Don't pick up loot if you want pearls?

Borderlands General Discussion
#1

After a whole day of farming on the weekend I managed to get my first pearl from Craw. First I got a Bessie, then a Rose shield soon after. But I did pick up a few guns after and well, no pearls after for a long time, again. So does picking up loot degrade the quality of the loot? Seems that way. Share your thoughts

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#2

The RNG has no memory. Every throw of the dice is a fresh throw.

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#3

Yeah but sometimes it seems like the game has periods of generally better loot. Although you’re probably right

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#4

“Seems” being the operative word here. It may not look like it, but in the end it’s just luck of the draw, roll of the dice and toss of the coin

But to be honest, I start seeing patterns sometimes, like Brick being “luckier” with the loot than Lilith


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#5

The Random Number Generator is random.
To quote another wise person: “I think you’re simply experiencing bias by remembering standout moments and forgetting the mundane ones.”


As you may recall, I did a lot of testing and proving, for FRI at least, that the loot is random.

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#6

For a deep dive on the subject:

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#7

Humans aren’t generally very good at processing randomness. Apparently the ‘shuffle’ feature on iPods had to be tweaked because folks complained that it wasn’t random enough when two songs by the same artist played consecutively- even though that’s what would be expected to happen sometimes by random selection
which is confusing even distribution with random distribution.

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#8

I work with slot machines; can confirm that this is a thing.

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#9

I think a good reference point for visualizing nature of random is picturing a big ring.
A machine comes and randomly paints 2 dots on the ring. What you will find is that the 2 painted dots will always have 2 paths to each other - a short one and long another. The closer you ge the 2 dots to each other, the longer becomes the long path.

Of course, random in practice is not limited to just 2 dots, so you can get multiple succesful rolls in short succession, but the useful thing to be aware of is that a quick streak of luck commonly is a precursor of a following much longer timespan devoid of any luck.

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#10

Yeah I think I have beeen confirmation biased because alot of the times I keep finding loot that is trying to mimic the one I’ve found or equipped and that gave me a theory that found loot narrows and shapes pools

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#11

No ! Every single drop is RNG or Random Number Generator . It generates a number and gives you loot. Based on that its simlar to how you get gear in fortnite.

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#12

All I am saying I haven’t found a volcano in a while since I started playing Borderlands again. I use to find them all the time when killed Craw.

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#13

The rarest gun in the game is the gun you are looking for

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#14

I think I’ll have that framed to hang it over my screen


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#15

Crawmerax tends to drop some legendary’s and a few pearls. Just saying

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#16

I wish the game made loot pools reflect what type of guns and gun parts you tend to keep so still rng but higher chance towards your loot tastes. Sometimes the rng can be too much rng and it takes forever to find something to your liking. Like for example I haven’t found one decent Bitch yet despite mostly using smg’s

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#17

Interesting concept. Not sure how you’d implement that without the risk of it back-firing (you randomly find a few SMGs first; the game now assumes you prefer SMGs). If there was a way around that, though, it would be neat.

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#18

Well maybe using or carrying a certain weapon type or most frequent of 3 could increase the chance of said type found by say 5% and then using guns with certain part configurations could also increase their rate by lets say 5-15%. Then every gun that you find and keep also increases the chance until you pick up 3 more that are different type. So the game has a memory and gives you a slightly better edge.

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#19

That actually is a pretty good mechanic . I would like to see that in the game for maybe a day . That is pretty cool man. Only Problem being that would affect the RNG in borderlands /2/3/TPS

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#20

I do like that idea, or something similar.

I play a revolver-packing Mord, thinking about using repeaters more often. For giggles I opened the Golden Chest 75 times. I got 3 Baha Blasters, 1 Hellfire and no other Oranges. I got more shotguns and combat rifles than I can count. I got 3 revolvers, and 6 repeaters.

How is that fair for a Mordecai?

One of these days I’m going to pop that chest a couple hundred times and record everything - count the number of Blues and Purples, maybe even break the parts down and count the likelihood of getting a Scope5, etc.

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