Good luck figuring out a system that is being used by thousands of people at once, even semi-discreetly
Semi-discreetly since every draw above 50 PEDs is public for all your data mining needs. Well, semi-public since you don't have the PEC values
Let's look at it this way. No company would want to be indebted.
An easy solution is to have a completely player-fed pool, and having every draw be based on what is left in the pool, in such a way that the pool can't hold a negative number (a debt so to speak)
Even if you
were to have some sort of algorithm predicting what the next draws are going to be, you would need a starting point (know the ammount held by the lootpool at a given time).
Not to mention inner info of how everything works
(What are the limits of a "lootpool" and how does one contribute to it?)
If you can't have direct access to the lootpool value, for the prediction method to stay accurate after some time, you would need a direct feed of what goes in and out, to update the lootpool value accordingly for the next draw
That is, a real-time log that reads:
Code:
avatar A shot gun G for a sum of 1 PED
avatar B shot gun G2 for a sum of 0,2 PED
/!\ avatar A called in to the loot generator
=> *algorithm proceeds with calculation*
substracting 3 PED from the lootpool
And that is assuming loot is generated upon hitting the button "Loot" over a corpse.
If loot is, as some believe, generated upon spawn of a mob, what was messy gets even more nuts
If you were to find a way to abuse this, well.. uuuh
When you have the hypothetical lootpool value,
if the algorithm is "forgiving" about rounding (eg. doesn't make too much of a difference if it's 200 000 PEDs or 210 000 PEDs) you could try and predict the future
You could conduct a study at Ithaca and end up with very rough values of how much money is spent per minute, how many corpses are looted per minute and so on..
Then proceed to compile your own little log, hoping it could show you about when the next big hit is due..
But you could've already done that long ago, just by taking a peek at Entropia Tracker's graphs
"Hmm.. a 20K Atrox Young October the 19th, a 16K Atrox Old November the 17th.
Today is 18th of December, there must be some 18k Atrox Mature lurking out there!"
And there is some truth in that.
I'm pretty sure most dashed to the end of this post or skipped it altogether (nothing to be ashamed of, it's pretty messy stuff and it's only one big guess)
In a nutshell, I'd keep this "cracking the loot system" in a little cozy corner of my brain to keep things interesting, but I wouldn't dare going too deep into it