So I tracked 2,000 drops
The purpose was to get an idea of their model and figure out what was the best way to obtain the infinite amount of gear required. It wasn't really to find out what their exact "drop rate" is. If y...
Forum Discussion
"Tiggus;894153" wrote:"sneeekypants;894005" wrote:
The long stretches bothered me a lot as well, there are an infinite number of examples in the game where the incredibly unlikely happen, repeatedly. ...
I also suspect that the game artificially boosts "streaks" (both winning and losing), as I've witnessed being extremely lucky or unlucky much more than in natural randomness (e.g. dice).
It's also very easy to do, since the computer can clearly identify on each coin toss what's a win an what's a lose: just seed the RNG to alternate 200 "unlucky" outcomes (say 30% of success) with 200 "lucky" ones (say 70%). On average over the long term, you still perceive it as balanced, and on average on all players, it's also balanced. But your perception will alternate extreme frustration with feeling powerful and lucky. I wouldn't be surprised that psychological studies show that this reinforces addiction (or other factors that lead to spending).
But without access to the source code, this one is a very hard one to demonstrate by statistical observation alone.
I'm not sure about this. My math on loss streaks showed that we should really be expecting LONG loss streaks. Long win streaks are orders of magnitude less likely (assuming a 20% droprate, having 2 wins in a row is less likely than having 14 losses in a row...). And both should occur in a typical stun gun (or cuff) farming run.
That said, you could actually test for this one quite easily (unlike @Shax's hypothesis, which is virtually impossible to test for, assuming they maintain the overall droprate amongst the population, and your own collection, over time). I'm not quite sure what test you'd have to use to calculate the probability of your streaks occurring. Probably some kind of entropy test, and you'll need a lot of data. But at least you're not assuming any external variables, just that CG fucks with the droprate to make it not completely random, but still even out over time.
EDIT: actually, @Shax: the OP already seems to reject your hypothesis (unless the variation between droprates is very small), given that he finds that the only two variables he needed to explain droprate are its rarity (white, green, blue, purple, yellow) and the minimum amount of energy required to farm it. So your hypothesis seems to be rejected already.
