How are opportunity draws determined?

There are a number of cards I see coming up repeatedly while I wait for a single instance of others. This isn’t a complaint - but I’m wondering whether the draw is fully random among the available cards, and if not, how much not, and what I can do about it. What I’m aware of:[li]

Location specific cards
Cards with requirements for a stat above (or more quietly below) a certain level
Item or quality-specific cards
Cards in your hand never seem to duplicate

But those alone don’t explain for eg why I seem to draw large numbers of ‘ways of the [place]’ cards, and incessant faction related cards, but haven’t seen the keen-eyed lapidary for dust since I repeatedly paid off her glim demands, why the charismatic anarchist I’ve been pursuing hasn’t returned my telegrams, and so on. Is it a statistical artifact of actual randomness, or something… sinister?

Short answer is that some cards are common and some cards are rare. All your observations are quite correct - you’ll never draw two of even the most common cards, though you might discard one and then immediately draw it again (which is why many people will keep such a card in their hand if they’re trying to draw a particularly rare one.) There are a lot of strategies for reducing the number of unwanted cards in your deck, but if you’re waiting for a rare one, keep at it and it will turn up eventually!

If you’re curious about the physical programming which determines the cards you draw, the process is as so:

  1. Each card is assigned a ‘weight’ value based on how rare it is (or becomes a 0 if you’re not eligible to draw it at the moment) Higher value=more common.
  2. Each card is assigned 3(or maybe 4)-digit numbers: as many as the weight value is. Eg. weight of 3 gets 3 random #s like 389, 254, and 099.
  3. A random # generator selects a 3(or respectively 4)-digit #.
  4. The card that was assigned that # is the one you draw. If none were assigned it, the computer generates another random # until it creates one assigned to a card.

Was that what you were looking for?

Is that with replacement (the pool of number-to-card assignments stays the same), or without (i.e. any number you roll can only yield a card once, until all numbers have been used up)?

[quote=Erik Vimes]If you’re curious about the physical programming which determines the cards you draw, the process is as so:

  1. Each card is assigned a ‘weight’ value based on how rare it is (or becomes a 0 if you’re not eligible to draw it at the moment) Higher value=more common.
  2. Each card is assigned 3(or maybe 4)-digit numbers: as many as the weight value is. Eg. weight of 3 gets 3 random #s like 389, 254, and 099.
  3. A random # generator selects a 3(or respectively 4)-digit #.
  4. The card that was assigned that # is the one you draw. If none were assigned it, the computer generates another random # until it creates one assigned to a card.

Was that what you were looking for?[/quote]

[li]
Yes, thanks. Is there a way to find out the weight of specific cards?

I’m not particularly hunting for anything specific (except the repentant forger whenever I go to jail, since despite my best efforts it’s quite hard to stay in there), more the opposite - I get a bit bored certain frequent cards (eg the Struggling artist one, which doesn’t seem to have any ‘locked with’ criteria, seems ultra-common and lacks any significant value from any resolution. I would like to be able to reduce its likelihood (among others’).

This process is done for each card draw individually; if you’re drawing 4 at once, the process happens 4 times, but in the 2nd trial the card your drew first has a weight of 0 because you already have it.[li]

Three ways, all of which are impractical:

  1. Beg the team to tell us (Rude and unlikely they’ll respond)
  2. Hack into their system and look at the raw numbers (Never trifle with a tiger)
    Or:
  3. Empirically determine them. Basically, every time you (or a larger community) draws a card, they would record what they drew. This would not only take hundreds of us drawing over a month or so to get accurate results, but we would all have to record what are current status values are to see which cards are available to each at the time of the draws. Once the raw data is accumulated, we’d have to see how many times cards were drawn (when they were available to the player to be drawn) out of the total # of cards that could have potentially been drawn and analyse the results by seeing typically what % chance each card is drawn and then multiplying them all by a number that would make all the %s into whole # weights.

This is what statisticians do. Not a walk in the park.

So basically, to truly determine them is much more effort than it’s worth. If you’re trying to see a card less though, either get rid of the quality which allows it to be drawn or raise connections and whatnot to make more cards available to be drawn.