Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-8335247-20131210225419/@comment-4572981-20131212095316

Evac156 wrote: 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.

I'm not entirely clear on Wishing Torches and how they're supposed to affect the odds; if I remember right, I read somewhere that each lit torch adds 1%, so with one torch lit you have a 2% chance of success; two torches, 3%; and with the full 10 torches, 11% chance of success, 89% chance of failure. So, if you had 10 torches lit for 30 tries (out of 127), and no torches for 97 of those attempts, the chance of failure would be:

(0.99 ^ 97) * (0.89 ^ 30) = 0.3772 * 0.0303 = 0.0114 (approximately)

Now you're talking about nearly a 99% chance of success. And if that's the case, yes, you have been really unlucky to be in the 1.14% probability of failure. Thanks for taking your time to explain the math behind the breeding approximations. I've never been good with odds or probabilities, that highschool class still gives me nightmares :( All I can do is keep trying. In the worst case scenario... I just save up the 1,000 diamonds and buy one. It may be that long before I succesfully breed one anyways.