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You guys just had some lucky/unlucky rng.
I don’t know how many people play this game per day nor how many average contracts they play, so I can’t really say if the observed numbers are anywhere close to the maths. I feel like this should happen about once per day with the player it happens to being completely random. Yet, I’ve seen multiple people report it happening multiple times to them.
I blame the pseudorandom number generator.
thats average rng, just keep playing.
Like they said, they're all basically equal chance. I feel like there'S a slightly higher chance of easier ghost on easier difficulty but that might just be confirmation bias.
Given the peak numbers, we're probably talking about 50-100k players per day, which is probably up to 100-150k investigations if we take like 2-3 games per session and 2 players as an average per lobby (everything estimated obviously). That said, having this happens like at least 3-5 times per week distributed over all players.
Statistically that's not really important to the game as a whole and i'm pretty sure, that the distribution of ghosts is mostly equal in the data the devs collect, but it happening to someone, who only plays a few games a week, that can feel way more unbalanced due to the low amount of games played.
And on top of that, it only takes 1 bad experience to assume there being a bug, while nobody really things about the hundreds of times where it didn't happen. And that gets amplified in this forums, because usually most threads contain problems, but if we do the math, then having like 10 player per month with like 100s of investigations is not really that high compared to the millions of investigations done by all the players, who don't come into the forum to report, that nothing is broken.
And in that regard, you can ask someone to throw a coin 1k times and writing down the results and more often than not, if people write it down without throwing the coin, they tend to avoid having the same result 4 or more times in a row, as people often think, that randomness means, that things need to change often, when in reality the coin doesn't care about what happened in the previous throw. So the other way around, if a pseudorandom generator ever stops generating these "strange" patterns in hundreds of thausands of rolls, that's rather when we need to assume, that it is broken and not, when it happens every now and then (though having a weighted RNG for any given lobby would probably don't hurt as well^^)
Sometime when playing a game, it might be a good idea to mix things up, like, maybe change the difficulty for one game, wait longer to start it, change the host for multiplayer or change who puts what in the truck. You will notice a change in the rng. Maybe it will be the placebo effect, but it will change, no doubt about it.
I don't know how phasmophobia is coded, but this might help you avoid a mimic for a while.
probably just the build in random class of unity, because there's not really any reason to build your own RNG these days anymore, unless you're researching on that topic
How many investigations are you playing daily though? Unless we're talking about like 100-200 at minimums, it is hard to argue about that theory, as the brain is very good at trying to find patterns, even if there are none. Like i've for once rolled like 100+ games and noted down everything and i could've sworn, that two of the ghosts appeared way more often than the others, but looking at the date made clear, that it wasn't as bad, but i've just been tricked, that at one place, one of the ghosts appeared like 3-4 times within a span of 15 games. and the other one just getting picked like 3 times within the last 20 games, but not being present more often throughout the rest of the test.
As for the random map pick, i've yet not written down anything, but feel free to make a list and tell us your findings after a few weeks of playing
Of couse it isn't "truly random". There's no such thing as "truly random" when it comes to human perception of a random number generator. You will always see patterns in the noise, because humans are hardwired to look for those patterns. That doesn't mean the patterns mean anything on the grand scale of RNG.
It's like rolling a pair of dice and getting 2 sixes 4 times in a row. The dice don't know what the last roll was, and they also won't know what the next roll is. Each roll has no relation to the previous roll.
I'll trade your mimic for my revs, sound like a deal?
TL;DR: computers can generate numbers as randomly as the seed itself is generated. If given the same seed, the generator will* produce the same number output
* Some RNG algorithms can use multiple seeds generated from different sources. If all seeds are left unchanged, then the result will be too.
Nerd talk:
Randomness in computers actually isn’t random, no matter the method used to generate. Some methods use a “list” that is “prebuilt” in the system. As you draw a number from the list, the computer cycles to the next entry and then the next and the next and so forth. When the computer reaches the end of the list (it’s a huge list), it just cycles back to the start and goes through it again.
Most “random” numbers are pseudorandom—pseudo meaning fake. There’s a math equation used to generate a number, but the “randomness” comes from a seed. If you feed the same seed into the equation, you get consistent results (think of hashing algorithms used for storing passwords online). The seed can come from anywhere: current date and time (in mm/dd/yyyy format or milliseconds format, etc), computer uptime, how many microseconds a button is held down, etc. I’ve even heard of some circuitry having a “floating” connection to grab an analogue ghost voltage to generate a seed.
Think about Pokemon shiny hunters. The game will generate a new seed every time it’s launched. A tool has been built so that players can collect three data points on the title screen, feed the data into the tool and then the tool will reverse engineer the results to find the seed. The tool will then use that seed to calculate the exact timestamp/frame where a shiny Pokemon encounter will happen as well as what Pokémon it will be (it will also calculate the non-shinies). Then it’s a matter of the player getting a frame-perfect encounter.
The game has enough RNG to make it feel completely up to luck on what happens, yet there’s so little actual randomness that an application completely external to the Switch itself can 100% accurately determine when very specific encounters will happen.