Fan Faire- how'd it go?

[Eleena Transient]

Actually you can't do it that way. If you fight for 30 min, then you have:

0-19
1-20
2-21
3-22
4-23
5-24
6-25
7-26
8-27
9-28
10-29

There's 10 "20 minute" windows in that 30 min fight, and thats only breaking it on the minutes. If you crit at minute 3 and at minute 25, you'd still say "I had a 20+ minute stretch without a crit". But if you wanted to do the "760x20 = 10.5 days" then no you didn't, because you did crit on the 0-19 interval and on the 20-39 interval.

That make sense?

[Cedor]

Let me put it another way. In 10.5 days played and assuming my crit rate percentage is correct, I should, on average, experience only one period of 20 minutes or longer without a crit. 10.5 days played is a lot. It's about 6.5% of my player's life.

Have I hijacked the thread enough? I'll stop now.

[Arghargh]

Something else to consider is given 2 billion random numbers what is the longest streak of number that might exist above or below some threshold?

This is a simplistic analysis, but it should server to make my point. Take 2 billion, and divide by 439 (the number cited earlier). This gives you over 4.5 million sets. Even if the odds are 760 to 1, that mean this bad streak will happen almost 6,000 time for each complete cycle of the random number generater.

If you take into account the fact that this bad streak could happen at any point in the cycle (not just at multiples of 439 as I've assumed), there will be many more than 6,000 cases of this bad luck.

Given that EQ has hundreds of thousands of players, this string of bad luck, and worse, is going to happen to someone.

As for dependancies, that is a very big problem. I read about one RNG that was evenly distributed, and any two adjacent numbers were independant. However, any three adjacent numbers defined a point on a set of planes in 3d space, and thus it wasn't random at all.

There is also the psychology of human expectation on random numbers. If someone flips a coin 10 time, and it comes up head every time, what is the probability of it coming up heads an 11th time? 50%, same as the first coin. If it takes an average of 20 attempt to skill up once, and you've failed 19 times, you should still expect 20 more attempts to skill up, not 1 more. People think they're due to succeed because they've failed so often are wrong in that expectation (and these are the one who lose $$$ big time in Vegas).\

[Laureana]

Sooo, any more info from the tradeskill panel?

[Trepan]

[had nothing to do with the tradeskill panel]