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Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Wed Nov 10, 2021 8:40 pm
by Nick
Does anyone know how para critters work? I know it is supposed to be a 5% spawn rate but, does that mean every time a critter spawns there's a 5% RNG chance it does so as a para? Is there a set max of Paras in the world (or sub-region IDK how UO works but I think the sheets are split up into regions).

I always thought it was just a plain 5% chance that if something spawned then it had a 5% chance of being a para. however, I've noticed that there are a LOT fewer paras in the world than there should be mathematically. For example, blood dungeon has roughly 600 critters in it and often only 2-3 of them are para. Last night I went on a dungeon crawl and killed everything in blood, exodus, rock sorcerors, dungeon and spectre dungeon all and all i killed well over 10k critters and there were fewer then 15 paras killed.

So, is there a rarely visited dungeon where all the para numbers are locked up and spawned and we just have to go kill them to get a normal distribution everywhere else? Has the 5% spawn rate just been lowered by a lot? does the increased spawn in Ilshenar just not have a chance to spawn as para for some reason? If anyone has some insight for me I would appreciate a discussion and a few ideas.

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2021 10:15 am
by MagicUser
Just spitballing, so people with actual answers would be great.

I have heard that UO spawning works from spawners. Not from random location spawning. Meaning that its possible that a single spawn has a 1 in 20 paragon spawn chance rather than for there to be a 1 in 20 overall spawn rate. If a single spawner has a rate of 1 in 20 the overall spawn rate would be much lower. I am sure there are other factors that might influence this as well, like what happens if the spawn around a spawner is full? Since the overall spawns don't compensate every time a para dies, the overall paragon percentage might vary.

Perhaps I am wrong on all accounts, but it was fun to think about regardless.

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2021 10:55 am
by Nick
I believe that spawners are placed (a lot like your personal animal spawner in your house) and only spawn one type and you can say how many it should spawn. so in blood, there are 3 bally spawners all set to one in that room but then there are 4/5 blood element spawners in each E and W halls all set to 3+.

The reason I think something is broken is that the numbers of para critters is much lower than 1% from what I can tell when its supposed to be at 5%. when I clear 5 dungeons repeatedly causing 10k+ critters to respawn and less than 15 of them are para it just makes me wonder how it works...

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2021 12:12 pm
by Orionesss
Another interesting fact is that no matter how many paragons I killed in Twisted Weald, I never received a para artifact or chest there.

An exception is 1 single day when I got 3 paragon artifacts + few chests in just a single day of farming.

Possibly a ruleset for Twisted Weald that paragon spawns do not drop artifacts or chests?

thanks for your answers!

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Fri Nov 12, 2021 1:08 am
by Wil
As I understand it, the paragon runs the same RNG for dropping a treasure map as an ordinary mob of the same type. If treasure map comes up yes then you get a paragon chest instead.

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Fri Nov 12, 2021 1:55 am
by arrow
Ouch Odds and probabilities makes my head hurt - if you look at it this way maybe it'll shed some light - for every 20 times out of 21 times you kill a mob it will not turn into a paragon upon respawn. (sorry for running thru Ilshenar killing only paragons :()

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Fri Nov 12, 2021 4:23 am
by Johnny Warren
Odds and probabilities are something the human mind struggles to deal with properly, unless you are a trained mathematician. Even then most mathematicians need to think clearly and do some sums to avoid the biases and innate errors our logic throws at us in these situations.

Just because it says 5% of the time a para will spawn doesn't mean that 5/100 spawns will always be paragons. Each spawn is it's own event, with a 5/100 (1/20) chance.

Imagine you are holding a D20 (a 20 sided dice for you scrubs that don't play dungeons and dragons) and I say roll a 7. It's very unlikely you hit that. You pick the dice up, I say roll a 2, again, unlikely. Each time there is a very low chance of the event occurring. You could kill 10 000 mobs and theoretically not spawn a single para. You could also kill 5 mobs and theoretically spawn 5 para's.

Google "regression to the mean" and possible also "The gambler's falacy" to get a better understanding of how human's struggle to understand how odds and probability works. This is why buying a million tickets in a lottery that has a 1 in a million chance of any individual ticket winning doesn't mean you have a nearly guaranteed chance to win.

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Fri Nov 12, 2021 10:09 am
by Nick
cool story John,

whilst mathematically possible it is very unlikely anything in your proposal is applicable to the situation. If 5% is the spawn rate then between 4-6% of critters spawned in a survey would reasonably be para with 100% or 0% possible but extremely unlikely (read statistically imposable). That's why probabilities and statistics are useful when defining an issue because whilst some things are technically posable; but with an adequate sample size, they can be completely ruled out.

Would be nice to know why the spawn rate is so low. My theory is that the increased spawn in the dungeons (because we all begged for more critters to spawn as we kill them so fast) don't have a chance to spawn para because they for some reason don't have that chance (ilish original spawners with para chance, are different? or, they were purposefully disabled to keep from flooding market with chest?) and only the original critters by game design can spawn para.

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2021 1:49 am
by Johnny Warren
Nick wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 10:09 am
cool story John,
Anytime :dance
Nick wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 10:09 am
they were purposefully disabled to keep from flooding market with chest?) and only the original critters by game design can spawn para.
But lots of the new spawn, like all those colourful spectres in the spectre dungeon, spawn as paras sometimes. They are fairly newly implemented spawn.

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2021 1:50 pm
by Nick
agreed, which is why im so confused about it. Maybe different ppl added the spawns and enabled/disabled the increased spawn spots in blood? Side note the highest chest I ever got (electric with a diabolical inside) came from spectral dungeon).

Re: Does anyone know (+C?) how para critters work?

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2021 4:51 pm
by arrow
Whatever the current rate of paragon spawn in Ilshenar I can tell you that's what it has been for at least the last 10 years, along with that I remember doing a gold drop comparison between live UO and here about 9 years ago and found most gold that drops is about 50% of what would drop on live. So perhaps the spawn rate for paragons is also about 2% instead of 5%. :verymad: