3 ms·

It seems more likely to me that they just run the PRNG before the spinning block animation begins, no? Or maybe time isn't a factor in their seed, just game sta

It seems more likely to me that they just run the PRNG before the spinning block animation begins, no? Or maybe time isn't a factor in their seed, just game state?

ChuckMcM 13y ago
This was my guess, that the 'roll' occured earlier in the sequence and by the time the dice showed up it was set in stone. There was a very interesting hack in World of Warcraft where the server would not show you the stats on an item unless there was one currently "on" the server, and after a server reboot (every tuesday!) if you were one of the first guilds on, you could step into an dungeon instance and check stats on the rare loot you wanted (warglaives were the big deal as I recall) and if you didn't see it, the boss hadn't spawned with them. So you step out, reset your view of instances and step back in, check, rinse and repeat until they show up. Then you go through and collect your prize at the end. Blizzard patched the loophole once it was discovered but for me the interesting thing was that the loot spawned right at instance creation time, not the time the boss 'died'.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  I imagine that was for the benefit of GMs (in-game customer support). Occasionally they'd be responsible for spawning loot for guilds who had just spent some hours fighting to and killing a boss, only to have the server crash afterwards and wipe out their rewards. By making the loot table a property of the instance, and attaching the last instance a player was part of to their character, the GM can just do a lookup to see what items were missing after the server reboot and hand them out. The only thing they have to take the players' word for is that the kill happened, rather than whether or not some ultra-rare reward was part of the missing loot.
kaoD 13y ago
Wheter you run it before or after doesn't matter. If the internal PRNG state didn't change (through another roll) the same seed is being used and has the same number of random() calls, so random() returns the same sequence!

It seems more likely to me that they just run the PRNG before the spinning block animation begins, no? Or maybe time isn't a factor in their seed, just game state?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

This was my guess, that the 'roll' occured earlier in the sequence and by the time the dice showed up it was set in stone. There was a very interesting hack in World of Warcraft where the server would not show you the stats on an item unless there was one currently "on" the server, and after a server reboot (every tuesday!) if you were one of the first guilds on, you could step into an dungeon instance and check stats on the rare loot you wanted (warglaives were the big deal as I recall) and if you didn't see it, the boss hadn't spawned with them. So you step out, reset your view of instances and step back in, check, rinse and repeat until they show up. Then you go through and collect your prize at the end. Blizzard patched the loophole once it was discovered but for me the interesting thing was that the loot spawned right at instance creation time, not the time the boss 'died'.

dangrossman 13y ago
I imagine that was for the benefit of GMs (in-game customer support). Occasionally they'd be responsible for spawning loot for guilds who had just spent some hours fighting to and killing a boss, only to have the server crash afterwards and wipe out their rewards. By making the loot table a property of the instance, and attaching the last instance a player was part of to their character, the GM can just do a lookup to see what items were missing after the server reboot and hand them out. The only thing they have to take the players' word for is that the kill happened, rather than whether or not some ultra-rare reward was part of the missing loot.

kaoD 13y ago

Wheter you run it before or after doesn't matter. If the internal PRNG state didn't change (through another roll) the same seed is being used and has the same number of random() calls, so random() returns the same sequence!