Incredible bad luck

DeletedUser

I am puzzled. I have tried to get a feather by scaring birds from a field for quite some time now.
I have 6 attempts (almost all of them of 2 hours). I also tried to find working spots with out any players working there, praying before and always having big motivation. I am trying for the 7th time now but I find it incredible I do not manage to get that feather!
Just imagine this: the scaring of birds has only 1% luck but I was already able to find at least 2 items while working on it. The product luck is 20% per 1/2 hour so when working 2 hours I should have 80 % chance each time. Multiply that by 6 and you will notice why I am that puzzled that I am not getting the stupid feather. I hope that the 7th time does the trick but it is getting really annoying :confused:
 

DeletedUser

luck is not 1% you might get an item but by the value of the item, 1% landed you a crappy item, if you did trading job, 25% value would be way better.
 

DeletedUser

True

Thank you Cutter Slicar. You are correct.:eek: However, I am asking, is the overall chance of finding an item better then 80% as for product? Maybe that is a good question too, what exactly is the chance of finding an item?
 

DeletedUser

ihope said:
when working 2 hours I should have 80 % chance each time.
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This is where you're going wrong. Probability does not work like this. If you look at it the other way around, you have an 80% chance of not finding it every half hour. Multiply that up and by 2 hours you have a 320% chance of not finding it! Does that sound right to you?

Toss a coin four times. You have a 50% chance of heads each time you throw it, but you would not be expecting a 200% chance on the fourth throw (I hope!), and if you got four tails in a row you would not be too surprised, would you?

Each half hour you work you have a 20% chance of finding it. 4 20% chances is not 80%, it's just four opportunities at 20% each.
 

DeletedUser

To Lincoln

Lincoln, please excuse my presumption, there was nothing clear about this in the help files. I figured that this is why we have the chance to put 10, 30, 1h or 2h targets, just to improve our chances. If what you say is true then the 10 minutes interval makes no sense to me. If there is a 20 % chance every 30 minutes then what is the chance for 10 minutes? How come i get a product after only 10 minutes sometimes?
I figured that when assigning the time for the job, the chance gets calculated related to this and not at each half an hour. Do you have any reference to some game explanations relating this?
 

DeletedUser

ihope said:
I am puzzled. I have tried to get a feather by scaring birds from a field for quite some time now.
I have 6 attempts (almost all of them of 2 hours). I also tried to find working spots with out any players working there, praying before and always having big motivation. I am trying for the 7th time now but I find it incredible I do not manage to get that feather!
Just imagine this: the scaring of birds has only 1% luck but I was already able to find at least 2 items while working on it. The product luck is 20% per 1/2 hour so when working 2 hours I should have 80 % chance each time. Multiply that by 6 and you will notice why I am that puzzled that I am not getting the stupid feather. I hope that the 7th time does the trick but it is getting really annoying :confused:
Click to expand...

Praying every time? let me guess, you've stubbed your toe about 5 times... The lord likes to work in mystrious ways. Stop praying for 3 days and then try the job without praying.

If praying doesn't work first time out then become an athiest for a bit!
 

DeletedUser

ihope said:
Lincoln, please excuse my presumption, there was nothing clear about this in the help files. I figured that this is why we have the chance to put 10, 30, 1h or 2h targets, just to improve our chances. If what you say is true then the 10 minutes interval makes no sense to me. If there is a 20 % chance every 30 minutes then what is the chance for 10 minutes? How come i get a product after only 10 minutes sometimes?
I figured that when assigning the time for the job, the chance gets calculated related to this and not at each half an hour. Do you have any reference to some game explanations relating this?
Click to expand...

The different work times are more related to how much energy you have, how much money you can earn, etc. The time doesn't alter the chance, except that it gives you 4 chances (2 hours being 4 half hours) rather than just one.

Sometimes you find something after 10 minutes because you obviously have that 20% chance to find it within the half hour, and the numbers have just come out in your favour. [Imagine I ask you to search your house for a coin dated 2003 and I give you half an hour to find it. There's a 20% chance you'll find one (say), given all the coins you might have access to, but there's no way of knowing if you will find it in the first ten minutes or only after 29 minutes. If you found it after 9 minutes, would you look for another 21 minutes, or would you call the job done and stop looking? :)]

No matter how long you search for, the chance is still 20% every half hour. You should get better results for half an hour or longer than you would for 10 minutes, because that is not a full 'unit', but it doesn't mean you will never find an item by only working for 10 minutes.
 

DeletedUser

thank you. I remain in your debt for the explanations. On a side not: the 7th time did the trick : I got IT! :D Made 4 quests one after the other after that one lol.
 

DeletedUser

Heh. I'm inclined to believe that it's complaining that does the trick - on forums for another online game (Kingdom of Loathing) there's a lot of complaining about the Random Number Generator. The moment you curse the RNG for not giving you what you want, you tend to get it. :)
 

DeletedUser

basicly the probabiltiy is way to confusing to predict so dont do the numbers they are just supposed to give you a general idea of which will come fast and which will take a long time. I am the opposite of you right now, I have gotten very lucky and not had to work much but now I have no quests to do!
 

DeletedUser

This thread got me wondering how the calculation for the 10 minute interval works,
since if one trial takes 30 minuets how can you have 1/3 of a trial?

in your example of the 20% chance in half an hour, if you look for an hour you have a 32% chance of finding the item (binomial distribution)

but binomial distribution only works for whole trials so :confused:
 

DeletedUser

I think that the percentage is calculated by an hour. So if you have 20% chance of finding some item in total, doing a half-hours work will make it 10%. While 2 hours will give 40%. I at least that is how I think it works for me.
 

DeletedUser

F0rtune said:
I think that the percentage is calculated by an hour. So if you have 20% chance of finding some item in total, doing a half-hours work will make it 10%. While 2 hours will give 40%. I at least that is how I think it works for me.
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Sorry you are wrong, it is 10% EVERY half-hour, 10% of every time would technically add up to 40% but more of 36%.
 

DeletedUser

example:

I worked picking cotton for 1 hour, got none despite getting cotton 50% every half hour.
 

DeletedUser

ihope said:
thank you. I remain in your debt for the explanations. On a side not: the 7th time did the trick : I got IT! :D Made 4 quests one after the other after that one lol.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't pray a lot in a row, the motivation will go down just like a job.
 

DeletedUser

F0rtune said:
I think that the percentage is calculated by an hour. So if you have 20% chance of finding some item in total, doing a half-hours work will make it 10%. While 2 hours will give 40%. I at least that is how I think it works for me.
Click to expand...

The percentage chance to find an item is for every half an hour
and they are not additive
eg. flip a coin once, 50% chance to get heads, but flipping a coin twice does not give you a 100% chance of heads.


TheBlackAdder said:
This thread got me wondering how the calculation for the 10 minute interval works,
since if one trial takes 30 minuets how can you have 1/3 of a trial?

in your example of the 20% chance in half an hour, if you look for an hour you have a 32% chance of finding the item (binomial distribution)

but binomial distribution only works for whole trials so :confused:
Click to expand...

no one has the answer to my question?
 

DeletedUser

I do not have an answer for that but I could give it a guess. 10 minutes out of 30 minutes is 1/3 so maybe the chances could be, in this case only, calculated differently. This is what got me confused in the first place. But it would make sense to have instead of a 20% chance for a full 30 minutes just 20/3 (6.66) % chance for 10 minutes. To use the example I received, if I give you 30 minutes to find a coin, what would be the chance to find it in the first 10 minutes used for looking?
Also, if you use 1h or 2h , every 30 min the stack you are searching in is probably reshuffled and also replenished and you have to start all over again the search for each half an hour. That also means that you could find the item even 4 times for the 2h interval if you always find it in 30 minutes or less
 

DeletedUser

those percentages are mutually exclusive so 2 hrs at 25% is 4 25% chances not 1 100% chance, on the plus side you could therorectically get 4 products.
 

DeletedUser

I don't see why everyone is yelling at each other with really complicated theories when it takes simple maths to work out. This is for finding the feather.

If you have below 50% chance of finding it, then it doesn't get harder to find it the longer you look as said earlier (320% chance of failing to find it is wrong) because it's the chance of finding it that you have to multiply by 4.

Real life situation:
You have lost many tennis balls in a bush. If this were in the game, there could be a chance of 80% per 1/2 hour. This means in 30 minutes you would find 0.8 tennis balls, which is impossible. So a random number between 0 and 100 would be rolled. If it was below 80 you would find it. If you looked for 1 hour then it would be 1.6 tennis balls, meaning definitley finding 1, and 60% chance you would find another. Thus, you could look for 24 hours and find 1920 tennis balls if there were that many in the bush.

Compare the game to this situation:
You would have to look for 2 and a half hours to definitley find it, but searching seperatley makes it reset each time. A 2 hour search means 1 in 5 of not getting it. Do this twice and there is 1 in 25 that you won't find it. So 6 searches is 5 to the power of 6=15625

Therfore the chance of not finding it after 6 2-hour searches is 1 in 15625!!!

So it is definitley possible not to find it but it is highly unlikely.

Now I hope everyone shuts up about theories and accepts it.
 
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