What is RNG and how does it work

"Rath_Tarr;c-2215322" wrote:

"Calo_Nord;c-2215302" wrote:

"Antario;c-2215119" wrote:
I also have the feeling the RNG in SWGOH has a pattern.
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But that is just a feeling. And feelings are not logical. RNG is.

Most RNG actually is deterministic and has a finite period meaning it does follow a pattern and the pattern repeats itself. A few important things to note are:

The pattern statistically speaking does a reasonably good job mimicking randomness (although some rng methods have better statistical properties than others. Mersenne Twister was popular for a long time but has known flaws).

The period is large like 2^128 large which basically means even if the same pattern was used for everything you do in swgoh the entire time you’ve played SWGOH and if you passed your account onto your children and then your children’s children and so on it would be a very very long time before the pattern ever repeated.

But that’s most likely not going to happen anyway because in reality it’s much more likely that different actions in the game such as simming, entering a battle, etc re-seed the rng. Meaning the pattern is constantly being reset to different “random” initial states. That random process also varies in quality but it’s often hardware based (eg the temperature of your device) which is a much truer source of randomness.

RNG that is purely hardware based is non-deterministic and stateless meaning it doesn’t follow a pattern. It takes longer to generate and is used for stuff that requires cryptographically secure rng.

TLDR: Software-based RNG isn't actually random, it's just pretending to be. :D