This game has seriously messed up RNG

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

The main problem with RNG in this game is that it's not made with human players in mind. I think the numbers are made to work out to the correct percentage if you do like a billion attempts, which is how SE tests it.

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This is how percentage chances work. The higher the samples, the more correctly the percentage. Don't trust your brain if it come to percentage chances. It is too emotional for the cold math. Check it with a pen, a paper and a calculator.

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Originally Posted by Felis

The equip play a role [...]

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It does play a role, but it does not play a role in RNG. Your equipment will never increase your chance to successfully increase progress or quality. It only affects by how much you increase progress or quality if you succeed. If you do not succeed in the first place, you might as well be naked.

That's what I'm getting at. No matter what equipment you have, your skills always have the exact same chance to succeed. Hence, your equipment has no bearing on RNG. RNG is independent.

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Originally Posted by Felis

Don't trust your brain if it come to percentage chances. It is too emotional for the cold math. Check it with a pen, a paper and a calculator.

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That's my entire point. The game is played by humans, not robots. It should have RNG that humans see and think "yeah, that's what should have happened". Not RNG that humans see and think "why is this so broken?"

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Originally Posted by Zojha

It does play a role, but it does not play a role in RNG. Your equipment will never increase your chance to successfully increase progress or quality. It only affects by how much you increase progress or quality if you succeed. If you do not succeed in the first place, you might as well be naked.

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And increased quality will increase the chance for HQ.
Better equip = better quality increase = better chance for HQ (at 100% a guaranteed HQ)

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

That's my entire point. The game is played by humans, not robots. It should have RNG that humans see and think "yeah, that's what should have happened". Not RNG that humans see and think "why is this so broken?"

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So breaking the RNG to make it look less broken?

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Originally Posted by Felis

So breaking the RNG to make it look less broken?

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

fake RNG and add a streak breaker so the outcome better matches our expectations

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That's about what I said, yeah. Other games use streak breakers to prevent players from getting frustrated with RNG that doesn't reflect their expectations, like not getting 9 out of 10 on a 90% chance.

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Originally Posted by Yukiko

The main mistake in calculating your % is that the server use ONE RNG for ALL players. If it says 99% it means not only for you, it means the "next" roll. That means you actually will never have the 99% because there will always be some others who finish the same craft/dungeon/loot before you! That results in seeing from your perspective many more odds than it should have! SE does not have any net to catch odd bias. The next mistake is that SE uses an algorithm for high numbers (you remember, one RNG for all players) but you are just a single player from that high number. As example you are number 254 from a total number of 123.456.789 rolls made at same time! Statistically when counting all rolls, RNG is working fine, but for YOU it will result in seeing more odd bias.

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That makes virtually no sense. On what do you base this assertion that it works this way?

Definitely agree that the game could use much less RNG.

I wonder who are actually programming RNGs?
So much said in this topic that is just not true...

Edit: In a Dev post SE already said which algorithm they are using for FFXIV, those who are familiar with RNG programming know about its weakness.

Maybe rng just hates you?

I still have never been able to get an Ifrit pony probably over 500ish runs had 2 groups that we got 7/8 and after 2 hour of no 8th pony drop the party disbanded sometimes RNG just hates you

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Originally Posted by Lexia

Maybe rng just hates you?

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Almost always, but I draw the line at utter unacceptability. Apparently the club for those that do the same is larger than I thought lol

I can’t comment as much on battle content, but as an end game crafter, I can tell you that the RNG for crafting works. The biggest determinant on your HQ rate is the strategy that you use and the gear you have. You will go through hundreds, if not thousands of synths, so the occasional NQ or failed reclaim due to a bad streak is largely inconsequential.

If you use the system as intended, you have a ton of control over your synth. It isn’t like melding or rolling on loot where you have absolutely no influence on the outcome. There are many different directions where you can take your craft.

I’m actually a bit curious as to how most crafters handle their synths. I remember back in ARR, there were a ton of complaints over the master 2 tokens being based completely on luck like melding. However, a lot of them were just blindly following instructions to use a set of 2 RS and 10 HT meaning that they would have to land everything to build 11 stacks of IQ. It was nothing more than a brute force method of building 11 stacks and usually only gave 30% even if everything landed. They themselves turned it into a game of pure luck.

Use the system properly and you shouldn’t be merely repeating a pre-determined sequence of abilities. You actually design the best possible sequence as you’re in the midst of crafting, responding to good and bad luck. If your luck is good, you’ll find opportunities to complete the rest of your craft rng free. This could mean using extra precise touches and then throwing in standard and even advanced touches. If not, you’ll have to look for ways of compensating for extra misses.

If you’re over-geared, HQing should be completely trivial. In 3.3, I had a set of partially melded i190 ironworks gear and tracked my performance on i220 3* gear from all NQ or nearly all NQ materials. It was literally an HQ yield of over 99% as I HQed 100 pieces of gear in row and reclaimed on my 101st synth, getting all of my materials back except for a few clusters.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

That's my entire point. The game is played by humans, not robots. It should have RNG that humans see and think "yeah, that's what should have happened". Not RNG that humans see and think "why is this so broken?"

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I understand completely what you're saying but it would destroy the RNG. In fact, it would no longer be random if it was fudged! The immense mistake SE made was using percentages at all because most people cannot understand them in relation to RNG. That's not being rude, it's a fact, I have a science Master's degree that had a lot of statistics in it & it still took me a while to get my head around it. I wouldn't expect the majority (one could say 99%+ ;P) to understand it.

For the people who are complaining about not getting HQ crafts at 95% chance... first of all, if that 95% made it a garanteed HQ, what would be the point of the whole system? Or if you could somehow know what crafts would fail at such high chances, and just use that craft for something random? You can't really change the RNG system for crafting much, it's either keep it or remove it entirely, making HQ crafts only rely on having over a certain amount of stats, making the whole crafting "minigame" pointless and redundant, destroying one of the things this game does differently and in a better way than any other MMO I've played to date (my opinion of course).

Also, I've had several times when I've messed up a craft completely, had like 3% chance and still got HQ, so it works in both ways. Most likely at the same rate, it's just that humans remember the failures more than the happy surprises.

Maybe SE should change it to a binary system?
0 or 1, no or yes. No maybe.
make the quality bar full for HQ or it will be NQ

That RNG is SO broken <.<

My biggest reason why I barely do dungeons for items!
Where is the motivation and fun to play a dungeon if you mostly get nothing cuz of terrible RNG - low numbers <,<
I mean, youre doing great during a 4 - 8 - 24 party istance and then RNG says: "Haha! You dont get anything again!"
and all I think is wow,, thanks for the time waste -.-

Yeah... That is one of the reasons I stopped crafting. The amount of times I get 90%+ and still fail is insane. Yes 95% isn't 100% but when you fail 5+ times in a row with 95% then clearly something is wrong not matter how unlucky you are. I have failed more times in crafting in this game compared to many other MMOs added together.

It is bad, but still not as bad as perhaps every Korean MMORPG ever made.

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Originally Posted by JCharms

I dislike the crafting in this game because if it.
In most games you usually get better at your craft as you go, here? they just add more layers of RNG.

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I agree. When you first start gathering/crafting, it's like "this is fun." Then it progressively gets more RNG heavy. Fishing happens to be the worst with it, imo. Especially when you get into mooching. Like the next size fish is really that picky about wanting a HQ fish on the hook.

Rolling a 96 on a bird from a fight you've near gone insane farming and losing it is fun.

I have seen much much much worse RNG in other games.

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Originally Posted by Yukiko

I wonder who are actually programming RNGs?
So much said in this topic that is just not true...

Edit: In a Dev post SE already said which algorithm they are using for FFXIV, those who are familiar with RNG programming know about its weakness.

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Mersenne Twister. Its a very high quality algorithm for simulating true randomness (high quality as in it doesn't repeat often iirc 10^23 iterations or something), low predictability and excellent spread of outcomes. The main issue is not the algorithm, its that its unshielded in its implementation i.e. it didn't have its outliers clipped so its possible to have scenarios the OP experienced

I must confess, I dropped seriously crafting when HW came in. This was due to the RNG endured when crafting the final lot of off-hands. (RS/HT/reclaim fails far over their %, 2/3 of the time). I literally ended up with 3 of each, along with the ones that went down the drain completely. To add to it, the mats were very expensive, involved a lot of grinding, and ended up RNGed into the toilet. The RNG situation hasn't changed from the crafting I do, make some blue/red script hand-ins, and even then I see the same thing. Even with much higher stats than required for the craft, I see strings of HT/RS failure that are quite predicatable - if I am crafting 10 of something, I'll see it 2-3 times. If I'm making 20, I'll see it 4-5 times. Those that say "but you get string of successes" are simply wrong - I can go a week without seeing that.

The problem is RNG is involved in every move - the more moves you make, and the high-level requires a lot of them, you're rolling the dice 30-odd times, each one compounds the chance of failure. That does not mean the RNG itself is somehow "wrong" - what it means is that it's being employed very poorly. All the expense/grinding pain of getting geared up to find landing a craft requires 30 dice rolls? Not my idea of fun, I'm afraid.

and speaking of RNG - has anyone tried getting the shaft from alex normal? Painful doesn't cover it. It's torture.

or how its mostly the lowest preforming player in the party always gets the loot

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Originally Posted by Atoli

Yeah, but the odds of getting 201 times heads and zero times tails are extremely low, because if the chance is actually 50:50, over a very large sample size, you will end up getting a fairly balanced result.
As for ADVSS's example: The chances to win the jackpot in my country are 0,00000071% and it still happens every few months. As long as the chance is not zero, it can absolutely happen, even if it is very very unlikely to occur.

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My point exactly - even if you have a 99% chance for a win; you can still lose many times in a row. Do 50000 touches with a 99% chance of success, you'll have roughly 500 failures. But RNG isn't based on odds vs prior results, it's as true a random as can be with computers.

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Originally Posted by YISUG

or how its mostly the lowest preforming player in the party always gets the loot

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Ive seen this phenomena many times

to the rest i still believe that there should be some control especially with crafting or gathering. Even if you say its "too easy" what is the point of even gaining levels for crafters and gatherers if all, besides the given tricks to kind of help boost your stats on even more rng. I still believe giving a little push or incentive to crafting wouldnt hurt but would make it a bit more competitve in the long run. Totally senseless to be maxed out and still botch things youve made dozens of times(albeit with luck on your side) just seems a little off at least to me.

Another bothersome thing about the whole special rng is when you quick synth simple items youd never fail with a basic synthesis and even 40 durability +

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Originally Posted by XiXiQ

I must confess, I dropped seriously crafting when HW came in. This was due to the RNG endured when crafting the final lot of off-hands. (RS/HT/reclaim fails far over their %, 2/3 of the time).

The problem is RNG is involved in every move - the more moves you make, and the high-level requires a lot of them, you're rolling the dice 30-odd times, each one compounds the chance of failure.

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I'm a bit surprised at this since HW is far less demanding in terms of RNG manipulation than ARR. In ARR, to craft 3* and 4* effectively, you still had to build up 11 stacks of IQ regularly and that was without the aid of new abilities like precise touch and maker's mark. HW is easier since you have far more tools to reduce RNG and everything is predictable due to low proc rates but much higher base CP.

For crafts (HW or ARR), you can expect to routinely see 1-5 misses in a craft. To master crafting, you have to be able to handle 4-5 misses as those are regular occurrences even if they're less common than 2-3 misses. I normally craft from 0/13187 for a 4* craft so 4-5 misses will make a craft go sour. But in most cases, I can rebound to 11 stacks of IQ leaving me with 78-90% usually depending on the situation. Start with 2000/13187 and I'd be able to completely absorb those misses and get that 100%.

There's a learning curve to RNG crafting/manipulation and it really isn't so much different from learning how to use a battle class and how to handle specific fight mechanics. I feel that the underlying RNG mechanics are actually quite fascinating once you've learned them and it's a shame that most players that I know don't really seem to care.

There are strategies over how to handle the maker's mark phase, strategies on what's the best thing to do when a good proc appears (there really is no blanket rule whether to use tricks, precise touch, hasty; everything is situational). Mid-craft, you can even work out what possible approaches there are and do a rough calculation to see which one can maximize your odds of success.

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Originally Posted by YISUG

or how its mostly the lowest preforming player in the party always gets the loot

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This kind of thing is just a bias. You tend to notice floor tanks getting the mount more than when average or good players get the mount. You think the latter is "normal" and you dismiss them.

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Originally Posted by YISUG

or how its mostly the lowest preforming player in the party always gets the loot

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i've seen this and from my personal experience since i moved from NA to JP server, I can't win a loot roll to save my life. constant roll losses when rolling 95+. If i don't roll a 99, i can just forget about it.

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Originally Posted by MN_14

I'm a bit surprised at this since HW is far less demanding in terms of RNG manipulation than ARR.

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I'd say they were even - while a few extra tools were thrown in, you get to use MM instead of a single RS, precise touch is nice but even it occurring inside the quality phase is - yep.... RNG. however, with more steps required, it's evened out again. I'm not ignorant of the fact that sometimes you can work around it, but the fails I'm seeing, you aren't working around - like failing HT 7 times out of 10, RS 3-4 times in a row, those are simply far more common they they should be. I see them EVERY time I craft 10-20 items, and typically more than once. I've not specialised - mainly because I lost interest because of the RNG, and later because the idea of "buying" an action put me off, so can't comment on that one.

I'll agree it's similar to battle classes - as things pile on there's just more buttons, longer rotations, more buff juggling, which means most of the rotation just ends up in the crapper due to unavoidable mechanics going on on the other side -then crit is RNG anyway.... sigh

Crafting has a similar issue - as the rotations get longer and longer, the RNG just compounds more and more, leading to a similar problem - it doesn't matter if you know what you're doing or know how it works, you're just constantly frustrated by it anyway.

I'm fence-sitting for SB as it stands, I'm beginning to find the game simply frustrating rather than amusing or fun. Less reliance on RNG and a general clear-out or condensation of skills is sorely needed. If this ARR-HW trend is repeated, the game will be unplayable to anyone beyond masochists.

Yes, failing a gather or craft at 95%+ several times in a row seems like "bad RNG". But if you do 10000+ gathering/crafting attemps, the total observed success rate is likely to be close to the stated base success rate.

That being said, I think that the amount of mechanics that rely on RNG in this game is too great. I can understand some of the crafting abilities being RNG-based, but have RNG decide whether or not I hit that rock in the correct way with my pickaxe is a little silly. Also, crystal FATE grinds etc is a stupid thing to have in a long, grindy quest because two people doing the exact same thing on the exact same quest should see the exact same progress. Any other outcome just seems unfair.

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Originally Posted by XiXiQ

I'd say they were even - while a few extra tools were thrown in, you get to use MM instead of a single RS, precise touch is nice but even it occurring inside the quality phase is - yep.... RNG. however, with more steps required, it's evened out again.

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I actually don't find them to be even myself. In ARR, you absolutely were required to use RS multiple times in a craft along with a whole ton of HTs. There wasn't a lot of room for RNG reducers such as PT or even swapping HTs with RNG free abilities like BT or ST. In HW, you can start with up to 50% quality and unless you're starting from 0 or near 0 quality, you usually can start swapping out RNG abilities halfway through the synth. That's the biggest factor on why crafting i220s while geared in 190s is really simple. With a quality requirement of only 10k, not only do you need fewer successful touches, but you can also usually simply cut out half of the RNG.

In ARR, several crafts such as artisan's tools or gear forced you to start from a max of ~700/4500 and 1200/5600 respectively. 4* crafted materials were even worse, forcing you to start from a max of 500-600/5600 iirc. HQ materials weren't worth the extra cost (absolutely minimal benefits) so in practice, you were forced to craft 4* materials from all NQ.

In HW, even from all NQ, I find opportunities to switch out RNG abilities for RNG free ones to guarantee 100% on occasion so HQ rates are definitely higher and more consistent than before. This is also just looking at synths in which you start from 0 quality.

If you're starting from 4000-6000 quality on a 4* craft, I find that I usually don't even need Byregot's Blessing and there probably is a RNG free way of crafting them if starting quality is that high (haven't looked into it myself). At 6K quality, you'd be able to absorb 8 misses no problem.

On an side note, HW crafts aren't really that much longer compared to 3* or 4* ARR end game crafts. My typical 4* craft is around 50 steps, whereas my ARR crafts were around 38-45 steps usually. They take longer than before but the difference is exaggerated.

I don't think on its own, from a purely mathematical perspective, the RNG is "wrong" in some manner. But its employed very badly - too many things rely upon stings of it - one good roll doesn't matter, you need to get 5 or more in a run. The longer that string is, the more limited your odds become. even the "side stuff" is RG heavy, like acropolis or WT. POTD gearing upgrades, chest drops, having to roll and pray after every battle. The odds have been so long in some cases, it's simply banging your head against a wall. Basically, the mathematics of RNG aren't the point any more, it's been so heavilly over used it's destroying the enjoyment of the game.

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Originally Posted by MN_14

My typical 4* craft is around 50 steps, whereas my ARR crafts were around 38-45 steps usually. They take longer than before but the difference is exaggerated.

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You've just quoted yet another 5-12 failure points, and yes, it does matter in the end.

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Originally Posted by XiXiQ

You've just quoted yet another 5-12 failure points, and yes, it does matter in the end.

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Ok, I understand your dislike for RNG as I've seen my share of failed rolls on loot. But I honestly don't see RNG is a problem in the crafting system as I've gone through thousands of synths myself. You do sometimes get 7-8 misses (and will see 5-6 misses routinely) but consistently seeing 7-8 misses 30% of the time doesn't make sense (I've had brief periods where I've seen multiple crafts turn out like that in a row and it's rare). Your sample size is probably way too small.

Crafting isn't complete random luck like loot rolls or even gathered items (BTN and miner shouldn't be a problem now aside from aetherial reduction; if you can meet the minimum gather requirements for the newer 1* and 3* gather points, you can increase the rate to 100% just by spending 100 GP). The 5-12 extra failure points from Maker's Mark don't matter unless you're consistently missing 5-12 extra times (which I've never seen in all of my crafts). On top of that, difficulty is adjustable via your starting quality.

Once you design a strategy where your average expected result from all NQ is 100%, you'll find yourself HQing practically everything left and right.

If you're writing off crafting simply from some bad experiences with a small sample, I really do think you're missing out. I can see why some players might have found the gearing daunting (fixed in 3.3) and materials expensive, but the system is so flexible especially in HW that RNG should be the least of their problems. I hope you do give it a shot again because I really do find it to be an enjoyable mini-game myself.

I actually still do it, but just as needed, I'm geared enough to do maybe 3* now, but not interested in grinding blue scripts to buy an action, or in RNG tossing out mats that have either taken a long time to grind or come at great expense. Or in wasting millions in crafting gear failures and melding failures - My "small sample" is probably 50-100 creafts per week. sometimes for blue script, usually the red ones, plus I make pots/food for my gathering, and sometimes for the crafting or furniture items. I just can't take it seriously anymore, or invest much skin in it, it's just too much of a crapshoot for me. With the exception of the food, I'm way overgeared, so the RNG doesn't affect the final outcome in the majority of cases - but I still see the same patterns of failures over and over, and know that's just going to continue with higher recipes as well. I honestly wish it was just a case of a few bad experiences and a small sample, but I've also gone through 1000's of synths since HW came out and am just seeing the same thing over and over. I might go back to it more seriously in time, will just need to wait and see what SB has to offer.

The RNG does feel extremely streaky at times. For example last night I was using my mount roulette and it gave me the same damn Sanuwa four times in a row. IIRC Apple had this same "problem" when they introduced shuffle to iPods etc. The randomness was too true, if you can say that, and people complained that it didn't feel random because same songs seemed to be playing too often. So Apple had to tweak their algorithms a bit. Couldn't find a source for this with 20 sec googling, sorry. IMHO at least some RNG aspects could use tweaking in this game. Like the mount roulette I mentioned. If I keep rejecting some mount, maybe reject those results automatically?

http://assets.amuniversal.com/321a39...80001dd8b71c47

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Originally Posted by XiXiQ

My "small sample" is probably 50-100 creafts per week. sometimes for blue script, usually the red ones, plus I make pots/food for my gathering, and sometimes for the crafting or furniture items. I just can't take it seriously anymore, or invest much skin in it, it's just too much of a crapshoot for me. With the exception of the food, I'm way overgeared, so the RNG doesn't affect the final outcome in the majority of cases - but I still see the same patterns of failures over and over, and know that's just going to continue with higher recipes as well.

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50-100 may sound like a lot but this is actually peanuts when it comes to RnG. This game's RnGenerator is rated for 10^23 iterations or something, true RnG is rated to infinity. We humans are just so prone to confirmation bias because our minds cannot envision infinity (or 10^23 for that matter).

Reclaim fails a lot more often than 10% of the time.

well, as I said, I have no idea if RNG is mathematcally wrong, and it's unlikely to be. It's the heavy reliance on it that's the real issue. 50-100 is insignificant on its own - but to see the same pattern repeated week after week, over many 1000's is begging incredulity. At this stage I'm not even complaining because my crafts fail, I'm at the stage where the failure rate simply doesn't affect it much. It's still obviously there, though.