Math and Spawn Rates

[Estu]

Yeah, you guys talking about faulty RNGs have a point, but so does Sirken. Someone early in the thread talked about how people don't think random numbers are as streaky as they actually are. To illustrate this, let me tell a short story.

I once took a probability course and the professor divided the class into two halves - he told one half to flip a coin and write down a string of 100 ones and zeroes for the heads and tails flips, and he told the other half to try and think of 100 random ones and zeroes in a row. He told us he'd leave the room, and to have one half of the class write their string of ones and zeroes on one side of the board, and the other half of the class on the other side. When he came back to the room, he'd have to guess which half was 'truly' random (the literal coin-flippers) and which half was trying to come up with random numbers.

He left the room, we wrote up the numbers, and we called him back in. He looked at the board for a couple of seconds and correctly pointed out the truly random numbers. How did he know? They had longer streaks. The coin-flippers had streaks of 7 or 8 zeroes or ones in a row, while the people who tried to think up random numbers never had a streak longer than, say, 5 zeroes or ones.

OK, so what's the point of the story? The point is we humans have a poor intuitive understanding of random numbers. We play EverQuest or whatever game and we see a long streak and we think, "Shit, this game's out to get me. It's not truly random, there's a bug in the code or it was done intentionally to screw with people." But we're INCLINED to think that because we intuitively believe that random numbers are less streaky than they can be mathematically shown to be.

The point is we can't rely on intuition to make these judgments. We need to take raw data and make statistical analyses, like was done in this thread. Yeah, if the skeleton has a 5% spawn rate then the probability of a guy going 270 spawns without a pop is one in a million. My personal conclusion to that story is that the wiki has something wrong in the spawn rate or the placeholder information (which is EXTREMELY common since the wiki has various sources, whether it be newer code from the game (e.g. maybe the spawn rate was increased in a later patch to make it less of a pain, which is the info the wiki is using, but in P99 it's the low original rate), hearsay (someone read something on an old allakhazam post or heard something from a random guildie), or straight-up speculation), so the wiki is giving the wrong probability or the guy trying to get the spawn is doing it the wrong way.

But if we're looking at anecdotal things without actual probabilities and data, NO WAY are we qualified to make judgments about the RNG and its streakiness based on our intuition. Which is what some people are doing later in this thread, and where I agree with Sirken and his tin foil hat image.