Zander, I got mine from the wiki, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. I've heard that the data is pulled from a source other than P1999. Anyone confirm?

Ele, I was refering to the Rotting Skelly, but yes, both camps are very... well.. let's say you can get some good reading done haha.

If you had coin that was skewed to land on heads 95% of the time and tails 5% and you flipped it every 7 minutes, what is the normal distribution of times you'd get a tails? It would be cool to see some projections where you could compare to eq spawns to get an idea of where you are falling on the luck curve. Isn't the AC like 10% in OoT?

It is far more likely you were killing the wrong ph or doing something wrong or the spawn rate % is wrong. The chances of killing a ph with a 5% chance of spawning 270 times without getting it to spawn at least once is so small that I would consider it statistically impossible.

A lot of good stuff in this thread already. Ploktor is absolutely right; with 1000+ people on the server you will expect some people to get fucked. I am pretty sure I am one of the most unlucky people on the server, having gone 0/20 on fungi tunic rolls in 2-3 man groups (something like 1/1000 chance).

I think the pained soul is more like a 1/100 chance to spawn, and assuming you are killing him every 8 minutes or so that means one pained soul every 800 minutes (expected pained souls = 0.00125/minute). Slightly elaborating on Jerok's math, the probability of the pained soul not spawning is 0.99*0.99...*0.99 = 0.99^n. Google gives 0.99^260 as 0.066 which makes you unlucky but not the most unlucky person on the server :D If we set 1/1000 = 0.99^n -> n = log[0.99](1/1000) = log[10](1/1000)/log[10](0.99) = -3/-0.004 = ~750 pained souls. Ouch! I'm pretty sure Shiftin was at the pained soul for 60+ hours.

One last trick you can use: (1-x)^n = sum[m:1-n] (n choose m)x^m. If x is small, you can throw out the high powers of x leaving 1-nx. So for example (1-0.001)^5 will be very close to 0.995. This breaks down for really high powers of x like in your example.

edit: I've had better luck with the rotting skeleton; if you camped him for 30 hours you are *probably* doing some wrong, but I have heard of people having trouble. We had a wizard in VD whose name escapes me who spent that amount of time there.

Well good. Now I know which of you are mathematically inclined so you can peer-review my analysis of the current AC system in a few weeks.

Also, I just wanted to point out I have claimed the title of Zanderr's worst customer.

:(

My guess is it is not a 5% chance of spawning. 1% sounds far more likely.

At 1% chance of spawning
After 100 kills: 36% chance of not getting spawn
After 200 kills: 13% chance of not getting spawn
After 300 kills: 5% chance of not getting spawn

At 2% chance of spawning
After 100 kills: 13% chance of not getting spawn
After 200 kills: 1.7% chance of not getting spawn
After 300 kills: .2% chance of not getting spawn

At 5% chance of spawning
After 10 kills: 59% chance of not getting spawn
After 25 kills: 28% chance of not getting spawn
After 50 kills: 8% chance of not getting spawn
After 75 kills: 2% chance of not getting spawn
After 100 kills: .5% chance of not getting spawn
After 200 kills: .0035% chance of not getting spawn
After 300 kills: .000020753% chance of not getting spawn

Thanks guys! This is great.

Loraen, that math is nice. I know enough about stats from my college course to communicate, but thank you for helping me with this. Exactly what I wanted to see.

Eqravenprince, the spawn might be indeed 1% on the Rotting Skeleton, but like I mentioned, I took it from the wiki's "stated amount" for what its worth. Thank you for the table, that is exactly the type of data I wanted to see. It's a nice gauge of where you fall in the luck-o-meter.

For all the "p99 iz fullz of Tr0LLz" and people who ask if the community is nice or not, this thread shows that we have some really helpful people here.

Thanks everyone for who contributed!

We are talking a Random Number generator here on some of this stuff. Good luck guessing that at times. And as the rumor mill goes most people including Devs have never figured out how Sony did it yet.

Nah. We just had bad luck. You were nailing placeholders above and beyond needed, and we had good conversation. Sometimes, good conversation is better than a night of "good drops".

The RNG on live was considered to be notoriously streaky. My inner conspiracy theorist suspects that something has been done here in an attempt to recreate the frustratingly "off" nature of EQ's RNG.

Or you might never get it. Ever. In a million years.

<3 numbers.