Randy is bit broken?

[Thraxon]

What you don't seem to understand is what you describe for random isn't random behavoir at all.

Randy isn't sending random event like the description say. It doesn't wait for years and then getting crasy and doing stupid things.
This is worst when your colony is wealthy.

It isn't a challenge at all anymore. So yes its broken, as it doesn't work as before and as it should be work according to the description .

[dburgdorf]

What you don't seem to understand is what you describe for random isn't random behavoir at all.

I'm not trying to be rude, but you're the one who doesn't seem to understand what "random" means. What you're asking for -- a guaranteed steady stream of events -- is predictability, which is the very antithesis of randomness.

The fact that Randy generates "random events" doesn't just mean that you don't know *what* event will happen next. It means that you can't be sure that *any* event will happen. Long stretches during which nothing happens at all, and long stretches during which you never have time to recover from one event before the next one starts, are *both* things which can and should occur if event generation is truly random.

Randy may or may not actually be broken in any significant sense, but the fact that he sometimes ignores you for a long stretch is *NOT* evidence that such is the case.

[erdrik]

What you don't seem to understand is what you describe for random isn't random behavoir at all.

I'm not trying to be rude, but you're the one who doesn't seem to understand what "random" means. What you're asking for -- a guaranteed steady stream of events -- is predictability, which is the very antithesis of randomness.
...

^ This.

[Thraxon]

What you don't seem to understand is what you describe for random isn't random behavoir at all.

I'm not trying to be rude, but you're the one who doesn't seem to understand what "random" means. What you're asking for -- a guaranteed steady stream of events -- is predictability, which is the very antithesis of randomness.

The fact that Randy generates "random events" doesn't just mean that you don't know *what* event will happen next. It means that you can't be sure that *any* event will happen. Long stretches during which nothing happens at all, and long stretches during which you never have time to recover from one event before the next one starts, are *both* things which can and should occur if event generation is truly random.

Randy may or may not actually be broken in any significant sense, but the fact that he sometimes ignores you for a long stretch is *NOT* evidence that such is the case.

I may be rude dburhdorf but you said yourself you never play high difficulty, so you probably have no idea what i am trying to point out. I never ask randy to be predicable like what you are trying to make me say.

Thoses are both thing that can occur when random, but when it is ONLY this for all game, hundred of hours, it can't be random. I don't talk sometimes, i talk about general behavior. There is someting in the code thats is done wrong.

[Bozobub]

You can literally find, by complete chance, ANY pattern in a random output, given enough time.  Possibly more than the entire lifespan of the universe for very organized patterns, but as time approaches infinity, the odds become 1 ("unity"; in other words, absolutely certain).  In fact, this has strong implications re: our own universe's origin, as well as the potential "multiverse", which I can elaborate on if anyone cares .

Thing is, truly random numbers are actually very difficult to come by, in the computing world.  What you end up with are "pseudorandom" numbers, instead, which display chaotic behavior but are actually not random at all ("random" and "chaotic" are actually mutually exclusive terms).  EVERY "random" number generated by a PC is actually "pseudorandom", and is chaotic rather than random.  Emergent patterns can certainly occur in random systems, but pseudorandom/chaotic systems ALWAYS have a pattern, even if they *look* completely random.

https://www.quora.com/Chaos-Theory-What-is-the-difference-between-chaotic-behavior-and-random-behavior
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~mpilant/math614/chaos_vs_random.pdf

The only way to get an actual random output from any computer is to give it something truly random (such as a source of radioactive decay and a particle detector) as a "seed".

[dburgdorf]

I never ask randy to be predicable like what you are trying to make me say.

I don't believe I'm "putting words in your mouth."  You have several times in this thread made comments such as the following:

"Randy doesn't work as intended and need fixes. It doesn't send random events, it tend to not send nothing for years, then all event all of a suddent it fire all."

Perhaps it's not what you consciously intended, but what you've actually *said* several times over is, in fact, that you want Randy to generate a more steady stream of events rather than long periods of inactivity followed by periods with lots of events. (The primary focus of your complaints, in fact, is those long periods of inactivity.) 

It's not really much of a stretch to say that it seems your entire complaint with the random storyteller is that he is, in fact, a *random* storyteller....

He may not be working as you want him to work, but Randy does in fact seem -- not just in my estimation, but in the estimation of many other players, as well -- to be working "as intended."

[TheMeInTeam]

I doubt Randy is or intended to be "truly random", in the sense that there are no constraints.  For example I think the game still blocks heat wave + cold snap together, or multiple copies of same raid type at same time as opposed to just multiple raids (maybe I just didn't encounter that?  I've never seen double-siege for example).  His raids have more variance but are still constrained (+/- 50% right?).

More likely it's more like he is weighted differently or his weights for next event are not contingent on what the game's done already.

Tendencies are pretty difficult to pick out anecdotally unless they're glaring.  I do remember an exceptional case in EU 4 where claim fabrication %chance of being discovered was wrong.  A lot of people suspected but devs didn't believe until players put together a controlled trial of same nation spamming same claim 10x to get 100+ trials where the rate was something like 10x higher than expected...enough for pretty solid statistical confidence that something was amiss (displayed odds really were wrong in the end :p).

In most times/games it's the mind playing tricks on itself.  You could of course sample what Randy does compared to some expected outcome, but that would depend on what his constraints are actually intended to be.  It's somewhere between "no events ever" and "20 mechanoid drop pod raids with 5 mechanoids each in the first 2 seasons", but where exactly I don't know.  Also if people record 50 runs and his 10th event were to be "cows join" in all 50 runs we'd raise an eyebrow at something like that too.

I'm guessing if you try that, it won't happen.  Still, Randy's design kind of does allow for some too-long gaps though, even if that is appropriately random.

[Limdood]

quite simply, if you want difficulty....pure and simple difficulty, then:
1) use randy extreme for early game, and switch to Cassandra at about 6-8 seasons.  This will provide the toughest RAID setup.
2) Adjust the scenario in one or more of the following ways:
   a) add difficult events, such as forced bad traits, climate cycle, planet killer, global stat changes that cause the game to be harder
   b) remove beneficial events...no more self tames, cargo pods, traveler groups, visitors, even single-animal-insanity (this causes the game to pick other events when random stuff would fire)
   c) add in scheduled raids (or other events) every 5/10/20/30 days...whatever you need for added difficulty...you'll still get unscheduled raids, so you'll still have some unpredictability
3) pick harder biomes or worse starting colonists - polar extreme sea ice, even day to day living can be hard (albeit still sometimes dull)
4) enforce playstyle rules on yourself, such as
   a) no killboxes
   b) no turrets
   c) melee only
   d) anything else that will make the game harder.

If you dislike boredom, then you're pretty much stuck with 2c.  ALL storytellers have downtime, its how they're coded.  If you don't like it, then MANUALLY changing the scenario or modding the game to remove raid cooldowns and weighting them more heavily is your only real option.

That said, I have noticed that it certainly seems (can't prove it, but it sure feels this way) that using the scenario editor to remove events such as eclipse, solar flare, short circuit, and other "annoying" but definitely still "bad" events SEEMS to DRASTICALLY increase raid frequency.  I'm either imagining it (which is possible, but it seems WAY more frequent), or removing those events makes the game pick other "bad" events when one would fire...so if a raid is event number 3, then reducing the pool of events from 12 to 6 would drastically increase the odds of the raid coming up.

[TheMeInTeam]

Cas/extreme is still usually fine for my tastes, but sometimes I do go for less kind biomes.

It wouldn't surprise me if events were put in pools and removing one would force the storytellers to pick from a smaller sample.  You COULD prove it in principle with tons of trials, but it's not worth doing IMO.

[IndustryStandard]

So um, speaking of Randy being broken, I have picked up 2 bugs whenever I use him. That a lot of people seem to also suffer from on Reddit.

1. You don't get notified to change faction/town name.

2. Combat music will randomly play until you kill the enemies still hidden in the ancient danger.

Probably other weird things.

On the topic of randy, I always found him interesting, but wanting the steadiness of cassandra. But that also felt boring. If we could merge the two I'd be a happy camper. Like the events are always random but the degree is controlled like cass.

[Cimanyd]

So um, speaking of Randy being broken, I have picked up 2 bugs whenever I use him. That a lot of people seem to also suffer from on Reddit.

1. You don't get notified to change faction/town name.

2. Combat music will randomly play until you kill the enemies still hidden in the ancient danger.

These are the same bug, which is already known (see this thread and this thread) and has nothing to do with Randy. When you have an ancient danger, the game perpetually thinks you are under attack.

[Perq]

... isn't that exactly what Randy is supposed to do? One time you get tails 5 times in a row, the other 5 heads. Others you get combination of everything. This is what RANDOM is.
You don't call bullshit on randomness because that happened. That simply happens. It may be annoying at times, but haven't you picked Randy RANDOM on purpose, eh?

[doctercorgi]

We shouldn't need a computer sicence major, a math major, and a philosophy major to figure out a difficulty setting in a gam. Has anyone opened up randys body txt file and remove his organs evidence of non random shenanigans?

[Thraxon]

Cmon i know what random mean and how it works, i made physics advanced studies so maths are not stranger to me .
As the Murfy law says, worst events can appear and they will appear.

But, in a random thing, worst events combination should not happend as often as it is.
And, In a world where worst combination represent 10% in totalcombination.
And when in your 500 hours journey of randy extrem is filled with 30% of theses worst event combination.
Then, you can have serious doubt about the apparent randomness of the thing.   

(numbers are here to illustrate, don't consider them )

Anyway i switched to cassandra, i am angry with randy