Is this just a coincidence?

I found three rare rings today within 2 hours all with level 5

Fire Bolt charges. This seems to happen often... ill be getting belts with no good modifiers but 25-30 strength multiple times in a few hours.

i got two identical

Raven frosts (like 185 17 both same), which only difference is ring skin, in 15 minutes

Yes, it's coincidence.

Do you know the effect that you start seeing faces when you look too long into noise? Same thing, people just see patterns where there are none. There are just sooo many drops per hour and so many combinations, it's very likely that some form of "Pattern" appears.

Its not a coincidence. I can rely that to that many times. I had 2 set amulets unfound to chronicle, today i found them in 4mins between. And they were the most hard to find.

I could go on with all the stuff, but you would be sleeping by the time I would be through it all.

Game rolls different loot on different times. It just the way it is, for eg. you cant find Tyraels everyday even if you would like to find it superbad. Its not gonna happen. There is special time for it. Trust me.

Orig_BarbaQ wrote: 1 day ago

There is special time for it. Trust me.

Lol, you made my evening.

glitch in the matrix

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as frequency illusion, is a cognitive bias where something you recently learned or noticed seems to appear everywhere, making it feel more common than it actually is. This occurs due to selective attention and confirmation bias, which lead you to focus on and seek out that specific information more frequently.

D2R drops are affected by a seed, a predetermined number that influences the game's (pseudo) random number generation. We've all seen Ginger's "It's Raining

Ber Runes video?" What he's doing is exploiting a single player map seed, and as long as he doesn't change it, it will repeat itself. In online games the seed is controlled by the server so each seed is different for each play, but at times it does look and feel as though something is awry. I once found 3

Windforce bows, over 3 different days and all in the Pit.

I feel these "can't be coincidence"s every now and then, but I habitually dismiss them as coming from the cognitive biases alredy mentioned in the thread. What I most often see is the same base item dropping more than once close in time, and sometimes a single blue affix repeating itself close in time. I play exclusively online.

It's an old game, so in principle Blizzard could have been taking shortcuts and making some variables not fully RNG-based. However dataminers would know this by now (though we can't know whether the D2R servers use the same drop-handling code as the local copies of the game).

mhlg wrote: 1 day ago

D2R drops are affected by a seed, a predetermined number that influences the game's (pseudo) random number generation. We've all seen Gingers "It's Raining

Ber Runes video?" What he's doing is exploiting a single player map seed, and as long as he doesn't change it, it will repeat itself. In online games the seed is controlled by the server so each seed is different for each play, but at times it does looking and feel as though something is awry. I once found 3

Windforce bows, over 3 different days and games and all in the Pit.

The seed is simply the first number that kicks off the pseudo-random sequence. One could in principle suggest that Blizzard uses a bad routine to seed the RNG, so that we get the same seed far too often. However, for that mechanism to yield something like the "3

Windforce in pit" event you describe, then you would not only have the same map these three times, you would have to do every kill and every chest open in the exact same order up to the then-inevitable

Windforce drop. This is at least what Ginger shows in his videos. So unless the different

Windforce drops happened in the exact same situation (map, tile, monster/chest, etc.), then I have a hard time seeing how it could possibly be related to the mechanism that Ginger showcases. (I don't think you imply that this must be the case, I'm just tagging on to your reasoning!)

Drop-controlling code that bypasses parts of the RNG is another possibility though, though it would imply bad design if it was noticeable...

Edit: Thinking about it, I think Ginger's videos on the topic shows that there are at least two RNG sequences involved, one generating the maps and one generating the drops. For maps are always saved between games in offline single player as long as you don't switch difficulties, but the drop seed would still differ unless it is excplicitly set on the command line. So they seem at least partly independent. I don't think it changes by reasoning above much though.

NaglFarfar wrote: 1 day ago

I feel these "can't be coincidence"s every now and then, but I habitually dismiss them as coming from the cognitive biases alredy mentioned in the thread. What I most often see is the same base item dropping more than once close in time, and sometimes a single blue affix repeating itself close in time. I play exclusively online.

It's an old game, so in principle Blizzard could have been taking shortcuts and making some variables not fully RNG-based. However dataminers would know this by now (though we can't know whether the D2R servers use the same drop-handling code as the local copies of the game).

mhlg wrote: 1 day ago

D2R drops are affected by a seed, a predetermined number that influences the game's (pseudo) random number generation. We've all seen Gingers "It's Raining

Ber Runes video?" What he's doing is exploiting a single player map seed, and as long as he doesn't change it, it will repeat itself. In online games the seed is controlled by the server so each seed is different for each play, but at times it does looking and feel as though something is awry. I once found 3

Windforce bows, over 3 different days and games and all in the Pit.

The seed is simply the first number that kicks off the pseudo-random sequence. One could in principle suggest that Blizzard uses a bad routine to seed the RNG, so that we get the same seed far too often. However, for that mechanism to yield something like the "3

Windforce in pit" event you describe, then you would not only have the same map these three times, you would have to do every kill and every chest open in the exact same order up to the then-inevitable

Windforce drop. This is at least what Ginger shows in his videos. So unless the different

Windforce drops happened in the exact same situation (map, tile, monster/chest, etc.), then I have a hard time seeing how it could possibly be related to the mechanism that Ginger showcases. (I don't think you imply that this must be the case, I'm just tagging on to your reasoning!)

Drop-controlling code that bypasses parts of the RNG is another possibility though, though it would imply bad design if it was noticeable...

Edit: Thinking about it, I think Ginger's videos on the topic shows that there are at least two RNG sequences involved, one generating the maps and one generating the drops. For maps are always saved between games in offline single player as long as you don't switch difficulties, but the drop seed would still differ unless it is excplicitly set on the command line. So they seem at least partly independent. I don't think it changes by reasoning above much though.

I had three Windorce bows drop in the Pit over three different days, but not always at the same location in the Pit. So the seed for each would be different.

mhlg wrote: 23 hours ago

...
I had three Windorce bows drop in the Pit over three different days, but not always at the same location in the Pit. So the seed for each would be different.

Right! I realize I have to amend the strength of my skepticism a little bit vs. my previous post. Apparently the map and the drops are controlled by different RNGs, as evidenced by the fact that you can keep the map but still get a different random sequence controlling the drops. Here is one way in which your

Windforce result could be due to a systematic process (rather than simply luck).

Let's speculate that there might be a bug or design mistake leading to the RNG controlling online drops being initialized with the same seed for several online games in a row, during a specific time period, or otherwise in a systematic way. I don't think this is the case, as it would imply a substantial bug or design failure, but let's consider the possibility.

In that case, the RNG would produce the exact same sequence of numbers every time. However, since the maps are different (evidently as you verified and due to the maps being controlled by a different RNG) this would not be too obvious, because the different maps would lead to different behaviours from you as a player (different monsters, chest locations, etc). So even though the RNG sequence is the same, whatever event the N:th number in the sequence is used to determine will usually be different, making the deterministic sequence non-obvious.

However, here is the kicker: in an area such as the pit (or any area) there is a set area level (unless terrorized), a limited list of monsters that can spawn, and a few types of clickables (chests, skeletons, etc), each having a set drop table. If you query a specific drop table with a specific number from the RNG then you will always get the same drop. So for the

Windforce to drop it is not mandatory that you do everything in the same sequence, it suffices that the right number in the sequence hits the right drop table. Since the number will come up some time during each run, and in every run you would kill the same monster types and open the same chests (albeit in different order due to the map and human spontaneity), it is not implausible that over the course of a few hours of pit running you would hit the right number+droptable combination 3 times. But only if the online random seed is the same, which I would not expect.

The above would mean that the

Windforce would drop from the same type of monster or object type every time (unless several monster/object types share the same drop table). Maybe you already know this was not the case.

To be clear, I don't think such a scenario is plausible at all, as it would imply a huge bug or design problem if the same seed is reused in a systematic way. But it is not fully as implausible as I first suggested