Square Enix's RNG

[Moirear]

This reminds me that there are still too many people that don't understand percentages or probability.

Less than 100% chance is not 100% chance, no matter how close it is to 100%.

50% does not mean that a specific person will succeed 50% of the time, it means that there's always a flat 50% chance of success or failure. You could fail 90% of the time even though you had a 50% chance of success every time, because it's not cumulative, but flat probability for each check.

Most RNG systems are not perfectly random in the strictest sense, but can seem close enough. This game uses one of them.

[Castillan]

This reminds me that there are still too many people that don't understand percentages or probability.

I understand probability quite well. Did statistics in University. When I frequently see sequences that have less than a 1 in 100,000 chance occurring, every 500 chances or so, and others complain of the same thing, we're either all incredibly unlucky, or the system is prone to excessively long sequences of extreme values.

Frankly though, I'd be happier if they just did away with the RNG entirely, and introduced some form of Fatigue factor, that increases with every action, and once full, the next action is going to fail. Various abilities increase fatigue more, while various traits decrease the rate of fatigue growth.


Do the same thing as well, but for HQ gatherings. When you gather, your HQ meter fills, and then once full, you get an HQ hit, and it resets with any full surplus carried over.

Such a system would remove the immense frustration that many feel with an RNG. I hate RNG's in MMO's period (excluding combat). If I'm a skilled artisan or botanist, it's only a matter of time, not chance, that I'll HQ something.

[Moirear]

I understand probability quite well. Did statistics in University. When I frequently see sequences that have less than a 1 in 100,000 chance occurring, every 500 chances or so, and others complain of the same thing, we're either all incredibly unlucky, or the system is prone to excessively long sequences of extreme values.

You're all incredibly unlucky, because some others are incredibly lucky. My results are fairly average.

That's just how it can go. And most RNGs are basically pseudo-RNGs because they're not based on natural phenomenas that are truly random, so they can occasionally be perceived as prone to extreme values.

You're doing the math on a few samples, but you'd have to gather the data from all players, all checks, all the time to get a more reliable picture of how well the system works at acting random.