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: 3 days 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: 3 days 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: 3 days 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: 3 days 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: 3 days 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

Indeed your base RNG seed is set in Stone at the point of Character Creation. The map seed and drop seed are derived from this. Each RNG query progresses your RNG counter. So, in theory it is possible to roll a character that is so unlucky that it appears bugged. Each individual map will not roll every game item in its tables at once. I can attest that some games will have higher frequency of drops of certain items e.g some games will drop high number of gcs, some bases, amus etc. I use this method to farm runes. If I find 2 runes within the first 5 minutes and another in the next 5 minutes I know I've found a 'rune-game' and I proceed to kill the whole world. In a true rune game I find 10-30 runes and this happens regularly so it's not coincidence... It Pseudo RNG.
One strange thing I noticed: I thought my char was bugged due to finding nothing but normal mode loot forever. I stopped passwording my games and suddenly started finding consistent good drops. I go back to my passworded game (with same old game name) and it reverted to near drop-less game, every time.

Meat5000 wrote: 6 hours ago

Indeed your base RNG seed is set in Stone at the point of Character Creation. The map seed and drop seed are derived from this.

This is new to me. Can you share your source for these 2 claims?

The info comes from various people who have decompiled the game code itself. It's tertiary info as I haven't looked at the game code myself. There are two layers to the game, there's the base code and there's the mechanics files. Most people tend to just unpack the mechanics files; they deal with the behaviours and stats etc. This structure allows devs to easily reconfigure the game without worrying too much about breaking the game's base. But extensive searching reveals that there are 3 separate RNG counters in the game. The map seed governs which enemies spawn, chests and their loot etc. The enemy decisions and loot drops are governed by their own seed and this RNG 'progresses' the Character RNG counter, from what I remember. There is a difference between single and multiplayer in the way this works. In single map seeds are fixed but in multi, the server generates fresh seeds every game. On server you don't have access to the data but they are generated via a mixture of your chars data/seed somehow using your system clock. It's why you get characters with the luck of the gods and some chars with such poor luck that they appear bugged. As its Pseudo RNG there are certain actions you can take per character that will help to improve your luck because progression is based on path trees, seemingly, but this is spurious at best and good luck finding the trend that helps your character! Realistically, online, there are only 2 things you can do to improve your drops : Be a higher level, kill more monsters.

With all this info it leaves me baffled as to why playing an online game without a password gives me decent drops but with a password (and the same game name) I get terrible loot. Game name is not even a factor in seed generation!