But they are kind of rare. Same goes for Shield Amplifiers. Used to have quite a few in cargo now it's like one at three days or so. Might be luck tho.

I have 5k AP/hr and haven't gotten a shield restorer in more than a week. I thought it might be statistically significant when I get 5 or more of anything else in that time.

I don't have 5k AP/Hour but yeah, they look significantly rarer than before. I get a lot of crap I don't need but hardly useful consumables. The beauty of RNG. Might be that they tweaked the odds a bit so you get even less useful stuff and more crap but it's not like things like that gets announced.

Considering if I want to stay in the game or not. I feel like I am wasting time throwing away crap. I can clean my house if I wanted to do that. Type in Number, delete 75 cloning pods. Type in Number delete all stupid probes.

Why not a complete overhaul of the artifact system.

It's like the Mass storage pod was given as a saving grace so we can keep building up on these stupid useless about 4 times a year types of artifacts.

Nothing significant can be gotten from arty draws anymore. I get 40000 points in under 18 hours and nothing but crap consistently. I wish the mass storage pods could be ejected into space filled with this crap. Even better if they are self loading so I don't have to think about it.

I got a few shield restorers and amplifiers the last day or so.

Just today I got 2 android scientists, a durtanium bracket, a crimson obelisk, 2 engineered viruses, and a star chart purger. I am seeing no problem with my artifact draws.

i quite regulary get many ok artifacts, but 7/10 times i get those crap artifacts i cant scrap fast enough because they are waste of pixles on my screen.

I consider most of those things crap. I used to get an energy cube every 2 days from artifact draws. I have seen this turned into a money making scheme instead of a game of passion like I had originally seen back then.

Sorry Dan, but prove me wrong on this and start re-adding something useful to the draws again. I have seen this turn into the vision you stated you wanted to avoid. Where those who pay more are in the top leaderboard spots. Hard work cannot get you to level 700 very fast. I paid money back when energy cubes were in the artifacts. Since the game has grown so unbalanced I have been waiting to see if you fix it before investing money into it again. I am still under level 200 and was one of the first players of this game. Something is unbalanced when the top spot on the leaderboard is close to 1000. Took me years it seems to get to level 200 and people are making 700? I admit, there were times when I could not spend my energy, but not to the extent that someone beat me by 4 times what I have. I was on that leaderboard at one point dammit.

You do realize that the player approaching 700 started from the very beginning of the game when everything was unbalanced and was more in testing stages. When terraformers were as common as probes and there was no such thing as NPCs.

How can one get 7 (seven) Void Shells and 8 (eight) Space Elevator Chassis in 24 hours if draws are random ? Obviously no ship bots or rescue prisoners in the same time. Looking at the posted numbers things really don't add up.

You have to remember your dealing with pseudo random computer code, unless if I'm mistaken the timing of your click (in accordance to your computer's milliseconds)
determines the seed which then generates a "random" finite reoccurring sequence.

basically if you manage to click at the exact same time by freak of nature, your more likely to get a certain item/item set (depending on dan's code). Unless if Dan has made some optimizations to the basic random function. But that is what most programming code runs on. Very and I mean VERY few games out there actually have true-random number generators, it's just too much of a hassle.


There's also luck so yeah >.> winning losing streaks... -.- I've gotten like 9 planetary time vortexes over 2 days and none for a week. Seriously lol don't bothering trying to count, it works out in the end when you use a spreadsheet. But if you asked around they definitely didn't come in a random order. You'll just go wtf.

Random means once in a while you'll get clusters of things; that's why people are bad at just picking things randomly: they refuse to accept that if the same thing happens a number of times in a row it's still random.

No. I think the seed is generated like once a day. There won't be a roll every time you click the button. Anything else doesn't make sense, if you look at the numbers. I would accept it if, let's say for 7 void spheres I would have gotten 3-4 sip bots. Given the fact that the price and chance in that spreadsheet are equivalent. 7 with 0 it's a bit statistically improbable. The bad part is I never seen a "ship bot day " or a "rescue prisoners day". It's always the useless crap. Same goes with the NPC seed.

Yeah they're random, some levels I get more ship bots/prisoners than others. Of course when I'm not pulling those I'm usually getting heavy crew bots and brackets/cells so I'm not too very unhappy usually. But lately I've been getting TONS of stinking artifact structures. There was a time i'd have given my right arm for a warp gate chassis. Now I cry when I see the stupid things cause they suck up a huge chunk of my arti points and I scrap most of them.

There is one thing that makes more sense, which is that it generates a number every time and once in a while you get a bad luck streak and have the need to explain it as anything more than random, because that's what people do.

I have seen the code for a randomization on a scientific calculator, and it does indeed have statistical probability based on a uber-massive equation. If the code is server-side, then the artifact draw equation advances a value on every single draw by every player, probably recalculating on artifacts above the amount a player has.

It's probably designed to cycle instead of follow a seed, and all those possible terraformers and expanders are probably being skipped during the "reroll if not enough artifact points" I mentioned. And considering the number of players currently playing this game, chances are someone got a terraformer yesterday, and might have been a noob who had no idea how rare they are.

Really? I would think it would just be:

artifactGotten = Math.random() * numberOfArtifacts;

playerArtifacts.add(drawableArtifactList[artifactGotten]);

And maybe does the random thing a second or even third time if you get one of the nerfed devices (if you really can still get them at all).

Keeping state like that would be a pain. My guess is that it does something like the following on the server when you click the receive button:

do
{
number = rand(time()) * 1000;
artifact = artifact_table[number];
} while(aritifact.pionts > artifact_points_available);

store_artifact(player, artifact);

The artifact table would have repeat entries for the more common artifacts.

There are a lot of different ways it could be done, it is just a lot easier to calculate which artifact you get when you hit the button then to keep track of which artifacts you have received in a day.

http://rapidshare.com/files/439065010/GL_Artifacts.ods
http://rapidshare.com/files/439065011/GL_Artifacts.xlsx

Ok those of you who understand the odds and spreadsheets please incorporate all this new data.

Note I never took an artifact draw without having at least 20,000 points.

hope I put this in the correct thread. Share the link in the other thread if it's the wrong one.

I really don't know how to put the spreadsheet in to jpg picture I could post.

Brian

I have 3 theories for the drop ratios, although I favor #1:

(1) All the possible drops occur at the same rate, so if there are say 60, the drop rate on each is 1/60. Note statistically, the actual results vary widely. This seems closest to reality at least before the drop changes (when continuum beacon appeared). Other than a couple of "wierd" artifacts that seem to differ for each person being really high or low, the rates are pretty equal.

(2) There are a few classes of artifacts, or maybe 2, common/uncommon, and one is twice as likely as the other. It made sense with some things like probes, but not others like EMP/disarming bomb that should have the same rate/class. This is very hard to detect, esp. if it's small differences like 0.9% vs. 1.0% or something since it could randomly appear to be like that.

(3) System wide or player "recycling/balancing". I have noticed if I consume several artifacts then draw, there is an increased chance of getting those same items back, in fact in a couple of cases I basically drew exactly what I had used earlier in the day. This might be on a player basis, or the system may give a certain amount of each out that changes depending on usage patterns. Difficult to prove, prolly coincidental.


I will check all the data later and see if I get a better picture with a larger set than my own.