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Prayer

Started by DrCyanide [2696029] on in General Discussion.

40 replies · 637 views · thread synced · 3 days ago · View on torn.com
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Most-liked replies

  • Fists [2830940] · 13 likes ·
    why is everyone here so anti religious, he's asking a genuine question about the game
  • Dooxo [116017] · 2 likes ·
    I want the last 2 minutes of my life back!
DrCyanide [2696029] · #1

Has anyone ever done the work to truly try to penetrate the value of prayer in this game?

Like, really try...with legitimate science?

I haven't seen anything, but I also haven't looked very hard.

If luck/blessings were to exist, they probably would manifest most cleanly in xanax OD rates.

In a game like Torn, it would probably have some sort of cooldown effect.  I am not certain, but my gut is that it would not be stackable, else human pattern recognition in the community would likely have picked up on it.  Further, if it exists, its effect is likely small enough to also dodge human pattern recognition.

Would rosary beads have an effect?  In a game like torn, I imagine it would have an effect, and my guess is that they would either a) augment the luck effect, or b) be a gateway requirement to access the prayer-based luck mechanism.

I have a bit of a research background.  And, I am half decent directing Claude to make scripts.

With community involvement, I think we could likely collect enough data to statistically analyze this and put the issue to bed.

I am feeling this would be in the form of a script, that:

randomly assigned players to either:
1. never-pray
2. pray-once-within-5-minutes-of-xanax

ensure every participant is wearing a rosary

ensure compliance with their group (compliance and drop out would be likely the largest confounders)

keep track of business addiction level as a secondary statistic

record the number of xanax before an OD

Once an OD is detected, randomly assign the person to a group again.

I think that 1000-2000 ODs should probably be enough to pick up on a 5% luck effect.

I believe the proper statistical tools would be log-rank comparisons, followed by Cox proportional hazards regression.

Would there be interest in this?  Or has it already been done?

LuigiMangione [1870934] · #12

Religious debate aside, the church has always felt kinda out of place in the game. I'm not complaining about the extra merits from it and I like how it's integrated into the newspaper/comics, but once you get the merit from praying and the donation merits it just becomes a dead end.

chaoticsoldier [2752977] · #16

You're assuming that praying has an effect on OD rates but, supposing it's not a complete hoax, praying could potentially affect any other aspect of the game too - maybe only crime success, casino luck, or racing crash chance etc.

 

You'd first need to spend tons of time in advance to establish a baseline for pretty much everything before testing.

 

But then what if there are actions that undo the effects of praying? What if committing sinful crimes undoes all our good praying work?

To eliminate as many influences as possible you'd have to do no other actions in the game other than what you are testing against, just in case.

 

Then, even if you were sort of on the right track, what if the effects of praying are not instant? Or what if the effects only last a short time? Or what if you must pray more than once at a time before it starts to work? Can praying too much have a negative effect?

 

There are just way too many variables to accurately determine the effects of praying.