Real Math and Sq Enix Math - the twain shall never meet

I'm essentially a full time gatherer/crafter. I've noticed a significant disparity in the stated "success" percentages and real outcomes. Not enough room here to post in detail (I've kept a log for both crafting and gathering and have statistically significant numbers), but someone at SE needs to take a course in Binomial Probability. After farming 990 Rosewood logs today, that 93% success rate was suspiciously close to 78% -- and the likelihood of three successive failures (at 93%) is astronomical; yet, it happened seven times. Still love the game heaps, but how about revamping the crafting/gathering interface with accurate percentages!

Welcome to RNG

You know that random is random right? Even if it's statistically less likely to happen, it CAN happen.

Yup, I get it. I'm not really biotching about it -- I love the crafting/gathering in this game too much to get terribly upset, I just find it remarkable, random or not, that a 93% chance at success can fail sequentially as frequently as it does. It hints that this so-called randomness is weighted markedly against the player. On the flipside, when gathering, I'm so terribly pleased that 15% HQ chance is off in favor of the player! Too bad the same cannot be said on the crafting side.

Cognitive Bias

That 93% chance to succeed still has a 7% chance to fail every time.

Welcome to the world of RNGesus.

i wish you would post your data. would be interesting to see.

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Originally Posted by fortuona

i wish you would post your data. would be interesting to see.

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Steel Ingots, using a macro with five Touch skills -- going for HQ ingots (was not using Standard Touch at the time).

100 ingots made -- 500 touches

Result: 181 failed touches or 36.2% failure rate

Two sequential failed touches occurred 41 times

Three sequential failed touches occurred 19 times

Five of Five touches failed once

Total times HQ failed when >98% : 8 times

Total times HQ succeeded when <20% : 2 times


Similar results occurred on my Weaver when making Linen Yarn, as did my Leathermaker when converting Toadskin to Leather.

Regrettably, I did not keep records when my crafters were at lower levels; however, the precipitous number of failed touches is what caused me to begin keeping a log.

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Originally Posted by Ashelia_Ferron

You know that random is random right? Even if it's statistically less likely to happen, it CAN happen.

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That's the thing tho. This isn't true random. It's very hard to implement true randomness using computer algorithms. For all we know their RNG seed/algorythm could be completely bonkers, and the only way to verify it is with massive, and exhaustive tests.

In fact, I remember a dev once talking about their RNG seed having issues with repeats: It tended to repeat itself a bit too much. They said they patched it up a bit, but from the looks of it it's still repeating itself a lot. This is why it's rather common to see strings of 5x fails when statistically that should only happen once in a blue moon.

To the people saying "well random is random. It's not 100%" everyone gets that, the issue is the proc rates. When you think about and see how high the proc rate is for a 3%-20% chance to fail/NQ it's absurd. Since 3.0 the proc rates have worsened, and most of the people who are strictly craft/gather have noticed it. The real question is why does such a low chance to fail have a high chance to proc constantly, but yet the low % chance to succeed has an abysmal realistic proc rate? For example why can the 20% fail rate for SH2 + HT fail back to back 4/8 times in 1 synth for 3 separate synths but a 20% chance to HQ will proc maybe 1 out of every 200 or so synths? The same with gathering, 98% chance to gather and you gather 500 items but you miss about 45 attempts, some of them twice in a row. That 2% proc rate is pretty high. But yet your 12% chances to get an HQ only proc'd about 20 times during that whole session.
The game is too heavily reliant upon it's RNG system to keep people from progressing too fast. It's been stated by Yoshi P himself in interviews when they design something, for instance relics in 2.0, they have a time frame when they feel people should obtain/complete them. So really progression is gated behind RNG. On top of that we have the materia system where we need to meet certain requirements just to gather/craft things. That's all the materia is good for in all honesty, because stats and skills have no hold over RNG. Then there's the RNG of melding which is horrid. All in all you can have the most pimped out fully melded HQ gear and still fail as miserably as if you were in the NQ gear with a few melds. So is RNG a bad thing? No, it's not, not saying it is. But when it becomes something that is heavily relied upon and becomes a gate towards progression more so than skill, then it becomes a bad thing.