**WE ARE NO LONGER Temporarily Reverting Tier 1 War Ban System**
After further discussion, the game team has made the decision not make adjustements to the ban system.
The previously proposed fix would have resolved the issue for Summoners who are on the cusp of T1/T2 play, and negatively impacted Alliances more securely in T1. Instead, we recommend that cusp Alliances switch to Manual Placement to your members to place the allotted 5 Ban Champions limit there.
Apologies for the back and forth, and for any confusion.
After further discussion, the game team has made the decision not make adjustements to the ban system.
The previously proposed fix would have resolved the issue for Summoners who are on the cusp of T1/T2 play, and negatively impacted Alliances more securely in T1. Instead, we recommend that cusp Alliances switch to Manual Placement to your members to place the allotted 5 Ban Champions limit there.
Apologies for the back and forth, and for any confusion.
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Back in the day when 6*s champs were first released, and the pool was significantly smaller, I had a friend who pulled beast with his first three 6* crystals.
These are low probability events, either happening a handful of times or not happening to a given player is expected.
Any maths teachers in the forums, take note 😉
At one point I pulled him 6 times in a row
Why?
People keep thinking that because "there's no such thing as 'truly random'" the crystal openings must be broken in some obvious way. They aren't. Most of the old school language libraries used a variation of Mersenne Twister as their built in RNG. Mersenne Twister has flaws, but those flaws are only meaningful in very sophisticated circumstances. In the "roll a random number between one and a thousand" scenario, like what you find in a video game's lootboxes, Mersenne Twister contains no flaw that human eyes can detect. It would not generate more three in a rows than statistical chance would dictate.
In fact, it is (essentially) mathematically provable that Mersenne Twister will not generate more three in a rows than statistical chance would dictate for something like MCOC crystals, because Mersenne Twister is a GFSR with a twisting modification to achieve equidistribution of high order bits. To oversimpify a bit, all possible bit sequences (of high order bits) occur the same number of times. Or to put it another way, all possible sequences happen equally often. Three in a row happens exactly as often as random chance would dictate. That's baked into the math.
Modern pRNGs are better than Mersenne, but even Mersenne is sufficiently strong that for something like lootboxes, no human observation could possibly detect any variation from statistical randomness. Mersenne is known to pass most of the Diehard tests for randomness. It isn't going to pass those, and then fail the "MCOC let's open a couple Cav crystals" test.
The whole concept of what randomness even is, is a very complex and subtle one. But it is also mostly irrelevant to the question of how MCOC crystals work, and I wish people who did not actually understand the subject would just stay away from it. For the purposes of a game, crystals do not need to be "truly random" (whatever that means: I don't know anyone who does). They just need to have the following properties:
1. Every option has an equal chance of appearing.
2. For any reasonable length of sequence of openings, all possible sequences are equally likely to occur across the entire playerbase.
3. Future drops are not predictable from observing any reasonable number of prior drops.
4. No factor under the control of the player can predictably influence the opening.
That's what humans colloquially call "random." But it doesn't have to be mathematically random, or entropically random, or any other kind of random. When we talk about random crystals, that's all we care about. And pRNGs can *easily* satisfy these requirements.
The first requirement is obvious. The second one generalizes the first one: the odds of pulling Nebula and then Hercules in sequence is the same as pulling Groot and then Starlord, or Groot and then Groot. So duplicates and triplicates and all other sequences are equally likely. The third says that drops don't follow a predictable pattern.
The last one has an important word people tend to forget. Some people say that crystals are not "random" because pRNGs are predetermined, so in theory a player can influence their drop by picking the time they open the crystal. This is true. But this influence is not predictable. You know that your crystal will generate a different drop if you open it at 10am vs 11am. But you don't know in what way. That makes this influence statistically meaningless.
If MCOC crystals obey those four criteria - you can't predict them, you can't influence them, and everything is equally likely to drop - then they are random enough. Modern pRNGs are random enough.
Biggest problem with that mindset, I used to spend. I don't now. 12.0 closed the wallet, spent after dev diaries, focus on the enjoyment. Yeah, fooled me twice.
If you think algorithms and rng are mutually exclusive, they aren't.
The champion will change of course - to me that's the randomness - but the fact that I will get 3 OG Hulks out of 5 PHCs or 4 wolverines out of 6 tells me that there is a seed being used (whatever the pRNG uses, whether it be time of day, my uid, etc) that at that point it time makes it likely to pull the same single number out of the 200 in the crystal several times.
I agree it's not something I can influence and it changes (hence being "random and fair") but it's also less random and noticeable than it would be if I was picking a single pebble out of 200 pebbles in a bag, put it back each time, shaked the bag up and did that 5 more times.
Now personally I don't care myself - i've never started a thread in here complaining about pulls, because I know this is a game and it has software, but at the same time, I don't like the way people say "it's RNG" as if it is perfect randomness and the trend people see (which is basically the same digit rolling up several times out of 200 possible options in a very small set of rolls) doesn't exist.
This would imply that Real RNG is broken, and the primary reason no one uses it. Reality would be bugged.
For the coin flip example the odds of the same 2 results in a row is is 1/2. This is because there is a 1/4 chance of getting 2 heads, a 1/4 chance of getting 2 tails, and a 1/2 chance of getting one of each. You don't care which 2 you get in a row. It could be either tails or heads so you add those probabilities together.
It is the exact same situation with champions. Assuming there are 250 champions in the pool, If you are just talking about the odds of pulling a specific champion twice in a row (such as ghost) it would be 1/250^2. However if you are talking about the odds of pulling any champion twice in a row you would use the sum rule and get something like this 1/250^2 +1/250^2+1/250^2+1/250^2...+1/250^2 for as many champions are are in the pool (we assumed 250 in this case). You could simplify this math to (1/250^2)*250 which is the same as 1/250.
I guess it’s just a distorted perspective since there are not that many champions.
I’m more annoyed about not having pulled a single 6* from cavaliers in the last three events when some in my alliance have without even going for all the available ones.
Conspiracy? Nah, probability is a b****.
Besides, when you say it is "quite common" to see 3+ copies of a given champion when opening batches, how common is quite common? How often do you think you're seeing that happen, and how often do you think it is *supposed* to happen? If you think you're seeing a problem, you should have some idea of how much more often it is happening that it is statistically supposed to happen. So these two values are significant: how often do you observe this to happen, and how often do you think you're supposed to see it happen, and what's the difference.
Except the pool of champs is smaller than dates in the year, so the probability of finding a pair will be even higher in a given group size.
Inputting a pool of 250, and a stack of 10 openings, you get a probability of .1667 of getting a dupe. Basically the same as rolling a die and getting a specific number. You seeing it every other week is probably right on point. You seeing it in your alliance feed much more frequently, when 30 people are opening crystals, makes a ton of sense. What you’re describing is exactly the behavior the math predicts.