RNG questions (seed)

So, after the worst start to a season since they started on consoles (PS4 in my case), and generally horrid luck with regards to RNG on an ongoing basis since I installed the game 4 years ago, I have questions…that probably only Blizzard can answer…

  1. Is RNG seed created randomly, in real time?

  2. Is RNG seed created at game session launch (and lasts for the entirety of the actual session)

  3. Is RNG seed created at the initial installation of the game , and if this is the case, if you “roll” BAD/unlucky RNG seed, will that persist for the entirety of the game’s life, until it’s uninstalled/reinstalled (and even then, will uninstallation/reinstallation make a difference, since the RNG seed is probably loaded as part of the character save, so I’d prolly have to delete all characters and uninstall/reinstall the game to force a new RNG seed…)

So, this season…so far…p400 and:

  1. no focus has dropped
  2. no restraint has dropped
  3. no yangs has dropped
  4. no dawn has dropped
  5. set items for DH are really hard to come by for me - I’m lucky to get One set piece drop per 8 or so t13 rifts…drop rates just feel a helluva lot worse for me this season…I didn’t get all set items for DH m6/n6/impale and UE until p400…

Chain of shadows dropped at p380 odd…

Doesn’t matter whether it’s drops from mobs, blood shards, upgrading rares, certain items are just not dropping for me.

It took me 6 damn upgrades to get a karleis point dagger, on a supposedly 50/50 chance…last season it took me 7 upgrades and the season before 9…for a 50/50 chance, that’s 2^6 odds (1 in 64) of happening…

I can accept being unlucky, but something makes me very suspicious when this bad luck lasts 4 damn years…so, either i’m One of the unluckiest persons in the world, or there is something up with the RNG on my install of D3 on my PS4…

Exactly how the RNG seed is created on the PS4 would be nice to know. If it is random, then surely I can’t be unlucky the entire time with random RNG seed…

My progression this season has been badly held back by a lack of luck when it comes to item drops…by this time of the season, I usually have all my set pieces for all sets for DH, and have completed the season journey…I haven’t even completed chapter 5 yet…it’s kinda hard to push GRs with no yangs and no dawn, hatred management is a real nightmare and dmg output is capped for UE MS and impale…

Whilst this thread is partly a vent thread, I am really curious as to exactly how the RNG seed is created for the PS4 version of the game. I guess non Blizzard devs will never know, since the RNG seed creation is hidden in the code of the game…normal players like myself can guesstimate and theorise how the RNG seed works in this game, but we will NEVER be 100% sure until we see the code imho…

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i think those are the company secrets. they won’t tell you unless they have to.
for example i know that the chinese government asks blizzard to show them the WoW source code for random things.
so they know what they pay and what they get.

my progression is sucky too btw.
i think as long as a game is RNG dependent, there is nothing we can do .

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well, even the original Diablo had RNG, although it was a helluva lot better than D3 imho.

An update on my s19 RNG woes:

dawn finally dropped around p450. At least I have near perma uptime on vengeance now, and this helps toughness, dmg and hatred management. Nemesis bracers dropped at p500 (helps with DB farming and speeds up rifts). Focus and restraint dropped just shy of p500 too (both from the same RG lol).

At p500 these items have not dropped from mobs whatsoever:

  1. karleis point (but I’ve had 10+ LGFs drop lol - so much for 50/50 drop rate hahaha).
  2. holy point shot (have had 2 drop from kadal, one pre lvl 70 so useless as)
  3. yangs

Please excuse my cynicism and paranoia about RNG…
I find it amusing that the main weapons for 2 DH builds have not dropped…co-incidence? I think not…

Last season btw, it took 22k blood shards before I got a HPS quiver from kadala…22k…and the HPS quiver as rare as hell for the entire season with less than 10 dropping in the entire s18…I prolly had 20 of each and every other quiver for eveyr single HPS quiver that I got lol…

But, I digress. This is the worst run of RNG I have had regarding start of season and getting key items such as main weapons…

Just because theres only 2 possible outcomes from upgrading, it doesn’t mean that the chance is 50/50. All items have different drop rates, just look at how often you get blackthornes.

i got one piece drop today sunwuko.
i completed every set my s19 monk but sunwuko is always the last set that drops.

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LGF/Karleis have always been presented as being 50/50 on various drop rate spreadsheets and posts on forums etc…I personally doubt it, it’s more like 70/30 imho based on personal experience with the game.

Nerfing drop rates on common items, just to make the game “harder” and more “interesting” is really bad game design imho. The D3 devs really screwed up when they introduced tiered drop rates to loot table sections imho. The original Diablo didn’t do it, nor did it need it, and it was a far better game for it imho.

I ended up getting a yangs drop at p505. Focus and restraint dropped the GR after yangs…I had karleis drop between p505 and p550. I had to LOL had, I ended up getting 4 more dawns drop (2 from the same RG lol) between p505 and p550…how 4 (and 1 of them ancient) can drop in 50 paragons, and none in 500 paragons is beyond me…that tells me the RNG distribution in this game is broken. And, badly broken.

I managed to get the final set pieces for m6 and n6 too between p505 and p550 last night, so was able to run the GR45 challenges with them for the LBs. Same with the no set conquest GR45 - with yangs and dawn, it was doable. I’m experienced enough to know that it would not be possible, at least with MS as your main DH skill without these 2 key items.

A very frustrating start to the season. I’d still really like to know how the RNG seed works in D3. Blizzard, are you listening or do I have to call you on my mobile phone?

edit:

well congrats. I typically find dawn, yangs, tp ammy, compass rose and karleis very hard to get every season. I guess it would be nice to have a nice start to the season where stuff drops!

HPS quiver - no drops yet from mobs. 2 from kadala (One pre lvl 70 and useless). 22k bloodshards last season to get a HPS quiver from Kadala. That’s 880 odd upgrades…considering there’s a 1 in 10 chance of a legendary from her, and there are 9 legendary quivers…that’s NOT good a good result imho!

re: yangs, according to the google spreadsheet that I have on datamined drop rates, all of the legendary bows for DH have the same drop rate (11.11%). I find it rather amusing that I had every other bow at least 4 times before a yang dropped…

So, either the datamined spreadsheet is wrong or I’m just unlucky…this is exactly why Blizzard should stop being so damn secretive with regards to drop rates and publicly publish them…it’s not a trade secret and would not harm the game…

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From my experience, pretty much every new patch introducing new items comes with drop rate adjustments.

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A post from the US Community Manager regarding drop rates…

yeah, I’d believe them not…I’d trust a fox in my hen house more than a Blizzard post lol…

Yesterday in non-season I found my first ever ancient Sacred Harvester - not primal - ANCIENT, first, ever, since I started playing. I’ve been playing a fair bit, less compared to many veterans but my profile should show a decent effort. Even if the harvester only drops for WD, I still logged a hefty time on them.

Last season it took me 800 PLvl’s to complete the build, just basic with no upgrade.

The season before that I started farming GR90 in 12 hrs of casual play and completed Guardian shortly after- no fancy boost or groups, just solo self found.

Tbh that’s what RNG is. Personally I had already accepted this aspect of the game. It just is what it is. Nobody other than your own bias is “out to get you” or working against you or something like that.

In the same context of your argument about how when something has a 11% drop rate only drop after 200 attempts, giving it 0.5%?

Well in the so-called data-mined spreadsheet you would be that statistical outlier wouldn’t you.

How would you define the “R” in RNG. Is an calculated average of 10% a fixed “1 out of 10” concept to you?

Let’s say Blizzard release the code, I’ll do one better, let’s say they invite you to go over and personally see for yourself the drop rate of an item on their database. You see 11.11%. They then simulate 1 million drops and it is fairly accurately presented… What would you say about it then? Would you finally be able to just accept the concept of randomness?

My goodness, things don’t go my way, instant conspiracy.

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this means that rng is adjustable.

and also means that if rng is adjustable whenever blizzard feels like it is not fair at all.

the way to check if rng is fair is not looking a data in a database table.
they have to show their all-drop-data (everything that dropped to every player so far) to the public and then if there is no inconsistency then you can say it is fair.

they wouldn’t do that of course and i have no problem with it because i accept that when i buy their game.
also that does not mean that every player should accept it and not question it.

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quotes snipped for expediency…

1 in 200 vs 10% - imho, there’s something very badly wrong with RNG if it lets that happen in a game.

And if that “statistical outlier” is consistent over 4 years of play? It should be random, not consistent…that was the entire crux of my initial argument.

Let 's look at it this way - you could be:

a) lucky (a small % of players at any given point of time)

b) unlucky (again, a small % of players at any given point of time0

or

c) average luck - most players, most of the time. It’s here where the RNG is very close to the stated RNG from datamining…

now reasoning should state that I’m more often going to be in group c) than a) or b), right? So, if I’m in b) most of the time, then surely something is wrong with the game? There are 2 thoughts here - either i’m consistently and naturally incredibly unlucky, or something has applied BIAS to the RNG to put me into group b).

My question is still valid as to how the RNG seed is generated. If it is calculated at initial install of the game and applied to every future character (and knowing Blizzard’s lazy programming, this is highly possible), and if you roll “unlucky RNG”, then you’re stuck with unlucky RNG for the life of the game, and every character. This is NOT random.

Why do I suspect this? Let’s consider elite affix propagation in GRs - over thousands and thousands of GRs, I have noticed that if you get say, arcane based elites at the start of the GR, you will continue to get them for the entirety of the GR (like an applied theme if you will). This is NOT random. Random should be every single elite has a roll to determine its affix, in real time. I am not the only player to notice this anomaly btw. This would strongly suggest that Blizzard determines affix at the start of the GR and then simply applies said affix to the entirety of the GR with bias.

How do you explain others (and quite a few of them I might add) who consistently talk about bad RNG luck? We constantly get laughed at and called idiots and told that it’s all in our minds. That’s a lot of players lol, surely we can’t all be wrong?

It’s not the drop rate per se that i’m interested in, it’s how the RNG seed is calculated and applied…that’s what I’d like Blizzard to be open about and tell the community.

There is zero reason for Blizzard to be so secretive about it all - it only implies that they have something to hide imho.

Because you’re suffering from the same thing that almost every human on the planet does, i.e. cognitive bias. People tend to remember getting a streak of 5 failed gem upgrades at 60% a lot more than getting 5 successful upgrades. For the same reason, you remember bad luck streaks of not getting the loot you want much more vividly than when upgrades were raining down on you.

This is why statistical analysis of drops involves hundreds of thousands of drops, not just interpolating from what a single player remembers dropping.

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I could clearly recall every long streak of terrible luck in my 7 years of playing. Yet when ever something happens “just right”, or even when ever luck was in my favor, my brain passes right over it.

I’m not familiar with how the PS4 version works. On PC, I guess what you are calling the “seed” is generated every “session” - from when a character of yours enter the game world until it leaves. It is not some curse that is bound to your account.

Scenario: I’ve not seen the item I’ve been farming drop - let’s say it’s a Compass Rose - for over two weeks. I’d be upset at the fact that I’ve identified over 200 set rings and The Compass Rose is still not coming up. At this exact moment, I just salvaged a Leoric’s Signet.

The last Leoric’s Signet that dropped for me was 4 months ago, over 500 legendary rings ago. Thing is: My brain will absolutely not register this, because that’s not where it is currently focused on - it is currently hating on RNG on The Compase Rose.

Anyway, I still rather believe that you are either just unlucky (the odd one out, happens from time to time to a few people) or letting only bad memories seethe, and not the fact that some bugs or glitches in the code is out to get you.

Take my view with a grain of salt. I do not claim to know how you think or function, just pure opinion.

A remedy could be if Kadala offered more specialised gear choices. Like if you could gamble for 1-handed crossbows etc.

After playing some 20 seasons, the only thing that I want those grad students to program is a recursive algorithm so that you dont keep getting the same crap being offered while you go through gambling on getting some item. Time and time again I have wasted precious limited resources in gambling to get something useful from Miriam, Kadala and the Cube. Honestly Blizzard, do you guys ever play your own game? Do you just simply use the same maths done by World of Tanks or something? If you give me access to your code, I will write the code so I dont get offered Dexterity 23 times before I get a socket for a ring. It cant be that hard.

Imagine rolling a random number from 1 to 100 and looking up the result on the following table to determine which affix you get…

  1. 1-60: Main Stat
  2. 61-80: Vitality
  3. 81-90: CHC
  4. 91-95: CHD
  5. 96-98: AD
  6. 99-100: Socket

You’d have a 60% chance of main stat, and only 2% chance of a socket. So, on average, you’d get main stat 30 times as often as a socket. That’s called weighting, and some affixes are way more heavily weighted than others. Main stat is one of the heaviest weightings there is on items for the simple reason that for every point of main stat you get, you gain 1% damage, and that’s generally desirable.

Affix tables being weighted does not mean which affix you get isn’t random.

I don’t mind the rng that corresponds to the item drops. If you think about it, you need to get the item for your build dropped out of a pool of many items, you need to be at least ancient or primal for end game so you can augment it, you also need to have the desired affixes on it which is too random for some items like offhands and you need the numbers to roll as high as possible. In addition to that, when you reach the point of min/maxing, you also start to pay attention to the secondary stats and breakpoints. All these conditions must be satisfied in order to say that you found the perfect item. And do that 13 times cause that’s the total number of items that you wear on your character. So I guess it is meant to be hard. 50 primals this season by the way and appart from a primal unity, the other 49 were from scoundrel tokens to cluckeyes and broken staffs. But oh well what can you do. Rng is rng. I can also understand that a guy like me who farmed 1400 paragons so far this season shouldn’t have a build full of primals and GG items so I am not complaining about that.

However, I am actually annoyed about the “other” rng that has to do with rifts. I am playing necromancer as a main right now and I swear I ve never seen so many juggernauts in my entire D3 life. This screws necro three times harder than any other dps character cause they are immune to crowd control effects (aka stun procs from bone armor) and it makes your krysbin worthless. All I see is elites that are juggernauts 80% of the time. Then I switch to my non seasonal monk and wizard. Both channelling builds and guess what… Every elite and their mother has knockback and throws me around so it disrupts my channeling ability. Ok, then I switch to my crusader blessed shield LoD and guess what… Every elite has this annoying bubble that makes my shields move in super slow motion. It is like the game is trolling me and whatever class I play right now gets countered by the bad rng of spawns and mobs. Other examples too. If I get screwed by wallers for some build, I half expect every elite to be a waller. This turned out to be the most anti-fun thing in the game for me so I just quit trying to push for now and just do bounties and farm, hoping to get at least a decent ancient/primal weapon or offhand.