Doom drops turn off during the event?

[gwen]

@railshot random distribution is random. It should not be equal.
What you want is to RNG work in your favour. Or remember previous rolls and avoid them. It will not.Some values will occur more often then others.

 

[Stinky Pete]

Eh, I'll just concede the point here. I shouldn't try to argue someone else's intentions. I don't think that the current team has ever acknowledged any issue regarding the RNG or made any attempt to change how it works so I may have inferred that the way they have it working is intended and I may very well be wrong. It's really not worth arguing about.

It's truly a miracle the game is still around after some major design decision made at the very top.

I don't really consider it a miracle that the game is still around today. They have a customer base of hoarders with loads of virtual junk that their customers have sentimental attachment to. Honestly, they could remove all content, fire the devs, put the servers on $50/month AWS VMs, and never release any content again and I'd be willing to bet that at least half of their current customers would keep paying for their accounts at least once every 3 months to keep their houses. Just look at the attitude of these forums over the last few years, UO is almost like an abusive relationship to a lot of these people. It's really kind of sad.

 

[railshot]

@railshot random distribution is random. It should not be equal.
What you want is to RNG work in your favour. Or remember previous rolls and avoid them. It will not.Some values will occur more often then others.

Let's not put words in my mouth. I said nothing of the kind.
UO RNG does not behave even close to a random fashion. Anyone who played long enough and knows the basics of probability theory had multiple chances to observe it. Toss a coin 1000 times. See if you get a single streak of 15 heads in a row. You won't because the chance of you getting that is about 1 in 32. But you will routinely see those kinds of streaks even within several hundred rolls.

 

[gwen]

Let's not put words in my mouth. I said nothing of the kind.
UO RNG does not behave even close to a random fashion. Anyone who played long enough and knows the basics of probability theory had multiple chances to observe it. Toss a coin 1000 times. See if you get a single streak of 15 heads in a row. You won't because the chance of you getting that is about 1 in 32. But you will routinely see those kinds of streaks even within several hundred rolls.

How can you state in one message that I won't get 15 heads in a row, and that it is 1/32 possibility to get it?
1/32 means I CAN get it. Nothing prevents me to do so. Even on my first 15 tosses . Go learn more about theory of probabilities, not just basics.
Finally learn difference between CAN and SHOULD

I checked all messages in this topic. Cannot find any clear stated criteria how you will judge if RNG is fixed or not.

 

[Keven2002]

Once I thought it would be great to be a Knight of all the virtues... but then when I did... the "reward" for doing so... was just not there... and seemed like an empty achievement. Rather disappointing to say the least.

I think many things in UO are more about the journey than the final destination. It's a great achievement to be knight of all the virtues (one which most people probably cannot claim) and yes I'm sure it was a bit grindy to get some of the virtues but that's all part of the journey. If every virtue was like spirituality and you gained simply for healing someone then everyone would be Knight of all virtues and it wouldn't be as special (it would be like having GM tactics).

I'd look at it as the "reward" you received was the X hours of gameplay you took part in and the feeling you had when completing a tough virtue rather than there not being a reward (like title saying you have all or something else). Again if there was some great reward for having all the virtues (even with the grind) then there would be tons of people that had it. I think this is why UO has such a following of seasoned vets because many of us still remember what it was like making our first warrior or crafter etc and the journey we all took in trying to finish our characters. The journey is the reward.

 

[Anon McDougle]

Forgive me both my ignorance and if this not allowed here but why is spaghetti code not an issue for free shards? Something about they use emulators? Why can't the real developers use them?

 

[Stinky Pete]

Forgive me both my ignorance and if this not allowed here but why is spaghetti code not an issue for free shards? Something about they use emulators? Why can't the real developers use them?

The code is totally different. For perspective: Most free shards use one of two emulators written in C#. C# did not exist when UO was written. Also, those emulators are actively maintained and open source.

 

[railshot]

How can you state in one message that I won't get 15 heads in a row, and that it is 1/32 possibility to get it?
1/32 means I CAN get it. Nothing prevents me to do so. Even on my first 15 tosses . Go learn more about theory of probabilities, not just basics.
Finally learn difference between CAN and SHOULD

I checked all messages in this topic. Cannot find any clear stated criteria how you will judge if RNG is fixed or not.

Did you actually bother to run the numbers yourself, or you just like to mouth off to people you don't know on the subject you clearly do not understand? What I wrote, if you were to do 1000 flips, the chances of you getting 15 heads in a row in that set of 1000 flips is 1/32. That means that on average you'd need 32,000 flips to get that streak.

 

[railshot]

The code is totally different. For perspective: Most free shards use one of two emulators written in C#. C# did not exist when UO was written. Also, those emulators are actively maintained and open source.

I think the main reason is that those emulators were written from scratch with good practices in mind. Original UO code was not. They could have written a maintainable code without C#. They did not, for whatever reason (poor management, mad rush to finish maybe?)

 

[Stinky Pete]

I think the main reason is that those emulators were written from scratch with good practices in mind. Original UP code was not. They could have written a maintainable code without C#. They did not, for whatever reason (poor management, mad rush to finish maybe?)

Yeah, for sure.

 

[The Zog historian]

Or, they can just say that it's working as intended because it's working as intended whether you like how it works or not.

And that more likely than not will be the response.

Wow! You know an "actual real programmer?" Can I have his autograph?

I take it you never heard of the semi-satirical "Real programmers" that floated around many years ago.

Who said anything about generating random numbers client-side?

Can you not be such a sophist when I'm trying to have a serious discussion? I used client-side generation as an example of generating a random number without the latency you're talking about.

As I've said multiple times now, the example I provided was to show how an RNG can generate streaks exactly like the ones that @Basara shared and how changing the speed at which the time-based RNG is possibly being seeded to match actual real-world conditions essentially mitigates the problem, thus making the chances of that being the issue highly unlikely.

And that is still unnecessary for true randomness. Like I said, the roll of a dice does not depend on when I hear about the results. Randomness is all about when the dice are rolled, or the server determines if you hit the balron.

If you don't understand it, you can just say that you don't understand it,

Way to derail the conversation with personal attacks that would have already gotten me a week ban, but what can I say, I'm not among the Stratics favored.

or you can get your friend's brother's cousin twice removed that used to work at Microsoft or whatever to explain it to you. Better yet, you could just not comment on it at all

There we go again with personal attacks, but it's not surprising from someone who fooilshly thinks ping has anything to do with probability.

and go back to complaining about what you think the devs should be fixing while the rest of us enjoy the game.

Oh so there it is, you like the game, so it must be running perfectly. Gosh, thanks for setting the rest of us straight.

Would you care to tell me the probability of not getting one of the Axem quests in 14 attempts, and tell me with a straight face that there's no problem with the RNG?

This is a game that a lot of us would enjoy, but these long-lived problems are wearing us down. After Tuesday I'll have no more open accounts, save for a few EJ throwaways. Multiply me by thousands of players (you can do that, can you?) who would be playing, except that Broadsword's view on fixing bugs is explained by their initials.

 

[The Zog historian]

And another consideration. It's quite possible they did use a good third-party RNG that works as intended. It does not mean that whatever transformation the random number needs to undergo before it becomes a tangible result is working as intended. God knows, UO Devs historically took the most torturous convoluted way to the goal possible.

"Quite possible," with this current team...nah.

Look at the damage formula. It's more complex than Windows Registry, and just like Windows Registry, you can do a PhD thesis on it. Do you really think it's beyond them to pancake the RNG output to the degree that they cannot understand or fix it themselves? I don't.

Each player gets six cards, except for the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven. The second card is turned up, except on Tuesdays. If you have two jacks, you don't want a third jack lest you be disqualified, but you want a king and a deuce, except at night, when you'd need a queen and a four.

There are so many easy ways to set an RNG seed, especially the server's clock (can be seconds since server up). Even something as simple as Atari BASIC had excellent built-in randomization, which wasn't hard to do on other 8-bit computers. There's no excuse for it today.

 

[The Zog historian]

These are all very good points. There's also a very good possibility that that part of the code is contained in a .dll along with a bunch of other stuff and they don't have the source code for it any more. Honestly, it doesn't matter. It's been like it is for almost 25 years now. At this point I would say it's part of the game that sometimes whacky and very improbable things happen, just like irl. So like I said before, working as intended.

I never accepted "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" and am not about to start.

RNG has been a thorn in UO players' sides for a very long time, and this latest dungeon event amplified the problem. Would you care to tell me, if the UO RNG is really working well (not just how it's "intended"), why the devs with Tokuno II implemented the threshold for a guaranteed drop? Removing it was one of the stupidest things they ever did.

 

[Anon McDougle]

But new legacy will be bug free and the UO of our dreams

 

[The Zog historian]

The problem is that computers use "pseudo-random" generators, not truly random. Back in the Day, Draconi even managed to determine what was being used for UO, and it appeared to be one of the simplest, least-random, PRNG, out there - one that was not only public domain, but also one commonly used for teaching programming of random generators in college (one that I had an assignment for, ironically, but my health issues caused be to have to withdraw from the class before completion). It was one NOT meant for being used in any serious application, but as the first step in teaching them (as a prelude to teaching more complex RNGs). Literally ANY other RNG package for sale (and all others for free) are more complex than the one being used.

The issue apparently lies with what's being used as the seeding process for the subroutine, from what Draconi said in 2009.

Sure, any computer generates a "random number" based on a seed. But it's the easiest thing to get a new random seed every time a random number needs to be generated, whcih makes the number random.

 

[The Zog historian]

I disagree. The tortuous grind that was acceptable 20 years ago is less and less so now. This is both because there are plenty of games that found ways to avoid grind or make it fun, as well as all of us are adults that are a lot less tolerant to it. Unfortunately, the current team consciously uses grind as a filler for content. In few and far between cases where accidentally they manage to come up with a mechanic that would provide mostly self-generated content without the monotony, they somehow always manage to step on their own pancake and self-sabotage. So, grind it is. And a wonky RNG makes that grind even less tolerable. When the game starts looking like a dreaded job (monotony with no end in sight), it's a problem.

When this event started, I was wondering how many years it had been since I went into Hythloth at all. Maybe twenty. It's good in concept that certain dungeons are an attraction again, but the implementation could be so much better. Well, I had the time to do the grind on Atlantic for the first couple of days (the dungeon events being how I make money to buy the priciest scrolls), I got the chest and daemon slayer talisman on Sonoma, and that was it for me. It's nice to have a variety of rewards to choose from, but at the same time, including all previous rewards would make a new event much more attractive to players who missed the previous ones (completely or they didn't have time to grind).

Fighting balrons in 1998 (and I always preferred the original purple gym rat daemon graphic) was much more interesting than this latest grind. It took a while for my friends and me to build our master mages so we could reliably cast EVs and strong e-bolts. If you got killed in one hit despite AR33, well, it was possible, and hopefully someone could res you without running out of regs. But now, with the screwy RNG behind the drop rate, and running around a corner only to find someone running from a couple of para balrons that suddenly turn on you, blah.

 

[The Zog historian]

The fact that the RNG is pseudo-random is completely irrelevant though. It's not the lottery, it's a stupid game about wizards and stuff. It doesn't matter if the numbers are truly random or not. Any psudo-random number generator would work fine, even ones not designed for serious applications because despite what half of this forum's users believe, UO is not a serious application.

The nature of the game still doesn't change that we, at least I, expect random numbers. And they aren't hard to produce.

The seeding process is important. I've already showed how to cause streaks in an RNG by seeding with a timestamp too quickly. I've also explained why that is likely not causing the issue but might still cause the data that Draconi shared to be flawed. I personally think the seeding issue is a red herring caused by how Draconi generated the data. Just a hunch based off of what I know and problems I encountered years ago.

And you're still not understanding that true randomness does not depend on the news travel time of the event.

I've already said I don't think this current team even knows how the RNG is generated, but if they did (if they could), it's the easiest thing to get a random seed before generating a random number, however pseudo-random the latter may be.

This is a mighty fine opinion. I can't disagree because I don't grind content in games as it bores me to tears. But neither you nor I get to decide what is intended. My opinion is that it's actually kind of neat that improbable stuff happens from time to time... probably way more often than it should. One might say that in itself makes it even more random, maybe not fair, but random.

The problem isn't just "from time to time," but that "improbable" happens too often. Stated success chances with imbuing and refinements are messed up.

Thinking about what I just typed... Perhaps it was intentionally coded that way. What if, built inside the RNG, there is another random number generated that decides if something miraculous and highly improbable happens with your next role or several roles? That would make things interesting for sure, and again... working as intended.

I've seen a lot of rationalization and cheerleading for the devs throughout the years, but this here, oh boy.

 

[Draza]

The game is 24 years old now. I would really like loot tables, answers on why i can fail 5 times in a row with a 99% success chance or why i can succeed with a 2% chance.

Just still seems wonky.

 

[The Zog historian]

A couple of points:

1) I think it is a real possibility that sometime in 1997 they decided to make the RNG not quite random. It may be working as they intended, but their 20+ year old intentions are irrelevant today.
2) UO can be used as an example of how to take a bad situation and make it worse, repeatedly. Every action was fully intentional, yet here we are. It's truly a miracle the game is still around after some major design decision made at the very top. Something is working as intended is not always good, especially if the person doing the intending is not that bright.
3) Several later generations of devs acknowledged the issue with RNG, so clearly it is not working as intended today.

I still say the current team doesn't even know how much of the basic code works. It's an inevitable problem when things are so cobbled together over a couple of decades, sure, but there are also fundamental functions that the current team should understand — and be able to give a definitive answer.

UO could be compared to a bar that seemed great when new, because there wasn't much competition, and you didn't mind (too much) things being watered down, because it was more about hanging out with so many friends. Over the years your friends, one by one and for whatever reason, stop coming. I have such few old-time friends left, and not enough new ones, that I once took a two-year break. But I suppose I'm just "complaining" when the Stratics cheerleader squad will tell me to put up with it. Some people want to believe that a plate of duck feces is fois gras, because they're paying for it.

 

[The Zog historian]

@railshot random distribution is random. It should not be equal.
What you want is to RNG work in your favour. Or remember previous rolls and avoid them. It will not.

Thanks for answering my question about whether I'm talking to a wall. You seem to have a comprehension problem, so I have to keep explaining that I in fact am not talking about historical events having any influence on a new event. I'm not talking about, say, hitting a para balron every time while it doesn't hit me. But your "argument" (I'm being charitable there) keeps coming back to this straw man.

Like I said: go do Axem's quest a bunch of times, or imbue something with a fairly low probability.

Some values will occur more often then others.

Right there you demonstrate that you have no idea what random really means. If there are three events with the same probability, but out of 1000 occurrences one occurs 50% of the time, there's a problem.

 

[The Zog historian]

How can you state in one message that I won't get 15 heads in a row, and that it is 1/32 possibility to get it?
1/32 means I CAN get it. Nothing prevents me to do so. Even on my first 15 tosses . Go learn more about theory of probabilities, not just basics.
Finally learn difference between CAN and SHOULD

Actually, it's you who needs to learn the difference, as well as basic probability functions. If you're lucky enough to experience something that "should" happen 1 in 32,768 times, good for you. But if there are 32,768,000 rolls of the dice and it happens only 500 times, or 2000 times, then something is wrong. The dice are loaded, or a computer's RNG code is not truly random.

Ever try imbuing refinements? Do you know what the odds really are with a bonus 5th mod?

I checked all messages in this topic. Cannot find any clear stated criteria how you will judge if RNG is fixed or not.

Well, go back and re-read them, then.

 

[The Zog historian]

I'd look at it as the "reward" you received was the X hours of gameplay you took part in and the feeling you had when completing a tough virtue rather than there not being a reward (like title saying you have all or something else). Again if there was some great reward for having all the virtues (even with the grind) then there would be tons of people that had it. I think this is why UO has such a following of seasoned vets because many of us still remember what it was like making our first warrior or crafter etc and the journey we all took in trying to finish our characters. The journey is the reward.

Not for me. Many other games have leveling, e.g. EQ (hated it) and Diablo II (loved it for the first two go-arounds but terrible replay value), of fighting progressively harder and harder monsters. But in UO you wanted GM swords and tactics even for just the first couple of levels of Despise or Wrong. It was better for my guildmates and me to spar up new characters to maximum skills first, and then go adventuring.

My first income in UO was from selling bows to NPCs, because lumberjacking built str pretty well. Then I started a tailor and sold fancy shirts, but again just for income. I didn't bother with a blacksmith until the introduction of smelting and unraveling made it possible to create and smelt with the same UOA macro key.

 

[gwen]

As being historian, you have really "humanitarian" approach to what is wrong and right. Including math.
State your criteria for RNG. Because your "wrong" criteria is incorrect. It CAN happen both 500 and 2000 times. Or not at all. Even though 32 million rolls.

 

[The Zog historian]

The game is 24 years old now. I would really like loot tables, answers on why i can fail 5 times in a row with a 99% success chance or why i can succeed with a 2% chance.

Just still seems wonky.

When something is not 100% guaranteed, it is certainly possible it won't happen several times in a row. Conversely, when something has an extremely low probability, it can happen with enough rolls of the dice. It's just highly improbable. If only 1000 lotto tickets are sold when the odds for a single line are 1 in 45,057,474, then there would be hardly any winners, but certainly still possible that there can be a winner on the first draw. But "highly improbable" in UO is absurdly streaky.

 

[The Zog historian]

As being historian, you have really "humanitarian" approach to what is wrong and right. Including math.

Once again, I'm talking to a wall here.

You don't know where my name comes from. It's to satirize an old scammer guild on Sonoma.

State your criteria for RNG. Because your "wrong" criteria is incorrect. It CAN happen both 500 and 2000 times. Or not at all. Even though 32 million rolls.

I have no "criteria" for randomness. Randomness is self-evident, and yet you don't know what it is. The example you bring up "can" happen, just not over so many as 32,768,000 coin flips. If it does, there's something wrong with the randomness. The coin isn't evenly weighted or isn't being flipped properly, or a computer's RNG code isn't truly random.

Go see for yourself: generate 1000 or even 10,000 random numbers between 0 and 1 in something like Excel or LibreOffice, and tell us the average. Do you think you're going to get anywhere near .4 or .6? You might with 10, even 100 rows. But not with thousands of rows.

 

[Stinky Pete]

Sure, any computer generates a "random number" based on a seed. But it's the easiest thing to get a new random seed every time a random number needs to be generated, whcih makes the number random.

This is literally what I did in the first example I provided. Generating a new seed every time a number needs to be generated is the exact wrong thing to do. I thought I explained that 5 times now. I've met a lot of people who just couldn't understand code in my time, I can respect that. I never met someone who argues that an idea that I can clearly prove wrong using code is correct. I give up.

 

[Stinky Pete]

The nature of the game still doesn't change that we, at least I, expect random numbers. And they aren't hard to produce.

You should probably quit playing games then. Truly random numbers, as I have already explained are typically too expensive (in terms of both compute power and monetary cost) or too slow to generate to use in a game where you might be calling for them hundreds of times a second.

 

[railshot]

I still say the current team doesn't even know how much of the basic code works. It's an inevitable problem when things are so cobbled together over a couple of decades, sure, but there are also fundamental functions that the current team should understand — and be able to give a definitive answer.

The problem is worse than that. I do find it hard to believe that regardless of how old the code is, they can't figure out how the RNG works, but let's suppose that is the case. I do know for a fact that they pointedly ignored game-breaking bugs in the EC. I am talking about getting too much text in a shard event and the text buffer CTDing the client. Or crashes when opening those event corpses with hundreds of items in them. The guy who wrote EC's UI sent them the bug information with quite a bit of the tracing already done only to get the silent treatment. Note this is not some Joe shmoe who can't tell a bug from the hole in the wall. This is a guy who used to work with them, who already did a lot of work towards diagnosing the bug. And they don't even bother to answer.

 

[The Zog historian]

This is literally what I did in the first example I provided. Generating a new seed every time a number needs to be generated is the exact wrong thing to do. I thought I explained that 5 times now.

Actually, while generating a new seed each time is theoretically superfluous, for the cost of a few extra CPU cycles, it ensures randomness in case the seed variable is happened on again.

I've met a lot of people who just couldn't understand code in my time, I can respect that. I never met someone who argues that an idea that I can clearly prove wrong using code is correct. I give up.

I didn't even look at a single line of your code. I scrolled on past, then once I saw in your summary that you don't understand the general concept of probability (particularly that the time for news delivery doesn't matter), why would I bother going back to see what you did?

You give up? That's a laugh.

I've met a lot of people who just couldn't understand statistic probability, which I don't respect if they try to talk about it. And I've met a lot like you who argue that a few lines of code can trump mathematical laws. But that's ok! Keep on cheerleading for the UO devs' broken design and broken programming.

 

[The Zog historian]

You should probably quit playing games then. Truly random numbers, as I have already explained are typically too expensive (in terms of both compute power and monetary cost)

Utterly false. Must I repeat myself?

Even something as simple as Atari BASIC had excellent built-in randomization, which wasn't hard to do on other 8-bit computers. There's no excuse for it today.

A seed is easy to generate each time from how many actions happened on the server in the last 60 or 600 seconds, or like with PGP the keystrokes over a defined number of seconds, or way back when, something as simple as white noise oscillations from the sound chip.

or too slow to generate to use in a game where you might be calling for them hundreds of times a second.

If generating a seed each time somehow takes too many CPU cycles, then it can be done once a minute. Even so, we're not talking about 1 MHz CPUs anymore, or do you not understand how fast a server is? Or at least how fast a server should be. I guess maybe UO is 6502-based after all?



Now, do you still not understand that whether code accounts or doesn't account for any latency, the probability of rolling dice, lotto, or any other occurrence does not depend on how fast the news travels? My point all along (and the one you just didn't understand about things being generated client-side) is that the code running on the server just doesn't do randomness very well.

 

[The Zog historian]

The problem is worse than that. I do find it hard to believe that regardless of how old the code is, they can't figure out how the RNG works, but let's suppose that is the case. I do know for a fact that they pointedly ignored game-breaking bugs in the EC. I am talking about getting too much text in a shard event and the text buffer CTDing the client. Or crashes when opening those event corpses with hundreds of items in them. The guy who wrote EC's UI sent them the bug information with quite a bit of the tracing already done only to get the silent treatment. Note this is not some Joe shmoe who can't tell a bug from the hole in the wall. This is a guy who used to work with them, who already did a lot of work towards diagnosing the bug. And they don't even bother to answer.

If they deliberately wanted to make players quit — and I stress again how many accounts they've lost by not fixing gameplay — what would they have to do differently? I didn't know about the guy doing the legwork for them, but it's just like that database vendor I mentioned, focused more on churning and burning new clients than keeping the big ones. I had to trace their bugs for them, I sometimes had to fix their SQL, I was willing to fix their C#. Like UO, it was a product cobbled together by dozens of people over so many years, that no one still there truly knew how things were programmed. But I'd used it since V1 and knew better than anyone on the planet how it functioned and where they should look. They'd always fall back on "proprietary."

 

[Stinky Pete]

 

[The Zog historian]

Yes, yes, a non-reply reply. I tell you what: show me how much you understand basic statistical concepts by answering a couple of questions. I figure you'll try to find the answer online, or ask someone secretly. That's ok, and I'm used to it. Back in school a lot of others would try to sneak a peek at my answers during tests.

If you rolled a standard six-sided die, and I rolled my own standard six-sided die, then with everything being "fair" in terms of a proper throw and a properly weighted die, what are the odds that I would get the same number that you did?

Now, if I rolled my die 20 ms after you did, or 20 seconds, or 20 days, how would the time delay affect the probability of my roll?

The rest of my points stand by default, based on your silence. I suppose I'll have to hop on Test Center and get Axem's quest or imbue something 100 times to show how streaky the non-random RNG is. I'd have to use an EJ account, though. All my six "real" accounts since early this month have lapsed. Now multiply me by thousands of other players who'd otherwise be playing, and BS is full of their acronym in stupidly ignoring all that lost revenue.

 

[Stinky Pete]

Now, if I rolled my die 20 ms after you did, or 20 seconds, or 20 days, how would the time delay affect the probability of my roll?

The fact that I demonstrated doesn't have anything to do with dice rolls and time delays of dice rolls. You are arguing about something I never said. What I showed, had you bothered to read it, was that you can't seed a time-based RNG in a tight loop. You will get frequently repeating results, as I demonstrated. So I'm just going to do this again and be done with you.



At first I thought you didn't understand but when you said:

I didn't even look at a single line of your code.

I determined that you aren't really worth a proper response.

 

[Pawain]

I can give an example of speed affecting results.

As an electronics teacher for 17 years sometimes I taught digital. After learning all about gates for weeks you want to let them build something that does something.

A digital display is first then a counter on a clock. Add start and stop numbers and have it count until a button is pressed that stops the counter and displays that number.

A very basic random number generator. But use a slow clock with a large range and it is not very random, you may never get to the high numbers.

But a 1k clock with 2 set ups running 1 thru 6, made a very realistic dice set.

A 1 Hz clock not so random.

 

[Pawain]

Also with your dice comparison. If you try rolling your dice in a very tiny space they do not roll a random number.

That's why you have to shoot craps dice across the table and against a wall that is not smooth.

Basically this is what Pete is saying. The generator needs time to set up artificial randomness.

 

[gwen]

@Pawain you try to loot para balron or underwater, or roof boss. Very random results as for me. Even it all generated at same instance.
For me it proves that RNG works and generates random stuff properly.

What people want is RNG to be more "fair" to them. To drop not random but what they want. And when they want it.

 

[Pawain]

I agree. I'm sure there is a term for it.
Using Axem quest which I have done a lot. My experience is that no matter which of the three items I want to turn in, it seems to take more than three attempts.

You remember the hardships and forget all the successes when it just took one click.

I imbue a lot and usually a 25% chance rarely takes more than 5 tries.

Yukio quest brought about many complaints about RNG. It was a one in 8 chance to get the earrings. But some players took more tries some took less. I was 2 for 17 tries. I did not like the quest So I bought more instead.

Then we have the weighted chances.
I carved over 100 pumpkins to get the Medusa one. For the rare demon head dropping at the spawn: that took me 60 belts and over 200 common heads.
Some got those items in just a few attempts.

Shoot craps or play Yatzee for many hours you will see every weird combination if you play enough.

 

[skett]

Eh, I'll just concede the point here. I shouldn't try to argue someone else's intentions. I don't think that the current team has ever acknowledged any issue regarding the RNG or made any attempt to change how it works so I may have inferred that the way they have it working is intended and I may very well be wrong. It's really not worth arguing about.



I don't really consider it a miracle that the game is still around today. They have a customer base of hoarders with loads of virtual junk that their customers have sentimental attachment to. Honestly, they could remove all content, fire the devs, put the servers on $50/month AWS VMs, and never release any content again and I'd be willing to bet that at least half of their current customers would keep paying for their accounts at least once every 3 months to keep their houses. Just look at the attitude of these forums over the last few years, UO is almost like an abusive relationship to a lot of these people. It's really kind of sad.

this is mostly me to a T

you said it better than anyone ever has





and its embarrassing to admit

every year that goes by i cant believe it just keeps getting worst. talk about bad leadership.....

 

[Anon McDougle]

this is mostly me to a T

you said better than anyone ever has





and its embarrassing to admit

every year that goes by i cant believe it just keeps getting worst. talk about bad leadership.....

But new legacy....

 

[The Zog historian]

The fact that I demonstrated doesn't have anything to do with dice rolls and time delays of dice rolls. You are arguing about something I never said. What I showed, had you bothered to read it, was that you can't seed a time-based RNG in a tight loop. You will get frequently repeating results, as I demonstrated. So I'm just going to do this again and be done with you.



At first I thought you didn't understand but when you said:

I determined that you aren't really worth a proper response.

Actually, you're the one who wrote: "but the fact that the numbers are generated server-side and none of us have a fast enough ping to run a loop that tight, even from a 3rd party program, it seems unlikely to cause an issue even if the code is technically bad." Right there you demonstrated that you don't understand that probability doesn't depend on how fast news travels.

Seeding does not need any sort of timing. It simply doesn't. Even the most half-assed RNG programming would need just one reseed at server-up, but anyone but a fool can see in UO that the RNG code isn't even that good.

You can argue A is B all you'd like, and I'll keep showing you're wrong.

 

[The Zog historian]

This is pic of table with random numbers in Excel. =Rand() function. Second column is =if(A1>0.5, 1, 0) . Then summarize each column.
You can play with it yourself. On a pic above I managed to have amount less then 40. Can be above 50. It aims to 50, but hardly can do. And even harder to make both at 50. It will be different each time you refresh page.
If you will make a slice chart how many occurances
=round(Rand() *8, 0) you will see something like situation happening to our ship plans.

I don't think I saw this before, but baby Jesus in the manger, you didn't have to keep showing .

The generation of a single truly random number doesn't mean you'll never get a lot below or above halfway. It does, however, mean that with enough generation, things will even out. If you flip a coin 10 times, you might get heads three or five or nine times in a row. If you flip it 100 times, it's not impossible to get heads 40 times, but improbable enough you should start questioning the randomness. But if you flip it 1000 times and you get heads only 400 times, then something's wrong. Must I keep explaining?

 

[The Zog historian]

I can give an example of speed affecting results.

As an electronics teacher for 17 years

Worthless appeal to authority, as well as irrelevant.

A digital display is first then a counter on a clock. Add start and stop numbers and have it count until a button is pressed that stops the counter and displays that number.

A very basic random number generator. But use a slow clock with a large range and it is not very random, you may never get to the high numbers.

But a 1k clock with 2 set ups running 1 thru 6, made a very realistic dice set.

A 1 Hz clock not so random.

Your example isn't based on built-in randomness, but the actions of the user, and that's, uh, exactly what I said with an RNG determined by player actions in a certain preceding time period.

 

[The Zog historian]

Also with your dice comparison. If you try rolling your dice in a very tiny space they do not roll a random number.

That's why you have to shoot craps dice across the table and against a wall that is not smooth.

Basically this is what Pete is saying. The generator needs time to set up artificial randomness.

Well no kidding. Rolling dice in a small space, or shaking them in a cup and just dumping them down, is not true randomness.

 

[The Zog historian]

Yukio quest brought about many complaints about RNG. It was a one in 8 chance to get the earrings. But some players took more tries some took less. I was 2 for 17 tries. I did not like the quest So I bought more instead.

Such quests, and Krampus too, need to be about building points to buy the reward you want. I got the earrings on my second time. I counted myself lucky and wasn't going to bother getting a second pair.

Like I said, I'll happily meet a Dev to test randomness with imbuing. Axem's quest's streakiness is right there to see.

 

[Stinky Pete]

Ummm... Ok... You're right about everything. Bye.

 

[The Zog historian]

Of course I am, because on top of you denying what you've put in black and white, you've been entirely wrong. You know, that Luke Skywalker line: "Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong."

I'm still waiting for an answer to my elementary question of probability that in Statistics 101 would be a remedial topic. If you can't answer something so basic, you have no place talking about random number generation.

 

[petemage]

Well that was in an intersting read so far. I think you guys are arguing a bit different cases though.

I think it's unquestioned that the UO RNG is streaky a lot. Streakiness in those old games often comes from using those bad LCGs, as @Basara seems to mention. They have been covered ad nauseam. To me this always looked pretty plausible.

OTOH does that alone explain what we often perceive (well - perceived lol) as "bad luck"? I bet there is another layer of abstraction build on top the basic RNG simply for having an convinient "UO style rolls" API. So there would be plenty of room for engineers that didn't understand the RNG in the first place to introduce even more side effects.

The main takeaway for me is that they prenteded for 20 years to be unable to rework those like maybe couple hundreds lines of code. How helpless are they lmao.

 

[petemage]

Well no kidding. Rolling dice in a small space, or shaking them in a cup and just dumping them down, is not true randomness.

You might want to make clear why true randomness matters in this context?

This is not a mathematical discussion about stochastics, but rather about applied computer science.

When two dozen players are slaying a boss generating a couple dozen items per player, the server needs to make a couple hundred or a couple thousands rolls with the RNG only for this instance. Do you want the server to block for half a second on each kill because after an hour of fighting it eventually ran out of entropy? Any true randomness is completely off the table, idk why you keep bringing it up.

You can keep talking in terms of that idealized model of a dice or coin used in stochastics. Yet the poor engineer implemting the model will have to resort to fairly less ideal means to make it happen in the real world.

 

[gwen]

If you flip it 100 times, it's not impossible to get heads 40 times,
....
But if you flip it 1000 times and you get heads only 400 times, then something's wrong. Must I keep explaining?

Yes, please explain how your coin should find out that it had 40 times heads streak before, so it must give more tails later.