random loot

[SmurfAsH]

And your missing the point, it's not just you flipping coins.

And you assume every roll is unique for each and every result..
Just take a look at how geo's are working nowadays.. There you may get results within seconds from removing to finding at same spot - conclussion, result from that search did not come from an unique roll.

[SmurfAsH]

lol I don't even know what to say to xibors post, except maybe I don't understand it. so let's put the maths aside...

would it be a good idea to increment the drop rate if you don't have any luck with buildings etc?

My suggestion about this.

Spoiler

So, adventure loot still need to be adjusted, but BB devs are way lost to make it happen. Though it wouldn't be that hard to "get the framework right"..

Start with..

• Introduce a new non-tradeable adventure currency, eg Skulls, usable to increase drop chance of special loot.
• Let every adventure have a "special loot slot" containing either something "special" (a buff, building or follow-up adventure) or some (amount depending on adventure difficulty) Skulls.

That way a rubbish drop chance" doesn't have to be that rubbish every time (but I don't think it should be possible to gain a 100% special drop chance this way - more likely 30%-ish at most).

Let's say every drop chance boost would have a Skull cost equally to adventure difficulty and, to get maximum boost, needed to be spent that many times equally to adventure difficulty.
That would ATM (still need some tweakings) make..
VLT having a Skull drop of 8, a drop chance boost cost at 8 Skulls per tier and a total cost at 64 Skulls (8 Skulls x 8 tiers);
..while..
WotS would get a Skull drop of 3, a drop chance boost cost at 3 Skulls per tier and a total cost at 9 Skulls (3 Skulls x 3 tiers).

[Dorotheus]

And you assume every roll is unique for each and every result..
Just take a look at how geo's are working nowadays.. There you may get results within seconds from removing to finding at same spot - conclussion, result from that search did not come from an unique roll.

Pity the evidence shows otherwise, If they worked the way you say they do then you would find your guildmates and yourself would be getting exactly the same loot drops for every adventure you shared lootspots with. The simple fact is even way back 35 years ago computers were generating 50-60 random numbers a second, todays systems with multi cores running 1000's of times faster have no problem generating a new roll every time a players gameplay calls for one.

[SmurfAsH]

Pity the evidence shows otherwise, If they worked the way you say they do then you would find your guildmates and yourself would be getting exactly the same loot drops for every adventure you shared lootspots with.

Pity your knowledge flaws again. Final outcome depends on the formula and random generated numbers are seldom the only variables there. If you'd paid some (more) attention to how geo's are working nowadays (compared to just a year ago) you'd see how predictable some outcome could be (depending on timeframe et c).

The simple fact is even way back 35 years ago computers were generating 50-60 random numbers a second, todays systems with multi cores running 1000's of times faster have no problem generating a new roll every time a players gameplay calls for one.

Still, it's much faster to use pregenerated numbers instead of calling for a new one for each and every.

[Xibor]

[Durin_d]

Geologist finding a deposit has nothing to do with chance. They will find a deposit if they can. The geologists skills are another thing.

With a little help of network monitoring with Chrome developer tools we can find out that the game servers use Java as a programming language (at least in the web interface) and with my limited knowledge of Java I could presume that the server code uses the standard (and easiest) java.util.Random class to provide all the random number that are needed for the game. Of course this class doesn't provide "pure" random numbers but it is used to generate a stream of pseudorandom numbers using a 48-bit seed.
My knowledge of pseudo random number generator is very limited so I can't say if that generator is good or not and also it depends how it's used and that we can't tell without seeing the source code of the servers.

When you are talking about the chance of getting a certain amount of successful loot from a specific amount of trials (10 heads from 15 toss) you are talking about Binomial distribution. It calculates the probability of drawing a certain number of successes (or a maximum number of successes) in a certain number of tries, given a population of a certain size containing a certain number of successes, with replacement of draws (Google sheets function is BINOMDIST(num_successes; num_trials; prob_success; cumulative))

[Durin_d]

I did some testing. This is not to show how loots are generated but to show how the java.util.Random works. The two codes use java.util.Random to provide a double value between 0.0 and 1.0. The random number generator is created for each number separately to more accurately simulate the usage in distributed environment.

The first code uses the default constructor Random() that sets the seed of the random number generator to a value very likely to be distinct from any other invocation of this constructor. the other code uses the system time millis (the current system time in milliseconds) as a seed.

Testing with these the first code (with Random()) I get less than 0.03 from the prng in 1-200 tries but with the other code that uses the system time millis the code it takes 1-500000 (and more) tries. The problem with the second one is that the code is run so fast that the prng is given the same seed making it to repeat the same numbers it generates.

This shows that with bad design the random number generator(s) can be made to generate non-random numbers.

This is how to run the code (you need Java SDK) to find how many tries it take to get random number between 0.0 (inclusive) and 1.0 (exclusive) that is less than 0.03 (so to get 3 or less from 100)

javac Random_test.java
java Random_test 0.03

import java.util.Random;


public class Random_test {

    public static void main(String[] args){
    
    int loop=0;
    
    double search = Double.parseDouble(args[0]);
 
    boolean not_found = true;
    while (not_found){
        
        Random prng = new Random();
        
        double num = prng.nextDouble();
        System.out.println(num);
        loop++;
        if (num<search)
            not_found = false;
        }
 
    System.out.println(loop+" iterations");
    }
}

import java.util.Random;


public class Random_test {

    public static void main(String[] args){
    
    int loop=0;
    
    double search = Double.parseDouble(args[0]);
 
    boolean not_found = true;
    while (not_found){
        
        long millis = java.lang.System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.out.println(millis);
        Random prng = new Random(millis);
        
        double num = prng.nextDouble();
        System.out.println(num);
        loop++;
        if (num<search)
            not_found = false;
        }
 
    System.out.println(loop+" iterations");
    }
}

[Xibor]

I won't quote the entire post Durin_d but nice work - you write nice looking code. On the second one yes - that would happen on a fast processor, but I'm surprised the milliseconds don't change for 50,000+ loops. That's a really fast processor.

At any rate, I never reset the seed before each request. I usually coded so that it was done periodically - in this game I would suggest when the player logs in, or perhaps at 00:00 +- a random variable perhaps in case they are the type that stay logged in all the time. Regardless, you are correct that there is no way to know what code base they are using and while it's java / java script for the browser interface the actually code running on the server could be just about anything. I suspect C# or C++, but that's just a guess.

Cheers for the research - I find probability theory and game mechanics interesting if anyone hadn't noticed

[Durin_d]

in this game I would suggest when the player logs in

If the login time is used to seed the prng it could lead to a situation where the player logs in at the same time every day and the same seed is used every time and the same numbers would be generated. Ofc this would depend on how accurate time is used for the seed.

My guess is that the prng is created separately every time it's needed i.e. when the loot is generated, or specialist skills are used.

I was surprised that the basic Random() constructor worked as well as it did. The OpenJDK that I used has implemented a good way to generate the seed value.

[Xibor]

If the login time is used to seed the prng it could lead to a situation where the player logs in at the same time every day and the same seed is used every time and the same numbers would be generated. Ofc this would depend on how accurate time is used for the seed.

Agreed but I would assume at least milliseconds would be used (kind of standard) and the odds (pun intended) of hitting that same number each day are astronomical. If they use something like minutes then that could indeed produce a pattern for you. But then to see the same results you would have to do the exact same things (that would use random events) each day in the exact same order which I also think is very unlikely.