Speaking of WoW, I got hit by the statistics when they introduced an achievement for the in-game valentine's holiday.
Each player got a bag that you once an hour could take a random piece of heart candy from. There were a fixed number of heart candies, the bag worked for a week, and you needed one of each to get the achievement.
One random draw once an hour for at max a week is a limited number of attempts, what are the odds of never getting a certain heart piece? About one in a million or so. How many players did WoW have at that time? Over ten million. So you're pretty much guaranteed that even if you never missed an opportunity to draw a piece of candy, some players would never get one of each, and never get the achievement... Statistics is a bitch.
(They implemented pity timers for every similar achievement afterwards, as far as I know.)
> what are the odds of never getting a certain heart piece? About one in a million or so. How many players did WoW have at that time? Over ten million. So you're pretty much guaranteed that even if you never missed an opportunity to draw a piece of candy, some players would never get one of each, and never get the achievement...
This extends the time to get the achievement from one year to "for 0.0001% of players, two years".
That will annoy those, um, ten people, but "getting the achievement next year" is pretty different from "never getting the achievement".
Yeah, because the achievement was part of the meta-achievement What A Long Strange Trip It's Been, and if you were one of those ten people, like me, it was pretty damn annoying. (There were actually quite a lot more of us, since very few people drew the maximum amount of candies from the bag, so the realistic odds of never getting it despite your best efforts was maybe one in 100k or something?
Anyway, they fixed it retroactively for the first year somehow, so that was nice.
> Yeah, because the achievement was part of the meta-achievement What A Long Strange Trip It's Been
This severely weakens the case that it was a problem that needed to be fixed; if you're getting the Valentine's achievement because you want What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, the extra waiting time you suffer from not getting Valentine's the first time around is lowered. (Because you would have had to spend a lot of that time waiting anyway, for the other calendar-based achievements that you didn't already have.)
Each player got a bag that you once an hour could take a random piece of heart candy from. There were a fixed number of heart candies, the bag worked for a week, and you needed one of each to get the achievement.
One random draw once an hour for at max a week is a limited number of attempts, what are the odds of never getting a certain heart piece? About one in a million or so. How many players did WoW have at that time? Over ten million. So you're pretty much guaranteed that even if you never missed an opportunity to draw a piece of candy, some players would never get one of each, and never get the achievement... Statistics is a bitch.
(They implemented pity timers for every similar achievement afterwards, as far as I know.)