Darkcloud! wrote:Buster2918 wrote:
Like I said, rares are not guaranteed and the odds are stacked against us all for even seeing one, let alone catching one before all other users. Pets of older dates/higher rarity are not owed to us in any sense. All we can do is say "better luck next time" and be all that more excited once we DO catch a rare. It is far more rewarding to get one when I've been unlucky rather than seeing a rare every time.
I'm not sure where people are missing my point- it's not just you, you just happened to be the only one to respond directly.
We should all be seeing at least two to three rares (or higher) per opening with the ratios and the way the new delay system works. Will you actually catch it? That's the 7% chance of you competing against other users looking at the same pets. Your chances actually go up if it's a rat or a horse, or a monthly vs event, and go down if it's a highly popular pet.
CS has never been transparent about how and who the system chooses to get to see a rare. I'd like to know how it's done before we go assuming that bots and all these complex theories are the reason that people are saying that that they lack the
option to click on one.
Once again, to clarify, we are absolutely owned an explanation of how the system chooses to show pets. We should absolutely have equal chance to click on a rare as everyone else who enters the pound. The comments have all expressed varying degrees that they feel the pound is unfair, and that the chance to
try to click on something is not being distributed equally. People are choosing to mainly focus on bots, changing the layout etc- but before these large changes are considered for implementation-
I would like to know
how does the pound choose who gets to see the rare+ pets?
(apologies in advance for the long post, i might have gotten carried away)
the odds aren't as straightforward as you make them out to be.
according to the pound rarity data, ~87% of pets are below rare and ~13% are rare+. however, that is just the data for the entire pool, not the distribution on actual user pages or the odds of every individual player. it does not mean everyone always has a 13% chance to get a rare or that 13% of pets on each individual page are rares.
your pound page only shows you 20 pets out of ~1300, which is only about a 1.5% of the pool. i'm not good at calculating probability, but i'm pretty sure the odds of you seeing one, let alone more, rare in that small fraction of the pool are not that high and definitely not a 100%. i assume each of those 20 randomly pulled pets only has a 13% chance of being one of the rares, meaning you have a 13% chance of seeing one, and increasingly smaller chances of seeing more than one (someone who is good at math feel free to correct me, i looked at the formulas for calculating this and they're insanely incomprehensible).
if we suppose there's a 1000 users at the pound right on time for the opening, that is a 1000 randomly generated unique sets of 20 pets. there is an insane amount of possible 20-pet combinations out of a 1300-pet pool, and it is highly unlikely that in a random 1000 sets every such set has a rare in it, considering there's only about ~150 rares in each pound pool, and i think it is even less likely with the pets now being released in waves (though we don't know the distribution of rarities in each wave).
e.g. if the entire 150 is dropped at once, for every person to see one rare each one would have to be shown to at least 7 people at once, but if only 50 rares are released in the first wave, for everyone to see one rare each one would have to be shown to at least 20 people (this is obviously not statistically correct but you get the logic). if everyone were to always be shown 2 or 3 rares on their page, those numbers would go even higher, making the competition for every single rare absolutely impossible for anyone not posessing superhuman speed.
if everything is truly random, we have no way of knowing how many people see any specific pet on their page at the same time. it may be 0, it may be 20. it is possible that one person sees 5 different rares and 5 people see none. random chance on such a scale is pretty much impossible to predict and calculate, and it is as plausible for someone to have a lucky streak of adopting several rares in a row as it is for someone to not even see a single one for months (they might even be the same person at different points in time!). for all we know it might even be possible to see 20 rares at once.
and all of this is only the pure math side of things that can be calculated to a certain degree. there's also tons of variables that are user based and impossible to account for. someone refreshed their page half a second faster than you and took a rare out of the pool, slightly lowering your chance of seeing one. alternatively, a few people took commons, slightly increasing your chance of seeing a rare. more people were at the opening, reducing everyone's chances. less people were at the opening, increasing everyone's chances. popular species, unpopular species etc, etc. there's absolutely no way of knowing what exact odds you will come to on any specific pound opening, and everyone's in the same boat with that. just because someone seems more lucky than you, doesn't mean they have some secret hidden advantage, they simply got lucky.
it is also worth noting that pretty much the only way we know about anyone's luck or the lack of thereof is their own posts. not every user participating in the pound actively uses the "pound pets" thread or any other threads/off-site communities. not every user participating in the threads posts all their catches. we don't know how many pounds each individual user has been to and what percentage of their catches were rare. some people come to every single pound opening and some only catch it once a week. of course, the first group will seemingly have better "luck", while in reality their actual chances are likely equal, but more attempts leads to what seems like a better success rate. we don't know the actual average rate of how frequently users get rares unless we start stalking every single rare in the pound and recording who it went to. we have even less ways to determine how many people simply saw a rare on their page as that is rarely reported and impossible to track.
all that being said, we have no way of knowing what actual mechanisms are at play here, and i doubt we will ever see solid data and algorithms of the pound. cs doesn't like to disclose numbers so all we can do is guess. all my babbling is purely speculation because i can't pass by a good opportunity to google a topic for several hours instead of being productive ;p
tldr: probability is an insane field of mathemathics and it is always more complicated that you think.
