SpakyPD (in a private message) said:
Hi, I have read through your HQS thread, but did not seem to see any information about something I have found:
I started two different servers, C and D, and have been doing the exact same thing on each of them. What I am finding that is odd is the 'random' rewards from the recurring quests are identical.
The first 8FP spend quest gave 100 supply for each as reward, 2nd time both got 5 lumber specifically, 3rd time both got diamonds.
It appears to be quest specific, opposed to random quest reward queues. Do you have any thoughts on this?
I am going to keep recording more information about it (trying to get a complete list of side quests and their activation times). If you are interested in any of the information please let me know.
Understanding How Quests Pay “Random Rewards”
It helps to understand that, in the game of FoE, “Random Rewards” are not
dynamically random—that is to say they are not random in the sense that each player “rolls a random dice roll” every time he or she completes a quest and the results of that random dice roll will determine what prize that player scores. It is much more accurate to say that, in the game of FoE, all “Random Rewards” are in-fact random across the entire population of FoE players but that each individual player is actually following a randomly chosen script of predetermined results. It works a little something like this; when a player account is first created, the game rolls one
huge dice roll, which randomly chooses a script of predetermined smaller dice rolls that, over a very long time of playing the game, would seem random to any casual observer (but not to a Cosmic Raven who never observes anything casually). Each player in FoE is actually following a scripted cycle of predetermined “random results” for any quests that pay “Random Rewards” and those predetermined results do follow a pattern of probability so that each player scores each type of prize a prescribed percentage of times.
Now what exactly do I mean by this? Each player actually gets their own script of
“random results” to win for each specific quest. FoE does not use a dynamic random number generator (RNG) that calculates a new random number each time we complete a quest In fact we now know that FoE uses the same RNG seeding for every new world we start. This means that if we completed exactly the same number of quests, in exactly the same sequence, in every off-world that we start, that we will
always score the same “random reward” from the same instance of the same quest on each and every off-world. When we score the 5 goods prize, it might be a
different 5 goods on each off-world, but any instance of any quest that scores us 5 goods on one off-world will also score us 5 goods on every one of our off-worlds. This means that we can note of what type of “random rewards” each of us personally scores from each side quest or event quest that pays a "Random Reward", because that will be the same reward we will
always score from that quest — it doesn’t matter how many off-worlds we try, we will always score the same reward on the same instance of the same quest.
Now the "randomness" of reward is tied to several factors:
- Player Account
- Time Period
- Specific Quest
- Specific Instance of Specific Quest
So for a quest to pay the same "random reward" it would have to be: same player account + Same Age + Same instance of the same specific quest.
For example, if you had 4 off-worlds in the Bronze Age and a specific event quest paid you diamonds on one of those worlds, then that same specific event quest would pay you diamonds on all 4 Bronze Age worlds. However, if you also had 4 off-worlds in HMA, the same specific event quest might not pay you diamonds in HMA, but a different event quest might. But again, all 4 of your HMA off-worlds would score diamonds on the same event quest.
So if you ever felt like RNG in the game of FoE isn't really random, well that's because computers in general do not do things randomly very well —they do things programmatically to try to simulate randomness. My educated guess here is that the FoE game designers wanted randomness to even itself out over long periods of game play or across many players, but seem like random results as we play through the game content.
) but the important part is that the fact that these medal prizes appear half "grouped", close to each other, this shows us that there is no real randomness, that something is manipulated in this story, just as you explained. In short, I had already realized that the award is not really random.