Gradual Reduction in MF Effectiveness

[Crystalion]

That is why I said the game does not get initialized properly.

/lurk:off

As many people have mentioned, there are likely quite a number of coincident things going on here. Some of them, in no particular order...

There is the psychological effect (humans generally make poor measuring devices).

There is the human ability to discern "patterns" where none exist

There is the self-selected report effect (humans report "patterns" but don't report all the data, so the apparent reported reality is skewed from the actual norm)

...

These could explain the phenomena reported. Certainly the reported from code-readers and armchair Occam's razor second-guessing of the implementors by other programmers seems to suggest it is unlikely that there is a new special code mechanism. OTOH I personally have put Easter Eggs into products and know other programmers that have, so sneakiness can not be ruled out.

I do not wish to go into each point in detail, but, for example, since a properly working system will indeed display streaks, if you merely do a bunch of MF runs until you hit a bad streak, and then quit, you could create a "certainty" that all MF runs eventually end in junk.

Clearly getting five people to do two different time-separated runs of 100 consecutive normal Baal's with a single -act5 char would provide a much better basis on which to guess whether the effect is real, whatever the cause.

That takes a great deal of effort however. It is easier to assume that the effect is at least partly "real" (aside from the "illusion" reasons given above) and then ask the armchair question: what could this be the natural consequence of?

The game probably does not get initialized "properly", afaik, in at least one respect: the prng seeding. If we use -seed to easily hold the seed to a single value across games we quickly discover that there is at least one other source of randomness (initialization/seed-line) because many things about the games will be different. I happen, for other reasons, to have done enough of this kind of testing to believe that the passage of time plays a role in this difference.

I also happen to be inclined to believe, from personal experience, that the streakiness of rune drops for Hellforge, as reported on AB, is likely a real effect, and not explained solely by the above mentioned "illusion" factors.

Given what Jarulf said about the seeding of areas I strongly believe that an audit trail of all the random number usage for a series of games would provide a quick confirmation or denial of this theory. It was quite easy to put such an audit into D1, btw, because their debugging of morph problems had already caused them to instrument the routine for their own audits. What you need to track is the source and transformation of the seeds into particular random numbers used for drops.

Hopefully it is generally clear, if only from -seed and the ancient bone-wall farming episode, that any degeneracy in the utilization of the prng (such as by poor seeding) has a major effect on drops when considered over the long haul.

While I understand the economics that typically dictate proprietary closed systems, I rather prefer open (as in open source and its philosophical brethren) systems, where broad peer review and corrections can readily occur.

But D2 is only a game. It is fun despite its many imperfections. It has been played and enjoyed for far longer than most "successful" computer games, but it is still destined for relative obscurity (e.g. like D1 and Warcraft 1 now).

If you are running into a frustrating effect, like apparent MF effectiveness reduction on a repeated run, then vary something in your procedure! It is probably totally overkill to make a new character. There are many many potential "control variables" to try, assuming the effect isn't illusory (in which case just about anything you try will eventually "work").

My two cents worth. YMMV.

/lurk:on