Broken Random Races?

from Sins Forums

I like variety in my games as such I almost always leave races set to random, (I like the surprise). However in my most recent game with all races set to random except myself set to Loyalist imagine my chagrin when I discovered that that all five other players were loyalist as well. Now I realize that its fifty/fifty since there are only two races to pick from currently but that cannot be just happenstance.

14,663 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Last random 10 player FFA I made in the Beta I had no TEC out of any of them. All 9 CPU's were either Advent or Vasari. (Not sure what the sub-faction split was though) Random give some very un-random seeming results at times. ;)

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Same by me. Most of my random games i am Loyalist. My friend and i both took random and we both set to Loyalist.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

That's because random means random, instead of proportionally or evenly distributed as you may think. It's completely possible (although unlikely) to play dozens of 10 FFA games and not seeing one of the races appear even once. If you want evenly distributed races just assign the races by yourselves, otherwise you'll get random ones ;)

Edit:

Any programmer can tell you a story or two about how the typical 'throw a dice' or 'flip a coin' program delivered an extremely unlikely output, and even after thousands of dices thrown the variance between results can be pretty high (think 3% or more after 10k throws). The more times you throw it, the more evenly distributed the values will be, but the more likely it will be that you'll find a lot of sequentially repeated values.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting cue6768, reply 3
Any programmer can tell you a story or two about how the typical 'throw a dice' or 'flip a coin' program delivered an extremely unlikely output, and even after thousands of dices thrown the variance between results can be pretty high (think 3% or more after 10k throws). The more times you throw it, the more evenly distributed the values will be, but the more likely it will be that you'll find a lot of sequentially repeated values.
End of cue6768's quote

 

Correct.

 

'Random' means that for each throw of the dice, each possible outcome is equally possible.

 

When you have a relatively restricted number of possibilities, this can create situations where 'unrandom' results become possible.  For example, in SCII, the 'random' race option will frequently have me be the same race 4 or 5 times in row, or flip flopping between two for ten games before I'm FINALLY the third race.

 

Why?  Because each 'roll' occurs completely independently of each other roll.  This means that my rolling one race once doesn't reduce my odds of rolling it again the next time.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Yes anyone with a background in applied mathematics understands this. All I am saying is that there appears to be a break in the rng.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Well i haven't tried the last beta build but i did get a few rebel/loyalist mixed on random games with the first and second beta builds so unless something got broken with the last one i think it's just bad luck

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting TerribleNate, reply 5
Yes anyone with a background in applied mathematics understands this. All I am saying is that there appears to be a break in the rng.
End of TerribleNate's quote

And what everyone else is saying, is that you cant say there's a break in the rng based off 1 game.

We all agree that statistically, you have a 3% chance of pulling all loyalists, but if you flip 5 coins, no one would freak out if they all landed heads either.

Run a few more and then see if the trend continues or if maybe you're getting all 1 faction or the other.

 

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting SithLordAJ, reply 7

Quoting TerribleNate, reply 5Yes anyone with a background in applied mathematics understands this. All I am saying is that there appears to be a break in the rng.

And what everyone else is saying, is that you cant say there's a break in the rng based off 1 game.

We all agree that statistically, you have a 3% chance of pulling all loyalists, but if you flip 5 coins, no one would freak out if they all landed heads either.

Run a few more and then see if the trend continues or if maybe you're getting all 1 faction or the other.

 
End of SithLordAJ's quote

This is quite true. In a pure random event, you can, but typically do not, see even spacing(Like an even amount of factions). If something was the result of pure chaos/randomness, you would see clumping, in this case, multiple of the same faction.

Also, considering how many people play this game, this outcome was bound to happen sooner or later.