Killing fairies and the laws of probability
Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2015 12:28 pm
Trying to kill enough fairies to get a light white wand is a risky business. With only a diamond staff and armour of 178, my level 210 wizard gets killed by swarming fairies pretty quickly. Eventually, a fairy dropped a white wand just before my wizard got killed trying to run for the bridge off the island.... So I had to reload and therefore lost the wand.
So..... I did what I do when crafting, keep reloading until the crafting succeeds. I felt my wizard had already earned his light white wand so I isolated a fairy for an easy kill by the bridge then went through the kill-reload cycle until she drops a wand.
At 1/1000 chance and having already dropped a wand, it was probable that I'd have to go through the kill-reload cycle 1500 to 2000 times to get one (That's a 78 to 86% chance of a drop). I've now killed the same fairy 2340 times (I counted to alleviate the boredom) and she still hasn't dropped despite the laws of probability showing that 2340 attempts yields a 90.4% chance of success.
This begs the question of whether there's some logic in the software that prevents a drop on first kill to prevent people using the kill-reload cycle to force a drop. Does anyone know?
So..... I did what I do when crafting, keep reloading until the crafting succeeds. I felt my wizard had already earned his light white wand so I isolated a fairy for an easy kill by the bridge then went through the kill-reload cycle until she drops a wand.
At 1/1000 chance and having already dropped a wand, it was probable that I'd have to go through the kill-reload cycle 1500 to 2000 times to get one (That's a 78 to 86% chance of a drop). I've now killed the same fairy 2340 times (I counted to alleviate the boredom) and she still hasn't dropped despite the laws of probability showing that 2340 attempts yields a 90.4% chance of success.
This begs the question of whether there's some logic in the software that prevents a drop on first kill to prevent people using the kill-reload cycle to force a drop. Does anyone know?