Time based RNG, a concept.

Greetings,I would like to make this small lecture on RNG that i have been gathething data on for over a year now , i think its time to present my findings to you and the results have been....enlightening.I have been noticing people from time to time being extremely lucky, and some(including myself) extremely unlucky in the "good" drops. So for the past year and something now i have been experimenting on RNG based on the time of the day. The mechanic that was used was the mystic forge and the ecto gamble. i always started with 50 ectos and 4 sets of 20 rare greatswords respectively.

Having stated the methods i used lets move on to the proceedure, i tested every time frame ,dividing the day in 4 hour periods, meaning 00.00-04.00, 04.00-08.00 etc, for the majority of the day my account was unlucky and i didnt receive anything of value and i was at a loss for the majority of the begginning of the test, however, my account from 01.00-03.00 roughly has been the luckiest i have ever seen, scoring all my money back and more on top !!! If pushed too much though the account hits diminishing returns and all your "good" rolls eventually run out as i have also discovered.(sometimes the gabler in you takes over ^^) What it felt like is that basically the account receives x amount of good rolls and then it goes back to normal even in the "good" RNG period.The fact that this timeframe has been the luckiest for my account consistently for over a year now i think doesnt leave much room for error, its happening and its real.

Now i would like to ask the developers if this is something that they intended to be a mechanic for loot in the game, and if so why wasnt it disclosed to us before.I would also encourage the community to help me in this small discovery and test it out as well to see if this is something that is happening only to my account or if its affecting more people.Please bear in mind that the timeframe for each individual account might vary and not be the same as mine.

Ps. I am not a math guy so i am not good with statistics and polls etc, forgive the lack of evidence to back this claim in the form of graphs.I am sure if this gets enough attention and people test it out the people with knowledge on the matter will present some awsome graphs.

Thank you for your time.Cloud

When you said you're not good at math you've lost creditibility for me. Also the fact, you have no evidence to back up your words. It's really hard to believe you've been gathering data for over a year and you have no proof.

Also, RNG is RNG.

RNG is set by a number derived from a source such as a computer clock. Combined with that is a roll to determine whether your outcome is above a certain threshold. For example, say the probability of getting an exotic from the mystic forge, with my combinations is 40% (.4). Any RNG roll between 0 and .4 will give me the item. Any RNG roll between >.4 and 1 will give me no exotic - and then probably another roll for which exotic.

So RNG interacts with the loot table to determine what the quality of what you will get, along with what you will get.

Over a very long run, possibly hundreds of thousands of re-rolls, it is possible to estimate something like the probability of getting an exotic.

But it is literally down to timing for that RNG draw in interaction with the loot table. So mainly luck, with some output parameters set.

And RNG is random. While the same seed value will produce the same set of random numbers in the same order, there are many types of methods to produce the sequence of random numbers. And PhDs have been written on the topic of whether a random number is truly a random number given how the seed is set. But that's way more theoretical than we need to get into here.

I don't think there's any need for a graph, but it would be helpful if you could share your actual data - whatever you wrote down during the tests which enabled you to reach this conclusion. Exactly how much gold did you get during a 'good' time period? And during a bad one? What was the overall wins and losses for each? How consistent was this pattern? How often was the 1:00 - 3:00 time slot unlucky (and was it then consistent with other unlucky times)? Did you get any lucky results during other time slots?

You're off to a pretty good start here - you've got a hypothesis, a method and a conclusion, but without the results it's no more valid than anyone else's hunch that closing their eyes when they click the forge or only doing ecto gambling on a character wearing red brings better results.

@Hesione.9412 said:RNG is set by a number derived from a source such as a computer clock. Combined with that is a roll to determine whether your outcome is above a certain threshold. For example, say the probability of getting an exotic from the mystic forge, with my combinations is 40% (.4). Any RNG roll between 0 and .4 will give me the item. Any RNG roll between >.4 and 1 will give me no exotic - and then probably another roll for which exotic.

So RNG interacts with the loot table to determine what the quality of what you will get, along with what you will get.

Over a very long run, possibly hundreds of thousands of re-rolls, it is possible to estimate something like the probability of getting an exotic.

But it is literally down to timing for that RNG draw in interaction with the loot table. So mainly luck, with some output parameters set.

And RNG is random. While the same seed value will produce the same set of random numbers in the same order, there are many types of methods to produce the sequence of random numbers. And PhDs have been written on the topic of whether a random number is truly a random number given how the seed is set. But that's way more theoretical than we need to get into here.

In this case it really depends on how GW2 does it, which may well not be nearly as random as computers are capable of being because Anet only needed to create a system which is 'good enough' to create a typical distribution of drops while being unpredictable to players, even if it isn't truly random and wouldn't stand up to the kind of analysis professional mathematicians would use.

For example in the earlier Pokemon games it's very easy to control 'random' outcomes because while they are randomised in the sense that the game draws from a string of randomised numbers to determine the outcome all random events in the game use the same string of numbers, which never changes. (That's due to the limitations of fitting the game on a cartridge - they couldn't fit a true random number generator in.) So once you know the pattern you can manipulate it - for example using something easily repeatable like the coin flip tool to work your way through the sequence of random numbers and then start the fight with a legendary pokemon, knowing you've reached the point where it's guaranteed to be a shiny.

I think GW2 has a much more sophisticated RNG system, and quite likely doesn't use the same RNG system for everything (it's a bigger game, running on much more powerful machines, and can be updated remotely so there's none of the same limitations). Otherwise I think players would have cracked it by now. Although if they did I suspect Anet would change the system so it's no longer possible to predict it. But even so I'd be surprised if it's truly random. The only important thing is that players won't get the same results all the time or in a predictable order. As long as the underlying code isn't accessible to players you can achieve that result with a fairly simple system which is cheaper and easier to produce and needs less processing power to run. Which would also be an important factor when you consider that things like drops from enemies are randomised and you could have 150 players on a map killing dozens of enemies and each needing their own personal drops created for each enemy.

@Salonikios.3154 said:Ps. I am not a math guy so i am not good with statistics and polls etc, forgive the lack of evidence to back this claim in the form of graphs.I am sure if this gets enough attention and people test it out the people with knowledge on the matter will present some awsome graphs.

While I applaud your effort, this right here pretty much means that any assumptions you make past your observations are without value. Assumptions based on observations are only of value if the observed, put into data, is properly analyzed.

You could try to ask a friend or someone you know who is better at data analysis to maybe use your collected data. Your personal interpretations though are meaningless in the context of actually scientifically breaking down how this games RNG works.

For example, you state that:

@Salonikios.3154 said:my account from 01.00-03.00 roughly has been the luckiest i have ever seen

which is absolutely unreliable UNLESS you actually spent time to track, input and compare many weeks or months worth of results. Otherwise this might just as well be subjective perception based on recent results or tainted by expectations (which happens a lot, people expect an outcome and as such are already prejudice towards any outcome, no matter if confirming the expectation or denying it).

You even then give an immediate explanations for your observation:

@Salonikios.3154 said:If pushed too much though the account hits diminishing returns and all your "good" rolls eventually run out as i have also discovered.(sometimes the gabler in you takes over ^^)

Which reads exactly as: "oh well my expectation was met, but I got unlucky after and that is due to another effect XYZ". This could have been confirmed if this effect happened a significant majority of times, which would be visible in a graph or timeline. As is though, it reads as you expecting an outcome, and every time it did not occur or deviated, you found some explanation which suited your expectations. Did the "better results" always change after the exact same amount of tries? Was the initial higher result ALWAYS higher in all cases, or just often?

Hesione.9412 gave a good short summary of how RNG in game is achieved. Suffice to say, it is very likely an unintended effect for certain periods during the day to give "better" loot, though not impossible. It depends on how sophisticated the tools for RNG in this game are.

One thing is clear though, don't expect any actual confirmation or comment developer wise on how they achieve RNG in this game, because there are people out there who could make use of this, if it is exploitable.

Thank you all for the feedback and responses to my thread-search, as i stated i dont claim that i am 100% credible or accurate, hence my plea to the community for more insight and testing of my theory-discovery.I have only my word to back up my claim, however as i stated in my original post everyone is welcomed to add to it and test it out for themselves and contribute their findings , all i am presenting here is a personal experience that i believe deserves a bit more knowledge to be build around it.

Again i cant thank you all enough for the feedback!

It's not the time your drops are dependent on, it's the kind of activity you do. Some ingame activity yields more loot, some other less. And every player is on some kind of schedule that tells when he plays what.

For example, someone might perhaps be a night active gamer who usually logs on late at 21:00, do his dailies until 22:00, then do some activity with your gild until 23:00, then stand in Lion's Arch for nothing until 00:00, then do some random open world stuff or world bosses until daily reset, and before you're going to bed you're doing the new daily T4 fractals with the initial crowd. Your actual daily schedule varies, but it may be roughly similar every day. In such a scenario, you would of course make your best loot with the T4 fractals somewhere between 00:00-04:00, because it's the activity that yields the best loot if compared with all the other stuff you're doing. The second best might be the world boss events with its boss chests. Random open world roaming isn't yielding much loot, and standing still somewhere of course none. Random activity with guild friends usually also yield not much, because this usually involves much waiting, and waiting yields no loot. On the other hand, T4 fractals via LFG at reset time is almost no waiting time, so it's pure action the whole time.

I have a solid superstition about another RNG thing in GW2 myself. I am absolutely positive that when you salvage Rare items with a Master kit (or Black lion kit) ONE BY ONE you will end up with more Ecto's then when you do choose the "salvage all" option when rightclicking the kit. My explanation is that the network/computer/server/game can't keep up with so many salvages within a second and just "forgets" to produce Ecto's a couple of times. Or something like that.

I realize this is total bull kitten, yet you will never see me do a Salvage All, ever when it comes to yellows. Greens and blue I do Salvage All though I am sure your results will be better there too with mats if you would bother to do them one by one.

I will not be accepting any tin foil hats, thank you.

NB I am not really kidding here.

years ago i suggested that certain "good" drops should be within X drops, things like pre-cursors could be ones every X chance.the idea is so anyone who isn't that lucky with drops will at least get a guaranteed drop after X the frst time, after that RNG kicks in.

back then ppl did like it, i dunno how much ppl still like it but it's just to give ppl a small chance of luck instead of a big chance of rotten luck.

@Salonikios.3154 said:Thank you all for the feedback and responses to my thread-search, as i stated i dont claim that i am 100% credible or accurate, hence my plea to the community for more insight and testing of my theory-discovery.I have only my word to back up my claim, however as i stated in my original post everyone is welcomed to add to it and test it out for themselves and contribute their findings , all i am presenting here is a personal experience that i believe deserves a bit more knowledge to be build around it.

Again i cant thank you all enough for the feedback!

So you didn't write down any of the drops you got while doing this? Didn't make any notes for yourself on what you got and when? Didn't take any screenshots? Not even a tally of how many results were good or bad? How were you able to work out what was a good time period without doing that? Were you going by memory the entire time?

It just seems strange to me that you'd take the time to work out an organised process and spend that long testing it but never record any of the results in any form. It doesn't need to be anything fancy or complicated, literally any info you have on your results would be helpful. Otherwise you're asking us to start over from scratch repeating your process with no basis except your hunch that it works, and all the time you spent testing it yourself is wasted.

@Salonikios.3154 Great research, must have been a ton of work. On what time-zone did you test it?

So, am I understanding you correctly? You've come up with methods for data collection and testing...but then decided not to actually collect any data? That's remarkable! And you spent an entire year not collecting data while meticulously following your carefully thought out methods? Truly amazing.

I recommend starting a Google sheet file and begin recording every single mystic forge attempt.

Log the time of day, the items you forged, and the result.

Get about 1,000 entries in each of your time blocks and then share the Google sheet with the forum for analysis.

@Danikat.8537 said:

@"Salonikios.3154" said:Thank you all for the feedback and responses to my thread-search, as i stated i dont claim that i am 100% credible or accurate, hence my plea to the community for more insight and testing of my theory-discovery.I have only my word to back up my claim, however as i stated in my original post everyone is welcomed to add to it and test it out for themselves and contribute their findings , all i am presenting here is a personal experience that i believe deserves a bit more knowledge to be build around it.

Again i cant thank you all enough for the feedback!

I didnt write down the drops that i received, however i was consistently ending up with alot of profit, my tiny brain can comprehend only this much in the grand scheme of things. I am not good with numbers and keeping track, all i know is that my gambles at that particular time frame for my account specifically yielded me profits and the gold kept going up, i just wante to share with everyone this experience, thats all. I dont wanna be a parriah or something here, let me be very clear! Just sharing with the community.

I dont believe or have reasons to believe that timezone has anything to do with this, and i will start keeping track of the drops and make a google spreadsheet to have something more robust to present in the future.About my method, i dont think that its too hard to replicate my proceedure, nor it would require you to waste a ton of gold to find the "sweet spot" timeframe as i stated in my original post i always started with 50 ecto and 4 sets of 20 rare greatswords, easy to replicate and doesnt cost much,imo.

Maybe it was a series of coincidence, maybe it was just me doing those 2 particular gambles that ended up rewarding me like that, i have absolutely no idea!This is where the community comes in, and i am sharing with all of you this so that we can elaborate on it IF its something real and discover if what happened to me consistently(and this is why i shared it with the community)for the past year is something more people can profit on.

As always i love feedback, as it only helps!

Outlier Accounts, never addressed by Anet. ( I believe John Smith spoke about them years ago but was rather ambiguous about them, but agreed they exist if my memory serves. Likely lost unless they can be found in the old forums).

You can search (the 'Search' feature works there) the archived GW2 forums, if you so desire. (A quick Google search will bring them up.)

Download GraphPad Prism, the free version, and to the statistics. Until you have a p value, all is speculation

Sample size may or may not be an issue. Usually, forum science does not take this into account.

That said, it was "common knowledge" (i.e, anecdotal) that in Guild Wars, drop rates for rare items improved in areas where players did not go, and got worse in heavily farmed areas. Without way more data than is being presented in this case, there is no way to prove it one way or another. However, we know that a lot of rolls for loot in a given area results in diminishing returns. So, it is clearly possible to adjust drop rates based on number of rolls, so why not for other factors?

Thank you all for the awsome feedback, i am checking out the tools that were suggested as i type this! If any (brave) soul does some testing as well on this please feel free to share it here.

Each time you kill a mob , an imaginary dice is rolled and the system chooses 1 of the 8 random ''imaginary tables'' (yeah a wooden normal table with spoons and dishes and any sensual music(exept The Contours Do You Love Me ... school festival... 8 years old...girl saying ''no i dont''...)''Each table has also its own food and RNG items

So for example :

The system rolls a dice , and you get ''4'' (1-8) = the system will choose the ''table 4'' . Then it rolls again for which RNG item(1-250) , it will give you

In the 1st Table , the worst item you can get is a a 10 copper grey item - while in the best scenario a 35 silver yellow chest .In the 3rd table , the worst is a 10 copper grey , and in the best a 2 gold weaponTable 7 has a Legendary weapon at its best , while the 8th a Legendary Gear

By increasing you Magic Find by 100 , you ''skip'' the first tableand the system rolls for which different table will put you (2-8 , not the 1st) , and it rolls again for the loot it will give you (this RNG item doesnt get effected my MF)

Edit: Mobs that haven't been killed for a while (20+ days) , increased your chance to roll for higher ''tables'' , and hopefully the second roll (which cannot be improved with anything) for the RNG item (1-250) doesnt screw you over:)

@AliamRationem.5172 said:So, am I understanding you correctly? You've come up with methods for data collection and testing...but then decided not to actually collect any data? That's remarkable! And you spent an entire year not collecting data while meticulously following your carefully thought out methods? Truly amazing.

^ This.

I thought OP's setup was promising, then realized it was nothing but a setup, and a weird plea for others to actually do the meaningful work for him. It doesn't matter if OP actually did the mystic toilet test for a year or not - failure to collect meaningful data wasted all that time and effort. Congratulations.

@mtpelion.4562 said:I recommend starting a Google sheet file and begin recording every single mystic forge attempt.

Log the time of day, the items you forged, and the result.

Get about 1,000 entries in each of your time blocks and then share the Google sheet with the forum for analysis.

I would think that the data set would require a lot more than just 1,000 entries to even begin drawing conclusions.

@kharmin.7683 said:

@"mtpelion.4562" said:I recommend starting a Google sheet file and begin recording every single mystic forge attempt.

Log the time of day, the items you forged, and the result.

Get about 1,000 entries in each of your time blocks and then share the Google sheet with the forum for analysis.

If it was so apparently "better" in the unrecorded entries the OP noted, it should be pretty easy to detect in a data set of that size.

@Danikat.8537 said:

@Hesione.9412 said:In this case it really depends on how GW2 does it, which may well not be nearly as random as computers are capable of being because Anet only needed to create a system which is 'good enough' to create a typical distribution of drops while being unpredictable to players, even if it isn't truly random and wouldn't stand up to the kind of analysis professional mathematicians would use.

That reminds me of all the whining on the WoW forums about RNG in pet battles...and someone figured out that instead of doing a separate roll for each event, the RNG code would roll from where the last roll landed...which led to the 5%-chance misses/dodges happening multiple times in a row. In short, the code was a bit lazy/flawed, probably to save on processing power.

Can't see that being the case here because the game is many years newer, but it certainly won't be pure random. (or the strikes and otters wouldn't drop 1 shard on most occasions, particularly when the strikes were dropping 2-3 shards on most occasions a few months back)