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RNG my @$$

After an impressive string of getting upgrades (6 in a row) I have now received 5 kings rocks in a row. There's no way getting evo items is random. I have gotten these all at different stops too.

Asked by clrinetwiz8 years ago

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That does seem unlikely. If there are 5 million PoGo players active enough to get 11 evolution items, only two or three players should get exactly 6 in a row, then 5 in a row. (Odds go up a bit if you include those who got at least 6 in a row, then at least 5 in a row, and odds go up more if you include people who have gotten more than 11 total.)

If it is random, then there might only be a handful of others out there who could share in your bad luck.

Personally, I've gotten 20 total so far:
3 Sun Stone
4 King's Rock
8 Metal Coat
3 Dragon Scale
2 Up-Grade

First off, I hate you. Second, Op should have played the lottery.

Haha!!

I've evolved 2 of each mon that require stones, have all these extras and still not a single upgrade for porygon

I have leftovers of every evolution item, but am yet to get a DragonScale.

Still beating the odds of RNG.

3 Sun Stones,
3 Kings Rock
1 Porygon Upgrade
I've spun untold hundreds of stops scattered over a 30 mile area. Just cant seem to find any.

Dragon scale is the only one I want to transform my excess Seadra and horsea candy to kingdra. I have got 4 sun stone in a row, pretty useless.

Though @OP, what mon are you desperately looking for that requires the evolution item? IMO the only useful one in the pack is a double bug scizor which can be useful against the occasional exeggutor. Is the metal coat the one you are looking for?

Kingdra is underwhelming, slowking is kinda the same as slowbro with a worse movepool, politoed is a worse verison of water gun pokemon already worse than vaporeon, steelix is also underwhelming, porygon 2 is good but it's a dice roll as you have absolutely no idea what is coming for the moveset, bellosom and sunflora....lol

TBH I just want to entry in my Pokédex I'm only missing 6 mons that are available in my region and half of those require an evolution item.

I've gotten mostly upgrades and dragon scales. Saving my porygon candies for Gen4 however. Happened to get Outrage for all 4 Kingdras so far! Kingdra is great as a generalist prestiger.

The only items I have gotten is sun stone, king's rock and (finally) dragon scales. That's it! Have been trying to evolve a steelix (actually, by now I could have two) but just can't the get metal coat.

RNG is messing with me :(

Finally at the last spin, the PokéStop stopped giving me those Dragon Scales.

Metal Coat is the only one I'm still awaiting one of (used my first to get Scizor). Managed to get a DB/O Kingdra and a B/HP Politoed, plus a C/P Slowking for defence, which I'll maybe power up one day if I have an overabundance of dust. I have a couple of spare Up-Grades and Sun Stones, and a King's Rock.

one law of random distribution has become common knowledge.
the law of large numbers.
it roughly means that on the long run, every number on the roulettewheel will win as many times as any other.
or in our case, every player will have collected an equal number of all five evo-items.
what makes it difficult to understand, poeple bang their heads on polished wood in casinos or even superstitious is the exact meaning of -long run-.
long run means after an infinite number of spins.
in the meantime, from spin one until the last one, for whenever that might be in an infinite row, all sequences of numbers will appear as well.
if you print out a list of 1.000.000 evo-item distributions by the gameservers since the launch of them, with 1600 numbers on each side of every page, it would make a total of 313 pages including the intrduction and a really heavy book. a long row of numbers. all 1,2,3,4 or 5 depending on the item the number represents.
picture yourself reading this book.
feel free to take your time.
doesn't feel so far fetched anymore to me that somewhere in this book there is a sequence of 1111133333 or something like it.

maybe you want to take a look at another law about probability.
it's the law of small numbers.
to me its more rewarding than the other one.

cheers

That is a terrible explanation of the Law of Large Numbers, which says, basically, that as the number of trials increases, the statistics of a system will reflect the probabilities underlying it.

Which, in this case, means that if the probability of getting each special item is equal, the more items you get, the flatter the distribution of your items should be.

I note that in my case (see below), the underlying probabilities are not converging to uniformity. In fact, they look strongly like the probability of Steel is just less than 50%, that of Up-Grade is just less than 25%, and Sun Stone is just less than 25%. Of course, my sample size is still pretty small (less than two dozen), but it's still alarmingly improbable to have this distribution.

I wonder if there's an issue with the RNG that the app is using, which is almost certainly provided by the OS?

Welcome to the world of random chance. The odds of you getting that exact outcome are exactly the same as you getting any other combination you can imagine. You just happen to be the person with that combo.

I know all about probability, so this is just a rant against the RNG:

4x Metal Coat (Yay - 1 Scizor!)
3x Up-Grade (I've never seen a Porygon in the wild or hatched one...)
2x Sun Stone (Yay - 1 Bellossom!)
1x King's Rock (Yay? I could add Slowking to Politoed if I could get more of these...)
0x Dragon Scale (WTF? Pretty long odds against this if there are equal odds for each item...)

I'd read that the items are supposed to be non-random under some circumstances - that they're supposed to cycle through all types for the seven day streak - but that can't possibly be true.

So now I'm up to 13:

6x Metal Coat (Scizor & Steelix)
3x Sun Stone (Bellossom & Sunflora)
3x Up-Grade (Porygon doesn't actually exist IME, so these are worthless...)
1x King's Rock (Politoed)
0x Dragon Scale

I'm too lazy to figure out the odds of getting 6/13 the same thing when each of the 5 is supposed to have equal odds, but I assert that it's quite low...

BTW, if the odds of each item are actually the same (1/5 = 20%), then I should've had almost a 95% chance of getting a Dragon Scale in 13 tries:

P(x) = 1 - !P(x) = 1 - (.8)^13 = 0.945

6+2 = 8 Metal Coat
3+2 = 5 Sun Stone
4 Up-Grade
1 King's Rock
0 Dragon Scale

Odds of no Dragon Scale in 18 tries (assuming equal probability for each item):

(.8)^18 = 1.8 %

Odds of neither Dragon Scale nor King's Rock in 17 tries (the only one I got was the first one!):

(.6)^17 = 0.017 %

Both statistics argue that the probability of getting each particular item is not, in fact, actually 1/5...

Another two weeks, another few disappointments:

11 Steel,
6 Sun Stone,
5 Up-Grade,
1 Rock,
0 Scale

I've reported this as a bug, as these statistics are ridiculously improbable if the underlying probabilities are equal. Of course, presuming that they're not insane, Niantic must be using iOS's rand() functions, which means there's an issue with Apple's implementation. (And also means that there will be different behavior on, say, Android devices.)

Ignoring the very first item I got (King's Rock), as Niantic changed how special upgrade items worked right after that, I've gotten:

11 Metal Coat
9 Sun Stone
6 Up-Grade
0 King's Rock (see above)
0 Dragon Scale

My guess is that they're using some sort of 'clustering' overlay on their random number generators to try to 'color' the random values and give different trainers different streaks of upgrade items, egg types, and (possibly, but not probably) wild encounters.

Unfortunately, this meta-RNG layer appears to be failing badly, at least in my case. I've given up on ever getting a Slowking or Kingdra, as I seem to be fated to never getting their items.

...a few months later, and I've now had a streak of about five King's Rocks in a row. But no Dragon Scale. I don't think I'm ever going to get a Kingdra.

I've got 27 unused special upgrade items, and have used at least 8. There's no way that these numbers are random.

as far as i can think of it, real randomnes is difficult.
it would be easier to simulate randomnes.
for example by using the rtc to get a pretty precise timestamp and a function that, in the end, distributes it to five.
leaving results of 0,1,2,3,4.
there are flawes in this method but in effect not to different from real randomnes.

btw, of about 20 items i got so far there is only one dragonscale. my wife got 4.
and no, they don't cycle at the seventh day.

Real randomness is, indeed, very difficult, which is why computers use pseudo-random number generators. There are a number of very good algorithms for generating random numbers, which Niantic would be foolish to circumvent.

My guess is that they are trying to get fancy with the RNG by trying to color or customize each trainer's random sequences so that you, for instance, get a bunch of Chansey from eggs, while I get tons of f@#$ing Pineco, instead of each of us just getting the one each that a 'whiter' distribution would suggest.

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