Percentages off? RNG...

So, I find that in this game the math seems to be a bit off regarding gathering percentages. If something says 80% on chance to acquire, why is it I can hit a node with 6 hits (leves) and 4-5 hits regular gathering and only acquire something 2-3 times. This happens WAY too often for it to be "80" percent. If it states 80%, you should gather something 4/5 times MOST of the time. In this game, I am finding the percentages to be way off. I am level 34 miner and botanist, with that said, I find that more times than should, I have failures 2-3 times on an 80-90% gather rate. The amount of times this happens does not coincide with the numbers. FIX This please SE.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by FF2GO

If it states 80%, you should gather something 4/5 times MOST of the time.

---

No, that's not what 80% means.

It means that over a very, very (, very) large sample, the percentage of time a hit will be successful is 80%. See this dev post on the subject.

The thing is, each time you click the mouse (or the button on your gamepad) to harvest from a node, it's a completely separate event from any other time before and/or after that you harvest from that same node. Each attempt has an 80% chance of success, therefore a 20% chance of failure. The current attempt is completely unaffected by any previous success or failure. By the logic you're using, if you succeeded 4x in a row you should automatically fail the 5th since it's an 80% chance rather than 100%.

You also have to remember that people tend to remember the negative results of things like this more than the positive ones. The times that you had 10 successful attempts in a row don't really stick with you (or the times that you things were pretty even), but you'll still be annoyed about the time you failed 5x in a row weeks from now. Just wait till you have 98% and you fail twice. I about fall out of my chair every time. xD

Everything is fine here. If you ever harvest several stacks of an item or go fishing for the Agenda you can see it on your own. I talk about the 15-20% HQ-Chance. The more items you get, the better you can see the 85/15 distribution of items. Thing is, the human brain tends to forget the "good RNG results" more easily and remembers the bad ones. How often do you get 2-3 or even 4 items in HQ with a 15 or 20% chance? But things like that go under in failures.

I dont ever take those percentages at face value when i craft cause as was previously said those percentages are over a very long period and independent of previous attempts. Which is why when i craft if the materials are overly expensive I usually just reclaim and purposely fail synth if I cant get the HQ up to the mid 90s cause I have very little faith in HQ when im at even 80%. Guess I'm pretty cynical like that lol.

Square's RNG has been off since FF Tactics.