A little update that isn't worth putting in the MotD, here...

Given that we humans see patterns in everything, to make something "feel" more random, you sometimes have to make it less random. We've all at some point fought the same monster twice in a row, or twice in relatively fast succession; sometimes a Rookie player, subject to the whims of the RNG, will fight the same four monsters over and over again and think there are very few monsters, and get bored and wander off and never give me any bloody money. The new nudger module tries to discourage that from happening.

The nudger intercepts the point in the beginning of battle just after a level has been selected and a monster has been pulled at random from the database - before the monster is sent off to buffbadguy() for any post-selection tinkering. It checks for the monster's unique ID in a list of the last eight monsters you've fought. If there's a match, it throws that monster away and picks a new one, then checks again - and if there's a match, it'll throw the monster away pick a new one and check again, and so on. In total it'll check three times before giving up and letting the main battle script continue (we'd let it try more, but each check is another database query and more server resources, and we don't want to deviate too far from true pseudo-random).

So, you can still fight the same monster twice in a row, or twice in recent succession - but the odds of doing so are now somewhat slimmer. Yay tinkering.

nice. very nice.

doesn't this also slightly increase the chance of seeing your quest beast?

[edit: perhaps even more than slightly, depending on the number of possible monsters per level]

probably not, since "quest result" is probably its own result in "looking for trouble".
Monster
Improbable Events (jungle-only)
Improbable Events (Jungle + travel)
Quest Monster/Item


is how it probably is, though I could be dead wrong...so the game already knows that it's not your quest monster before this takes effect.