and thinking they happen all the time, but I just have to vent. Why does it seem like I almost never lose concentration casting a spell just once? A spell at 75% probably works 8 times in a row without fail, but come that first failure, I can count on having to cast it two or three times more.

n/t

And that it's related to the reason why when you get one skill improve, you tend to get several in a bunch.

The RNG, if it works the way I'd expect it to, is based on some hash of the current timestamp. As a result, at times, things can happen in bunches due to the hashing algorithm.

I could be wrong, but I think that's reasonable speculation.

We probably remember such strange coincidences better and forget all the other times it works like normal.

>And that it's related to the reason why when you get one
>skill improve, you tend to get several in a bunch.
>
>The RNG, if it works the way I'd expect it to, is based on
>some hash of the current timestamp. As a result, at times,
>things can happen in bunches due to the hashing algorithm.
>
>I could be wrong, but I think that's reasonable speculation.

Its unlikely that that's how the RNG works. They're using a pretty "basic" RNG formula they've stated in the past, but even a basic one is probably only seeded once when the game first loads.

When a pulse hits, the RNG is used for every single roll in the game. Every attack getting made by every player and mob, every skill being cast at that moment, etc. Even if the RNG was "streaky", its spread out so much across all the different checks getting made that use the RNG that the likelihood of 3 of your casts being "next" to each other on the RNG is virtually nil unless you're the only person in the game online.

Consider an RNG to be more or less a list of numbers and the seed determines what spot on the list the generator starts at. Hence seeding it to a hash of the timestamp sets it to a random location since the timestamp is always forward moving and never changes. Its not literally random because of that limitation (technically if you know the seed its deterministic), so its considered "pseudo-random", but for all intents and purposes its random in practice as far as normal gameplay on CF is concerned.

Good points. I guess we'll have to chalk these effects up to psychology then :)

Damned if it doesn't seem streaky sometimes though, particularly with respect to skill improvements.

>When a pulse hits, the RNG is used for every single roll in
>the game. Every attack getting made by every player and mob,
>every skill being cast at that moment, etc. Even if the RNG
>was "streaky", its spread out so much across all the different
>checks getting made that use the RNG that the likelihood of 3
>of your casts being "next" to each other on the RNG is
>virtually nil unless you're the only person in the game
>online.

Absolutely. I am pretty sure that even if the random number generator just went 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 over and over again, you would still get statistically random numbers if you took a sampling every second. The randomness generated by the chaotic behavior of the playerbase (credit goes to Outlander) is probably more than sufficient to cause any sample to be indistinguishable from "true" random.