Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-8335247-20131210225419/@comment-24145588-20131211202910

Saborologan wrote: According to my log, I've attempted to breed a Ghazt 127 times to date. If the odds of obtaining one are supposed to become 50% after 70 attempts, it must have reset. Maybe breed number 140 will do it.... That or my plant island is broken and cursed. To further expand, my torches are always fully lit when trying to breed anything. 30+ of the 127 were done with full torches. I think there's a misunderstanding here of the statement about "50% after 70 attempts." The odds don't actually change at that point, that's just looking at the cumulative probability.

If there's a 1% chance of success on any given attempt, then there's a 99% chance of failure. Your chance of 70 consecutive failures is (0.99 ^ 70) = 0.4948, so you have a 49.48% chance of failing 70 times. It's roughly 50/50 as to whether you will or won't have a successful attempt by then.

The chance of having 127 consecutive failures is (0.99 ^ 127) = 0.2790, so you have a 27.9% chance of failing that many times, and an 82.1% chance of having at least one success in that time.

But on any given attempt, your chance of success is still 1%, and there's never any sure thing. You could try 1000 times and have all failures, although there's only about a 0.0043% chance of that happening.

As always, this is assuming that the egg generation is done with a correctly implemented random number generator, and there isn't any weighting going on behind the scenes that we haven't been told about.