They change drop rates on GGR? Wiki full of BS?

[DMN]

Originally Posted by Albanwr [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

so if I kill 10 and get 3 rings that means what to you?

Those results would, too, suggest that 3.5% isn't accurate and/or that the drop rate has been changed for some reason.

Originally Posted by jadier [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Nope, it's a Poisson process. Think of it like this: flipping a coin twice does not guarantee a heads, even though getting a heads is a 1-in-2 chance. Flipping a coin 4 times and seeing no heads still doesn't mean your coin is "broken".

If you see roughly 400 couriers in a row, that'd be decent evidence that there's something off with a 2% drop chance. Until then, you just have a run of bad luck.

The problem here is how you qualify "decent evidence", especially given the original source of the "expected average". To me, when it comes to random nobodies' claims on the internet, beyond 1 standard deviation I start to expect some some bullshit is afoot and virtually assured of it by the time I get anywhere near 2.

Originally Posted by TheBardo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

DMN has made 2887 posts, every one of them terrible, yet i keep clicking em

Oh, we both know why you read all my posts with bated breath.

[cd288]

TLDR: doesn’t really understand statistics

[DMN]

Originally Posted by cd288 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

TLDR: doesn’t really understand statistics

Sorry to hear that.

Statistics isn't really that complicated, but I understand you struggle with pretty much everything in life.

[Isomorphic]

The problem here is how you qualify "decent evidence", especially given the original source of the "expected average". To me, when it comes to random nobodies' claims on the internet, beyond 1 standard deviation I start to expect some some bullshit is afoot and virtually assured of it by the time I get anywhere near 2.

Under the assumption that the expected drop rate is 3.5%, you are already more than 2 standard deviations away from your expected number of drops after 160 kills.

[jadier]

Originally Posted by DMN [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The problem here is how you qualify "decent evidence", especially given the original source of the "expected average". To me, when it comes to random nobodies' claims on the internet, beyond 1 standard deviation I start to expect some some bullshit is afoot and virtually assured of it by the time I get anywhere near 2.
.

It’s not really a problem? Statistics exists specifically to quantify what counts as “decent evidence”. A string of 160 failures in a Bernoulli trial with a 2% success rate (twice what the courier page says) is about 4%.

So about four in every hundred would-be lords of the ring will see such a stretch of bad luck.

Given how many people camp that thing, it’s not at all surprising that you know someone who is experiencing such a run. I guess if you know exactly two people who have ever camped the ring, you’d be in some reasonable territory. But you likely know many people who have and you’ve only got data on a pair of recent bad runs. So it’s a biased data set.

Again, if you want to call the wiki bull shit or argue that the drop rate has changed, you need a run of bad luck so exceptional as to fall outside expectations. 160 is just not that surprising.

Edit: I found the 3.5% source! It is based on 224 kills. So 3.5% is the point-estimate, with the margin of error that means the drop rate was most likely between 1.5% - 7%. So, as above, a string o 160 failures is consistent with that dataset. That is, if you think the drop rate has changed, you'd need to find evidence that the drop rate is decidedly outside that interval than your two friends' recent string of (not outside expectations) run of bad luck.

Would be interesting to collect a fair sample of people’s camping experiences to refine that estimate, though!

[jadier]

Originally Posted by Isomorphic [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Under the assumption that the expected drop rate is 3.5%, you are already more than 2 standard deviations away from your expected number of drops after 160 kills.

This would be true except:

(1) this isn't a "fair sample" so a strict application of standard deviations isn't really appropriate. My guess is that DMN knows way more than two people who've camped the ring, and is *only* reporting the two most egregious bad luck runs he's seen (because most people only talk about really bad or really good runs of luck; you brag when you get it in <10 couriers, and complain when it takes >50, but no one spontaneously posts in guildchat or whatever about that time they got it in 31 pops).

(2) there's a margin of error associated with the 3.5% estimate. If we think the drop rate has changed, we'd need either a more representative sample of camp results, or a staggeringly large outlier dataset (which this is not) given the uncertainty in the 3.5% estimate & the bias of the sample.

Edit: To put it another way, if you take the 224 kills with 8 rings the 3.5% is based on, and just add another 160 pops with 0 rings from the "DMN dataset" here (which, again, you shouldn't do as the DMN is biased in ways the original isn't) you get an estimate for the drop rate of...between 1 and 4%. Even with the bias reporting, it doesn't exclude the 3.5% estimate. It's just not that bad a run.

Edit edit: To be even more precise: DMN's friends would need to observe 221 total pops without a ring to *just barely* exclude 3.5% if you lumped them together (which, again again, you **cannot do** since the friends-complaining-about-bad-luck dataset is heavily biased).

[Vizax_Xaziv]

Originally Posted by Albanwr [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

so if I kill 10 and get 3 rings that means what to you?

That would mean I hate you.

[Isomorphic]

Originally Posted by jadier [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This would be true except:

(1) this isn't a "fair sample" so a strict application of standard deviations isn't really appropriate. My guess is that DMN knows way more than two people who've camped the ring, and is *only* reporting the two most egregious bad luck runs he's seen (because most people only talk about really bad or really good runs of luck; you brag when you get it in <10 couriers, and complain when it takes >50, but no one spontaneously posts in guildchat or whatever about that time they got it in 31 pops).

(2) there's a margin of error associated with the 3.5% estimate. If we think the drop rate has changed, we'd need either a more representative sample of camp results, or a staggeringly large outlier dataset (which this is not) given the uncertainty in the 3.5% estimate & the bias of the sample.

Edit: To put it another way, if you take the 224 kills with 8 rings the 3.5% is based on, and just add another 160 pops with 0 rings from the "DMN dataset" here (which, again, you shouldn't do as the DMN is biased in ways the original isn't) you get an estimate for the drop rate of...between 1 and 4%. Even with the bias reporting, it doesn't exclude the 3.5% estimate. It's just not that bad a run.

Edit edit: To be even more precise: DMN's friends would need to observe 221 total pops without a ring to *just barely* exclude 3.5% if you lumped them together (which, again again, you **cannot do** since the friends-complaining-about-bad-luck dataset is heavily biased).

The standard deviation is a property of the underlying distribution, not a sample. Regardless of what you think/feel about OP's reporting, my claim still stands. Given the assumption that the drop rate is 3.5% nothing I said is false. This leads me to your second point. I am assuming what the drop rate is, meaning I am deriving the standard deviation from this assumption. I am not assuming there is some estimation of the drop rate, which suggests that the drop rate in question is a random variable, it's a constant.

[jadier]

Originally Posted by Isomorphic [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The standard deviation is a property of the underlying distribution, not a sample. Regardless of what you think/feel about OP's reporting, my claim still stands. Given the assumption that the drop rate is 3.5% nothing I said is false. This leads me to your second point. I am assuming what the drop rate is, meaning I am deriving the standard deviation from this assumption. I am not assuming there is some estimation of the drop rate, which suggests that the drop rate in question is a random variable, it's a constant.

Yes, a standard deviation is a property of the distribution. But the reason for applying it is to figure out what the chance you'd observe some data is given the distribution. However, it doesn't work that way if the data are biased.

That is, if you know that the normal chance for something is 10% with a sd of 2% and I tell you, "hey, I got a drop rate of 5% with this dataset where I just ignored all the people who got the drop more often than 7%" you can't just go "oh well 5% is more than 2 sigma away from 10, so I guess the droprate changed". [ I'm not saying DMN did this. This is an extreme example of why using Z-scores to interpret data relies on fair sampling. If sampling isn't, fair, it's meaningless to calculate Z scores ]

In other words, you can only meaningfully interpret a Z score if the sample's fair. If it's a biased sample, it doesn't readily translate to the probability expected from the standard deviation...because it's biased.

Regarding the assumption: the OP's question was whether the drop rate changed. 8 / 224 = 1.5 - 7% drop rate, 1 / 160 (even with the bias) translates to a <0.1 - 3.5% drop rate, and 9 / 384 = 1 - 4%. That is, they're all consistent with one another.

So you're correct that assuming a 3.5% drop rate, 1/160 is an unlikely observation...but my point is that although the point-estimate may vary by 2 sigma, when you account for sample size, even this biased dataset doesn't preclude 3.5%.

Eg, nothing posted here implies the droprate changed at all, even if you assume the true drop rate was exactly 3.5%. OP's friends just had bad luck, and the true drop-rate is uncertain but we'd need way, way, way more evidence to suspect a change.

(edit: tldr; if you assume a 3.5% drop rate, the point estimate of 1/160 is, as Isomorphic says, >2 standard deviations away from 3.5%. However, (1) the data are biased, so there's no way to actually connect a probability to the observation, and (2) even if it weren't biased, 1/160 is still not inconsistent at 95% confidence with a 3.5% drop rate because while an assumed distribution doesn't have error, 160 is a small sample size when dealing with a 3.5% chance event so the confidence interval still overlaps the previously-estimated drop-rate)

[Fleelord]

Originally Posted by DMN [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Moron 1: over 20 hours 100+ couriers, no ring
Moron 2: over 15 hours 60+ courtiers 1 ring.

I put in 48 hours at CoS/Idol camp in Droga. Didn't get the Idol until the final hour.

Got 3 CoS before getting the damn idol.