How actually probable is to “meet” other people in No Man’s Sky

no-mans-sky

I know the game is not really multiplayer so I mean "meet" as in standing on the same point/Planet/System, even though there is no interaction involved. I thought the odds of this happening were really thin (from several interviews with the developer) but as it happens the other day I arrived at the same Planet/System my girlfriend discovered the day before. We made no effort for this to happen:

enter image description here

So, is this just a really odd phenomenon or the probabilities are not as thin as they made us believe in the first place?

Edit: So I'll add more data for clarification…

  • We are effectively on the same planet, we just didn't log in simultaneously because we only have one gaming PC that we share. And I read this so I know we are not gonna be able to see/interact with each other and people seem to have no more interest in the "meeting each other" thing.
  • We obviously knew each other beforehand and played about 1 or 2hs each every day since launch, with no effort or hope to meet each other.
  • There are about 400,000 NMS PC players, according to steamspy.
  • There are about 100 billion planets per galaxy, and we all start in the same one (out of ~18 quintillion planets total).

I can't figure the math but it seems like a really odd occurrence to even be mitigated by the Birthday Paradox.

Edit 2: So, to be even more clear, this is not a duplicate of "Is No Man's Sky actually multiplayer?". I've read that one very carefully and I understand that you can't see/interact with other players in it's current state. It's just the shared "Discoveries" feature that makes it "multiplayer".

I'm asking a different thing: the actual odds of running into the same Planet that another person is right now (again, even though you can only tell by the name/location), because every time Sean Murray got interviewed he stated that those odds are really, really low, close to none. Yet, I'm in the same planet as my girlfriend after only a couple hours of gameplay. So, my question being, which one is it? what are the real probabilities of this happening?

Best Answer

The odds are actually pretty high that you will eventually "meet" somebody, as you can see. The odds of you being on the same planet at the same time and in the same place are where the odds drop like a rock unless you put in the effort and materials.

This is actually a version of the Birthday Paradox. With enough people involved the odds of two people having seen the same planet goes up VERY quickly.

Related Topic