I've noticed people complaining about the 20% or 10% Reverse Engineer chance, and then complaining they don't get something to happen within 5 or 10 tries.

Here's how math works, so you cannot complain:

You have an object that you want to RE. It has a 20% chance to cause you to learn a new schematic. You fail.

You have an object that you want to RE. It has a 20% chance to cause you to learn a new schematic. You fail.

If you take a 20 sided die, you have a 5% chance to roll any specific number. Just because you roll the wrong number, it doesn't mean that that wrong number is no longer available. It still means you have a 5% chance on your next roll to roll any specific number.

People are complaining and acting as if 20% chance means that if you fail 4 times, that the 5th time will work.

20% chance is not cumulative. It does not stack. It doesn't go 20% to 40% to 60% and so on.

That's why RNG is RNG.

If an item has a 1% chance to drop from a boss fight, and you've killed it 1 million times and it hasn't dropped yet, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a 1% chance to drop. It just means that every time you've fought it, you rolled one of the other 99% of numbers.

What I especially like is the belief many people have that if THEY are seeing a short-term 10% rate, then everyone else is, as well. If you're having bad luck, then somewhere out there, someone is having good luck. Only, no one posts when they have good luck. Just because it took 30 attempts to get that purple pair of shorts doesn't mean the function is broken. The smaller the sample size, the greater the deviation. It's quite possible to flip a coin five times and get five heads or tails in a row. Though, I'd imagine if coins had a flipping forum, we'd have people posting "these coins are broken" threads.

Whatever the rate is, it's a massive improvement over pre-1.2, so I'm content.

Just putting it out there, but I hit a critical on my first attempt crafting the Synth BoP bracers. That's a 100% success rate! Totally broken!

Random number game is random.

But this is a basic statistics and probability lesson. Dice and RNG's have no memory. Thus, the chance for each RE attempt is always 20%.

When looking at grouping RE attempts, for example 5 attempts, it's not "The probability of getting a successful RE is 100% in 5 attempts," it is actually, "The average theoretical probability of getting a successful RE in 5 attempts is 100%".

There's a difference. On average, a person gets a successful RE in 5 attempts. And, from experience, I'm usually successful every 3-8 attempts on items. Pretty close considering the small sample size each time

Yet, there's still the chance of going 30 in a row without any successful RE, and there's also the chance of being successful in the first attempt. It's all a part of the RNG. Both extremes usually offset each other.

If we took all the RE attempts from all the players in SWTOR, the average player should be having a successful RE every 5 attempts with little deviation. This is hardly guaranteed from happening every single time, though.

If you take a 20 sided die, you have a 5% chance to roll any specific number. Just because you roll the wrong number, it doesn't mean that that wrong number is no longer available. It still means you have a 5% chance on your next roll to roll any specific number.

This is true, but when we observe the series of rolls as a whole, we can do statistical analysis on it. For example, at 20% success chance and 20 tries, there's only a 1.15% chance that you didn't succeed at least once.

And since we are talking about humans here, all sorts of psychological factors come to play. When dealing with randomness, most people have a very strong bias towards an even distribution, even with sample sizes where it's unrealistic to expect it. If you ask a human to produce a random string composed of the letters A, B and C, you're likely to get something where no two consecutive letters are the same. An unbiased computer might produce something like CCBBBBCACAAA, but a human will likely think this is not very random.

If an item has a 1% chance to drop from a boss fight, and you've killed it 1 million times and it hasn't dropped yet, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a 1% chance to drop. It just means that every time you've fought it, you rolled one of the other 99% of numbers.

Again, statistical analysis. After 1 million kills and not getting the item you can conclude with 95% certainty that the item has a droprate of at most 0.0003%. If it had a 1% droprate, the chance of not getting any in 1 million kills is about 1 in 10 to the power of 4365. That's 0.000000..(a total of 4362 zeroes)..000001%. In other words, if you killed that boss 1 million times every second since the beginning of the universe, there probably won't have been a second where that item didn't drop at least once, since the universe is less than 10 to the power of 18 seconds old.

(I realize that this last part was probably meant as hyperbole, but hey, since we're talking math...)

My personal favorite is people claiming to have crafted and RE'd many hundreds of a specific item -

1) made from uber expenssive grade 6 mats,

a) that have very long gathering mission times, that have pretty poor yields even at max affection

b) typically not really "farm"able, without massive investments in time

2) requiring large quantities of those same mats

3) that have very long build times, when the most they can que up at a time is 30

4) and they supposedly did all that while spending credits on class skills, speeders & training, spaceship parts, while leveling an alt or two, browsing these forums, going to school/ working, & playing ME3/ CoD/ Skyrim/ and Hello Kitty.

TL;DR ~ It was B.S. before 1.2 & it's B.S. after 1.2

This is true, but when we observe the series of rolls as a whole, we can do statistical analysis on it. For example, at 20% success chance and 20 tries, there's only a 1.15% chance that you didn't succeed at least once.

 

And since we are talking about humans here, all sorts of psychological factors come to play. When dealing with randomness, most people have a very strong bias towards an even distribution, even with sample sizes where it's unrealistic to expect it. If you ask a human to produce a random string composed of the letters A, B and C, you're likely to get something where no two consecutive letters are the same. An unbiased computer might produce something like CCBBBBCACAAA, but a human will likely think this is not very random.

 

 

Again, statistical analysis. After 1 million kills and not getting the item you can conclude with 95% certainty that the item has a droprate of at most 0.0003%. If it had a 1% droprate, the chance of not getting any in 1 million kills is about 1 in 10 to the power of 4365. That's 0.000000..(a total of 4362 zeroes)..000001%. In other words, if you killed that boss 1 million times every second since the beginning of the universe, there probably won't have been a second where that item didn't drop at least once, since the universe is less than 10 to the power of 18 seconds old.

 

(I realize that this last part was probably meant as hyperbole, but hey, since we're talking math...)

One thing you're forgetting, and something I've been trying to address in these threads, is population size. Take the national Lottery for example. Each individual has something like 1 in 200,000,000 chance of winning. If you were the only one playing, you would most certainly die before winning the lottery. And yet someone does actually win the lottery...due to the size of the population participating.

So in your example, you could easily have 1 million players of an MMO kill a boss mob once. One of those players is likely to have scored the drop, just as 1 person in the US will win the Lottery even though the individual odds are ridiculously minute.

As it applies to SWTOR RNG, the size of the population means you will have individuals who have, through no fault of their own, ridiculously bad streaks. You cannot say who those individuals will be, but you are increasingly certain to have those individuals nonetheless as a population size increases.

The lottery concept is true, some exceptionally long streaks of bad luck are going to happen. But how many threads have we seen here where someone was talking about not being able to get a proc from green to blue on a piece of lowbie gear? It's almost always someone trying to RE blue to purple for a piece of gear made from T6 mats. Who would continue crafting if a piece of lowbie gear requirred them to RE over 150 items for a blue proc?

There have been many posts on this forum from people claiming that it has taken them hundreds of RE attempts for several different paterns within a single craft, on the same toon. That's like "winning" the bad luck lottery ~ over and over. You obviously can't say that it has never happened, but what are the odds? And what are the odds that it would happen more than once? It's a pics or it didn't happen kind of scenario.

Granted there was a real problem worth complaining about with the "you already know that schematic" proc. Because it made it genuinely more difficult to get a specific purple patern for gear with a branching RE scheme.

Law of Large Numbers

Bernoulli Trial

Online Bernoulli Calculator

• 20% chance for schematic while REing (80% fail rate).
  
• 25 attempts (or rolls of the dice) - online calculator limit
  
• Can have Zero Successes
  
• All can be successes,

Formula:

P(A) = ∑bi=a(ts+i)(p)s+i(1−s)t−s−i = ∑25i=0(25i)(.2)i(0.8)(25−i) = (250)×(.2)0×(0.8)25+(251)×(.2)1×(0.8)24+(252)×(.2)2×(0.8)23+(253)×(.2)3×(0.8)22+(254)×(.2)4×(0.8)21+(255)×(.2)5×(0.8)20+(256)×(.2)6×(0.8)19+(257)×(.2)7×(0.8)18+(258)×(.2)8×(0.8)17+(259)×(.2)9×(0.8)16+(2510)×(.2)10×(0.8)15+(2511)×(.2)11×(0.8)14+(2512)×(.2)12×(0.8)13+(2513)×(.2)13×(0.8)12+(2514)×(.2)14×(0.8)11+(2515)×(.2)15×(0.8)10+(2516)×(.2)16×(0.8)9+(2517)×(.2)17×(0.8)8+(2518)×(.2)18×(0.8)7+(2519)×(.2)19×(0.8)6+(2520)×(.2)20×(0.8)5+(2521)×(.2)21×(0.8)4+(2522)×(.2)22×(0.8)3+(2523)×(.2)23×(0.8)2+(2524)×(.2)24×(0.8)1+(2525)×(.2)25×(0.8)0

Result:

0.00377789318629571+0.02361183241434800+0.07083549724304400+0.13576803638250100+0.18668105002584400+0.19601510252713620+0.16334591877172800+0.11084187345224400+0.06234855381688725+0.02944237262043000+0.01177694904817200+0.00401486897140800+0.00117100344999400+0.00029275083649700+0.00006273228867600+0.00001150090324680+0.00000179700081000+0.00000023783834250+0.00000002642407900+0.00000000243335400+0.00000000018223590+0.00000000001075250+0.00000000000046000+0.00000000000001500+0.00000000000000000+0.00000000000000000 = 0.9999999998285

Probability of Success: 0.9999999998285%

So after 25 attempts we have a near 100% Probability for a schematic. Issues is, a lot of people are REing a lot more then 25 items, some upwards of 200 items and still get nothing. The Probability of REing even 100 items at 20% chance of success, chance of failure so insanly small it's infinitesimal.

Sure Probability is Probability though....... :-/

It's 4am and Im bored. :-/

I don't believe you're using that linked calculator correctly. You're trying to discover the probability of zero successes. You need to enter zeros in both fields. At least 0 successes, and at MOST zero successes after 25 trials.

That gives you a probability of .0037778931 for one individual to have a bad streak of zero success after 25 trials. But given a population of 100k crafters, you'd expect something like 377 crafters to have streaks of zero success after 25 trials.

The lottery concept is true, some exceptionally long streaks of bad luck are going to happen. But how many threads have we seen here where someone was talking about not being able to get a proc from green to blue on a piece of lowbie gear? It's almost always someone trying to RE blue to purple for a piece of gear made from T6 mats. Who would continue crafting if a piece of lowbie gear requirred them to RE over 150 items for a blue proc?

 

There have been many posts on this forum from people claiming that it has taken them hundreds of RE attempts for several different paterns within a single craft, on the same toon. That's like "winning" the bad luck lottery ~ over and over. You obviously can't say that it has never happened, but what are the odds? And what are the odds that it would happen more than once? It's a pics or it didn't happen kind of scenario.

 

Granted there was a real problem worth complaining about with the "you already know that schematic" proc. Because it made it genuinely more difficult to get a specific purple patern for gear with a branching RE scheme.

Yes. People come here to talk about their bad luck. That doesn't necessarily mean the RNG is broken...it just means these people belong to the population of unlucky folks, a population that is almost guaranteed to exist I might add, given a large enough sample size.

Problem is, we have no hard data on the number of people experiencing bad luck...we have anecdotal evidence of 'many posts' on the forums, but that is by no means measurable, and is in fact quite prone to observer bias.

I have been following the depressing trials of one poster who's up to something like 100 RE for a Rakata relic. I feel bad for him for all the Alloy he's gone through. Trouble is, I don't know that we know the RE percentage for the Relic. My guess is that it's a smaller percentage than the known RE chances.

My understanding regarding reports of 100's of REs suggests this was prevalent before 1.2.

Let me reiterate, as I do in every post like this, that I'm actually not a fan of the RNG system. It is precisely BECAUSE it is working as intended that I don't like it. You get a population, through no fault of their own, who gets screwed due solely to the laws of probability.

To the OP:

Your basic assumption is that the code is all working as intended and that people are just totally deluded (or are just lying).

That is not math. That is not rationality -- it is blind faith that everything within the game works as it's intended.

Your post tells us more about yourself than about anything else.

Law of Large Numbers

 

 

So after 25 attempts we have a near 100% Probability for a schematic. Issues is, a lot of people are REing a lot more then 25 items, some upwards of 200 items and still get nothing. The Probability of REing even 100 items at 20% chance of success, chance of failure so insanly small it's infinitesimal.

 

Sure Probability is Probability though....... :-/

 

It's 4am and Im bored. :-/

show me proof that people are really rveing 100 items. I call bs. they do like 15-20 an say it is like 100 felt.

What we are forgetting is that there are SO MANY CRAFTERS!

With a RNG, anything can happen, extraordinary good luck and extraordinary bad luck as well, and with an enormous amount of crafters, it IS going to happen, and it IS going to happen soon.

Just because it happened to you does not mean it isn't random any more.

I have a question about something that could possibly affect the probability.

On a successful RE, you can learn a pattern with a new prefix. Does that affect the odds of getting a different one? For example, for RE'ing greens there are 3 prefixes: Redoubt, Overkill, Critical. A 20% success rate means that each one should have a 6.67% chance on any RE. Say that you know 2 of those already. Are the odds of getting that 3rd one now 20% with each RE, or is it still 6.67%? In other words, does the second roll ignore the other possible outcomes, or do you simply receive a failure if you get an outcome that you've gotten before? That could certainly explain why there are many reports of low success rates.

As for getting Augment slots, I have noticed that the RNG is frustratingly quite varied. For example, when I was crafting enough of the lvl 20 orange augmented lightsabers for all of my chars and their force-using companions, I was doing them in batches of 5 at a time. The longest I went with no crits was 6 of these batches, and in one batch I got 3 crits.

As for getting Augment slots, I have noticed that the RNG is frustratingly quite varied. For example, when I was crafting enough of the lvl 20 orange augmented lightsabers for all of my chars and their force-using companions, I was doing them in batches of 5 at a time. The longest I went with no crits was 6 of these batches, and in one batch I got 3 crits.

I crit my Elegant double-bladed lightsaber first time, first schematic I bought after 1.2. I was so shocked, I had to make another one just to be sure criting wasn't a guarantee on first time, lol.

Law of Large Numbers

Bernoulli Trial

Online Bernoulli Calculator

• 20% chance for schematic while REing (80% fail rate).
  
• 25 attempts (or rolls of the dice) - online calculator limit
  
• Can have Zero Successes
  
• All can be successes,

Formula:

P(A) = ∑bi=a(ts+i)(p)s+i(1−s)t−s−i = ∑25i=0(25i)(.2)i(0.8)(25−i) = (250)×(.2)0×(0.8)25+(251)×(.2)1×(0.8)24+(252)×(.2)2×(0.8)23+(253)×(.2)3×(0.8)22+(254)×(.2)4×(0.8)21+(255)×(.2)5×(0.8)20+(256)×(.2)6×(0.8)19+(257)×(.2)7×(0.8)18+(258)×(.2)8×(0.8)17+(259)×(.2)9×(0.8)16+(2510)×(.2)10×(0.8)15+(2511)×(.2)11×(0.8)14+(2512)×(.2)12×(0.8)13+(2513)×(.2)13×(0.8)12+(2514)×(.2)14×(0.8)11+(2515)×(.2)15×(0.8)10+(2516)×(.2)16×(0.8)9+(2517)×(.2)17×(0.8)8+(2518)×(.2)18×(0.8)7+(2519)×(.2)19×(0.8)6+(2520)×(.2)20×(0.8)5+(2521)×(.2)21×(0.8)4+(2522)×(.2)22×(0.8)3+(2523)×(.2)23×(0.8)2+(2524)×(.2)24×(0.8)1+(2525)×(.2)25×(0.8)0

Result:

0.00377789318629571+0.02361183241434800+0.07083549724304400+0.13576803638250100+0.18668105002584400+0.19601510252713620+0.16334591877172800+0.11084187345224400+0.06234855381688725+0.02944237262043000+0.01177694904817200+0.00401486897140800+0.00117100344999400+0.00029275083649700+0.00006273228867600+0.00001150090324680+0.00000179700081000+0.00000023783834250+0.00000002642407900+0.00000000243335400+0.00000000018223590+0.00000000001075250+0.00000000000046000+0.00000000000001500+0.00000000000000000+0.00000000000000000 = 0.9999999998285

Probability of Success: 0.9999999998285%

 

So after 25 attempts we have a near 100% Probability for a schematic. Issues is, a lot of people are REing a lot more then 25 items, some upwards of 200 items and still get nothing. The Probability of REing even 100 items at 20% chance of success, chance of failure so insanly small it's infinitesimal.

 

Sure Probability is Probability though....... :-/

 

It's 4am and Im bored. :-/

I 100% agree with this. Thank you so much for posting. I've gotten up to 15+ of a max level color crystal and still nothing. It really bugs me. The schematic's available but after all these, I still can't get it. Then I work on lowbie stuff for an alt and nail every single recipe on the 1-3rd try.

The attempts need memory per item. That's all I'm saying.

My personal favorite is people claiming to have crafted and RE'd many hundreds of a specific item -

 

1) made from uber expenssive grade 6 mats,

a) that have very long gathering mission times, that have pretty poor yields even at max affection

b) typically not really "farm"able, without massive investments in time

 

2) requiring large quantities of those same mats

 

3) that have very long build times, when the most they can que up at a time is 30

 

4) and they supposedly did all that while spending credits on class skills, speeders & training, spaceship parts, while leveling an alt or two, browsing these forums, going to school/ working, & playing ME3/ CoD/ Skyrim/ and Hello Kitty.

 

TL;DR ~ It was B.S. before 1.2 & it's B.S. after 1.2

Hehe you know what i have actually crafted hundreds of the same lv48 aim shield cause i wanted the perfect one for dps/shield spec and one with pure tanking stats and got 10 of the variations pre1.2 and another post 1.2. Pretty sure that was at least 200 crafted cause i mainly ah the critted ones and only RE the no crits. And i still have 11 stacks of the blue mats i used saved for offhand schematics for other classes. =) Not everyone is poor, i buy 99% of my mats from the AH in a stack of 99. Craft them 25 at a time 3 time a day that's 75/day. Yes, some ppl do go that far to get the right stats =)

I 100% agree with this. Thank you so much for posting. I've gotten up to 15+ of a max level color crystal and still nothing. It really bugs me. The schematic's available but after all these, I still can't get it. Then I work on lowbie stuff for an alt and nail every single recipe on the 1-3rd try.

 

The attempts need memory per item. That's all I'm saying.

Except that he entered the wrong parameters into the calculator. See my follow-up post.

Let me reiterate, as I do in every post like this, that I'm actually not a fan of the RNG system. It is precisely BECAUSE it is working as intended that I don't like it. You get a population, through no fault of their own, who gets screwed due solely to the laws of probability.

So very much agreed.

That current system also makes it ridiculously hard to distinguish between bugs and features (because it takes a fairly large sample size to distinguish chance variation from a true effect). I imagine customer service gets a fair number of reports from unlucky players, and so has a hard time tracking trends that are true bugs. So they send back canned responses, which is more like salt in a wound than a helpful reply. Badness all around.

I've noticed people complaining about the 20% or 10% Reverse Engineer chance, and then complaining they don't get something to happen within 5 or 10 tries.

 

Here's how math works, so you cannot complain:

 

You have an object that you want to RE. It has a 20% chance to cause you to learn a new schematic. You fail.

You have an object that you want to RE. It has a 20% chance to cause you to learn a new schematic. You fail.

 

If you take a 20 sided die, you have a 5% chance to roll any specific number. Just because you roll the wrong number, it doesn't mean that that wrong number is no longer available. It still means you have a 5% chance on your next roll to roll any specific number.

 

People are complaining and acting as if 20% chance means that if you fail 4 times, that the 5th time will work.

 

20% chance is not cumulative. It does not stack. It doesn't go 20% to 40% to 60% and so on.

 

That's why RNG is RNG.

 

If an item has a 1% chance to drop from a boss fight, and you've killed it 1 million times and it hasn't dropped yet, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a 1% chance to drop. It just means that every time you've fought it, you rolled one of the other 99% of numbers.

OK Mr Math genius. Calculate the odds of failing 30 times to get a schematic that you have a 20% chance to get. Then multiply that by the 30+ people who have posted threads about them doing 30+ tries without getting succeeding. What would the odds be of the 30 people having that failure rate?

Try and get out of that one.

OK Mr Math genius. Calculate the odds of failing 30 times to get a schematic that you have a 20% chance to get. Then multiply that by the 30+ people who have posted threads about them doing 30+ tries without getting succeeding. What would the odds be of the 30 people having that failure rate?

 

Try and get out of that one.

I've actually already calculated this here and in another thread. Roughly speaking, you'd expect in a population of 100,000 crafters, around 500 of them to have bad luck streaks of the order you're speaking of. In fact, the odds of 30 people having that failure rate is nearly certain.

So very much agreed.

 

That current system also makes it ridiculously hard to distinguish between bugs and features (because it takes a fairly large sample size to distinguish chance variation from a true effect). I imagine customer service gets a fair number of reports from unlucky players, and so has a hard time tracking trends that are true bugs. So they send back canned responses, which is more like salt in a wound than a helpful reply. Badness all around.

As a side note...think about the population of people on the Earth...7 billion. Now think about the everday events that happen by chance in our lives every day. Ever wonder why some people seem to 'have all the luck' while others claim to 'have the worst luck'. This 'luck' can be plotted as a normal distribution curve, a bell curve. Most people have average luck, but others have one, two, or three standard deviations from the norm. In a world with 7 billion people, you're simply going to have a certain small percentage of people who are really damn lucky. You can't tell who they will be ahead of time, only that they will exist.

anyway, that's food for thought.

Except that he entered the wrong parameters into the calculator. See my follow-up post.

Oh I know I totally agree. I read your follow-up also. Totally agree with you.

On a side note, as you know, you look at large populations and you start to see some interesting stuff on the outliers of the bell curve.