How "honest" do you feel the RNG in POE actually is?

3 days after dropping a not uncommon Div card once every 30-35 minutes I've gone over 14 hours without a drop. Doing nothing differently and de-levling to stay at no quant penalty (as I did when the cards were dropping) Interestingly during this time Masters spawns in the area went from normal frequency (something like 1 every 45mins) to almost never like one every 7 hours (yes about 2 masters in the last three days after seeing one every 45mins).

I experienced almost the same thing farming Deaths Oath a couple years ago (which was a similarly common drop at the time I believe they've nerfed it a lot since) and Belly of the beast cards several times over the years. Again not particularly rare cards that suddenly hit a wall and seem to no longer be in the drop table... This reminds me of the current Bugs with spawning Conquerors how 1/3rd chance for a taunt can go multiple days of mapping with no taunt.

a couple years ago I farmed the Porcupine card (back before quill rain was nerfed) and had much the same experience, having farmed almost all the cards in a grindy but manageable 8 or 9 hours for almost the whole set; I then went 12 hours without dropping a card which to put into perspective is about how long most people report taking to farm an entire SET. The distinctly abrupt wall I seem to hit feels a lot like Anti botting code, or "player retention" code meant to string out how long it takes for players to farm cards that aren't uncommon but give potentially "end game" items. Because these are not extremely rare cards the wall you hit FEELS distinctly artificial even if its theoretically possible to be "bad luck" Consistent and artificial feeling "bad luck" streaks that only seem to involve cards for 1 off end game items feel suspect. Dishonest feel in a game about grinding is REALLY OFF PUTTING. I'm not saying there shouldn't be bad luck streaks, but having a 20x less drop rate suddenly kick in is just pure frustration. A card that's dropping 2 per hour taking 2 or 3 hours to drop is one thing, suddenly taking 14 hours is not in the same universe as honest good faith RNG regardless of probability that it might happen once in a while.

In contrast when I farm cards that give a random selection of items (like The Lion) another card that also is not UNCOMMON. (One that you might expect people to need to farm many sets of) I absolutely NEVER hit this "wall" In fact you can count on a card every 20-25 minutes on average. This means you might go 30 or 40 minutes, or sometimes 10 or 15 minutes. but never 12-14 hours. The range is not consistent with one off item cards. If I regularly experienced 6 or 8 hour dry spells farming The Lion: THAT would be consistent. But that never happens... Multiple leagues farming that card and I've never gone over an hour.

I realize responses will chalk this up to RNG that is theoretically possible, (and after all if its not "just RNG" we would have to allow that GGG can make mistakes, Bugs or even misguided "retention" oriented code meant to prolong players farming OR punish "bot like behavior" but accidentally punish normal players, and we all know GGG are saints and could never do that), or they will ask me why I'm so dumb as to farm a card I could buy, so they can then tell me I'm playing the game wrong. All of which is perfectly irrelevant; this is a game about farming, grind is literally the name of the company. Protracted and buggy feeling "improbable" streaks are one thing, but to happen so often that I now EXPECT to have this happen whenever I farm a card for a single end game item like a chest?

Also I realize how RNG actually works (probabilistic clustering and rarefaction AKA good and bad streaks) that its theoretically possible to have long strings without drops, but in practice cards going from 30-35 minutes per drop to 20 times longer and to happen so many times over the years FEELS like artificially created scarcity.

It doesn't FEEL honest, it feels as lot like the loot seed debacle in Delve league (I still have never once found a 4 socket resonator BTW) and frankly I don't believe it is, at the very least I suspect anti botting code or bugs like the ones that are responsible for "33% chance for taunt" to turn into hundreds of maps without a Taunt (a bug which BTW is still NOT fixed after the most recent patch).

This league has been shit for me until this morning. I mostly relied on doing chaos recipe to generate some currencies. And early this morning:


BANG!!!



House of Mirrors div card drops. For some, 26 exalts might not be much, but for me it was like winning the lottery.

Someday, RNGezus will notice you too and bless you with all of his goodness.

are you expecting real answers or the typical sheep "it's arpg, grind, it's fine"

tencentggg is slowly getting into activision-blizzard levels with RNG levels on their content people eventually will get sick of it it's only a matter of time.

There's an RNG seed

Use statistics rather than "feels".

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alhazred70 wrote:

but in practice cards going from 30-35 minutes per drop to 20 times longer and to happen so many times over the years FEELS like artificially created scarcity.

You literally just said you knew what RNG was though.....

An implementation of a "controlled RNG" would become instantly clear to the community.
Besides, something like this ALWAYS backfires via some bug. If it were to be discovered, GGG's reputation would be damaged immensely.
I don't believe they have a system like that in place, it would be wayyyyy too risky for them.
So yeah, just bad/good luck imo.

There is no rng. Tencent is manipulating the drops depending how much money you have spent in the game. Streamers and rich whales have the best drops. Simple as that. Ofcourse some poor ppl will see one exalt drop per league,is the carrot to the stick. But don't believe that everything is rng in this game. GGG was sold and now Chinese company is on the throne.

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cjimaras wrote:

There is no rng. Tencent is manipulating the drops depending how much money you have spent in the game. Streamers and rich whales have the best drops. Simple as that. Ofcourse some poor ppl will see one exalt drop per league,is the carrot to the stick. But don't believe that everything is rng in this game. GGG was sold and now Chinese company is on the throne.

This statement is so easy to disprove it's not even worth the trouble.

"

cjimaras wrote:

There is no rng. Tencent is manipulating the drops depending how much money you have spent in the game. Streamers and rich whales have the best drops. Simple as that. Ofcourse some poor ppl will see one exalt drop per league,is the carrot to the stick. But don't believe that everything is rng in this game. GGG was sold and now Chinese company is on the throne.

the conspiracy theories from people who play 30 minutes a day vs people who play 16 hours a day are hilarious