I no longer think the Great Vault is random. I’d like to see the actual formula involved with this.
Anecdotally haven gotten two of the same items in the same slots two weeks in a row should be nothing short of miraculous when it comes to the loot pool size. Compared to chasing your raid chase items for 15 weeks with full vaults across multiple toons to never see any of them. I’m very suspect.
The probability of drawing 2 distinct items from a pool of 25 where you get to pick 3 without replacement is 1% and that’s if the pool is even 25 items.
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1 percent drops happen all the time. Can’t farm mounts without them.
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That is just the probability of the first instance happening with the first “set” of two items. For it to happen again a week later is still 1% but the odds of two 1% events happening consecutively and in the exact same slots before a higher probability event occurs over the course of 15 weeks is ridiculous
*commenting before “OP didn’t loot his vault one week prior.”
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I agree. I think it’s that Blizzard’s implementation of a random number generator is pretty poor. I frequently see two of the same cape or two of the same ring at end-of-dungeon drops (esp. in Vortex Pinnacle). It feels like the psuedo-random number generator has too short a cycle, or more likely that the same “current seed” is used more than once when it should increment every time the RNG function is called.
If they do something incredibly stupid like this example
math.randomseed (44) – fixed random seed
math.randomseed (os.time ()) – randomize from whatever the time is
then you can get stupid results. The two problems above are that: 1) the fixed random seed is an even number which cuts the random cycle in half before it starts over again; and 2) the os.time() needs to be converted to an odd integer. If the devs never explicitly initialize the random seed using well established semi-numerical methods outlined by Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming Vol 2 and others, then Lua 5.4 will make a weak attempt at randomness (“When called with no arguments, Lua generates a seed with a weak attempt for randomness.”).
I found this articles on Computers are Lousy at RNG to be of interest. Rather than a fixed seed, a better RNG algorithm samples something from the analog world low order bits in human delays between mouse movements or from CPU/GPU temperature sensors or microseconds elapsed since last check for a core system task combined with an MD4 hash of environmental process variables.
It could be that the loot distribution is weighted (they don’t all have an equal probability), but that feels unlikely except for Raid items that explicitly say “very rare” like the Screaming Black Dragonscale, Pillar of the Elder Flame, Neltharion’s Call to [Chaos/Dominance/Suffering], and Voice of the Silent Star.
It really just feels like multiple calls to RNG return the same result because of seeding/incrementing issues (like lack of a global mutex per instance for M+/Raid or per player for Great Vault).
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It never was, what they call rng is, in fact, a ‘weighted’ algorithm based on gawd knows what factors, but I dare say how much money you pay is part of that algorithm.
I’ve been calling for an independent audit of the code for years to identify predatory coding designed by psychiatrists and sociologists as consultants.
It’s becoming an issue each passing year and it might be legal but it sure the hell is taking advantage of a vulnerable group of people and needs to stop.
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I’ve randomly gotten the same pants from the vault 5 weeks in a row….
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I haven’t had a useful vault in awhile. We need a token system where we can target the items we can actually use
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Call it dinar ?
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I take the “Don’t care about the vault, but if I do something to get it, then bonus points if I get a transmog out of it” approach.
The vault treadmill is what some may refer to as “degenerate” in my view.
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I’ve always thought of it as “cluster randomness”: what item is “up” is RNG, but then that cluster has to run its course before you randomly get a new cluster.
Computer generated RNG is not really RNG and is predictable
do you have, like, anything at all to back this up?
huh? which group of people do you have in mind here?
okay, so predict what i’ll get in my vault next week on this character. you can’t, nor can any player, nor can any blizzard employee. the fact that it’s technically deterministic doesn’t mean anything. it is equivalent to random for all intents and purposes.
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if you’re 435-440 and doing heroic raid and a couple of 16ish keys a week at most, the vault isn’t going to have much for you. that’s not rng.
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this is however how RNG can RNG. its like lightning striking the same place twice. like true randomness its a little more like to strike that same spot because there is a reason it was drawn to it in the first place.
BG3 is aware of this and uses karmatic Dice instead of True RNG by default.
it was stated somewhere that players dont actually want or like True randomness because you can get into a streak of bad rolls/ draws/ etc.
What players want is weighted Randomness. Randomness that is influenced slightly to exclude previous rolls based on what you already got.
“smart RNG” is what we need.
and if a player has a average ilvl at or above 444 the game should IMO be weighted a bit more into giving tri stats on gear, maybe not on all drops but at the very least in the vault. doing that means there is a slightly higher chance that a duplicate item (because the player has everything) might still get a slight upgrade from the vault.
Ez.
My friend’s father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former room mate once spent 20 dollarydoos on wow gold and then got his best in slot weapon in the vault meanwhile I only paid my subscription like a goddang peasant and got offered a ring with my worst two stats on it and it was also a colour I don’t like.
Using these two data points I then expanded that out to the 12 million players who still run keys and came to my conclusion that paying more money means more loot.
Don’t ask me how the game knows what my bis is or how to know to give someone another 447 belt with haste mastery because their current 447 belt with haste/crit is a few hundo dps less.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to write a stern letter to my music streaming service of choice because their random shuffle played the same song twice in an hour and I feel like if it were truly random then it should play each distinct song once each until the entire playlist is exhausted.
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Stop playing for vault.
ez.
Bro…I’m in the same boat. I’ve only seen the same shoulders and helm for almost a month now I think??
Something is going on.
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https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-a-computer-generate-a-truly-random-number/
Have a gander
Just grab a socket or spark fragment if you didn’t get anything good. 
It’s not just the vault. If you recently got bracers, for example, you are more likely to get bracers as a drop from other content types of a similar tier.
I understand the laws of probability and all that, but its laughable at this point to think its actually random when litterally everything else in the game is meticulously designed to string you along as long as humanly possible.
Acitivision also actually holds patents on some sort of tech that auto matches you in groups with people who have better items than you, to make you feel jealous and inspired to play more or hit the cash shop (to be clear auto matching is supposed to be random, just based on who queued first). I can’t remember what game this was designed for, it was not WoW, but still, this is their way…