Crafting mechanics and probability engine...

Crafting mechanics are screwed, as far I have counted the probability engine doesn't match up to the %'s displayed.

Its streaky. I sometimes run through 3 - 4 crafts with the exact same patterns of goods or fails.

Yeah, its because you're HQing a non HQable item.

I think if its going to say 80% it should be 80%. If gear plays a factor in chance to land something their should be a stat or some description in it. I use the lazy mans syneth, hasty touch steady hand method, that being said there is no reason to bust over half my synething process at 80%, thats over 50/50 which makes no sense by probability standards.

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Originally Posted by jrbaetz

I think if its going to say 80% it should be 80%. If gear plays a factor in chance to land something their should be a stat or some description in it. I use the lazy mans syneth, hasty touch steady hand method, that being said there is no reason to bust over half my synething process at 80%, thats over 50/50 which makes no sense by probability standards.

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So this is an "issue" that has come up before. Someone notices that some of their actions are failing more then they think they should, so they make a post about how the RNG is broken and on and on. Is it possible there is an issue with the RNG model? Of course. That doesnt mean i believe there is one though. Players tend to jump to conclusions based on small sample sizes, and its human nature to remember all the times that things went against us more then when they went for us(i forget that i havent failed a 90% chance in 6 or 7 weeks, but ill tell everyone wholl listen when one fails three times in a row). The RNG of the game shouldnt be judged based on the last 10 items you synthed, or even your result over the last 10 days. To determine if the RNG is working as intended, you should be looking at the last 10 million actions and see how closely they match the stated percentage. If the devs want to run a report on this and let us know that everything is/isnt working correctly id welcome that. Failing that(i dont think its likely theyll share any such report), id tell you that every time a player has been convinced of this and done a focused trial theyve eventually reported that the percentages are more or less accurate(or theyve never shared any findings). If you record your next couple thousand results and do the math, youll likely see that everything is more or less working at the intended percentages.

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Originally Posted by jrbaetz

Crafting mechanics are screwed, as far I have counted the probability engine doesn't match up to the %'s displayed.

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This is based on how many samples?
Unless you have several hundred tries (as an absolute minimum) to compare against, you have no idea if the RNG is good or not.
You would need many thousands of samples to be able to tell for certain if it is working correctly.

To put sample sizes into perspective, you've looked at a couple hundred maybe?

When devs do a test sample they pull datasets in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 range. The RNG engine that crafting uses is the same one as everything else uses, stop and think about how many random elements there are in the game and multiply that across what everyone is doing in the world and DC. Think about how many buttons are clicked in those few seconds and you'll realize this isn't 10 successive fails in a row, this is 10 fails out of tens of thousands in the last 30 seconds and you just got unlucky to get bad results while others may not have.

RNG is RNG.

Nobody ever remembers when they get 3 Excellent procs in a craft.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

Unless you have several hundred tries (as an absolute minimum) to compare against, you have no idea if the RNG is good or not.
You would need many thousands of samples to be able to tell for certain if it is working correctly.

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Only sort of. In the long term over hundreds or thousands of synths I'd bet the numbers would be pretty close to the listed percentages. I don't think anyone is denying or debating that. The issue is the short term and how the game gets to that point.

I don't know how the game calculates things but the RNG is this game is way more streaky than in pretty much any other game I've ever played (in everything, not just crafting.) I expect random things to come in streaks occasionally, random is random after all, but I do not expect it to happen all the time. It's like the game tries to balance percentages by keeping track and swinging the pendulum back the other way if it gets too far off balance. That keeps the numbers straight over time but in insane in the short term. (Three 90% fails in a row, twice, in 20 minutes of crafting, should be a rarity, not a regular occurrence.)

If I didn't know better (and I probably don't) I'd almost make a guess that when condition is Excellent, that some under-the-covers modifier gets baked into the equation.
I would venture to say that I have a <=50% success rate on Synths when Excellent. I see "Excellent" and say "oh boy.." cross my fingers...

Just my observation, YMMV. Just seems that way to me.

I am talking about straight up syneth's no HQ involved, my high end crafting does fine by the %'s its the class I am leveling that do not. I am taking in to account the fact I go farm 100 stacks of material for 100 syneth's in that I bust ever reciepe while making something about 1 per syneth... heres the problem I us 3 syneth abilities that require an 80% chance to syneth. 1 in 3 is not 80% then we get to the multi bust syneth busting mulitple times in 1 reciepe. So..... I am probly averaging about 1 good 100% syneth every 4 syneths. So thats 75%. I play on East server random times in the day and it makes no difference. Busting rate stays consistent. Currently doing Arm BS Ach Wev and LW all at once 1 level at a time doing roughly 70 syneths a level. I have had LOTS of samples no where close to the devs. But again the percentages are off.

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Originally Posted by jrbaetz

heres the problem I us 3 syneth abilities that require an 80% chance to syneth. 1 in 3 is not 80% then we get to the multi bust syneth busting mulitple times in 1 reciepe. So..... I am probly averaging about 1 good 100% syneth every 4 syneths. So thats 75%.

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Ok, the game uses the term "synthesis" referring both to completing a recipe and to the action in a single step of that recipe advancing it's progress number, so it gets a little confusing where you're using which meaning. To avoid that confusion, I'm going to use different terms here: "completing" for when you finish a recipe with either a newly crafted item or a bust, and "progressing" for when you use an individual action like Basic Synthesis on one step of your crafting.

I think the problem is that you're looking at how often you successfully complete a recipe and expecting that to fall into line with the percentage that indicates how likely you are to successfully progress the recipe in an individual action. It won't, not if you're using three progressing steps in the process. If you're relying on three actions with an 80% success rate each, then you only have a 51.2% chance that all three will succeed, along with a 38.4% that two will succeed, 9.6% that only one will succeed, and a 0.8% chance that they'll all fail. So you should expect about half to have failures, and over ten percent to have multiple failures. That isn't going to feel like an 80% success rate, but it is.

Add in the human tendency to remember failures easier than successes, and we keep having threads like this pop up with people thinking the success rates are off. Yet whenever someone actually keeps track over a statistically large sample of individual actions, they find it actually comes out about right. (Admittedly, it has been a really long time since I've heard of anyone actually keeping track like that. But quite a while back, like maybe two or three years ago, a particularly long thread on the subject led to someone doing it. Their result was that the success percentages are right after all.)

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Originally Posted by jrbaetz

I have had LOTS of samples no where close to the devs.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

Add in the human tendency to remember failures easier than successes, and we keep having threads like this pop up with people thinking the success rates are off. Yet whenever someone actually keeps track over a statistically large sample of individual actions, they find it actually comes out about right. (Admittedly, it has been a really long time since I've heard of anyone actually keeping track like that. But quite a while back, like maybe two or three years ago, a particularly long thread on the subject led to someone doing it. Their result was that the success percentages are right after all.)

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Jrbaetz, you say youre leveling 5 classes from 1 to 70? Then you certainly have a decent sample size in front of you. Record your findings. Track your quality and progress actions(you can skip recording the 100% ones - we know they work right). All you need for each action is % chance to succeed and whether it did or not. This will prove to all the doubters that youre right(or more likely prove to you that the doubters are right). Because every time i read someone who says something like "I am probly averaging about 1 good 100% syneth every 4 syneths", all i can think is "human tendency to remember failures easier than successes".

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Originally Posted by TattersailNightwish

If I didn't know better (and I probably don't) I'd almost make a guess that when condition is Excellent, that some under-the-covers modifier gets baked into the equation.
I would venture to say that I have a <=50% success rate on Synths when Excellent. I see "Excellent" and say "oh boy.." cross my fingers...

Just my observation, YMMV. Just seems that way to me.

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This is the only "conspiracy theory" related to listed success rates that I sort of believe. It seems that on Excellent procs, it's like I have a baseline lower chance to succeed. I almost never succeed an unbuffed touch on Excellent.

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Originally Posted by Elamys

This is the only "conspiracy theory" related to listed success rates that I sort of believe. It seems that on Excellent procs, it's like I have a baseline lower chance to succeed. I almost never succeed an unbuffed touch on Excellent.

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And yet I've had several times when I've done it successfully without Steady Hand I/II, definitely more than it's failed on me. I will say that it seems to fail more on a high level item than a lower level item but that could just be the typical perception bias.

My personal beef is with Armorer and Rapid Synth. You can't get Rapid Synth to 100% even with Steady Hand II so there is always that chance of failure. My failures still seem more or less in line with the success chance in all the jobs except ARM. With ARM, I get about 2 out of 3 failing. I mentioned the situation as a joke in FC chat and the other omni-crafter went "you too?". He had noticed the same thing - his failures were pretty much in line with what they should be except for ARM.

It makes me wonder what they use to determine the seed for the random number generator on crafting procs. Bad seeds have been known to skew results. If the seed is influenced by character/account data, it would explain why some players consistently see a result outside of what's expected while others don't - they likely ended up with a bad seed.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

And yet I've had several times when I've done it successfully without Steady Hand I/II, definitely more than it's failed on me. I will say that it seems to fail more on a high level item than a lower level item but that could just be the typical perception bias.

My personal beef is with Armorer and Rapid Synth. You can't get Rapid Synth to 100% even with Steady Hand II so there is always that chance of failure. My failures still seem more or less in line with the success chance in all the jobs except ARM. With ARM, I get about 2 out of 3 failing. I mentioned the situation as a joke in FC chat and the other omni-crafter went "you too?". He had noticed the same thing - his failures were pretty much in line with what they should be except for ARM.

It makes me wonder what they use to determine the seed for the random number generator on crafting procs. Bad seeds have been known to skew results. If the seed is influenced by character/account data, it would explain why some players consistently see a result outside of what's expected while others don't - they likely ended up with a bad seed.

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That's really strange. I haven't noticed any differences from crafter to crafter. I might start keeping track of stuff like that though. I'm not generally one for theorycrafting and crunching numbers in the game but it would be nice to know

Yeap broke busted a 90% syneth about 45% success rate for a level 50 master reciepe when I am 65....

okay to clarify because I am saying "syneth" and I mean to progress. Now it says it has an 80% or 90% chance to progress... if its not 80% or 90% why is it labeled that way?

statisically that is impossible to bust that many progression steps if it is 80 or 90 %

You have a 10-20% chance to fail on each individual step. It's not "you do ten steps then two of them fail." That is a significant chance to fail on each of those actions. It's labeled that way because it is an 80-90% chance to progress.

I understand now. The progression is split over 5 steps for abilities that increase chance to progress. When I read it my understanding is 80% or 90% chance to progress when in fact it means spread over the 5 steps. Thanks was frustrated as hell with all the busts thinking it was the next 5 steps are 80 or 90% each.

It's funny because people interpret things differently, its like a union contract its all in interpretation. It sound really say "over" the next 5 steps. Thats rather more clear and understandable but again someone might interpret it differently. Thats the problem with the english language lol