Fantastic Races and Where to Find Them

[Ruzuke]

My background is starting as a data analyst and moving up from there.

The probability of someone getting 10 majors in a row is next to 0. Could it happen. Sure people do win the lotto every single day. The possibility of someone winning the lotto is more than 1 and billion. Could someone when 100 million or more on a lotto purchasing only 1 ticket each time. It is possible, just not probable to the point when it is not statistically significant to say there is a chance of doing so.

Being an engineer (and I will make the assumption you are a data engineer with a background in software development. You would know with a coded solution of "random" is anything but. It mathematics that simulates a random feature. That does not make the probability of the 5% go up.

To determine the outcome of something businesses use predictive analytics rather than statistics. They are two different disciplines.

[Kythana]

Xerah's statistics checks out to me.

Each award roll is independent, and the probability is a success/fail. A 5% chance to get a award, or a 95% chance to not get a major.

So we have a Binomial Distribution. So, on average, the probability of what we expect to see is.

N(number of trials) * P(probability of success)

In this case, it's 2000 * .05 = 100 awards. So, on average, yes, we will see around 100 major awards per year, given 2000 rolls.

If we look at the variance here, which is:

N(number of trials) * P(probability of success) * (1-P(probability of success) ) we get:

2000 x .05 x .95 = 95. Take the square root for the standard deviation for:

9.7. Round that up since you can't get a portion of an award.

So! On average, we would be seeing around 100±10 major awards with 2000 trials.

From someone who took stats like 6 years ago.

[The GrumpyCat]

Bolded my response point.
Not sure that's true.

Awards are easy to get. You’re talking as a single individual, but the population as a whole means they are easy to get since it is much less defined by individual RNG.

In a year, let’s say we have 2000 players. Let’s say, they, on average, roll once a year (I’ve probably done 5 year on average since the limits started—all normals).

2000 rolls

Not everyone will max gold, so let’s assume the lowest 5% major and 20% greater.

After 1 year, you have 100 major rewards and 400 greater rewards.

That’s an absolute insane amount of rewards. Maybe there’s not that many rolls a year and I’m over estimating but I was trying to be very conservative in my estimates.

Also like, I think this is a very conservative estimation. Remember for the longest time there was no timer on awards, but leveling is very fast now. So someone even slightly dedicated could get to 26 in... if I say a 'month' I'm being generous- and roll - and get 12 rolls in a year.

With the timer that's now down to... lets say four rolls a year? (again, being very conservative here) so surely one can, theoretically, times those above numbers by four. And that's not even adding that a lot of people will try to get some gold bonus for the awards too.

It all adds up.

EDIT: I also took a quick look at the race count recently

I counted (manually I'm sure I'm wrong by a few) 330 people currently playing Greaters or Majors* out of a population of 2252 so... IDK, doesn't seem like the stats are entirely out of line?

*Note I didn't include Ogres or Shadovar because they've switched from greater to normal/normal to greater which muddies things. I also didn't include Gnesai, just presuming they were all normal award. Also of course, RDD's wouldn't be included on this.

[Paint]

I do think that looking at the individual's perspective is important here: You've created a system where character turnover is fast, because people want to roll characters to get to the 'real' character they want to play.

When I read this, people start throwing advice out about how they think the game should be played. "Well, maybe you shouldn't think about award races!" But how could they not? The whole system is already in place, and there's a lot of options. Of course people are going to think about award races. And of course, people are going to grind to try to play the award race they want to play. If you make it more difficult, you're just going to frustrate the people who are burning through character after character to get to what they want, and they'll come here onto the forums to complain about how much the award system sucks.

See, when people are talking about pandora's box already being opened, the threshold being transgressed, whatever you want to call it, it's this: When you see all of these wild and wacky races, and you want to play one, you're going to try to play one. That means grinding out characters every two to three months if necessary to get the dumb award you need to play the stupid award race you want to play. I legitimately do not blame people for burning through characters so quickly. To them, those characters are stepping stones to what they actually want to play.

If you think that's, 'Playing Arelith Wrong,' you shouldn't have designed a system that encourages that behavior. Make leveling slower, people'll still do it. Make award timers longer, people'll still do it, they'll just complain more about it.

Because getting back to that individual perspective vs. group perspective, what the individual sees, and this is the important part here, and why we care what the individual thinks, are a bunch of cool races running around Arelith that they're not allowed to play until they shoot themselves in the foot for long enough.

And this leads to... an Arelith filled with flatter, more boring characters who don't want to develop because if their players get attached to them, they won't roll them.

I don't really know what system you could invent that would encourage character turnover so that characters don't stick around forever, but also doesn't encourage this kind of mindless grinding, but here we are. This is Arelith in 2024. This is the system as it stands now.

[Spriggan Bride]

The characters who stick around forever and are still played regularly aren't going anywhere. If the player is content to keep playing their ancient elder I don't think offering a 5% chance of being able to get a Major is going to change their mind. You'd probably have to offer most of the ones I'm thinking about real money to give up at this point.

So the awards are for everyone else, and I guess it's a good thing to give us a push to clear our vaults of characters who come and go every now and then even though they are no longer relevant but I still have to wonder if that's even necessary. Because to me, disposable characters who exist just to be rolled and don't engage are a far bigger problem than characters who RP but don't know when their time is up.

We shouldn't have a system that is a slot machine for special races. Let people play them with restrictions (eg you can request one major every few years) and separate that from rolling characters, who can get some little boon on their next like starting at a higher level or a skill bump or something (and even that should be standardized and no RNG)

[Ruzuke]

Bolded my response point.
Not sure that's true.

Awards are easy to get. You’re talking as a single individual, but the population as a whole means they are easy to get since it is much less defined by individual RNG.

In a year, let’s say we have 2000 players. Let’s say, they, on average, roll once a year (I’ve probably done 5 year on average since the limits started—all normals).

2000 rolls

Not everyone will max gold, so let’s assume the lowest 5% major and 20% greater.

After 1 year, you have 100 major rewards and 400 greater rewards.

That’s an absolute insane amount of rewards. Maybe there’s not that many rolls a year and I’m over estimating but I was trying to be very conservative in my estimates.

Also like, I think this is a very conservative estimation. Remember for the longest time there was no timer on awards, but leveling is very fast now. So someone even slightly dedicated could get to 26 in... if I say a 'month' I'm being generous- and roll - and get 12 rolls in a year.

With the timer that's now down to... lets say four rolls a year? (again, being very conservative here) so surely one can, theoretically, times those above numbers by four. And that's not even adding that a lot of people will try to get some gold bonus for the awards too.

It all adds up.

EDIT: I also took a quick look at the race count recently

I counted (manually I'm sure I'm wrong by a few) 330 people currently playing Greaters or Majors* out of a population of 2252 so... IDK, doesn't seem like the stats are entirely out of line?

*Note I didn't include Ogres or Shadovar because they've switched from greater to normal/normal to greater which muddies things. I also didn't include Gnesai, just presuming they were all normal award. Also of course, RDD's wouldn't be included on this.

As many people have pointed out we never delete our greater or major awards. It is too rare.

So, 330 people have their forever character. Lines up with the previous statement. It does not line up with a great number of them occur. Now the astrolabe shows when a character was created.

Out of 330 people playing Greeters and Majors here are some descriptive analytics questions:

When where those characters created?
How many are Greater?
How Many are Majors?
When were the Majors created?
When were the the Greaters created?

So we can start comparing we can ask about the rest of the population.
When where they created?

Because created and told they are active now we can guess they time between creation and now is how long then have been around.

Note: This will grant many false positives simply due to people taking breaks, gaps, and returning to play their characters. Another issue is people who log on characters and don't play them.