RNG Fairness

[VarHyid]

What if, let's say a TV competition, and the winner gets a huge amount of price money.
Later it's found out that there was an error in the voting system.
Would the winner still be allowed to keep the price money, or would they do a re-vote?

Depends on the error. If it did not lower any one person’s odds any more than any other participants, but only introduced the possibility that the drawing could fail, then if it didn’t fail, the results are fair and odds equal.

[Breezelyn]

and all the people that got zero'd just get a tough luck suckers, system is only fair for the winners

Is it to fair to people, who never had a house before and won their plot, to say "HA! Sucks for you, you're losing it now." Yeah, that's gonna end REAL great.

What if, let's say a TV competition, and the winner gets a huge amount of price money.
Later it's found out that there was an error in the voting system.
Would the winner still be allowed to keep the price money, or would they do a re-vote?

The winner should still keep the money? It's not their fault the system was flawed. Things need to be checked before they go official. However, the winner shouldn't be stripped of their winnings because things weren't double, TRIPLE checked before it went live.

Easy fix: Hold another contest and choose a few more winners. /s

----------------------------

Anyway, this whole situation is sore for everyone involved. Myself included. Am I angry? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. People who won their plots shouldn't have it taken away, because they played the lottery like everyone else. The blame should be on SE for not triple-checking to be sure everything was up to date. Don't punish the players because of a system failure. This is all I will say on the matter. Arguing over nonsense will get us nowhere. Let us wait to see what the team does and decides to do on this matter.

[Evergrey]

There's a different set of problems with that though.

Your scenario doesn't have people who transferred their lot to a new plot to factor into whatever solution they come up with.

Your analogy is flawed.

If they can't rollback JUST the housing districts to a point after the bidding closed and before the winner drawn, then there is no perfect solution. Those who won a lot should keep them, the sole bidders should be given their plots, and the bidding reopened once they've fixed the bug.

roll back all housing wards to the point before then.
Then it would be as if nothing had happened and things were as they were before this problem happened.

Easier said than done perhaps, I know.

[S0lara]

If the zero was only added and the count was not shifted by 1 because of it, then there’s absolutely no need to re-roll and the result is fair because the odds were equally lowered for everyone.

For example, if 4 people entered the lottery, each would have had a 25% chance to win, but if they dropped a 5th “zero bidder” into the mix, all it means that now all 4 real people simply had a 20% chance of winning… and there was a 20% chance that the drawing fails and hits the zero. If it didn’t, though then how exactly is it unfair?

Only those cases where zero actually won need to be re-rolled (and the single bidders should just get the house, of course).

Ugh, VarHyid, lol. After reading this...I hope you are not right. If they did that, then that is shady, lol. I think that since they officially came out and said the zero's were unintended, then the "zero bidder" was not supposed to be factored into the percent chance of each person bidding.

[VarHyid]

Because like you said, instead of a 1/4 of winning it turned out to be a 1/5.
The 0 just acted as a ghost-vote with no person behind it.
If the winning roll was, let's say a 23 (on a roll of 1-100), then person nr.1 would've won on a 1/4 with a 25% win rate. But thanks for the "ghost" that means the 2nd person won due to nr1 got shifted lower.
Meaning the results were altered due to the ghost, ending in that all results were tainted.

You can’t assume that if only there was no zero in the mix, the roll would have hit exactly one number higher. It’s much simpler, there were 4 win states and one lose state. All 4 win states had equal chances. If the lose state would have hit, the we just re-roll. There is no taint here… or let me put it this way - the taint was the possibility that the results may hit the fail state.

[VarHyid]

Ugh, VarHyid, lol. After reading this...I hope you are not right. If they did that, then that is shady, lol. I think that since they officially came out and said the zero's were unintended, then the "zero bidder" was not supposed to be factored into the percent chance of each person bidding.

I’m not sure how else to clarify this. Everyone’s odds went down equally. One real person did not get lower odds of winning, but all real people had the same equal possibility that the roll fails.

In other words, the fact that instead of a 25% chance you now had a 20% chance is irrelevant for your personal fortune. You still had a real 25% chance of winning against any other of the 4 real people, only all 4 people had an equal chance of being collectively screwed by a zero. If they didn’t, though, and zero didn’t won, then they all had a 1 in 4 shot of being a winner.

—-edit—-

Let me put it like this - the percent chance for each person winning did not change at all. What changed is that the possibility of everyone losing was introduced.

[Evergrey]

You can’t assume that if only there was no zero in the mix, the roll would have hit exactly one number higher. It’s much simpler, there were 4 win states and one lose state. All 4 win states had equal chances. If the lose state would have hit, the we just re-roll. There is no taint here… or let me put it this way - the taint was the possibility that the results may hit the fail state.

Mm.. I think I understand now.
Just my head having a little trouble binding dots together today.
Lack of sleep and long day out.
But yeah, if there was a re-drawing without the 0 then yes, it would become a "normal" rng.
My bad.

[S0lara]

You can’t assume that if only there was no zero in the mix, the roll would have hit exactly one number higher. It’s much simpler, there were 4 win states and one lose state. All 4 win states had equal chances. If the lose state would have hit, the we just re-roll. There is no taint here… or let me put it this way - the taint was the possibility that the results may hit the fail state.

Okay. Thank you for the clarification. What you said makes sense.

[Nihility]

You can’t assume that if only there was no zero in the mix, the roll would have hit exactly one number higher. It’s much simpler, there were 4 win states and one lose state. All 4 win states had equal chances. If the lose state would have hit, the we just re-roll. There is no taint here… or let me put it this way - the taint was the possibility that the results may hit the fail state.

I know that but the human perception will be... I was 6 and 5 was picked... that effing zero screwed me and now I hate S-E forever. No amount of reasoning will make those people see otherwise and therefor the flaw in the system kind of taints the whole thing.

Then if just to reroll all the ones that landed zero which seems like an unreasonably high amount if you go around and read boards. What happens to the people that had no idea and got their money back and lost there lottery ticket? Are they just out of the competition?

and if they just do another round of lottery. The people that won, won and yay for them... now the field of rewards is cut down drastically and nearly the same amount of people are competing again. Many of whom should already be done with it but instead have a ton of extra competition for less resources just because

what is the fair thing to do? Literally every option is bad for a ton of people and the FC house ward restrictions and people only wanting large are making things far worse even in the old zones.
can't relocate to mist or lavender beds because all the opened up ones are in the FC wards.

I didn't even try, I like my house in the goblet and now I'm worried that my area will die off and go ghost town because it's an FC ward. Just seems like everything is bad now XD

[dspguy]

The problem with that is if an FC bid on a house in order to relocate their FC house and transferred and they roll back, do they get their original house back? What if they then lose the re-bid if they aren't able to get the original house back?

While I'm not saying I agree with the OP's idea, but the question you have isn't so much of a problem. If an FC relocated, the other house can't go up for sale since lottery is frozen. This would allow SE to revert some of this stuff if they wanted to.

However, I think the bigger deal is the gil spent on buying construction permits, exterior walls, etc etc etc. If they were going to talk about reverting this, they should have said it at 11:10am EST today. Not, 6 hours later or 1 day later. It would be hard to make everyone whole without possibly messing something else up in the meantime.

I think the most likely scenario that is going to happen is:
- anyone that won a plot keeps their plot
- all other plots are back up in the next lottery draw

Why not reroll for just those that lost to the "0 winner?" Lots of people took their gil out in the form of the refund. I think it won't be easy for SE to track all of these transactions (who took out gil, who didn't take the refund, etc etc). In my opinion, that ship has already sailed. The "0 winner" plots, even with just 1 bid will go up in the next lottery.