Feature Crystal RNG

Is it just me or is the feature crystals hot garbage most of the time?

Comments

Probability is only useful in this scenario if one is calculating how lucky, or unlucky, one has been. The reality is, the server doesn't keep track of what you pulled last time. Each Crystal is a 1 in 24 chance of being any particular outcome. Unless you believe Skynet has become self-aware and clairvoyant, and sees that 4 NCs will hock you off.

Cyporg

If you flip a coin and get heads 4 times in a row, it’s 1/2 ^4, not ^3, it doesn’t matter if you were aiming to get heads or not. Getting OS 4 times in a row is the same as NC if the chances are even.

Cyporg

I never said I personally have a different RNG than anyone else, I said I’m skeptical that the odds for every champ are even between all champs within the pool. Anyone pull a featured champ 4 times in a row?

ItsDamien

If you flip a coin and get heads 4 times in a row, it’s 1/2 ^4, not ^3, it doesn’t matter if you were aiming to get heads or not. Getting OS 4 times in a row is the same as NC if the chances are even.

The probability isn’t that you pulled NC 4 times in a row. The probability is pulling NC 3 times more after the first. The first pull is irrelevant since that is 1/24. It could have been any of those champions, you then have to calculate the odds of pulling the same champion a further 3 times in a row. That’s how it’s calculated when the first pull is completely random. If you were aiming to pull a specific champion 4 times in a row, THEN you would do 1/24^4.

SummonerNR

If you flip a coin and get heads 4 times in a row, it’s 1/2 ^4, not ^3, it doesn’t matter if you were aiming to get heads or not. Getting OS 4 times in a row is the same as NC if the chances are even.
The probability isn’t that you pulled NC 4 times in a row. The probability is pulling NC 3 times more after the first. The first pull is irrelevant since that is 1/24. It could have been any of those champions, you then have to calculate the odds of pulling the same champion a further 3 times in a row. That’s how it’s calculated when the first pull is completely random. If you were aiming to pull a specific champion 4 times in a row, THEN you would do 1/24^4.

Agree.
The supposition is that you got an unwanted champ 4 times in a row (unless you declare in advance of even opening your first one, as to which one specifically you are talking about).

Which is really just 3 factorial (not 4), because the first pull is just setting the table for WHICH unwanted champ will be the basis of the argument.

While technically, yes, the odds are 4 factorial, the supposition of the argument is not.

(addendum… I guess you could add a 20/24 multiplier onto the end of the 3 factorial, assuming you would consider any of 20 of the 24 to be “unwanted”, but that is far from the 1/24 wholly extra factorial number).

DNA3000

2 out of 3 champs u pulled are great and u define this as hot garbage funny
It’s my opinion, just like it’s your opinion that they are not garbage….
It’s okay to have wrong opinions as long as you don’t try and state them as fact.
No opinion is wrong, that’s why it’s called an opinion, but it’s not a fact either, just an opinion…

In my opinion, the opinion that no opinion is wrong, is wrong.

DNA3000

If you flip a coin and get heads 4 times in a row, it’s 1/2 ^4, not ^3, it doesn’t matter if you were aiming to get heads or not. Getting OS 4 times in a row is the same as NC if the chances are even.

Yes it is, which means the odds of someone pulling *a* featured champ four times in a row is equal to the odds of pulling one of them four times in a row, plus the odds of pulling the second one four times in a row, plus the odds of pulling the third one four times in a row, and so on. There are 24 champs in a featured crystals, so there are 24 ways in which someone could beat the odds and pull a sequence that has a 1/24 x 1/24 x 1/24 x 1/24 chance of happening. That reduces to 1/24 x 1/24 x 1/24, or one in 13824.

However, the odds of actually seeing this are even better than those numbers imply. The odds of ever seeing this would be one in 13824 if everyone opened exactly four featured crystals, and then stopped forever. But consider someone who opens exactly five. They have two shots at getting four in a row. They could get AAAAX (four identical champs in a row from the start, then anything for the fifth), or they could get ABBBB, where the first drop is something, then the next one is different, and then the next three matches the previous one. The odds of seeing four in a row are almost twice as good in this scenario. And then you have consider the player who opens six, eight, or twenty crystals. They are going to have progressively better than one in 13824 odds of pulling four in a row.

Suppose we have 10,000 players all opening ten featured crystals. About how many would we expect to see four in a row? I don't want to do the closed form math, so once again I'm taking the lazy way out and resorting to Monte Carlo in python. It turns out to be about five or six. In other words, we would expect one in 2000 or one in 2500 players or so to see four featureds in a row, if ten thousand players open ten featured crystals.

I'm pretty sure there are more than ten thousand players opening more than ten featured crystals. So while this would be an unlikely occurrence, across all the players opening featured crystals I would expect to see many cases of a player seeing four in a row. It is bound to be a number in the dozens.

Dozens of players seeing this in every featured crystal cycle means maybe a hundred players per year seeing this. What are the odds of us hearing about something that is happening to about a hundred players per year, because at least one of them decides to mention it publicly? Pretty good.

Incidentally, I've opened on the order of about a hundred featured crystals in the past year or so. I haven't seen four in a row yet, but the odds of a player like me seeing four in a row within that time span are about one in 160. So that's uncommon, but not astronomically rare. There are probably players like me, opening crystals at my rate, that have seen four in a row, because there have to be hundreds of players out there, if not thousands that open more featureds than me. One in 160 per year is not something I ever expect to see in my lifetime playing the game, but it is something I expect one day to directly encounter someone who has.

frodo2377

Here's my data for this current featured so far. Make of it what you will. This is in order btw.

Thing
SpiderGwen
Korg
Hulkling
Scorpion
Elsa
Hulkling
Black Cat
SpiderGwen
Guardian
Howard
Sabertooth
NC
SpiderGwen
Sabertooth
Drax
Scorpion
Modok
Black Cat
Havok
Mephisto

Aldac

Man I really want Hulkling. He was my top target for this featured and he’s the only one I still can’t get 😂

Here’s my data if it helps (I had a lot of shards saved up at the start). There’s been a lot of 🦆

Black cat
Elsa dupe
Sabertooth dupe
Omega Sentinel
Spider gwen dupe
Darkhawk dupe
Wong
Rintrah
Howard dupe
Howard dupe
Guardian dupe
Omega Sentinel dupe
Thing dupe
Korg dupe
Scorpion
Darkhawk dupe
Darkhawk dupe
Spider gwen dupe
Howard dupe
Thing dupe
Thing dupe
Howard dupe
Wong dupe

unknown

This content has been removed.

unknown

This content has been removed.

DNA3000

its all RNG. only kabammer knows how it works

It isn't difficult to make an educated guess. There are only three possibililties: Kabam decided to use the built in pRNG in their software development tools, or Kabam decided to pull a published pRNG used in the gaming community (i.e. IBAA or WELL), or Kabam decided to roll their own. If they had rolled their own, the odds of it being horribly broken to the point of being detectable by statistical analysis are almost 100%. So that didn't happen. If they decided to use a built-in pRNG, it is almost certainly either Mersenne Twister or something similar. If they decided to use a published algorithm, it is almost certainly even better than that. Cryptographically secure pRNGs do exist that have better entropy properties, but they are also far slower and less efficient in a gaming setting, so those are unlikely. We'll go with Mersenne Twister as the most likely floor for pRNG strength.

Picking a random choice from a dynamic random table is kindergarten stuff. Almost everyone does it in one of only a few similar ways, all involving proportional binning. You can Google those algorithms, and the only differences in implementation between games has to do with how they set up their reward tables: histographic, weighted, nested, whatever.

Here's a tutorial on how to do it with weighted reward tables in Unity: https://hyperfoxstudios.com/category/tutorial/

This is not anything mysterious or opaque. There isn't even enough wiggle room for a lot of innovation. I would sooner believe Kabam spent time trying to improve on algorithms for drawing circles.