You flip a coin four times. Three times it's heads.. does the probability that the fourth toss is heads decrease because if the previous three results? No. There remains a 0.5 probability for both heads and tails. Similar reasoning should be used for voidfang vestments if you are to assume RnG.
That being said, it is highly unlikely that it is RnG... Imagine throwing 100 heads in a row - common sense would tell us that other factors have influenced the toss.
Interesting thread.
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a coin only has 2 sides there are 6 possibilities here and they could all be chosen at any time if it is random so your example is moot.
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The math is not strong with this one.
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Correct but also wrong. Yes the chance of flipping heads on the 4th try is 1/2 but the chance of flipping heads four times in a row as that -blam!-nut Xur has done is 1/16. OPs math is correct, apart from the part where he states the probability would decrease if it was a choice of type and then specific item. (Chest/3, VV/2). The fact is it would still account to 1/6^4 due to coincidence and not a general rule. If however it was sun breakers 4 weeks in a row it would have a much greater chance following the armour type, specific item rule as it would be 1/3 for gauntlets and 1/1 for sun breakers equalling a total 1/3^4. Which would work in the opposite way for a particular helmet equaling 1/9^4.
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And yet I've received three skull of dire akamhara from three engrams :p
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Now that is very unfortunate as the chances of that happening, providing there is no weighting, is 1/729 or 0.13% (roughly) too tired to be precise.
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If there weren't outliers, that would actually be proof it [i]wasn't[/i] entirely random.
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And to make it even more confusing, the probability of heads when flipping a coin is actually 1/3, because the coin could physically land on the side and be neither heads nor tails...
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There are three ways it could land, yes, but not all three possibilities are equally likely. It's more like a 49.999% chance of landing on each side and a 0.002 chance of landing on the edge (and that's being extremely generous).
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Also true, due to surface area and weight of the coin and many other variables. But long story short, Xur is not RNG because Bungie placed him in the game to sell certain stuff at certain times in which they have decided.
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Edited by Patient3591: 11/28/2014 10:53:19 PMYeah, but the mechanism that determines which item to sell out of that predetermined list at that predetermined time is a random number generator. That fact doesn't change just because one item has more numbers that satisfy the algorithm's if:then requirements than others. RNG doesn't mean pure randomness, it means random number generator.
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Right, but something being part of an algorithm isn't "random." The "RNG" system seems random to the player, but to Bungie it has a purpose. They have created said algorithm to drop different items based on many different variables, which we as the player will never truly understand. Which is why everything in the game seems so random. And Bungie has stated that Xur is in place for those who aren't "favored by RNG" (which is me).
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Yes, but the mechanism by which the algorithm functions is a random number generator, which is what RNG stands for. Is it "completely random?" No. Is it RNG? Yes.
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How many times have you flipped a coin and it landed on its side? I'd say there's a 49.995 chance of tails 49.995 heads and .01 side.
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No, there is not a 1/3rd chance of this. There is an extremely small chance..: