DezoPenguin
Mar 26, 2004, 11:40 AM
Or, more accurately, people who don't understand what the frag a one-in-X chance of something happening means.
*sigh*
We've all been there. We see there's a 1/512 chance of a rare monster appearing, a 1/28807 chance of a nifty item showing up, and so on. Then somebody comes along and says something like "I got that on my fourth time and ninth time, so that chart must be totally wrong!" or "I've done this thousands of times and still nothing happened! That chart must be totally wrong!"
It works like this. Every time the game, say, loads a Rappy, it rolls a 512-sided "die." If that die comes up 1, it spits out a cute little blue (or pink, or parrot-colored, as appropriate) peep. If it doesn't, you get generic yellow.
Each appearance is generated *separately*, with a *separate* roll of the die. You could end up with a whole room full of Al Rappies with enough luck. More commonly, you could see thousands of peeps and never see a darned one in a pretty color. But it's all luck. You are not entitled to exactly one for every 512. What that means is that if you take millions and millions of rappy appearances, something pretty close to one out of every 512 will end up being a rare rappy. The experiences of any one player are simply not statistically significant in determining whether a particular percentage is "right" or "wrong"--the sample size is just too small.
This is why casinos make money. They know the odds--and they apply them over millions of plays. They know that, even though individual gamblers will get lucky, over the long haul the casino will get rich.
*sigh*
We've all been there. We see there's a 1/512 chance of a rare monster appearing, a 1/28807 chance of a nifty item showing up, and so on. Then somebody comes along and says something like "I got that on my fourth time and ninth time, so that chart must be totally wrong!" or "I've done this thousands of times and still nothing happened! That chart must be totally wrong!"
It works like this. Every time the game, say, loads a Rappy, it rolls a 512-sided "die." If that die comes up 1, it spits out a cute little blue (or pink, or parrot-colored, as appropriate) peep. If it doesn't, you get generic yellow.
Each appearance is generated *separately*, with a *separate* roll of the die. You could end up with a whole room full of Al Rappies with enough luck. More commonly, you could see thousands of peeps and never see a darned one in a pretty color. But it's all luck. You are not entitled to exactly one for every 512. What that means is that if you take millions and millions of rappy appearances, something pretty close to one out of every 512 will end up being a rare rappy. The experiences of any one player are simply not statistically significant in determining whether a particular percentage is "right" or "wrong"--the sample size is just too small.
This is why casinos make money. They know the odds--and they apply them over millions of plays. They know that, even though individual gamblers will get lucky, over the long haul the casino will get rich.