A Random Comment

[Tiggy]

It's surprising how many gamers don't have even the most basic concept of statistics even though the games they play use the mathematical laws of statistics constantly.

If I can somewhat consistently fail something with a 70% chance of success 8 times in a row, essentially meaning the 30% of failure won out, shouldn't it be possible that I successfully do something with a 30% success chance 8 times in a row? As anyone who plays this game will tell, that will never happen... ever. The game seems to favor failure regardless of your chances of success. There are so many occasions throughout my mining in this game since launch that a 95% success chance has yielded 3/4, 4/5, and 5/6 fails. They're always in batches, be it in a row or over a larger pool of attempts. This isn't even including the rather consistent occurrences of 1/4 failures on nearly every node with a 90% or higher success chance. Why is it common and predictable that I fail a 45% success chance to meld 8+ times in a row, meaning the remaining 55% won out all those times, yet I will almost never successfully gather something with 55% success rate as a common and predictable outcome?

You are falling prey to the very fallacies they listed, and then act like success conditions when probability is low never happen at all when they most certainly do. I recently desynthed 72 silver sovereigns starting at a 40% success rate and I most certainly did succeed a decent amount of the time. I didn't check the statistics of my end results but 40% felt pretty accurate at the start.

A computer cannot do random (on it's own), that's why it has pseudorandom in the name, it makes you *think* it's random when really it isn't, it's possible to ensure that the results you get from a pseudorandom number generator are exactly the same every time (i.e. you start the generator, write down the first 1,000,000,000 numbers, restart it and the same 1,000,000,000 numbers come up), which is a bit like having the same lottery numbers this week, next week, the week after and the week after that.

A psuedo random number generator uses a seed number to begin calculation. As long as that seed is different every time (perhaps based on cpu cycles, or system clock, etc) then no numbers will appear in the same order as you suggest. Only when using the exact same seed will the results you listed ever happen. No game is going to overlook such a basic use case scenario in regards to random numbers. The way you suggested it is not how it works.