RNGG and RNGTards – Your stories needed!
So my ‘Guide to RNG’ is closer and closer to being in a presentable state. I’m getting quite excited about being able to finally share it with you guys.
Amongst the different topics I’m covering is ‘Common mistakes in dealing with RNG’ in which I discuss some of the more common errors people make with chance. This is stuff like “Well I’ve killed Baron Rivendare 20 times so far and no mount yet, so it should drop soon” and especially ANY QQ related to the ‘unfairness’ of RNG.
I’ve fondly termed these examples ‘RNGG’ and the folks in them ‘RNGTards’ (a play on the WoW economic term ‘freetards’). I need examples and stories of folks you’ve encountered who really don’t seem to understand or cope well with RNG.
I’ll even throw in a [Papa Hummel's Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuit] loot card for the best example!
Oh… RNG. How I hate thee!
Right. My name is Petrol and I play Azjol-Nerub EU. I first started messing about farming low % drops after doing Stratholme on my first toon. I’ve farmed the Baron mount three times now- the first run I got it after 6 runs and ofc because I was a total noob, so I was like “Oh nice, a mount”. After falling in love with it I farmed it twice more- 55 runs, and then another 106 runs. That was funny because I never saw the other epic drop, only the mount.
Then theres Thunderfury. Been after it for a while. Other week I decided “hell, i cba to go to MC and it be hassle, i’ll pug it and the probability of either bindings dropping will be tremendously low”. So, low and behold BOTH bindings drop and I lose on both, because I’m in a huge pug.
And there’s one more. The Speaker in ZG has one of the ‘highest’ PBD drop rates in the game, if I recall correctly. Whilst trying to get all these damn diamonds I went to ZG and it dropped off the speaker, despite the fact I’ve killed the two mount bosses a ridiculous amount of times :p
Not entirely sure whether this is the kind of material you’re after but they are funny stories to tell people. Man, RNG is a bitch sometimes xD
Gah I forgot the best bit about Baron mount. The first time I got it was before they buffed the drop rate. Rofl.
Val’kyr Twins kills (Trial of the Crusader 25 player): 17
Only seen the offhand (Chalice of Searing Light) drop once, and it went to a warlock as a very minor upgrade while i was using an offhand with +hit (Im a resto druid) -.-’
and for my RNGG, i got the H MgT mount on the first time i literally Solo’d the instance myself :)
and i got the H Seth Halls Anzu mount 3 days after that, and the Tiger mount from ZG 2 weeks after that =D
So yer, RNG can bless me in some areas of my game play, and curse me in another.
Back in the beginning of TBC, a few months before the daily quests was implemented in WoW.
Me and my friend had a week off school, we were bored and I needed my epic flying mount, ( oh well we both did ). So we sat down, and started to farm at the very well known Elemental farming spot in Nagrand.
We grinded 5days in a row, I was sitting there for at least 15hours per day, and he was with me 10 hours. We grinded endlessly for 5 consecutive days. We got to grind about 250 Primal Fire, which we sold for 20g each to the Action house… and we were pretty impressed with our self.
A week later or so, a good friend of mine were questing and then suddenly a epic recipe drops. This recipe happens to be a very rare one, and he sells it for 3400g to a guy in one of the best guilds of the server at the time, and along with the gold he already had from levelling up and all the questing, he managed to get his mount in about a day, because of pure luck.
Another storry is one my friend told me. He and his friend went to Ironforge to fish up Old Ironjaw, they did this during the night because they were horde. They both needed the achievement, but since the chance for the actually item to be fished up is so low and random, he managed to fish it up 4 tiems and his friend didn’t even get to see it once.. and as far as I understand they fished there all night.
Chitz. True story.
I had tried farming the Heroic Setthek Halls mount on my druid a couple of times (maybe 4 or 5) with 5 man groups and no success at all. I read online about an exploit where you can pretty much solo it, but it takes about 30 minutes to kill him. Got it first try. =]
The one that didn’t get away – approx 11,000 casts
Old Iron Jaw – 9 casts.
You just have to keep thinking to yourself “I’ll beat you eventually”.
I had leveled my druid to 80 and began completing my epic flight form quest, so I would be able to summon Anzu. I had expected to go to Sethekk Halls for a very long time, first of all the drop rate is very low and second, I was farming it with my IRL mate, so we needed a mount each. We get our first mount drop on our 4th run and the second drop on our 8th run… Very lucky :D
My husband and I used to farm MC for Rep and got his Thunderfury crafted when our 3rd binding dropped. We decided to take a hunter along to speed up the run and I ended up passing it to him ’cause he wanted it so desperately (didn’t have the other half mind you, and I’m a druid). Never saw him again after that run. This was back when I could have crafted the sword for the achievement. GG.
I went along to a MGT run with a few newly made guildmates and the Hawkstrider dropped. We debated on how to go about it and decided everyone should roll. I ended up winning it and they gave me endless grief for it since it was my first run through with them.
The luckiest son of a gun I’ve ever met was a Priest back on Deathwing that won the Baron mount on his first trip inside Strath and won both Brewfest mounts in the same week (the first Brewfest that had Direbrew avilable). I forgot his name, but he stopped playing mid-BC.
Personally, the worst RNG I ever had was the feral staff off Illhoof. I went a solid YEAR of doing him every week until I finally saw it drop. By then I had the ZA one off Hexlord. Every time it dropped in another group they’d tell me “Better luck next time!”
My best example of range-tards has to do with an app called Bunnyhunter. The app is actually really quite good in that it lets you farm for rare pets and lets you know how many you have killed; however, it can show a pretty good demonstration of how range does NOT work.
1. The app lets you know that there is a 1/1000 chance of an Azure Whelp dropping per kill when you are farming specific mobs in Aszhara.
2. The app lets you track “progress” toward getting a better chance of your drop because it lets you know how many whelp carriers you have killed. If you kill 150 mobs, it lets you know you have approximately a 15% chance “so far” of getting the whelp.
3. It has a tracking bar that shows you your progress — so after 1000 kills, you have a 100% chance so far of getting your drop.
This shows a real fallacy in the RNG analysis which is that successive kills actually increase your chance of getting a rare drop. Despite the multiple attempts, you have the same chance of getting the drop on your first kill as you do on your 999th kill which is 1/1000.
This may be the RNG fallacy you are pointing out above.
I know a bunch of people who calculate down to the exact minute, how long they will have to grind something until it drops according to percentages.
I had a friend start the ‘Insane’ grind, and then give up a week later because apparently the Ogres in Dire Maul were not dropping the librams at an appropriate rate. Didnt seem to care that random drops are random.
The obvious example is the one you said – Evil, Evil, Evil Baron Rivendare. 140(?) kills, no mount. Statisically I should have seen the mount atleast once, right? Oh wait, random loot is random!
But my fav example of ‘RNGG’ is actually a piece of loot. Five Heroic Anub kills, and no Heroic Reign of the Unliving! QQQQQQQQQQQQQQ!
- Quintakii
Ill send a pic with this story because not screen shooting this would have been lame
A few days ago me and my friend just did our heroic daily. He found out that an addon he downloaded had a click roll button so he started hitting it then he found out that he could change the number. He changed the number to /roll 1000 and he wanted to see how long it would have took. After a few minutes of him rolling just about every number, I /roll 1000 and, well, the pic says it all.
http://i48.tinypic.com/vzub09.jpg
i don’t know if this counts as an horror story but i’m currenty on my 77th hour (not in a row of course) , for fishing the turtle mount .
blargh
aiight..
1.Brewfest went in as lvl 66 SUB rogue ROFL! i basically wasted their dailies and got all those items that dropped…i had everything even the remote..and then the ram drops so im like OH gay since i was alliance i wanted kodo so i won the roll and every1 called me a ninja coz i was only lvl 66 :P..but ye swapped to horde and its mad.
2.ZG- ive been playing this game for like 3 years but i keep getting banned so i switch toons xD…so ye everytime i see some1 advertising for ZG run mounts only i come along, i went with this guy and he only wanted the tiger mount so i asked if we could do raptor mount boss for me too and he goes ye w/E.
we kill the tiger mount boss the tiger drops..i let him have it we go to the raptor boss..raptor drops and he ROLLS ON IT AND WINS IT TOO! i was pissed.
3- I was 60 twink while playing with saate and did some MC runs on aman thul still no luck with the bindings.
4.WHELPLINGS =[ OK..when i 1st saw one of these on the AH for 2000g i was like easy money…i started off grinding dark whelpling at dustwallow ROFL..so i was there for 2 days STRAIGHT and i finally got it for my rogue which was like lvl 44 at the time.
Swap server/race to horde frostmourne
i get to the AH check theres no whelplings on AH so id be able to sell for good money..i get to azure whelpling 0.2% drop chance grinding there for 3 hours and it drops :S not bad but i got bored…until i found out the hunter there was a botter -.- he sells em on AH for 350g so i got PISSED.
dark whelpling AGAIN- i grinded the dark whelpling again but this time at badlands..thought it might be luckyer tiktoktiktok 5 hrs later FUCKING FINALLY!
i played this casino thing that u put money there for eg 20g, then u type/roll and if u roll over 60 u get double ur money if not then u lose it..i put dark whelpling in thinking that they knew the price for it.i win and she gives 25g baack -.-
and no1 wanted to buy it so i gave it to my friend =[
but fuck that i got my pheonix :)
People in dalaran sometimes make me think everyone needs to take basic statistics. I was talking to some random dk in dalaran who was riding Barons mount. I asked him how many runs it took and he said 57. I proceeded to call him lucky since I’m up to 264 with no drop, and I was exalted with the runeblade (was my first epic and I got it on my birthday, good old rng) back in classic. His reply was thats impossible because after 100 runs you’re gaurenteed to see a 1% drop. I spent 15 minutes trying to explain thats not how statistics works before giving up and just assuming that some people are beyond help.
Time for my TF woes. So a guildie and myself have been farming TF for about a year now. In November we finally finished our first one (His) and have since been killing baron ever week for my 2nd binding. Upon the completion of his TF annother guildie decides he wants one. First run, garr’s binding. Second run he had to kill rags for the essence, and he gets an eye of sulfuras. 5th run he completes his TF, leaving me to be the only one without baron’s binding after a year or farming. Gotta love stats and RNG =/
Hey.
Back when I was on Jubei’thos Horde a few months ago, I had a friend whisper me a very desperate and sad message. Basically what he said was that he’d been farming the ZG mount for about two years now, ever since he could 4man it at level 70 with a few of his friends. Two of his three friends got their Tiger and Raptor mounts, and he himself had gotten the Raptor mount. They never stopped farming it though throughout all of TBC, but the lack of a mount drop made his third friend quit, and his other two friends quit when WoTLK started for RL reasons. So, he leveled to 80, and started solo-ing it. From November to April, he had no drops, all he had to keep him occupied was Naxx (which everyone knows was probably the best instance ever!…) When I met him in May he took me on a ZG mount run (of course after making me promise I would pass the mount) and it didn’t drop.
So in October, he whispered me and said that he was quitting, and he was tired of this game and how RNG hated him. He was going to Aion, and he was about to delete his toon. I told him not to, even told him that I would run ZG with him again to help him this time. We went to ZG, and it dropped. He was so happy, I passed it for him and he didn’t stop playing. :)
A week later, I got mine. He put me on ignore.
Well, the first time I ran stratholme at 80, for the achievement, the mount dropped. All my guild mates were so pissed.
On a related note, in farming for that elusive hyacinth macaw i have killed 22000 pirates over the course of the last few months
Either its karma from the mount, or the RNG gods just straight up hate me
Killed 16,000 pirates in stv for the macaw, had to make myself stop at max exalted rep, or i’d still be down there. Farmed over 8 thousand green oozes in various locations, in the end have bought pretty much every pet off the auction house – i figure sanity vs drop rates – just want the pets and am willing to pay someone else who is “luckier” than me an exhorbitant amount of money for the privelage. One thing the goblins taught me, “time is money friend”.
If you have the gold and the item is listed, the AH is 100% drop rate.
The bop items are another matter, countless anzu runs, over a years worth of oracles eggs and 12k + “fish and other things caught” (in the continual quest for the sea turtle) have me convinced some vengeful rng god at blizz just dislikes me.
At some point hope turns to paranoia.
Someone needs to be blamed so i feel better.
Hours spent contemplating this while fishing leave me in no doubt that an evil one-eyed monkey controls all loot drops and their distribution and finds it most amusing watching all of our attempts and frustrations.
On the upside i have enough fish feasts for a lifetime and shall never, ever run out of aged yolk or white tickbird hatchlings. There’s got to be a plus side to to it, right?
And please, please, please Mr Evil one-eyed monkey god of loot, can i plz have a sea turtle…… PLEASE!
The very first character I made in this game was a human rogue, and around level 30 I realized I was not going to have nearly enough gold to get my mount at 40.
I wasn’t aware of the X-Play feature on WoW mentioning that dragon whelps sold for a lot of money, but I had seen them on the AH for several hundred gold (in pre-BC, that was ungodly), so I hopped on Thottbot and saw that the red ones dropped from various types all in the same location.
It being my first character, I thought nothing of grinding for long periods of time, so I went over to the Wetlands on a Friday and pretty much did nothing but kill whelplings through Sunday afternoon. I probably spent more than 10 hours over the course of those couple days just stabbing green-level and eventually grey-level mobs. I actually looted a fair amount of silver and made a lot of money selling the glands they drop (which could be used for something like dragonbreath stew or something to that effect).
However, over 1000 kills later, I still hadn’t found a whelpling, and of course I’m thinking, “But the drop rate is 0.1%! Math shows I *should’ve* had one by now!” Of course, that isn’t how it works, but it was still fairly frustrating.
But here’s the kicker: my roommate, leveling an alt, decided to drop by the Wetlands and kill a couple whelplings on his way through for kicks. Three kills in, he got a whelpling.
So i was outside nexus summoning peeps for the heroic daily,i see someone on an interesting mount so i ask”hey,where’d you get thatr”, they reply “the blue curve in storm peaks.”
So as im waiting for a summon to good ol’ naxx i think to myself “hmmm,maybe ill check that blue curve above frosthold for that interesting mount..”
Well,to my amazement and to my guildies alarm, who i was currently on vent with,the Time-Lost Proto Drake was flying past.
At the time i wasnt an achievement whore and was just a lucky *%^&,and because of this discovery i decided to start farming the strat mount and the ZG mounts.this was at the beginning of april last year and since then my enthusiasm had somewhat faltered at not seeing anything for 7 months.i had given up on rivendare and only did 3-5 runs before feeling sick,but i still did ZG every reset.
and early in december i finally see a raptor drop,after 7 months.Of course i felt hard done by,not being a prebc or even a TBC player and really understanding how hard stuff was to get back then,untill i told saate when he logged on and getting called a bastard =p ive also been getting oracle eggs for a while now,up to lucky number 48 if i recall,so yes,RNG has some mercy at times,but not often =)
Arathorn(and yes i regret naming my toon that xD)
Probably aren’t doing this anymore, but I saw this on just my two copper forums (http://20kleveling.com/JMTCforum/viewtopic.php?p=24318#p24318) and had to copy paste it here:
A classic example of superstition/trying to beat RNG when prospecting titanium.
‘The most epics I have gotten off of 1 stack is 4, 1 stack of 5 gave me 2 and then I got 1 and 1. I usually do not prospect any ore unless I have 5+ stacks, I like doing 20 stacks at a time. But I will put them in my bags side by side, and start with one stack, lets say I get an epic off of the first prospect, I leave that stack at 15 and move to another, lets say on that stack i get an epic after 3 prospects, I move on to the next stack leaving that one at 5, I continue to do that in that order, and If I get a stack that I got no epic out of, I have a full stack that I already got an epic out of. So I list it on the AH for 300-340g (which is still profit as I only paid 250) or I may prospect it in hopes of keeping it balanced.’
Thanks so much for all the responses! Winner post will be coming soon :)
@Lucky Mount Drop People – I hate you :p
@Petrol – Speaker has ‘highest’ PBD drop rate?
@Ansgar – Good story about how much difference a single drop can make.
@Elz and Piscea – Leave the pirates alone! :)
@Serephim – That’s actually pretty funny, although you being frustrated at anything tends to amuse me :p
@Disreputable – That tentacle staff was a major ‘omg want!’ item for me, it would have absolutely killed me to go that long without seeing it!
@Quin – I’m actually kinda fond of calculating grinds myself :p
@Teapa – Awesome screenshot :) Would have loved to have seen the ‘omg’ responses after that happened :)
@Craterz – Urgh, 77 hours fishing? How many casts are you at?
Quaras: I’m the author of BunnyHunter, and i think you’ll find it doesn’t work like that at all. After 1000 loots on a 1/1000 drop it will show 63.2%.
The formula is: 1 – ((1 – drop_chance) ^ loots)
In laymans terms, 1 minus the chance to perform 1000 consecutive loots without finding the thing you’re looking for. As the addon clearly states, it just tells you how unlucky you are, not when to expect a drop.
Wow, looks like my addon ‘won’ for not understanding the RNG. Quaras wins my contest for not understanding how the addon works :D
Actually the irony is pretty extreme. I won the contest by proving I misunderstood the RNG most of all. My problem was that I had not spent enough time with Bunny Hunter and was getting too lucky with my drops. I did not notice the divergence from the median and assumed the addon merely tracked by a linear formula based on number of drops. Now that I am suffering through 970 failed loots on the Captured Firefly, my percentage of unluckiness is at 62.1% I am sorry to have misunderstood the underlying mechanics of the app that I implicitly maligned and have proven in an even more robust fashion what a RNGTard is…
Only advice I can give is you’ll never beat RNG if you stop trying, a rare mount always feels better if I took you 500 kills to get it IMO,