I wanted to ask how the process of coordinates decay actually works. I know there is a set amount of degradation that begins to trigger after a certain amount of time, but what after that? Is there a maximum amount of degradation that is added to the inaccuracy? And when, if even, will old coordinates be deleted?
The accuracy of an expired coordinate is reduced by a random amount up to a 7x increase in the inaccuracy radius. So a coordinate with 25K of inaccuracy while it's alive can be up to 175K of inaccuracy once it expires.
Actually, funny story, expired coords have an approximately 30% chance (according to community testing) to drop one off exactly where they were scanned.
Oh. Huh. Yeah I see where that's happening. It's mathematically one in seven but because PRNGs tend to suck if they're not cryptographically secure sometimes you get predictable number chains. Thank you for the bug report I guess?
Or maybe we're just lucky. Considering that we were literally spamming the same few coords over and over again and Jumpdriving, that may have jacked our percentages up, but I'm only an end user over here.
Yeah it looks like you probably just got really lucky with your timing since the entropy used to seed that particular random number is just the non-cryptographically-secure C library srand()/rand() generator. No point in bumping it up to something nuts like arc4random().
Thanks for the explanation. I actually was worried, thinking I was maybe using a bug as they simply didn't "decay that hard" and never died out. That's just enough inaccuracy to not end up in a system wall.