Talk:Glittering Cave

Percentages on Fossils

The article tells us no more about the drop rate of fossils than that it occurs "Randomly." Do we have any more confirmed information on the ratios in which fossils drop? I've been playing on Y and smashing fossils for a few hours, and my fossil ratios suggest it was anything but a flat random equal percentage for each of them. I have 25 Dome Fossils, 7 Old Ambers, 10 each of the ARmor, Cover, and Helix Fossils, 5 Skull Fossils, and only 1 Plume Fossil. I nearly gave up on that Plume Fossil after reading Bulbapedia's page, until it suddenly occured to me that a 25:7.5:10:10:5:1 ratio might be in place. This also led me to wonder if Pokemon X has the same relative distribution with its own fossils, or if some of the rarities are flip flopped, and to wonder which, the root or claw fossil, was rarer in X. It also seems rather relevant given, for example, the sheer magnitude of differences in rarity between a Kabuto and a Archen. Imperatrix (talk) 15:34, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

From a bunch of data I have, Plume should be about the same as Armor and Old Amber (and just under Cover and Skull); you just had some "bad" luck. I have thought about checking X too myself, but besides that, the main reason I haven't added anything is because I haven't checked the before Hall of Fame distributions. Tiddlywinks (talk) 15:45, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

That's so odd, that I could wind up with distributions *that* skewed with 50+ fossiles. I would have assumed that was a big enough sample set to get the jist of the hierarchy, and my dome and helix fossils weren't even *remotely* par! Thank you for the clarification; In any event, I won't be going back to suffer in that dwebble infested cave any time soon XD Imperatrix (talk) 16:43, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

The Dome/Helix is actually more striking, yeah. In fact, AFAIK your Dome Fossil luck was way high (at ~35%); it should've been more like just 13 found. And Helix should even have been about even, if not higher (at such a relatively small sample, the difference is negligible).

Anywho, luck is always a huge factor. 100 samples can still easily skew (if you just have 4-5 less than "ideal" for something—which can easily be 1-2 more than ideal of this, 1-2 more of that—that looks pretty different); only by going even higher can you halfway hope to smooth out the effects of luck in your averages. Tiddlywinks (talk) 17:03, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

This just means you've had terrible luck. Do remember that even if something has a 50% chance, it's possible to not get the result you want in a hundred tries. Highly unlikely, but still a possibility. And as anybody who's played any sort of Pokémon game can tell you, and you probably know yourself, when most of the game's mechanics rely on RNG you're bound to run into stuff like this of varying degree. It seems unusual, but again, when everything relies on RNG it's actually only a handful of times you'll get gypped like this, and you're most likely to notice getting screwed over when actively trying to accomplish something. R.A. Hunter Blade 21:38, 21 June 2016 (UTC)