Gathering and probability....

[DeceptionsWrath]

I also agree the %'s are totally off. For me i found that certain numbers are better than others like, 76% chance yeilds better results for me than 85% chance for some reason. 85% chance for me means i'll miss atleast one pick per node. But 76% i rarely miss. And it's not even just those numbers. 72% is horrible for me as well, but 69% gets better successful picks. 92% is also a horrible number but 88% is good. So i'm really not sure how their system works.

[Reiterpallasch]

ITT: We learn that 1-99% ≠ 100%

[meJojo]

I noticed this as well. I'm pretty sure someone screwed up a formula or two up and the number displayed isn't the actual gathering chance. It's not far off, but it's noticable.

[Astarica]

What are the odds of missing a 93% gather 14 times in a row? cause I did that nearly 3 times yesterday.

I'm not sure if the number begins with quadrillion or something else bigger, but either you remembered wrong or you should've bought lottery instead. Common sense says it is nearly certain you remembered wrong. If you're sure you remembered correctly, send the log to SE and they'd definitely be interested in how you got an event that significantly rarer than winning lottery twice in a row.

[JayCommon]

That is the problem with the gathering percentages, is that they are outlined to us as percentages NOT probabilities. Or if they are supposed to just be probabilities, that is never told to us. There is a difference between a probability and a percentage, however the biggest misconception about distinguishing between the two is that most probabilities USE percentages to quantify their "probability".

Probability is the probable (read: theoretical) amount of times something will occur based on outlining factors.
Percentage is the actual amount of times something occurred in a given set of attempts.

The problem lies in the interpretation of what the percentages in this game means, which is obviously supposed to be a probability. I mined Gold Ore yesterday with a 31% chance for HQ and got HQ on 5/5 swings. This is a probability with a percentage being used to quantify it. Equate this to weather predictions: there may be a 80% chance of rain and your area totally doesn't get hit by rain at all. Some unknown factors (more than likely wind, or cloud dissipation) caused it to not rain on YOU. It may have rained 3 miles down the road but you never saw it. This is a percentage being used to quantifty a probability.

Most gamers in FFXIV are looking at the percentage as a factual number, which isn't incorrect either, but misconceived as what you are supposed to hit every time. "I have an 84% stat for gathering so I should hit 84/100 times." "I shot a basketball and made 5/10 attempts; therefore I shot 50%"

None of this is incorrect, but since it's obvious that this game uses RNG to determine whether your gather connects or not, we have to assume that our % is a probability, and not a technical percentage.

TL;DR = Math is fun! And also very misleading...

[MachammondtheXXXII]

From what I have seen, the numbers aren't really random at all. they run in streaks and if you keep working the same place for a long time, it eventually evens out. It's just super noticeable when you miss several times in a row, and then later you'll hit the same about of HQs in a row and it balances things out.

A lot of it is confirmation bias, but there is definitely something odd with the RNG system.

[Nenin]

I'm not sure if the number begins with quadrillion or something else bigger, but either you remembered wrong or you should've bought lottery instead. Common sense says it is nearly certain you remembered wrong. If you're sure you remembered correctly, send the log to SE and they'd definitely be interested in how you got an event that significantly rarer than winning lottery twice in a row.

Yea, 0.07^14 is about a 7*10^-15 percent chance. I'm calling BS on this one too.

0.000000000000007%. lol

Just slightly better odds than 1 in 15 quadrillion.



The worst I've had was 16 consecutive failures on a 45% meld which is a 0.1% chance. Given that I've melded well over 1000 times this isn't very surprising.

[Lysandrus]

Yea, 0.07^14 is about a 7*10^-15 percent chance. I'm calling BS on this one too.

0.000000000000007%. lol

Just slightly better odds than 1 in 15 quadrillion.

Of course, if you look at it from the number of all gather attempts at 93% chance by all players across all servers since the game started (assuming the algorithm did not change during that time), that number isn't quite so unbelievable. Admittedly, it's much more likely to be a case of exaggerating the bad.

[Astarica]

Any pseudo-randominess is irrelevent in the context of a MMORPG, because you don't get to reserve your own dedicated RNG. If there's a MMORPG coin simulator and all it's doing is alternate between heads and tails while serving thousands of clients, there's no way any particular player to detect any pattern unless you managed to request 2 coin flips without anyone else making such a request in between. Even if any pattern exists, it'd be wiped out by the fact that while you're attempting to gather at 50% 5 times, thousands of players would've spammed the RNG with completely unrelated requests between your attempts and stealing whatever rolls you were hoping to get. The RNG is just handing out numbers on a first come first served basis, and you can be assure there's a whole mess of guys that's taking these numbers between any two actions you might attempt.

[Gucci_Charms]

Completely agree with many of the people in this thread. Gathering success % seems really off in this game. I like how I can harvest 40% items more successfully than 80% items from a node. Makes no sense.