As I said its been A LONG time since I was in my statics class (and frankly I only just passed) but in my example if the ball count always stays at 100 and there is only ever 8 red balls how does doing it more often increase your odds?
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Fun fact. Most people donât know how probability works. Itâs why many will think itâs an equal probability each time whilst ignoring the secondary layer of probability. Each drop from any rare has 2 probabilities. First is the probability it will drop. Second is the probability that it will drop in a certain number of attempts. For some reason a lot of people arenât aware of the second probability layer thatâs associated with the first.
Thereâs a mathematical term for it but I forget what itâs called. Just Google it.
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ItsâŚworse!
Simply, look at it this way.
If youâre in a raid, and 4 people can roll on the item, that makes the 8% chance an 8% chance/4, or 2% chance.
I think.
Anyway, itâs âworseâ.
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You canât think of it on a single basis.
Because you keep trying something youâre basically increasing your chances of getting it, the odds each time havenât changed, but the probability overall has.
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An easy way to think about it.
Flip a coin once. 50/50 chance you will get âheadsâ.
Flip a coin 1000 times and there is still a 50/50 chance on the 1000th try you will get âheads.â
But⌠what the issue is.
If you are JUST trying to get âheadsâ once then you have a much better chance if you flip 1000 times to get âheadsâ once during all that time then if you just tried one time.
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I like this answer
Yes, but itâs like coin flips⌠The probability of flipping a coin and only getting tails 1,000 times in a row is extremely low. If you flip a coin 1,000 times, youâre probably going to end up with at least one head toss somewhere in there.
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Probability is a greatly misunderstood area of math that impacts most areas of WoW gameplay, but none so intensely debated as drop chances. You donât have to be a math expert to want to know how many times you need to kill a boss to have even odds of seeing that drop youâre seeking. Unfortunately everyone seems to be saying something different about how probability works.
If you hope to get the rare Deathchargerâs Reins mount from Baron Rivendare for example, we know that it has a 1% drop chance. That means that every time you kill the Black Baron you have a 1% chance of getting the mount. 1% on the first kill, and 1% on the 100th kill. However, over the course of 100 kills, you have a much higher probability of getting the mount. But not 100%. Never 100%.
Join me after the cut where we take a friendly and gentle look at understanding probability, and give you a cool tool to automatically calculate drop probabilities for you!
Your Chance on Each Attempt is the Same
If your mount has a 1% chance of dropping, it will always be 1% on every single attempt. The Gamblerâs Fallacy trap that many fall into is assuming that previous results will change future results â or put in WoW terms, âIâve run this 50 times, so it must be really likely to drop now!â And it really feels like it should be that way. But itâs not any more likely on the 50th kill or the 500th kill, itâs still 1%. Every. Single. Time.
As an example, letâs say youâre flipping a coin. Thereâs a 50% chance that it lands heads. You flip and get tails. Next time the chance is still 50%. Tails again. The next chance is still 50%. The past results donât affect the chance of the next result. Thatâs randomness for you.
Your Chance Over Multiple Attempts Increases
Even though your chance on each single attempt always remains the same, the probability of getting your drop over the course of multiple attempts increases. I know at first this sounds like crazy talk that contradicts what we just discussed, so another example is in order:
Weâre flipping our coin again. We know that we have a 50% chance of getting heads on any given toss, and it doesnât matter at all what results we got before. But I think we can all agree that if we flip a coin 100 times itâs very, very likely that weâll get heads at least one of those times. The chance on the first toss is 50%, and on the 42nd toss itâs 50%, and on the 100th toss itâs 50%. But over the course of 100 tosses, the probability of getting heads is way more than 50%. (In fact, the chance is 99.999999999999999999999999999921% that weâll get heads at least once.)
So the more often we down a boss, the more likely we are to see the loot that we want. Instinctively we all know this, thatâs why we keep going back and keep going back, and eventually our persistence is rewarded. Sometimes youâll get lucky, and sometimes youâll get unlucky, and the more you try the better your odds are overall. But the chance will never be 100%. Itâs never guaranteed.
How to Calculate it for Yourself
The formula to calculate your drop chance ( x ) over any given number of runs ( y ) is this:
1 - ( ( 1 - x ) ^ y )
Thus we can learn that if we kill Baron Rivendare 100 times, we have a 63.4% chance of getting the mount drop at least once.
So in this instance
28 runs would give you a 90% chance.
55 runs would give you a 99% chance.
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So letâs say, I gathered the data of 5000 random people killing this mob without getting a drop (as we simply ignore all the successful attempts, done by people in between those kills, as we canât possibly know about them, same as you canât possibly know what happened in-between your personal attempts), so I come forth and continue their effort and do the next kill which is kill 5001 in this âseriesâ, following your logic (aka gamblers fallacy) Iâm nearly guaranteed to see the drop.
But alas, all those attempts are in no way connected with each other, and donât influence anything in any way, and my chance is still only those same 8%.
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https://www.engadget.com/2010-01-13-drop-chance-probability.html
This link that was linked right above your post literally tells you what I just said and how youâve completely misunderstood. It even tells you how youâve misunderstood gamblers fallacy.
Your post is a perfect example that proves my point of how there are so many people who donât understand probability.
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No, youâre not nearly guaranteed to see a drop, thereâs no guarantee in probability
What you are is extremely unlucky. I like to think of probability as a luck gauge. If you get it below 50% youâre lucky, if you get over that you slowly get more and more unlucky, but it can never ever hit 100%.
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Iâm amazed at how threads like this show so few people have ever taken a statistics class.
Probabilistic Risk Assessment or Monte Carlo analysis would blow their mind.
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Thatâs not how statistics work.
That would be like saying you could flip a coin and have it never land on heads.
There is an entire field of math that studies this.
There are two types of probabilities.
One where the previous outcome influences the next one (think the odds of pulling a card out of a deck - assuming you donât put the card you pulled out back in).
The other is when the previous outcomes donât impact the next one (like flipping a coin). Most loot drops in WoW function like this (doesnât matter what dropped last time, it doesnât impact current drop rate).
You can look up the formulas. It is an interesting read.
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You can test it in game OP,
/roll and see how many time it takes you to get 92+
Then do it again
And again
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With the adjective nearly it no longer means guaranteed so if your talking about 99.999999999928% the language would be correct.
Furthermore the adjective takes the term guaranteed from being an objective claim to one that becomes subjective as everyone has a different percentage of what nearly guaranteed means.
This is why math is better then other languages. There are no misunderstandings over word usage.
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That is semantics, your example would imply that Iâm extremely unlucky if I donât get the drop in the example provided. Which is not the case, as those attempts are independent of each other events, that donât affect any probability in any way.
Then you donât understand what probability is.
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Theoretically an 8% drop rate means that it should drop once every 13 encounters.
That is not a guarantee, though, merely a probability.
As each loot roll is independent of every other loot roll you could, theoretically, never see it until the heat-death of the Universe.
orâŚ
You could see it the first time you run the encounter.
Both are possible.
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Also, if we are talking about a reported 8%, as in Wowhead says 8% of attempts resulted in a win condition, that is historical data, which, in no way, has any effect on future attempts. As more data is collected, that number could change, based on how many win conditions are met out of the number of attempts. If itâs 8% now, and future reports are 1% or less, we could see that number drop until it is at or near 1% itself.
Also, as shown by the Wowhead data, each person is not in this by themselves, so there will be people who get it immediately, some after a few tries, all the way up to never. The chance and probability belong to all of the attempts. Not just the one person.
âThe past does not predict the futureâ - Ghost - Enter the Matrix
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then follow your own logic, find a dude in wowhead comments farming soundless with 628 attempts, champion his cause, and make the 629-th kill. Then conclude that you are in fact extremely unlucky in that youâve done 629 kills with no drop, right?
Or the probability cares for who explicitly made the roll? So him doing his next kill, and you doing it in his stead are two totally different probabilities, right?
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