Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24577221-20140418165437/@comment-24145588-20140418174704

Bunsen -- I'm also playing on Windows, so we should be in the same ballpark WRT breeding likelihood.

As for the Blabbit, I don't think they (or any other Special Occasion monsters) are really particularly rare. I've bred the Yool, Schmoochle, and Blabbit in just a few tries each, without using any Wishing Torches. But that's obviously a very limited sample set, since I've only bred three of them, and didn't continue trying after the first success.

I'm not breeding any Ethereals at the moment, but my own experience with the randomness of breeding has been that it's distinctly "lumpy," for lack of a better term.

In what I would consider a well-implemented random process, there shouldn't be discernible patterns. You would see some hot streaks and cold streaks, but in general, over the long run you'd have a reasonably pattern-free distribution of success and failures.

What I've seen (and of course, there's probably some perceptual bias here) is that when breeding semi-rare (four-element, Shugafam, and Special Occasion) and very rare (Ethereal) monsters, successes always seem to come in batches.

Take the four-elements as an example. On the five Natural islands, I'm just breeding the four-elements for cash. Instead of seeing them somewhat uniformly insterspersed with the failures (one-element and three-element monsters), instead I will see all successes for a couple days, and then a longer stretch of all failures.

Yes, this could happen as part of an actual random distribution (I've done statistical studies on the Random class in Java, and yes, streaks do happen), it doesn't seem likely that there would be consistent "streakiness" if randomness was correctly implemented in breeding.

Take all this with a grain of salt, of course. What's actually happening, and what I think I've been seeing, may not be entirely the same thing. Maybe it really is a nice random distribution, and selective memory has just imposed a pattern on it that isn't really there.