LogFAQs > #955521897

adjl posted...

This is pretty much how I apply it, too. It's never a sure thing, by the nature of random chance, but this is all you really need to do to be able to say "it'll probably take me about this long." If you want to be really thorough about that, you can figure out the standard deviation on that and get an even better idea of how long it'll probably take (it follows a normal distribution, so you've got a 68% chance of being within one SD of the 50% mark and a 95% chance of being within two), but all you really need is to evaluate whether or not farming a given drop is going to be worthwhile, and you don't need really detailed probabilities for that.

Right. Of course my focus on 50/50 tricks my brain into expecting to get a drop around 178 tries for my 1/256 odds and makes me mad when I hit 400 without seeing anything, even though 400 tries is far from rare for 1/256. To calm myself down (and out of boredom) I multiply it out:

75% odds after 178 x 2 = 356 tries.
87.5% odds after 178 x 3 = 534 tries, etc etc.
...which is more or less the same as standard deviations without using the formal terms.

Sometimes that makes me feel better. Other times... :)

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