Public Service Announcement: The RNG in this game is not biased

I posted about this in another thread earlier but I'm sure only a handful read it.

The Random Number Generator is working fine. The percentages listed for melding, gathering, and HQ chances are accurate to within 0.5%. The game is not shafting you, your memory is.

When you fail 4 times in a row while mining a node with a 95% success rate it sticks in your mind because you think to yourself, "bullsh!t!!! That's gotta be like a 1 in a million chance". The times you successfully gather 4 HQ items from a node with 85% chance and 15% HQ are far less memorable despite being significantly less likely. This is just the way human memory works. For survival it's far more important to remember what went horribly wrong than to remember what was slightly better than normal. I could easily write pages about how crappy our brains are when trying to remember things accurately but that's not my primary point here.



Want to know EXACTLY how unlikely your string of bad luck was?

Go here
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
and type in the percentage you had to succeed/fail raised to the power of how many times it happened. Example: Failed 4 times in a row while mining a node with a 95% success rate. Your failure rate for each try was 0.05 (1 is 100%, 0.05 is 5% etc), and you tried 4 times. So you type in "0.05 ^ 4" and hit enter. The number listed as "Rational Approximation:" is the chance of that happening. In this case it's 1 in 160,000. Pretty crappy odds but far from 1 in a million.

edit - Apparently you can type it in an even easier way, like (5%)^4.











Read on only if you want to know how random number generators actually work. It will get pretty technical from here on out.

Let's start with how numbers are represented in computers. You've certainly heard the word 'byte' thrown around a lot but you probably don't know what a byte actually is. It's 8 bits.

SO HELPFUL I KNOW!!! A bunch of bits is what you picture already when you imagine computer jargon or streaming numbers like in The Matrix. A bit is just a piece of information that can only have two values, 0 or 1. Now you probably don't care and it's not super important but the standard number system with 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12...etc is base 10. Binary (nerd computer stuff) is base two. All you need to know about binary is that you can represent EVERY SINGLE NUMBER like 24, or 817,281,110 by only using 0's and 1's.

Obviously you need more than one bit to store anything with more than two values so we picked a number at random that seemed like enough for some useful data. We chose 8. Don't ask me why. But a BYTE is just 8 bits smashed together and considered as a whole. So while a BIT can only be '0' or '1', a BYTE can be '00000000', '11111111' or any combination of zeros and ones in between. I'll wait while you count up the number of possibilities with 8 slots, each of which can be 0 or 1.


That seems like enough time. It's 256. WAIT A SECOND you might say to yourself. That seems familiar! If you ever cheated in Skyrim (or Morrowind I think as well) you might have noticed that despite having the ability to type in any number you want for your Strength, it never goes above 255. This is because the programmers were stingy with the memory usage and decided to only store your Strength and all your other stats as one single BYTE. Why can't it go to 256? Because the number 0 counts as one option, '00000000'.

I'd like to take a moment now that you know what bits/bytes are to make you hate all Internet Service Provider commercials even more than you already do. They all scream at you, "8 MEGABITS PER SECOND OMG!!!". They are intentionally deceiving you because 8 megabits is only 1 megaBYTE per second. The true number is always 1/8th of what they shout. Not to mention the fact that you can never reach that number in any normal scenario.

But I digress. If you want a number higher than 255 you need at least two bytes to represent it in a computer. The technical name for a two-byte number is a SHORT. A short can store any number between 0 and 65,536. Need a bigger number? Then you can store it in a LONG (programmers are known for their creativity) which is 4 bytes and can hold any number between 0 and 4,294,967,296. I think you get the picture.





Why does any of this matter? Because Random Number Generators use super obscure math equations to 'randomly' pick a number between 0, and whatever the maximum value is that number can hold. I put the word random in quotes because technically it's not entirely random. Let me explain. I'd be happy to tell you about the inner workings of RNGs but I doubt even 5% of readers will make it this far so I'll give you the short version. Here's a start if you want to know more, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister.

Most RNGs use some complex equation to shift around individual bits in the computer in such a way that it's almost impossible to predict what you'll get. It's ALMOST impossible because even the most complex algebraic manipulation involves some variable, usually called X in math class. The number X is the 'seed' number and if you think about it for a minute I'm sure you will realize that no matter how ingenious the equation is it will always give you the exact same output for some number X. Computers are not like humans. They do not make mistakes and you can force a computer to compute e^√(tanh(⁡x)) with x=5 as many times as you want but it will always give the exact same answer.

So now the problem becomes how do you pick a random 'seed' number for your random number generator? The infinite regress is solved by human ingenuity yet again. All computers are built with some form of an internal clock that in spite of daylight savings time and other crap marches forward inexorably. No date/time combination ever repeats because time only moves forward. It will only be 10:25pm and 26 nanoseconds EST on 11/6/2013 for 1 nanosecond. This digitally represented number will NEVER appear again.

Modern RNGs pick a seed number based on some, probably copyrighted, algorithm involving internal computer numbers like the clock and sometimes temperature of the CPU.


Now that you fully understand the complex nuances of every RNG ever created imagine yourself as a programmer. One of the staples of any programming library is always a robust Random Number Generator. There are many kinds to choose from but any respectable programmer will opt for one whose accuracy and 'randomness' far exceeds any purpose he has in mind. Since he doesn't have to write the complex algorithm himself all he has to do is specify where to get the seed number. For extremely sensitive information like nuclear launch codes they build special machines to generate specific seed numbers in a pattern known only to those who built it and maybe somebody who has 50 years to sit there trying passwords at a rate of 10 billion per second.

For online games it doesn't need to be this secure so they usually just generate the seed numbers at the location of their servers. If you think you've found a pattern with success rates on your melds or anything else you are mistaken. A new set of pseudo-random numbers is generated on a millisecond basis. You could hypothetically 'beat the system' if you knew the exact code used and the seed numbers were generated client-side (on your own computer) but I've never heard of a company doing this.










TL;DR:
You're more likely to remember failures than successes

Random Number Generation is a srs business and an unbelievable amount of thought has gone into developing the best methods. "The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance." - some mathematician you've never heard of

There's no programmer out to get you manually screwing with your gathering swings while laughing hysterically

Cure list needed for FF14. Any takers?

Edit: Arg - I guess no one here's actually used the cure list in FF12 and understood how it worked. My mistake.

I feel like I just wrote a novel that nobody will read lmao. Oh well. I'm sure there will be one person who reads it and goes "omg this is awesome". This is for you man

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Originally Posted by Nenin

I feel like I just wrote a novel that nobody will read lmao. Oh well. I'm sure there will be one person who reads it and goes "omg this is awesome". This is for you man

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My life in code, the last RNG I made was awful, so wonky, but it's nice to see someone explaining it in black and white, bumping for good justic.

Comuptuers are never truly random, but it certainly isn't biast just as you said. But holy poops the ""bad luck"" that some people get, whether they just simply get nothing.

Tough Love.

I'm glad someone wrote this. I was getting sick of people claiming that random numbers are not random, and the whole "the thing that's happening to me right now is the only thing that ever happens" mentality. Math and statistics don't have biases.

Though I'll be the first to admit that it's infuriating when you miss 3/4 on a 90% chance to hit (0.36% chance of that happening, by the way).

Omg this is awesome! <3

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Originally Posted by Kotose

I'm glad someone wrote this. I was getting sick of people claiming that random numbers are not random, and the whole "the thing that's happening to me right now is the only thing that ever happens" mentality. Math and statistics don't have biases.

Though I'll be the first to admit that it's infuriating when you miss 3/4 on a 90% chance to hit (0.36% chance of that happening, by the way).

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Truer words have never been spoken.

Despite me knowing it's all impersonal I can't help but feel a temporary twinge of 'woe is me, why am I getting screwed?' when I keep failing to overmeld some expensive materia.

I was going to replay to another post to say it's just memory but I guess none of the ppl who's complaining would really care.
But I just want to reply here to bump this :P

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Originally Posted by Nenin

I posted about this in another thread earlier but I'm sure only a handful read it.

The Random Number Generator is working fine. The percentages listed for melding, gathering, and HQ chances are accurate to within 0.5%. The game is not shafting you, your memory is.

When you fail 4 times in a row while mining a node with an 95% success rate it sticks in your mind because you think to yourself, "bullsh!t!!! That's gotta be like a 1 in a million chance". The times you successfully gather 4 HQ items from a node with 85% chance and 15% HQ are far less memorable despite being significantly less likely. This is just the way human memory works. For survival it's far more important to remember what went horribly wrong than to remember what was slightly better than normal. I could easily write pages about how crappy our brains are when trying to remember things accurately but that's not my primary point here.

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While I do have to say, I think the number generator is working fine enough and all that. This right here is just wrong. You are quite a bit more likely to get the 15% HQ (85% change to even succeed then 15% chance that will be HQ ---> ~0.026% chance to occur) than you are to fail at 5% 4 times in a row (0.000625% chance to occur) Other than this. I approve this post.

I love you op

This is brilliant. I read the entire post, I knew none of this information. Very interesting. Thank you.

you won the internet man

Well, take me for example. I only went to coil as a stand in. So far only beaten coil 1 thrice, coil 2 twice, coil 4 once.

I got 1 Allgan melee ring, belt, choker and mage hands.

While the static guys have not seen a tank gear drop yet.

Its all random. Sometimes you got great stuff sometimes you get nuts.

Yes it is cruel like mad. The only means to be fair is probably by token drops. But that brings out a whole new set of drama and qq.

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Originally Posted by Lafier

While I do have to say, I think the number generator is working fine enough and all that. This right here is just wrong. You are quite a bit more likely to get the 15% HQ (85% change to even succeed then 15% chance that will be HQ ---> ~0.026% chance to occur) than you are to fail at 5% 4 times in a row (0.000625% chance to occur) Other than this. I approve this post.

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Thank you for bringing this up but this is an area where I'm not sure how they programmed it. The percentages depend on whether they consider your chance to successfully mine and your chance to HQ separate or combined.


Scenario A: The RNG effectively rolls a number between 0-100. If it's 0-15 you miss the node entirely. If it's 15-100 you mine successfully. If the number is between 85 and 100 you HQ.

Scenario B: The RNG effectively rolls a number between 0-100. If it's 0-15 you miss the node entirely. If it's 15-100 you mine successfully. Then the RNG rolls AGAIN and if it's 0-15 you HQ, otherwise normal.


I'm sure somebody has run the numbers and knows which it is. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Not sure why you have to bust out some crazy math. Random is random, tat's pretty much it!

The numbers I used was assuming worst case, were you have an 85% chance to hit the node, then a 15% chance to HQ your hit.

alot of software rngs tend to stick around extreme values
you sound like a first year journalism major that took 000 introduction to computer science

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Originally Posted by Mayin

Not sure why you have to bust out some crazy math. Random is random, tat's pretty much it!

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Because computers are never truly random, but it's close.

And depending on how the RNG is set-up, it (can) theoretically be set up to weight more in one direction than the other, we just don't know how they've set it up.
(It'd be safe to assume it's set up fairly)

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Originally Posted by Shioban

Because computers are never truly random, but it's close.

And depending on how the RNG is set-up, it (can) theoretically be set up to weight more in one direction than the other, we just don't know how they've set it up.
(It'd be safe to assume it's set up fairly)

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I wouldn't be so quick to asume, it's not so simple to give the RNG enough entropy, or atleast, it requires some thought into it. : D
But I've been wondernig the same thing, how good actually is their RNG.

Nice one OP!

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Originally Posted by Shioban

And depending on how the RNG is set-up, it (can) theoretically be set up to weight more in one direction than the other, we just don't know how they've set it up.
(It'd be safe to assume it's set up fairly)

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"All RNGs are equal, but some are more equal than others". ; )

Except when crafting, I hit a 10% chance failure 3 times in a row (that's 1:1000 chance) two days on the trot. Added, I crafted 46 items before getting a HQ when the HQ chance was always better than 6% and up to 15%.

World's unluckiest gamer? Doubt it. Spout all you want about stats when the engine works mathematically correctly. This game does not work correctly.

This was a really informative post.

Next is implicit functions for implying the boundary between a number that is random and one that is part of a group or cluster :)

thanks for the brain food !

please dont bring logic and math to the people, they arent ready ;)

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Originally Posted by Nenin

Lots of information with no actual data to back it up

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Ok so you've explained why a perfectly working RNG works perfectly.

What you haven't done is shown that SE's RNG works perfectly.

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Originally Posted by Quesse

Ok so you've explained why a perfectly working RNG works perfectly.

What you haven't done is shown that SE's RNG works perfectly.

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This.

OP if you want to prove a point actually do some tests in game and publish your numbers.

Most of us that have an issue with the RNG at present agree that the overall odds (with a big enough sample) match what the game tells us, but to get there it seems to roll long strings of good and bad luck more often than is believable (I say believable because software RNG is inherently flawed and only creates the illusion of being random).

The odds of getting 5 failures in a row on a 70% touch action are 0.00243, which is 0.243%. Now I probably craft a few dozen items in an evening and I see that string of bad luck multiple times in one evening, multiple evenings in a row. With those odds that simply shouldn't be happening.

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Originally Posted by Quesse

Ok so you've explained why a perfectly working RNG works perfectly.

What you haven't done is shown that SE's RNG works perfectly.

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So this. Not a single person here believes that a proper RNG doesn't work properly, just that the FFXIV RNG is broken or rigged.

do you have the numbers to prove that SE's RNG is rigged? random is just that random. You could have a 50% chance to get a drop. It's likely it will drop but if the chance always falls on the side where your item doesn't drop, you just have bad luck, which you can't come up with a value for.

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Originally Posted by Quesse

Ok so you've explained why a perfectly working RNG works perfectly.

What you haven't done is shown that SE's RNG works perfectly.

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This.
/10char

I ran Brayflox 23 times on my alt. When you consider the boss can drop the body or leg armor from 3 sets, that's 6 possible drops. That's about a 16.7% chance for any of the 6 pieces to drop, right? Assuming there's no bias towards a particular set, there's an 83.3% chance the drop will be something other than what I want. But after 23 runs, Infantry Shirt hadn't dropped a single time. Unless I did something terribly wrong (which is highly possible), here's how that looks:

http://i.imgur.com/8iu1OeI.jpg

So that can't happen forever, right? Right. The next two times I ran it, Infantry Shirt finally dropped both times. (But I lost roll both times, so there's that.)

I've also recently gone 0/29 on a 22% meld chance, and I don't even want to get into how many tens of millions I spent melding my Obelisk for DRG relic in 1.0. This all isn't to say that I think RNG isn't working correctly, but sometimes it seems to be set up in such a way that it allows people to get extraordinarily unlucky with some things. Unluckier than they ever really should, even statistically. (Allagan Tassets of Maiming for everyone!)

Who knows, though. It is what it is.

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Originally Posted by Nenin

Thank you for bringing this up but this is an area where I'm not sure how they programmed it. The percentages depend on whether they consider your chance to successfully mine and your chance to HQ separate or combined.

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From my observation, it's a single roll, though I've done no substantial testing on this. Leveling up gathering I'd notice a significant higher percent of HQ to NQ items from a 15%HQ/70%Success node than a 15%HQ/100%Success node. Like I said though, simply from observation over small numbers (I usually farm for stacks of 200).

Walnut logs spring to mind as I gathered about 1200 of those as soon as I hit 25 botany to feed carpenter leveling.

Argument is invalid, no where did any of it mention making sacrifices towards the RNG gods.

Also Holding A+B down while looting to increase the success rate. (Or was it tapping B...?)

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Originally Posted by carlos777uk

Except when crafting, I hit a 10% chance failure 3 times in a row (that's 1:1000 chance) two days on the trot. Added, I crafted 46 items before getting a HQ when the HQ chance was always better than 6% and up to 15%.

World's unluckiest gamer? Doubt it. Spout all you want about stats when the engine works mathematically correctly. This game does not work correctly.

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Failure bias, over hundreds of thousands of actions involved in crafting it would actually be less statistically likely to NEVER have 3 failures in a row. You don't notice the strings of ordinary successes you receive compared to the negative impact of strings of failure. Though in huge repetition, both will happen.

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Originally Posted by verily

I ran Brayflox 23 times on my alt. When you consider the boss can drop the body or leg armor from 3 sets, that's 6 possible drops. That's about a 16.7% chance for any of the 6 pieces to drop, right? Assuming there's no bias towards a particular set, there's an 83.3% chance the drop will be something other than what I want.

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1.4% chance of not getting the shirt over 23 runs is unlucky but not strange. It's harder to roll a 1 on an item roll and I do that all the time!

It sucks when you get probability based failures over and over again and it triggers a natural human response that the system is being unfair to you, though in reality it's being fairer than a human based system would have the capability of being.

When thinking about probability you have to consider your successes with your failure, and your failure with your successes. If you really believe that the system is broken then there needs to be proof provided that it's broken, which will involve thousands upon thousands of repetitions to observe how well or badly the data falls within the expected by 2-3 standard deviations.

As for my personal experience, I tend to do repetitive activity in bulk, and I've found success/failure/HQ rates to be about where I'd expect them to be over hundreds of repetitions.

Public Service Announcement: The OP in this thread is biased

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Originally Posted by Quesse

Ok so you've explained why a perfectly working RNG works perfectly.

What you haven't done is shown that SE's RNG works perfectly.

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Originally Posted by Alberel

This.

OP if you want to prove a point actually do some tests in game and publish your numbers.

Most of us that have an issue with the RNG at present agree that the overall odds (with a big enough sample) match what the game tells us, but to get there it seems to roll long strings of good and bad luck more often than is believable (I say believable because software RNG is inherently flawed and only creates the illusion of being random).

The odds of getting 5 failures in a row on a 70% touch action are 0.00243, which is 0.243%. Now I probably craft a few dozen items in an evening and I see that string of bad luck multiple times in one evening, multiple evenings in a row. With those odds that simply shouldn't be happening.

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Originally Posted by Kat_Manx

So this. Not a single person here believes that a proper RNG doesn't work properly, just that the FFXIV RNG is broken or rigged.

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Well what exactly would you be satisfied with? I'll gladly start recording all my meld/gather/crafting attempts and bump this with the results in a month if people want to see that. Until then everyone is just flinging around anecdotal evidence.

Most people underestimate how frequently RNGs are used in games like this. It's not only invoked when you swing a pickaxe or attempt a meld. It's also the backbone of all combat interactions.

Every time a mob swings at a tank it gets called half a dozen times at least. First it rolls to see if the swing is a miss entirely. Then it rolls again to see if the tank dodges it. Then it rolls to see if the tank parries it. Then it rolls to see if the tank blocks it. Let's say none of these happen and the swing goes through. It still has to roll again to see if the hit is a crit. Then it rolls yet again to determine the actual damage dealt within some range.

If the RNG created a patently nonuniform distribution every aspect of this game would be wonky.



I've got some real life stuff to attend to now but later tonight I can probably spend an hour or so spamming hasty touch with no steady hand, with steady hand I, and with steady hand II. I'll do the same for a few other abilities. Maybe I'll even record a bunch of gathering attempts. Since I know you won't take me at my word I'll screenshot the chat logs for posterity.

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Originally Posted by Quesse

Ok so you've explained why a perfectly working RNG works perfectly.

What you haven't done is shown that SE's RNG works perfectly.

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It's a reasonable assumption to believe that a psuedoRNG runs properly in this day and age. A first(or second if the curriculum sucks) year computer science student can put one together with the .NET framework with very little work (the framework includes a Random class). The efforts required to create unit tests to verify it's functionality are slightly above trivial for most software professionals that participate in unit testing (which we all should!). Edit: On second thought it would be non trivial to test as you could never test all seeds, but I'm pretty confident you could develop a seed spread that would be sufficient.

Due to that reasonable assumption, it's on you to prove that there are flaws in the psuedoRNG and to identify what those flaws are. Everything I've heard from people can be explained by a lack of understanding of probability and failure/success bias.

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Originally Posted by Alberel

Most of us that have an issue with the RNG at present agree that the overall odds (with a big enough sample) match what the game tells us, but to get there it seems to roll long strings of good and bad luck more often than is believable (I say believable because software RNG is inherently flawed and only creates the illusion of being random).

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Runs of failure/success should happen quite often in large repetitions of data, it's less statistically likely for them not to happen. I don't know of any human that can observe runs of good/bad luck over a sufficiently large sample and make a gut call on whether there were to many or to little runs off the memory of that data. It requires intense calculation to make such a call, what you feel will always be subject to negative or positive bias.

How is software RNG inherently flawed? It's not random, but it is sufficiently removed from it's seed to more accurately model randomness than any thing a single human can physically provide.

Throwing a die is not a random act, however it is influenced by so many physical variables as to be indistinguishable from random to the normal human consciousness. This is the same principal that software driven psuedoRNG works off of.

This was like a throwback to my first CS course at college and when we were learning how RNGs work - really nice to see you know what you're talking about, and that you're willing to take the time to explain it to others. :)

During the early 1950s, the government set an elaborate scheme in motion, culminating in the present era when korean double agents used extra-terrestrial alpha wave stimulators to manipulate core game mechanic programmers at Square Enix during the development of Final Fantasy XIV. This covert act lead to the implementation of an advanced algorithm that operates through injected nano-machines in a battery of handpicked individuals, chosen by a council of powerful leaders from across the world.

http://content8.flixster.com/questio...954450_std.jpg
Korean agent

The nano-machines use the product case as a vector, and once they have established working conditions within the human host, microcrystalline structures impregnate the soul of the subject with metaphysical ley-line disturbances and causes chakra impeding oscillations at a sub-atomic level. This, in turn, causes inevitable 4 chain missing streaks when they try to mine at 87%, 89%, 94% or 95% or when they try to use hasty touch during periods of irregular magnetic resonance in their immediate area of residence.

This is all based on FACTS. Take your "math" someplace else.

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Originally Posted by Nenin

The Random Number Generator is working fine. The percentages listed for melding, gathering, and HQ chances are accurate to within 0.5%. The game is not shafting you, your memory is.

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That's lots of conjecture and superficial knowledge. I'm really curious where you got that 0.5% from, do you have an insider source at SE?

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Why does any of this matter?

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I have no idea why you think it's important to explain binary representation of numbers, as that only affects the range of generated numbers. The real problem is how well the numbers are distributed over that range and you actually never get back to answer that question. Unless you work at SE it's even impossible to answer that question, as only SE developers know how their RNG is implemented.

It's true that there's no direct proof, that something is wrong with RNG used in FFXIV, but the reverse is equally true and there's enough anecdotal evidence to question the quality of the RNG.

If anyone wants to play with the standard pseudo RNG, here is a small test program, so you can see for yourself, how it compares to sequences generated by FFXIV:

Code:

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#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

int main(int ac, char **av)
{
        double prob;
        int i, cnt, max;

        if (ac < 3) {
                printf("%s probability max_count [seed]\n", av[0]);
                return 1;
        }

        srand(ac > 3 ? strtol(av[3], NULL, 0) : time(NULL));

        prob = strtod(av[1], NULL) / 100;
        max = strtol(av[2], NULL, 0);
        cnt = 0;
        for (i = 0; i < max; i++) {
                double rnd = rand() / (double)RAND_MAX;
                if (rnd > 1)
                        printf("???");
                if (rnd < prob) {
                        printf("!");
                        cnt++;
                } else
                        printf(".");
        }

        printf("\nprob(%g): %d of %d (%g)\n", prob * 100, cnt, max, (double)cnt / max * 100);

        return 0;
}

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The only guys who think RNG can be flawed are the guys with a minimal understanding of randomness. They basically read a book somewhere saying RNG is pseudo-random, and that's about all they know. They don't even realize that the RNG is on the server that serves everyone, which already makes random even if the underlying system is not random. Let's imagine our system just generates the sequence 0 1 2 3 4 ... 99. For the purpose of say gathering we'll consider your gather a success if your % to succeed is greater than the number. However, this RNG also serves everything else that requires a random number, so it'd look like this:

A gathers a node with 95% success rate, gets the '0' (success)
B is fighting a lady wasp and asks for 50 random numbers (this is very conservative for a fight)
A gathers node again with 95% succes rate, gets '51' (success)

In reality, there are way more than one guy that's also hammering the server RNG at the same time. The server likely have given out thousands of random numbers before you can attempt to request a second random number again. Since the number of random number requests is, well, random, this means even if you knew the exact pattern of the numbers, it still does you no good because you have no idea how many numbers were requested in between your two actions. In our hypothetical example, as long as more than 100 requests for RNG occurs between any of your two actions, then you have absolutely no way to predict the number you're going to get, despite the sequence is completely known. You can't even get a rough idea of the range the number ought to fall under. And there's absolutely no way for any player to know the number of random number requests that has occurred between any of his 2 actions.