“The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance”

– Robert R. Coveyou

I’m going to digress from Paladining issues for the moment to indulge in something that has been bothering me for some time. As you might know from reading my various raid recaps, my guild distributes loot using a tiered rolling system, the heart of which is the ever trusty /roll.

As such the yellow-tinted “x has rolled y” announcements are typically flying around non-stop during the raid, and invariably someone says “oh boy you just rolled a 100, there goes your only high roll of the night.”

NO! That’s not how the system works!

WoW uses what’s called a “pseudo-random number generator” to produce the results of a /roll, /random, or the various need/greed rolls that the game generates.

I’m no where near qualified nor intelligent enough to fully explain what a PRNG means, but what it boils down to is this: when you type /roll into the client, the server returns a value based on a complex algorithm that it stores in a generator library server-side. And the starting point of that algorithm is a “seed state,” a number that the whole formula tumbles down from to produce the inevitable result.

Rolls in WoW are absolutely not random, cf:

So while the numbers can not be truly random, we have done what we can to make them as random as possible.

Rolls in WoW are actually nothing more than the answer to a math problem that you initiated. So in fact, when you typed /roll into the client and hit enter, at that exact millisecond, you could not have gotten any other result.

Like another thing that people say that bothers me: “I am lucky to have been born in x.” That’s not how it works! You are the result of two different genetic sources combining in a unique way, and as such, you could not be the offspring of any other pairing of creatures on this planet other than your two parents. Rolling works in exactly the same way.

Luck has nothing to do with it. That 1 you just rolled on the Betrayer of Humanity means that you just picked a really crappy moment to type /roll.

And if you roll a number above 90 during the course of a night, that doesn’t preclude you from repeating that feat again later in the raid.

Sorry for the digression. I’m a very skeptical person, and silliness like assuming that you only get one high roll a night tends to get my goat. We now return you to your regularly scheduled RiDef.