31–40 of 123 posts
"The one on the left, with the clumps, strands, voids, and filaments is the array that was plotted at random, like stars." Are stars really plotted at random?
Back in the day I was in a raiding guild in World of Warcraft. And back then, each boss monster in a raid dungeon had a loot table, and when you killed it, your raid got a few pieces of random loot. And I don't know how many times I, and the other guy in the guild who understood statistics, had to explain to the others that random doesn't mean uniform. If a certain piece of armour has a 1/X chance to drop from a boss…
Too bad the WoW random number generator was flawed, somewhere in there it had the clause if (item == tier2.druid.pants) return (item = plate-wearer-loot()); Of this I am certain.
Last thought, if there was a truely random number generator then why do fruitmachines have control systems to monitor the distribution and with that what is paid out to maintain that x% payout to comply with laws that say x% of money taken has to be payed out. Mostly 70-80%, but does vary and whilst the legal min may be say 70%, some casino's and the like will generaly have a higher % payout in a promenant place, just so people think it's even higher.
Back in the day I was in a raiding guild in World of Warcraft. And back then, each boss monster in a raid dungeon had a loot table, and when you killed it, your raid got a few pieces of random loot. And I don't know how many times I, and the other guy in the guild who understood statistics, had to explain to the others that random doesn't mean uniform. If a certain piece of armour has a 1/X chance to drop from a boss…
http://www.shacknews.com/article/57886/blizzard-details-secr...
Back in the day I was in a raiding guild in World of Warcraft. And back then, each boss monster in a raid dungeon had a loot table, and when you killed it, your raid got a few pieces of random loot. And I don't know how many times I, and the other guy in the guild who understood statistics, had to explain to the others that random doesn't mean uniform. If a certain piece of armour has a 1/X chance to drop from a boss…
Too bad the WoW random number generator was flawed, somewhere in there it had the clause if (item == tier2.druid.pants) return (item = plate-wearer-loot()); Of this I am certain.
Those frickin' salad shoulders.
Back in the day I was in a raiding guild in World of Warcraft. And back then, each boss monster in a raid dungeon had a loot table, and when you killed it, your raid got a few pieces of random loot. And I don't know how many times I, and the other guy in the guild who understood statistics, had to explain to the others that random doesn't mean uniform. If a certain piece of armour has a 1/X chance to drop from a boss…
This is actually an important lesson for game designers. Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random. For example, there's an expansion to The Settlers of Catan that lets you use cards instead of dice to ensure a nice smooth distribution of resources... I think it's a lot more fun!
This reminds me of Magic: the Gathering and the misery of mana screw.
I disagree with the uniform "should be", because there are so many different design objectives. Slot machines aren't "good games" by Euro standards, but people spend a lot of money on them. (One can argue about whether that's enjoyment or addiction. I'll skip that for now.) Random payoffs can foster enjoyment, as seen in Skinner Boxes and on slot machines. Random denial makes people unhappy. What you want in most games is some degree of random windfall but no one getting "killed by the dice".
Have you played Ambition, by chance? It's a trick-taking card game designed to remove card luck.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad the WoW random number generator was flawed, somewhere in there it had the clause if (item == tier2.druid.pants) return (item = plate-wearer-loot()); Of this I am certain.
May be the case that it was coded with one version of a programming language and upgraded later and the newer version changed the handerling of rounding. Believe python from 2.0>3.0 had some difference along those lines and whilst on the surface may not mean much they can add bias into what you get dropped as rounding and somebody adding .5 will never get the low value with some rounding as it will always round 0.5 o…
That's easy to answer -- to comply with rules that require a certain outcome some x percentage of the time, one need only take a truly random generator's output and filter it by x:
outcome = (rn * 100 If rn is a float, lies between 0 and 1 and is truly random, then the above trivial filter will produce the required distribution in the long term.
http://books.google.com/books?id=GGPm4I3BbxAC&pg=PT194&#...
(possibly NSFW)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually an important lesson for game designers. Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random. For example, there's an expansion to The Settlers of Catan that lets you use cards instead of dice to ensure a nice smooth distribution of resources... I think it's a lot more fun!
Oh yes. Our intuition is that random is fair and uniform, but it's absolutely not. I was bit by another random quirk in World of Warcraft. There was a long-running achievement called "What a Strange Long Journey it has Been", which took at least a year in real-time to complete, and you had to actively play during each of the ten or so in-game festivals and holidays, and do some quests and tasks during each. If you mi…