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Random number generator for reverse engineering flaky


Grondar

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Either the percentage of 20% chance to reverse engineer a standard item is the wrong number or someone has coded the random number generator for the engineering algorithm wrong.

I've noticed that it is almost impossible to reverse engineer certain items, in this particular case a barrel.

 

The item mentions the 20% chance, yet in 30 attempts I have gotten zero schematics. Now, I know that 20% chance does not mean that in 5 attempts you should be getting an assured schematic, because, yes, every attempt is a new one. However, given enough attempts and making enough rolls, the numbers should approximate 20% yay and 80% nay. Basic math says the chance of me not getting a schematic 30 times in a row is .8^30 = 0.123 percent. And this is not an exception, it often takes 25 or more attempts to reverse engineer.

Has anyone else experienced these skewed numbers while reverse engineering certain items?

Edited by Grondar
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Either the percentage of 20% chance to reverse engineer a standard item is the wrong number or someone has coded the random number generator for the engineering algorithm wrong.

I've noticed that it is almost impossible to reverse engineer certain items, in this particular case a barrel.

 

The item mentions the 20% chance, yet in 30 attempts I have gotten zero schematics. Now, I know that 20% chance does not mean that in 5 attempts you should be getting an assured schematic, because, yes, every attempt is a new one. However, given enough attempts and making enough rolls, the numbers should approximate 20% yay and 80% nay. Basic math says the chance of me not getting a schematic 30 times in a row is .8^30 = 0.123 percent. And this is not an exception, it often takes 25 or more attempts to reverse engineer.

Has anyone else experienced these skewed numbers while reverse engineering certain items?

 

I know what you mean - my artifice crafter had one heck of a time getting the schematics for a blue hilt (I think it was Might 18) - it took about 40 tries to get the schematics, while all the other hilts produced the schematics in 1-10 tries.

 

Theoretically, you could be so unlucky that you never learn the schematics - if the quarter lands heads up 1000 times in a row, it still only has a 50% chance to come up tails when you flip it for the 1001 time.

 

Random number generation in computers is not truly random (only a pretty good approximation). This might be one of the causes.

Another possibility is that 20% might not really be coded as 20% across all RE-able items - I suspect this might be the most likely explanation.

Edited by Totaltrash
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Basic math says the chance of me not getting a schematic 30 times in a row is .8^30 = 0.123 percent.

 

0.123% is still thousands upon thousands of RE attempts since there have been millions done in the game.

 

And this is not an exception, it often takes 25 or more attempts to reverse engineer.

 

I doubt that, you're probably suffering from confirmation bias as so many others have. (It's natural, I'm not blaming you.) I've gone over 50 attempts for one item, which was my longest streak and has a 0.0014% chance. My best streak however is 7 in a row on the first attempt, which is a 0.0013% chance. You'll note that's less likely yet it still happened ;)

 

BioWare has the stats and checks them, because they've fixed RE chance errors before based on them, so I wouldn't worry about it. Any one player's results aren't statistically meaningful.

 

Personally I think the chance should be lowered but made guaranteed after 5, so the overall average chance remains at 20% but the process is less frustrating, but that's a separate discussion.

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Well, I have method for increasing RE proc. I have 7 toons from range lv19 to lv42 and I have reverse engineered a lot of green items in to blue.

Apparently in game "random" generator is wheeling system and nothing else and "wheel" has it's reset timer.

I don't know exactly yet how long takes reset wheel but let's say you want RE something.

Craft 5 items, RE them, if you don't get proc, craft another 5 and forget about those items for several hours (3-4).

Log out from that char, just do something else. After 3-4 hours log on to that char again and try RE.

Mostly like you will get proc from first 3 items, this method is been working for me so many times.

Seems like entire wheeling system is bit sluggish, same goes with missions. If you start mission after wheel is been reset, first 2 missions mostly like have very high proc rate. Then wheel starts shifting again.

I just resubbed today, so I had not enough time test everything, servers vent "Kablah".

 

So here is the question for BW, could please we have truly random system with out any negative modifiers BS?

Your current system causing a lot of anger, I don't think so that you could afford loose more players.

Thing is, players who willing to RE something, they will, no matter how many failed attempts it takes but peoples who are "gifted" with patience are minority.

This game has wonderful crafting system, make it interesting for more than "few selected peoples", this "artificial hard mode" is pointless.

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Either the percentage of 20% chance to reverse engineer a standard item is the wrong number or someone has coded the random number generator for the engineering algorithm wrong.

I've noticed that it is almost impossible to reverse engineer certain items, in this particular case a barrel.

 

The item mentions the 20% chance, yet in 30 attempts I have gotten zero schematics. Now, I know that 20% chance does not mean that in 5 attempts you should be getting an assured schematic, because, yes, every attempt is a new one.

Random Number Generator is ok. You are just unlucky.

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Well, I have method for increasing RE proc. I have 7 toons from range lv19 to lv42 and I have reverse engineered a lot of green items in to blue.

Apparently in game "random" generator is wheeling system and nothing else and "wheel" has it's reset timer.

I don't know exactly yet how long takes reset wheel but let's say you want RE something.

Craft 5 items, RE them, if you don't get proc, craft another 5 and forget about those items for several hours (3-4).

Log out from that char, just do something else. After 3-4 hours log on to that char again and try RE.

Mostly like you will get proc from first 3 items, this method is been working for me so many times.

Seems like entire wheeling system is bit sluggish, same goes with missions. If you start mission after wheel is been reset, first 2 missions mostly like have very high proc rate. Then wheel starts shifting again.

I just resubbed today, so I had not enough time test everything, servers vent "Kablah".

 

So here is the question for BW, could please we have truly random system with out any negative modifiers BS?

Your current system causing a lot of anger, I don't think so that you could afford loose more players.

Thing is, players who willing to RE something, they will, no matter how many failed attempts it takes but peoples who are "gifted" with patience are minority.

This game has wonderful crafting system, make it interesting for more than "few selected peoples", this "artificial hard mode" is pointless.

 

That's a classic Type I error. We're wired to see and learn from patterns and have a really hard time when faced with random numbers. It's like a mental optical illusion.

Edited by Atrix_Wolfe
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That's a classic Type I error. We're wired to see and learn from patterns and have a really hard time when faced with random numbers. It's like a mental optical illusion.

Have you tried? Prove that I'm wrong, if it works for me, then it should work same way for you also.

I'm guessing you forgot about game flaws, this is one flaw I have discovered some time ago.

Obviously now timer gets "fixed" buy increasing reset timer but it still will work and it will work till result generation will be replaced with another system.

Same way as slicing nodes got "fixed", slicing nodes still respawn in same places, just timer got changed from 3 minutes to 30, that's it.

Looking more deeper in to game mechanics helps reduce unnecessary grid.

Edited by Chaffery
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In the past getting a blue schematic quite often happened within the 1st 5 attempts, with most happening within 10 attempts. Then there would be the occasional painful one.

 

However over the last couple of days they've mostly been painful. Either I've had a major bad run, or someone in BW has changed something.

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I've several items that I've attempted to RE now for 184 tries and counting.

 

This is statistically nil, and should be impossible if the number generator at all worked like it should.

 

I'm more inclined to believe they lowered the chances of a successful RE across the board way back when they did the crafting changes, and did a lazy copypasta of 10% and 20% to the appropriate schematics (which would totally fit right in with the same copypasta tactics they've used for everything else).

Edited by Malkavier
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Human perception of probability is severly flawed and there is always an abundance of posts about it in games where RNG is involved.

 

The X-Com Enemy Unknown forum is full of it atm.

 

Always the hottest topic in Blood Bowl.

 

Or the Crew skill section of SWtOR.

At the beginning it was the Battlemaster tokens.

 

Quite entertaining for someone who studied maths and experienced the process

from flawed intuitive perception of probability till the theoretical understanding.

 

My own mind fooled me on many occassions on the way.

Edited by Sabredance
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Here is a little feed for theory.

Yesterday before logging I left T7 craft lv45 armorings, logged on, had 3 armorings in inventory, all RE attempts failed. Crafted another 3, T7 critted 1, blue proc from 4'th RE attempt.

Then I made 3 lv45 barrels, blue proc on 2'nd RE attempt.

3 aim modifications for lv45, blue proc on 1'st RE attempt.

2 different types lv43 enchants for commando and M1-4X, enchant for commando blue proc on 2'nd RE attempt, enchant for droid blue proc on 3'rd RE.

 

All that today, while I was leveling treasure hunting on 1 toon and did try RE with hour or more breaks.

 

Tell me something more about RNG, let's stay on topic, RE in game is flaky. :D

Or switching toons messes up RNG, or something else but as I mentioned in previous post, from 5 crafts after break blue proc is mostly like 100% guaranteed. At least that is how it works for me.

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Here is a little feed for theory.

Yesterday before logging I left T7 craft lv45 armorings, logged on, had 3 armorings in inventory, all RE attempts failed. Crafted another 3, T7 critted 1, blue proc from 4'th RE attempt.

Then I made 3 lv45 barrels, blue proc on 2'nd RE attempt.

3 aim modifications for lv45, blue proc on 1'st RE attempt.

2 different types lv43 enchants for commando and M1-4X, enchant for commando blue proc on 2'nd RE attempt, enchant for droid blue proc on 3'rd RE.

 

All that today, while I was leveling treasure hunting on 1 toon and did try RE with hour or more breaks.

 

Tell me something more about RNG, let's stay on topic, RE in game is flaky. :D

Or switching toons messes up RNG, or something else but as I mentioned in previous post, from 5 crafts after break blue proc is mostly like 100% guaranteed. At least that is how it works for me.

 

Nothing you can do is statistically meaningful. We'd need thousands of players with dozens of items each confirming this. Like I've said above, BW is the only one with those kinds of stats and they are checking them.

 

My streak of 50 was broken when I logged out and back in and the first RE attempt worked. But I didn't have to wait like you say, and it only happened once. If I were to believe that was a surefire method it would be nothing but confirmation bias.

 

I still agree that this is a dumb system, but yeah.

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What I have noticed, if you craft and try RE without logging attempt mostly fails. I have been using this method with all crew skills, it works same way with any crew skill.

One day I was lazy to log out, as I had enough mats, I was just curious how long it takes. I ended up with 21 augentation slot components, technically I wasted stack of Diatium and Resinite. What a waste.

 

And if we talking about collecting information, many peoples don't know it yet. Hopefully now peoples could experiment and give some feedback, unless BW nerf it.

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What I have noticed, if you craft and try RE without logging attempt mostly fails. I have been using this method with all crew skills, it works same way with any crew skill.

One day I was lazy to log out, as I had enough mats, I was just curious how long it takes. I ended up with 21 augentation slot components, technically I wasted stack of Diatium and Resinite. What a waste.

 

And if we talking about collecting information, many peoples don't know it yet. Hopefully now peoples could experiment and give some feedback, unless BW nerf it.

 

OTOH - I typically RE as the stuff comes into my inventory because I usually kick off 10-20 craftings and if I get what I want I cancel the rest. I have sometimes gotten a schematic on the first attempt. Sometimes on the 20th. Sometimes not at all. Typically though I get one within somewhere in the 5th to 10th range. And that is statistically average (on 20% chance the chance of success tips in your favor after the eight attempt).

 

I have also kicked off 20, logged off and then back on - after all the crafting is done (usually overnight) - start REing, saving the items that happened to get an augment slot, and I go through 18 with nothing then I take a chance and RE those with the augment slot and BAM two in a row OR I get nothing.

 

My point is You do your thing, I'll do mine, and there are plenty of players out there who do things they THINK influences the outcome. But in reality, everything you or I or anyone else does to try to influence the numbers is all superstitious nonsense :p.

 

That being said, like the Bud Light says, "it's only weird if it doesn't work." :)

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If you read my previous post, over night did not work for me. Perhaps it would if I had 5 items for RE, my goal was test proc from 3 crafted items. Only 1 failed, as I got RE proc on 4'th attempt. Any way, I'm not insisting using my method but saying anything against with out testing and talking about "random" is is nonsense.

This game is so badly manipulated, it is full of negative modifiers. So what some peoples call to random is actually fixed card deck.

 

Examples? OK, no problems.

First go to 10 levels lower 4 man HC and see what drops. Then level up 5 levels and see drops, amount of dropped credits is significantly less. Plus try grind out some items, not a chance in hell, best what you could get is some green junk. Random? Sure, I call it to anti grind measure.

Then hottest topic, slicing, do T1 missions. First only with 1 companion, let's call it to random, then let second companion start doing T1 missions. Oh noes, cases are far slimmer than with 1 companion. Stop second comp and you notice that boxes get fat again. And last thing, send out 3 companions do T1 slicing missions, you barely come up with par. Same way entire "random" works with any mission based crew skill, best result comes with only 1 companion.

 

Why? Look at legacy vendor prices, you will get the idea. It is first, anti grind measure and second, pre programmed down time via grind. Because BW selling playing time, obviously than more you have down time, than better for them.

You may remember from past my ranting here on forums, looks like finally I figured out all mechanics.

Last hint, create trial account and run missions on trial account, out come is significantly boosted. Why? Take it as advertisement.

 

This game "random" is full of nanny policy "can't do this and can't do that" BS.

So BW, can we have truly random system please? Current "random" system looks to me like scam.

Edited by Chaffery
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As many others have explained in more complicated terms, I feel it is perception. The times we have to RE an item 32 times stand out in our memory far more than the times we got it on the 1st or 2nd try.

 

All that to say, in the hope of improving perception, I would gladly do away with the latter, to avoid the former. Just get rid of RNG completely and make it a finite number. Green -> Blue = you have to craft/RE 5, every time. Blue -> Purple = you have to craft 10, every time. And you always get your schem on the 5th or 10th try respectively. I could live with that.

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  • 3 months later...

Funny how people have posted to this thread who claim they know something about mathematics or statistics.

 

Put simply, what it means to say "you have a 20% chance of succeeding each time you try this" is that, if you had a statistically significant sample set, you should find that somewhere close to 20% of the attempts resulted in successes. This correlation should increase the larger your sample set.

 

So, if your sample set is 1 attempt, you aren't going to derive ANY meaningful data. Same with 10, 100, 1000. Ok, so maybe at 1000 you will start to get SOME meaningful data.

 

But imagine if you had 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts recorded down, and in that enormous sample set, only 6% of the attempts actually succeeded.

 

Assuming you had this huge sample set and this observed result of 6%, how accurate is the original claim that "you have a 20% chance of succeeding each time you try this"? Well, given the astronomically huge sample set and the extremely skewed results, your conclusion would be "the original claim is totally bunk".

 

That is just one extreme example, where I demonstrated that, with an enormous sample set whose results do not even come remotely close to matching the original claim, the descriptive statistics of the results do not match the inductive statistics of the prediction.

 

All we're looking at with SWTOR is a much, much smaller sample set, where the data is still nonetheless skewed. That doesn't mean "you can't derive any conclusions from it at all because it's random" -- there are different types of randomness, different "qualities" of randomness. If the randomness source were ideal, then the more data points you have, the less likely you are to observe results which do not agree with the inductive principle (the 20% chance) -- assuming that (1) the inductive principle is CORRECT, and (2) assuming that the random number generator produces true random numbers.

 

So, if we HAD a significant sample size and could demonstrate that the sum of all our player-experience data is statistically significant, and we found that the results were skewed, then we could conclude that either (1) the inductive principle is INCORRECT, or (2) the random number generator DOES NOT produce true random numbers.

 

While it is true that one player's results would not be enough data, I think it'd be neat to have some kind of collaborative spreadsheet on Google Docs where a ton of people record their RE attempt results. This would allow us to gather a significant sample set.

 

Of course, "significant" is in the eye of the beholder. What's significant? How many is enough? It really depends on how many chance events are occurring within a practical timeframe that you're willing to measure.

 

For example, if you are measuring probabilistic quantum events that occur thousands or millions of times per second, a sample size of 1000 is not statistically significant. But, if you are measuring a baseball player's chance of hitting a home run when he steps up to the plate, 1000 could be very significant as a means of coming up with an inductive principle.

 

What Bioware has done is they've given us an inductive principle (20% chance of success) without providing us the "source code" (the mathematical theory or empirical evidence) supporting that principle. So, basically, without a statistically significant number of rolls of the dice from their random number generator in a spreadsheet, we can't be sure that what they claim is true, unless we observe the results ourselves (which will take a long time to get a goodly amount of data).

 

Right now, "20% chance of success" means nothing. It may as well be 0.1%. Any inductive probability claim is only as true as the data supporting it.

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First off as an individual with a Six Sigma Green Belt, I always find the statistical numbers interesting. Yet, even with my background combined with the fact that I understand the assumed logic of the 1K flips of a coin and the odds that align with this for heads and tails.

 

It is as one of the previous posters points out; the number (e.g. 20% Green to Blue) is simply that without the understanding of the formula used to determine this and the alignment of the code to implement the formula it truly does means nothing. Honestly I do not foresee BioWare or EA allowing their code to become public regardless of the concept that has evolved of F2P.

 

I do remember a discussion over a year ago (shortly after launch) that revolved around the logic of real world thinking. That discussion in this forum based that even if I fail at something I learn from the mistake to improve my odds of success the next time I attempt the same thing. This was when the BioWare coders actually and openly admitted the formula did not account for "n" attempts to create a new formula after each attempt due to the complexity it would require.

 

Now even with the odds and the statistical studies we all point to with different trains of thought and methods that work for one person and not another, we have to remember that the underlying code is nothing without understanding of how it integrates into the system. Thus the fact that without evidence of the code and the formula being used to drive the code all this is simply assumptions on what should occur and how it works.

 

So in basic terms I would declare it more a myth and base it on the fact that it works every now and then for me. This assumption also plays around that I have the patients at times to waste hours gathering resources (including credits) to craft with only to have to spend more time doing it all over to get the desired outcome.

 

Hence the real question we are asking is are we satisfied with crafting in general cause it is not delivering what an individual wants, but might for someone else.

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