Salvage is BAD for skillups

[Itek]

*soft sigh*

The -entry- market into the game, true -entry- not people buying second accounts, not people refer'ed by friends, does indeed depend on marketing.

Name 10 accounts purchased for EQ in the last year where the purchaseor had NO previous exposure to someone playing the game, or a substantial review, and I'd probably die of shock. (Which might make the person posting evidence of such a hero in some corners of the forums.)

Everyone else demands high quality dependable randoms.

I'd have to turn on a packet sniffer to determine if the client doesn't send out a request when new characters are started. It'd only need one out packet, 3 random numbers generated (or even just one) and a single return packet. The time and effort required to send one packet on an established (you had to log in, not only to the login server but to a LIVE server as well) connection falls well below trivial. If there is a half a second delay between you clicking it and the screen loading with latency of around 30... heck 100 ms, you have 3 tenths of a second for the server to generate that one random number. EONS of time.

Random pathing. *sigh* Yes the mobs have AI decisions about start/stop/etc in SOME places. Most of them do not. Most of those that do have VERY limited ranges. I meant "random pathing" in that you could NOT draw a "this is Roamer One's path, this is Roamer Two's path" lines on a map. And for every mob. Imagine the pain and suffering and anguished cries if a Juggernaut wandered up even just to the mushrooms in Old Seblis.

"They use 20+ rolls in a melee round"

Hmm... Ok. What's a melee round? Looking at a recent combat my Speed of the Brood hasted PoP enchanter animation pet vs. an unslowed (he resisted) Dulak's Harbor mob.....

Mob (unslowed) attacked every 2 seconds, sometimes double attacking.
Pet (hasted) attacked a little faster, getting in 4 attack series in the same period the mob got 3 attack series.

7 total attack series in 5 seconds. EVEN presuming that each attack series takes 20 rolls this is 140 rolls in 5 seconds.

We have previously determined that a SLOW processor, running fully loaded, can produce 10,000 rolls a second, even with an INCREDIBLY slow RNG algorithm. If there were 500 attack series every second we MIGHT BEGIN to run low on random numbers.

"they use/might use/should use...."

*sigh*

Element two, unpredictability. You see it IS possible if you know the algorithm and take sufficient data samples with high accuracy to reverse engineer the 'seed' of a p-RNG. And as was correctly pointed out by Neebat, one doesn't generally change random seeds on a whim. (You can and it's not hard, it's just usually not efficient or needed.) If one were to guess or deduce which comercially available algorithm SOE used and then sample enough data one COULD then guess what number was going to come up at a given time. So, almost certainly, they use a VARIATION of a public method. (And probably reseed quite a bit more often than every time the server comes up.)

With Agnostic as my witness I swear to you that SOE developers know what they are doing. They are NOT out to -get- you or make life miserable for you, except to the extent that you LIKE being miserable. I complained BITTERLY about the difficulty I had getting sufficent skill and drops for the 8th shawl. I contemplated the Aid Grimmel quest and thought "gosh, that involves a lot of pain" ... Then they upped the limits to 300 and I thought "ouch, I dunno ... I was gonna avoid the 1750 club... 2100 seems out-rage-ous..."

Salvage and the Mastery (people who MENTION JCM to me go on /ignore I won't discuss it, I hate it, I'd love for everyone to have it if ONLY to stop the endless whine-fest) skills still fall in the category of a quote from the movie (not the book) 'The Firm'

Guy: But the taxes are only defered...
Tom: What do YOU -care- it's the best interest free LOAN you are ever gonna get!
Guy: So the worst case is... I pay my taxes much much later?
Tom: NO. The worst case is you don't take this, next year they close the loophole and you feel ....
Guy: You know that for a fact?

Take the Salvage'd stuff and run. Yesterday you would have gotten nothing, people haunt these boards who remember when invalid recipies ATE EVERYTHING IN THE CONTAINER!

I'm curious though .... what can be gained by a greater understanding of the specific p-RNG they use? If it couldn't be abused they would probably PUBLISH it just to close arguements like this. (Although they HAVE published formulas in the past, and people STILL accuse them of LYING.) A full and complete knowledge of the general theory of how a slot machine sounds like it would be helpful, no? But say I had such knowledge. (stepper motors, check .... relays, check .... microprocessors, check... circuit boards, check... math/probability theory, check .... high level language, check check check check .... assembly language, check .... machine code, check ... gee, guess I have a pretty firm grasp on how the slot machine works....) Would I be able to break even, not even win just break even, on a slot machine over the long haul (presuming I don't hack it, and prison holds no attraction for me so I wouldn't) ... nope. Have slot machines been hacked? Yes. But understanding the RNG in EQ won't even help you in your next combat. It certainly won't improve your chances of making your next skill up or combine. Back in the day everyone had a theory of how to increase skill ups or successes. "Keep the book open." ... "Delibeately put a wrong recipie in" ... etc etc. Do whatever makes you feel better but as said in "Pushing Tin" ...

John: So should I lean into it or relax and go with it or...
Billy: Son, you're about to get run over by a 747 wide body, you can clap hands and pray for Tinkerbelle ... it's not gonna make any difference...

[Palarran]

Some people, like me, just want to know for the sake of knowing, and enjoy speculating about it. :P

[Neebat]

Some people, like me, just want to know for the sake of knowing, and enjoy speculating about it. :P

Yay for idle speculation! Yay for meaningless chit chat about a passtime!



It's almost like being a baseball fan, and both are losing audience to flashier games.

[Cloud]

From what the devs said before they can certainly adjust the min chance to fail on any recipe up or down.

Of course they can do pretty much anything they want but consider all the no fail combines out there? They are no fail cause the GM set them to never be failed so i am sure they could change the fail rate on items like they can change the chance to get skill up on items (if they ever get around to this).

As for RNG there is no such thing as random numbers in comps. If u know the formula and the variables then u can tell what number it will generate. But in a game like EQ where so many different people are getting random numbers every sec and the fact that it is impossible for us to know the variables or the formula they are using it is basicly to us random although to soe it is not.

Someone made a point that getting 3-4 skill ups in a row is just random and has nothing to do with RNG etc going through highs and lows. This simply isn't true but I have no way of telling why it does this. It may be some kinda incoding to give u so much higher chance to skill up after doing so many combines or it may be that when the RNG hits a high that it gives out 1000s of highs at the same time and u are getting multi of these. After almost hitting a total of 2000 in trade skill total I can say that u will get multi combines in a rows as the norm and 1 here and there as the abnorm.

[Qaladar Bragollach]

Actually... you CAN get true random numbers in your computer... just not from software. You can use hardware to get true random numbers though. Its not even particularly expensive. Though its somewhat more time consuming than pseudo random number generation via software.

http://www.protego.se/sg100_en.htm

One example.

[zumbenn]

Actually... you CAN get true random numbers in your computer... just not from software. You can use hardware to get true random numbers though. Its not even particularly expensive. Though its somewhat more time consuming than pseudo random number generation via software.

Actually you can do it for free in Pentium III's on up....

Discussion of Pentium III features

Dunno about Athlons but I wouldn't be surprised if AMD tossed a similar feature in their processors.

[Raederle]

To add a bit of background to my original post (which was basically a primal scream), they do use a table. And unless things changed dramatically its a table not a seed. Back in the early days of eq ('99) a friend went into an empty zone (sol ro was good for that) and hit /random 1 10000 a billion times, parsed the results and found it was a fixed table. After that for the next year or so, when he had an expensive combine he'd go back to an empty zone, hit 5 or so random 1 10000 's , find his spot on the table, and run through it till he was sure the next was a guarenteed success (low numbers) and do the combine. He never failed an expensive combine, ever.

As the devs noticed and had reported to them that this could happen, they responded by declaring they had a new table far too long for anyone to parse. I think its still a fixed table with a pointer. I suspect but do not know that its a personal table. In the first few days after a patch, high success/fail rates are common. Remember back in the day when all the druids screamed snare nerf after every patch? That was because they were getting lots of resists after every patch. I *still* get lots and lots of spell resists and fizzles when I hunt after a patch. This can be whether its 2 days since the patch happened or 3 weeks (that char waded through them, this character is only finally getting played). After 3-6 hours of hunting time this goes away. It is still my premise that there is one 'table' and each character has a pointer to it, and that pointer is reset in patching.

Do I have proof? No. But a truly random number generator based on time or hardware events would not have such clear patterns. And absolutely at one time they used a common table with either zone or individual pointers to it. They admitted as much. Mathematically salvage doesnt change a thing. Experientially it does.

Raederle

Okies all you mathemeticians who quote statistics can go back to having a field day. In the mean time I'm up to 350 combines and counting on my last pottery skillup, and averaging 70 combines per bd/plat skillup. I blame salvage.

[Abazagaroth]

"and hit /random 1 10000 a billion times, parsed the results and found it was a fixed table."

HAHAHAHAHA!!!

Sorry, had to get that out. Either your friend lied to you or you are lying to us or you are *grossly* exaggerating. Even if you could /random twice a second (which you cannot, not even with hotkeys (try a hotkey in /say or something that has different things on each line, if you spam it too fast anything on the lower lines doesn't even get transmitted because your next click overwrites it), and did that non-stop 60 minutes an hour 24 hours a day, it would take you nearly 6000 days to complete a billion of those.

A million would take you almost 6 days straight to do.

Let's quit with the ridiculousness =P

Trying to claim that the system is set up in ways which we all know is not true doesn't do much for credibility, especially when you add in posts with claims like this.

[Qaladar Bragollach]

I still don't see how salvage could skew it one way or the other.

Even if your conjecture is true... that there is a table and that certain parts of the table have high numbers come clustered but granularly enough that salvage checks will cause you to skip some...

Surely then when you are in a dead zone of the table, salvage gets you through it faster right?

If the table is large and reasonably close to a sequence of true randoms then it won't make any difference... especially since the number of additional checks that salvage does is undefined... its determined by the recipe and obviously can't be predicted by the table.

Answer me this... compare 2 recipes... one with 4 components and one with 8... on which recipe will salvage cause you to miss the most skillups?