Math, Materia, and How to Succeed at Melding

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Originally Posted by Nero

As far as i like your Thread, you should consider gathering information about moon-phase and directions as well. SE denied that the 12 has anything to do with it, but wanted to keep it a secret if moon-phases do.

Actually moon-phases and directions had an effect in FFXI, so why not in FFXIV? If not this, the moon-phases didnt need to be there at all.

All triple-melds tier IV i made, including the 5-meld tier I for the crown happend during new-moon btw. i tried it also on different phases, as on full-moon i never got a 4-meld tier I. As i mentioned in a different thread i cant prove it, SE did not deny it. So gathering info's about this, may could help to clarify this topic as well.

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I'll add a category for that in my records, but it would take a data set of at least 2 thousand melds before I could say anything conclusively about it.

Honestly, this sounds to me like a "Self-fulfilling Prophecy." That is, you believe that a new moon will give you a better chance at double melding, so you decide to wait till the new moon to attempt the meld. And since you do more melding during a full moon than any other time, you get more melds during a full moon. This encourages that belief, and it just goes in a vicious cycle.

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Originally Posted by Alzelia

Honestly, this sounds to me like a "Self-fulfilling Prophecy." That is, you believe that a new moon will give you a better chance at double melding, so you decide to wait till the new moon to attempt the meld. And since you do more melding during a full moon than any other time, you get more melds during a full moon. This encourages that belief, and it just goes in a vicious cycle.

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I get what you are pointing at, which is logical. Problem with that is.. i tried to 5meld for the crown during all moon-phases, while i burned around 200 STR tier I Materia's. Same goes for the tier IV triple meld.. ich tried them a lot, no matter which phase.. when they started to work out at new-moon, i stood on that which does not mean that i never tried on other phases again.

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Actually it never did in FFXI. Took down synth data for over a thousand synths back then.
People just like to believe in whatever they want.

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So did i, since i was a Bonecrafter.. and now? you believe it didnt have an effect, i did believe it had an effect. SE themself stated "may it does, may it does not". Who is right? you or me?

Exactly my point of gathering data about it.

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Originally Posted by morpheus

With a pool size as large as 1200 if it was 42% chance you would think you would see it start equal out after a while? Or maybe not only did i get unlucky, but i kept getting unlucky over and over and over again. What's the odds of someone having this bad of luck over and over again on something with a 42% chance. Now, what are the odds that the 42% number might not be correct considering the information i posted along with others.

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Sure you can expect to see an out come around 42% AFTER THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of attempts.

However it's a probability of success. So some people after thousands of attempts will find they only had a 35% success rate while someone else might find they had a 50% success rate.

The 42% you're seeing is just the chance of probability that EACH item you attempt will have a positive out come, but has a 58% chance to fail. It's just a roll of the dice and hope you come out on top.

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Originally Posted by tymora

End of the day, it's a "religion". Just believe in whatever makes you feel good. No need for proof. Even if there is proof to the contrary, people will still think moon phases have an effect.

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Thank the 12 i'm an athiest.

I still plan on updating this, I've been a bit busy though

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Originally Posted by ChiefCurrahee

Just because something says you have 42% chance to create a successful result doesn't mean 42 out of 100 WILL be successful.

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ehhh. yes and no. It should be close to 42 within tolerance. if you do 100 attempts and you are supposed to get a result 42% of the time, you should expect to get that result between 39 and 45% of the time. anything beyond that And i would say it's not really 42%.

more later

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Originally Posted by ChiefCurrahee

It's pure Random Number Generation (RNG) per individual item. You can have 100 melds @ 42% positive meld rate and fail all 100. Yet you still have a 42% chance in a positive result.

For all those people who don't understand you can do an experiment. Go buy a 10 or 20 sided die

pick 2 random numbers for the 10 sided die and 5 random numbers on the 20 sided die. This will give you 20% of the numbers on the face of the dice. Roll the dice 100 times and record your results. How many times did your randomly picked numbers show up? 20% on the nose? Was it less than or greater than 20%?

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the results will vary between the two die. using a RNG (http://stattrek.com/statistics/rando...generator.aspx) i just did a quick test. 100 attempts to get a number between 1 and 20. i had 6 instances less than 20. Doing this 4 more times i got 14, 9, and 23, and 18. so out of 500 attempts i had an average of 14% success. that's 6% off. and 500 is a fairly large sample size. at what point do we say we have enough samples to be statistically significant? at what point do we say it's not within tolerance to say that this is not 20% success rate?

doing the same test between 1-20 and looking for instances between 1 and 4 i had 21 instances. doing this 4 more times i got 19, 23, 15, and 18. that's a 19.2% success rate. this is much much closer to what is expected. it would be difficult to argue that this is not an accurate rate.

so one is perceived to be more accurate than the other. even though they are technically exactly the same. Why is this? It's a simple mater of scaling.

IE: in the 100die example there are 100 possible outcomes. when you attempt 500 times, that's 500*100=50000 possible outcomes. in the 20 sided die example there are only 10000 possible outcomes. IE: as an individual i need to increase my sample size by at least 5x on the 100 sided die to see a comparable scaling.

So when a success% is displayed, is it for the individual or the server? in this case it is most likely for the server. because we don't accurately see this rate unless we have an absolutely massive sample size.

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Originally Posted by ChiefCurrahee

The game doesn't keep track of every meld you make, and if you fail 4 times in a row the 5th isn't a guaranteed success for a 20% positive meld rate. It just means that every item you meld has a 20% chance to roll the magic numbers on the dice.

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the perceived problem is our die is just too large. when it says 20% is it 20/100 4/20, 200/1000? because this makes a large difference on the small scale. the average player probably won't attempt more than 20 times because they aren't likely to be able to afford it. so it should be normalized to show this percentage over 20-100 attempts. not over thousands.

title should be changed to Meth Materia and Melding. Stop overthinking it guys

Seriously. Just get a whole mess of mats, a whole mess of materia, and start crafting. Make bigger piles for crazier melds. You might get what you want out of it, or not.

Yeah I do think the title is a bit misleading. It doesn't really tell you how to be successful at melding, as well it couldn't, since melding is entirely based on luck. If anything it teaches you how to manage expectations and not smash up your keyboard lol. As far as anything rng related goes, its just a simple roll of the dice. Probability, unfortunately, deals with infinity; that makes it a bit harder for our brain to wrap around. Since we think in terms of finite numbers, all statistics can tell us is the chance of failing every time out of a finite number of attempts. Its useful for humans, since we never plan on doing anything to infinity. Regardless, the probability of success will always remain the same no matter how many times you repeat it, thus the only real way to succeed at melding is to do what OP said:

1) Do it a billion times until you win

or

2) Buy it.