new Adventures were added to the Explorers searches. Naturally percentages had to be juggled to make room for them, but I really don't believe BB tweak chances nearly as often as we think they do, nor do I think they tucked away bits of programming like that which stops my music channels playing "Fernando" at me 23 times in a row. They could have, I suppose, but it just seems profoundly unlikely while our continued hunt for patterns explains things much more simply.I cannot be absolutely sure that bb cannot in some way manipulate the searches, but I veery much doubt it.
Last edited by Iolanthe; 08.06.13 at 16:07.
Iolanthe, normally I'd be in complete agreement but for me there was a complete 'sea-change' following a maintenance last November.
Apart from my eternal curse never to receive a White Castle, most of the other stuff generally played fair with the laws of chance. It seems to be more than coincidence that since that time, TO prices for the goods which seem no longer to appear have rocketed. If this is a bad streak, then it's a heck of a long one!
My French and German accounts fare a little better, German explorers have recently been finding plenty of advs, and last night IOP actually coughed up a Motherly Love on the French, very noticeable considering the number of times we've been forced to play it lately.
But even these two show a significant shift to favouring e/w over granite, and any variance usually means saltpeter or tit ore.
One major exception, the new adv Lost Skull has so far been quite fair on the granite drops.
I do get what Harald intimated, it does 'feel' as if supply of certain resources has been biased one way rather than another, making aspects of the game seem somewhat out of balance since the apparent shift.
We love our new CM.
Newfoundland: 20th November 2011 to 25th November 2014. RIP
It was good while it lasted.
6 times in a row 3 map fragments; starts to get close to winning the lotery when doing the chance math. And that chance it kept low on purpose.
It might be suspicious me...but I sense programming that links the chance for finding adventures to the amount of adventures you already got...
And, since this is a commercial game, it would make sense to have such programming done. Money is made via the shop; why would all of us go to the shop if you can find the adventures via your explorer?
Last edited by MrBranch; 08.06.13 at 19:38.
Nogbad, your No Castle streak gives me pains. It's just brutal. (Not laughing, really...but it's just so impressively awful! :/) If there were any way I could (and assuming I had one) I would happily hand it over.
Something may well have shifted in the last better-part-of-a-year, I'm not saying things here never change, but that I sincerely doubt they change as often or as whimsically as we think. I can't say I remember a specific change last November though I do recall looking in a few months back on a very annoyed Granite-less thread on a day I'd had three Granite drops from three Adventures. Course all that tells us is that there is Granite out there and that I chanced into it while other players did not.
As far as trade prices go I can't help wondering if a large part of that isn't simply due to our actually using the harder to find resources. For a long time most Islands had little need of it but now many of us feed Granite to our Islands at an alarming rate and prices that began sky high when fewer people could do the Advs that gave the most then fell when there was a surplus have now risen again as demand has out stripped supply.
Only six in a row? Not bad.
Having watched this conversation play out what feels like (but clearly isn't) countless times and over various resources (I'm betting it will be Titanium soon, course I could be wrong.
Last edited by Iolanthe; 08.06.13 at 19:52.
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