Resist "streak" anecdotes, anyone?

[fadetree]

The RNG in use is inherently streaky. I would really like to see the implementation of it in source code, and also how they gather and process entropy. Anyone who has ever done tradeskills can see that it goes like this:
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
'you have gotten better!'
'you have gotten better!'
no 'you have gotten better'
'you have gotten better!'
'you have gotten better!'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'
no 'you have gotten better'

and so on. Whatever the implementation of the RNG is, it's not very good.

[cd288]

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

Tradeskill skillups also occur in groups. I am half-convinced that there is a time window involved where skillups are gated and then blocked until another interval has passed. Swimming skill shows this behavior as well.

I've had two consecutive Gate collapses occur, resulting in a fatality. I would guesstimate half a dozen overall on Green across two casters.

On a tangent from oldhead's observation, on P99 (presumably EQemu in general) you'll notice that if you attempt to cast with what appears to be just enough mana, the client will start the cast, poll the server, then correct your mana to a lower number and interrupt the cast with "insufficient mana". Fair enough but it will continue to do this even if you wait a tick and will continue this indefinitely unless you wait two full ticks.
On live, I recall the server returning spell fizzle chains in this scenario so that the fizzle dropped your mana total lower than the spell cost and continued to do so until you had sufficient excess mana.

Videri's theory has a proponent here. Some otherwise identical mobs just resist more.

Maybe there's a rough target percentage for things like resist rates and it just compensates to keep it within that percentage range of occurrence whenever it goes too long without hitting a resist? Doubtful though I suppose.

[fadetree]

yeah the grouping consistency almost makes me think there is some kind of persistence or other incremental stuff going on in the chain, because if that is just straight up the output of the RNG itself, it's terrible.

[Zheta]

Swimming skill is probably the easiest way to see this in action.

[larper99]

I always thought it was some sort of macro killer. In UO, people would "coffee-cup" a skill to maximum: Literally resting a coffee cup on a keyboard to auto macro a skill, and go to bed.

I always thought it was intentional, for non-combat skills. What I hate is the string of misses while melee-ing. ESPECIALLY when the enemy is fleeing. It seems harder to hit them from behind than it is from in front.

[fadetree]

It has occurred to me that it might have been designed to be streaky...I suppose it's possible. Without streaks you'd get a nice smooth, predictable distribution, and you wouldn't have surprise streaks of 6 fails/fizzles/misses/collapses in a row very often. If the distribution is spiky then you never know when you are going to get slapped down hard by a bunch of sudden failures...it makes the game a bit harder and in a sense 'more random' than a nice smooth bell curve.

[flacidpenguin]

Got two fear resists in a row on treeants in SK, died to being nuked to death.

[Tecmos Deception]

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

It has occurred to me that it might have been designed to be streaky...I suppose it's possible. Without streaks you'd get a nice smooth, predictable distribution, and you wouldn't have surprise streaks of 6 fails/fizzles/misses/collapses in a row very often. If the distribution is spiky then you never know when you are going to get slapped down hard by a bunch of sudden failures...it makes the game a bit harder and in a sense 'more random' than a nice smooth bell curve.

Hmm. Maybe. My poor little troll shaman mana pool can't stand a bunch of resists or else I'd try fighting even cons for a few hours. I kinda suspect that I won't suddenly see streaks of 5-6 resists in a row even from mobs that tend to resist 20% of my spells... Even though true randomness would mean that's more common than the 3-resist streaks I've been seeing on low blues. Maybe it's got a bit of quirkyness to the rng for better and worse.

Originally Posted by larper99 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I always thought it was some sort of macro killer. In UO, people would "coffee-cup" a skill to maximum: Literally resting a coffee cup on a keyboard to auto macro a skill, and go to bed.

I always thought it was intentional, for non-combat skills. What I hate is the string of misses while melee-ing. ESPECIALLY when the enemy is fleeing. It seems harder to hit them from behind than it is from in front.

For sure you won't miss 15 times in a row until the mob is fleeing towards his buddies at a snail's pace, then you will miss miss miss miss.

[larper99]

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

For sure you won't miss 15 times in a row until the mob is fleeing towards his buddies at a snail's pace, then you will miss miss miss miss.

You either miss or you hit for minimum.

[Polixa]

Getting streaky resists could be due to mobs spawning with a range of possible resist values, instead of being fixed each time. Once in a while that same L30 mob spawns with elevated resists?

Not a serious suggestion really, but would we ever know without sight of the code?