Low probabilities of Triple Triad drops, big fish, etc. Grinds becoming unreal.

[Aeyis]

This is extremely lucky! It took me around 100 wins to get my first card drop from an npc, and then probably 50+ more to get another card.
The drop rate from npc is really stupid, thats why I never really got interested in triple triad, I dont think its worth it spending 3 hours for one card that im not gonna use anyway

Dungeon drops seem more decent though, I got mog king from 3 hm runs, shiva from 3 ex runs, tonberry from one wp run. It's weird that its easier to get cards from dungeons than beating npcs

Dungeon drops are just as RNG. Sitting on 25+ Garuda HMs without a card now. Managed to get half a dozen weapons and a feather in that time. Not seen a card from any other duty yet either, with about 20 of those done.

Triple Triad Card drop rate I can attest with fact is not that bad so idk what you are doing that you are not winning cards. In one day I went from starter deck (plus one dungeon card) to having 27 cards, all of which I won off of npcs (I also barely knew what I was doing since I hadn't played TT since FF8 in like 1999). Today I started at around 35 cards and went up to 46 or something. All won from npcs save one I got Ahriman from Dzemael dungeon. Yes, my RNG might have been a tad better than some people, but that is way too many wins of cards for it to be just all luck. Sometimes I even went to an npc and got a card first win.

That is precisely why people complain. Because you got godlike RNG to get cards that easily. I had to spend 3-4 hours just to get individual cards to drop. (with a high win % at that) The differences are just too great.


Basically, you did nothing to earn those cards and just got RNGesus to smile upon you. While it could have been the opposite: you had to spend many hours just to get to 30 cards, or to get a single rare card; all the while actually being pretty good at the game.

Spending 15 minutes getting one card when you dont even know what you are doing, versus spend hours when you win most of the time. Thats some godawful rng there.


For reference; I've had 6 cards drop in 11 matches (10 wins), and I've had 4 star cards drop back to back.
In contrast I've gone 30 wins without seeing a card.

[myahele]

id be happy if some of the low level cards droped from their respective mobs

[Havenchild]

This thread is full of people complaining about MMO's being MMO's since as long as it came into being.

RNG is luck and yes that's what it is. Don't like RNG? Go the grind route.

Dont want RNG or Grind? Get into a new category of gaming then. MMO's are not for you.

People need to stop havig such weak stomachs for every single grind in the game. I can fully understand the impatience from grinding and the RNG sometimes slapping you in the face but to expect otherwise from the MMO genre is equally silly. Pace yourselves or bulldoze through it, your only two options. Pick one and take a seat.

[Orrias]

Ok so I normally don't complain about things like drop rates. I farmed Atma for 3 relics, 2 with old rates, no big deal. I farm ponies all the time and still only have 1. But some of the RNG is sapping the fun out of this game. I've spent 7 hours trying to get Bahamut from Elmer mostly winning. I've spent 13 hours trying to catch Kuno the Killer for the Feast of Famine quest and I have full FSH BiS. I'm really into achievements and vanity items and silly little side quests but the grind is too much for some of this stuff.

As an example, I played all day today and this was my experience:

- Unable to catch Shonisaurus or Kuno the Killer (out of 4-5 30-45 min windows).
- Unable to get any Triple Triad cards
- Unable to get a PvP queue
- GATES were a bust
- The Cactpot was a bust

In short, I didn't make any progress towards any of my game goals and the frequency of days like this seems to be increasing. We're not talking about the game being too "hard," there's just too much waste of time on unfun tasks.

Anyway, I just got a PS4 yesterday and I'm going to spend my game time tomorrow playing The Last of Us. Maybe I just need a break for a bit but I'd like SE to consider that some players don't want 60 hour grinds just for a fishing achievement or 12 hour grinds for 1/80 Triple Triad cards.

I liked this game a lot more when I was just finishing most content by the time the next patch came out, but it seems SE is worried they can't release content fast enough for the people who play 12 hours a day and so are making the grinds worse and worse. This takes up more and more of our game time to extend content lifespan but a higher percentage of that game time is grinding stuff over and over and never getting anywhere.

Right now I can play 15 hours a day and hardly make a dent in all the stuff I want to do. You can cut back on the grinds from now on SE. PLEASE. With a little better odds, we can maybe see results for a 4-8 hour gaming session.

I don't mean to be rude, but RNG is RNG. As I'm sure you understand, time sinks required for MMO's to be persistently worthwhile/relavent for it's audience.

If you find specific 'grinds' overly unfair, then post in the applicable forum sections, and hope for a dev. team member to read and/or respond to your plight.

In the scheme of things, as far as MMO's have gone (and still go), FF14:ARR is very casual friendly and not downright tedious in it's grinds.

To be honest, you sound like more of a 'console gamer', that just wants to play a narrative, get things done in a relatively short time frame, and be 'done' with it.

If you were to finish all the "grinds" in FF14:ARR (or any MMO for that matter), then you'll just end up in the go-to city hub epeening your trite mount skins (or w/e rare item you can show), or just 'twiddling your thumbs' till the next patch/ expansion/ content.

[Adire]

This thread is full of people complaining about MMO's being MMO's since as long as it came into being.

RNG is luck and yes that's what it is. Don't like RNG? Go the grind route.

Dont want RNG or Grind? Get into a new category of gaming then. MMO's are not for you.

People need to stop havig such weak stomachs for every single grind in the game. I can fully understand the impatience from grinding and the RNG sometimes slapping you in the face but to expect otherwise from the MMO genre is equally silly. Pace yourselves or bulldoze through it, your only two options. Pick one and take a seat.

That's the problem. Oftentimes, there's both RNG AND grind, intertwined. Novus scrolls comes to mind. There are much better ways to incorporate grind, and if they really want to, RNG. RNG really isn't even necessary if a well made grind is in place. The Secret World did this well. Gave decent short term rewards for luck, gave good long term rewards for long term investment. Here, you can invest weeks of work and a ton of money into some things and get nothing, and someone else can invest a day and a little money into the same things and be finished.

Why not just reward everyone fairly, maybe extend the grind to make up for RNG being gone? Or maybe reduce the essentialness of having good RNG luck, but make it still beneficial, as I explained about TSW's system in my previous post?

[Purrfectstorm]

This is pure and utter greed. You think it's unfair you didn't win the lottery? Something that is/was/will always be 100% luck based?

Ignoring that nonsense for a moment - Personally, I enjoy them adding more grind to the game. Why is your point of view on the game more valid than my own? I like my gameplay to include some play in my game. And as for the Triple Triad card drop rates being "too grindy" as well, it hasn't even been out a week and you are complaining, your whole post reeks of I want it now. Learn some patience.

Should drop rates be increased a bit? Perhaps. But don't pretend you want anything more than stuff given to you with that attitude.

I didn't say it was unfair I didn't win a lottery. I was expressing my disappointment that everything I logged on for didn't work out. I'm not saying I'm upset about bad luck over the Cactpot, I'm saying I'm upset about extreme bad luck carrying across many different activities.

You're reading many other things into what I'm saying also. I said grind was subjective so therefore I wasn't trying to say my point of view was more valid than your own. Although you seem to be doing this several times: "Ignoring that nonsense," "That's just pure greed," "Learn patience," "You want stuff given to you."

You should know that I enjoy grinds (I've done THREE relics!) but there also gets to a point where even people who enjoy grinds have enough. You say to learn patience but I've spent 13 hours spamming the same 2 buttons to catch Kuno. I think that shows some degree of patience (and stupidity most like: playing a game for a large chunk of time without having any fun).

I'll repeat that I don't want anything "handed to me" (why is it that so many people think someone's wanting to see measurable progress towards goals means this?). I also don't expect to get all the Triple Triad cards in a week. However, it is really silly to expect people to grind for any of the cards if it's going to take 10+ hours to get 1. Do the math and it could be 800 hours (80 x 10). You and I have vastly different definitions of both fun AND grind if you think that is in any way close to ok.

[Miste]

That is precisely why people complain. Because you got godlike RNG to get cards that easily. I had to spend 3-4 hours just to get individual cards to drop. (with a high win % at that) The differences are just too great.

Basically, you did nothing to earn those cards and just got RNGesus to smile upon you. While it could have been the opposite: you had to spend many hours just to get to 30 cards, or to get a single rare card; all the while actually being pretty good at the game.

Spending 15 minutes getting one card when you dont even know what you are doing, versus spend hours when you win most of the time. Thats some godawful rng there.

For reference; I've had 6 cards drop in 11 matches (10 wins), and I've had 4 star cards drop back to back.
In contrast I've gone 30 wins without seeing a card.

I never said I didn't go a lot of wins with no cards during my attempts to collect. I've gone more than 30 wins on multiple npcs to get their cards and also there is a gap from another day where I went from 27-35. It took me godawful long to get Bahamut, like 100+ wins probably. If you learn a strategy that gives you a high win rate then you can win like 60 matches in like an hour worth of time give or take since it depends on the npc and how quickly you can place cards.

Also, yesterday when I went from 35-46 cards I had many npcs give me a lot of trouble, but I kept trying, and I eventually win their cards. My sample size is just too big for it just to be RNGesus smiling on me, do you not get that? Maybe others do not have as high win rate as I do, but I am fighting these npcs and formulating my own strategies for them mostly, and I don't give up if an npc doesn't give me the card, I go do something else, or fight a different npc then come back later.

Just because I happen to get cards at a rate that keyword: APPEARS to be faster than your own (you do not know how many hours I spent, even I do not know exactly. It took me 3 days of doing more focus on TT than other things to get to 46. You do not know my win rate on all npcs I fought, even I do not know this cause I did not keep track), does not mean I did nothing to earn them.

I looked up a list of npcs and what they drop and formulated a plan on which npcs to attack first based on rules or trying them out to see how hard they were, I fought them over and over learning how they play and which cards they use to formulate a good strategy to increase my win rate so it is uncalled for rude of you to say something like that, especially when my original post said nothing rude to the OP, I just figured maybe she would attempt to try more TT if she knew the drop rate is not that bad.

The OP said she played all day so I am saying there is no way she could not have won at least couple cards from npcs in this time frame unless she was losing way too often or getting draws, since you do not actually have a chance at their card if that happens.

[Yukiko]

SE should just implement smart RNG and be done with it. Pure RNG has never worked properly in MMOs as 'rare' items will always drop on the first try for one player and NEVER after 100 tries for another.

Blizzard saw sense when they modified the RNG algorithms to increase chances after every failed roll and it works incredibly well. You can get super lucky occasionally, but never so incredibly unlucky you just give up playing, and that's something SquareEnix needs to be aware of because I know people that up and quit the game over the atma grind simply because they had bad luck and never saw a drop after weeks of farming.

RNG can be fun in that it adds some unpredictability and tension to progression but it also gets out of hand when one player has an unfairly difficult time completing something just because they always get bad rolls. Smart RNG keeps the former and removes the latter. Problem solved.

Ok first: we do not have a true RNG (TRNG) and thats one of the mistakes we have (seeing same drops twice, tripple and so on... while some jobs seem to never drop).
The Problem is genrating a number individually for each player once each try... statistics counted then from total numbers and you will see there are lucky and unlucky players...
Why do we see then drops twice or more often on each try? Because it is counted individually, that means between your number and the number of your friend are many other players inbetween... (or lets say inbetween your first run and your secund run are many other runs from other groups)...

pseudo RNG (PRNG) have their advanteges, but you have many problems with the repeatable patterns... well, its a balancing act because server load. However, either you use TRNG or PRNG you need a net to catch the unlucky players, special in a social game (most MMOGs are).

So what can SE do?
Simple and blizzard is one of the best doing that: WORKAROUNDS and FAILSAVE-SYSTEMS
Workarounds are as you described with increasing the odds to get something... each try adds somthing to your unluck, that makes you luckier...
Failsave systems are like trade ins, you get something for each try and after a while you can trade that into your desired item... when you are falling, something is catching you...

Ever experience a time crafting when you are at 90% and still manage to blow it up? Three times in a row?

I know I’ve experienced some unlucky situations like this and thought to myself “Oh c’mon! No way!” all the while thinking the RNG gods hate me. If you’ve ever had times when you thought the same and questioned whether there something wrong, you are in for an interesting read.

Grab a drink and snack, because it’s time for a mega-knowledge bomb from Hiroshi Minagawa.

Hello,

Since this was brought up in the UI forum, even though I’m not in charge of it I will go ahead and comment about this a general discussion point.

I checked up with our main programmer “K”, and for FFXIV it seems like we are using 3 famous random algorithms different depending on the application. Naturally, everything is processed server-side, and the random seed differs for each process.

So in response to the question if there is a bug with the coding that generates the same random number if you continuously press an action, the answer is that the system implemented is such that this type of problem will not occur.

There were older games where you could use certain patterns to your advantage to beat the game, but in recent days there aren’t any games like this anymore. Probably.

However, the rate (random) process in games from very long ago and up until now -- not only for FFXIV -- have continued to be doubted by players.

From my perspective it’s just a clear cut case of chance, but this alone may not be convincing enough, so I will try to explain about this a bit.

This discussion is not particular to FFXIV and it is more about why random number programs are easily doubted.
(Of course there have been a number of cases where there were bugs…)

So to start off, I’ll lay out the essential points quickly.

A. The standard random number programs used by FFXIV, and other modern games, generate practical “true random numbers”.
B. With a range of trial numbers that can be understood by a person, because it’s a true random number bias arises.
C. Since our brains are very adept in their capability to detect bias as abnormal or a singularity, we perceive true random numbers as abnormal.

I’ll explain about each point above individually.

First, I’ll start with the program for generating random numbers.

FFXIV and other modern games use a random number algorithm (properly known as a pseudorandom number generator), which was contrived by some really good mathematicians and computer science people, and it was tested for a number of fields and is used as a solid algorithm.

As an example, I’ll explain a little snippet about the periodicity of the random number algorithm known as Mersenne twister.
“The algorithm provides a super astronomical period of 2^19937 – 1 and 623 dimensional equidistribution up to 32 bits accuracy.”

Got it? No? That’s okay.

Random number algorithms are part of a field that was built by the results of pure mathematics. As long as we the users understand that the random numbers generated are correct and practical that is more than enough.

★Those of you who know about random number algorithms and examples of problems in the past that arose in games, you’re probably wondering about something I didn’t touch on above. I will add an explanation to the end of this post.


Next is about “true random numbers”.

When it comes to random numbers there are two different types with different distribution patterns: uniform random numbers and normal random numbers. As the number of trials increase, we start to converge on the ideal condition.

Conversely, if the number of trials (sampling number) is low, bias arises in random numbers.

As humans, when it comes to the number of trials in games and such that we are able to grasp, it’s normal for us to perceive bias in the random numbers.

In other words, the premise that it’s strange that there is bias in random numbers is mistaken.

Of course, with hundreds and thousands or billions of trials, we will approach a distribution that is uniformly random and the bias will disappear. Unfortunately, this is impossible for a human to actually observe and experience.

Due to this, every time you observe bias arising from a limited number of trials you can’t help but think that something’s wrong.

Finally, onto our cognitive fallacies.

Humans are able to instantly determine and intuit various things. It’s often said that our brains are really good at this but computers have trouble. On the other hand though, there is an aspect to this ability that is weak, and when this is exploited it opens us up to tricks and deceit.

The pattern of deviation in judgment and illogical interpretation is known as cognitive bias.

A leading example of where cognitive bias arises is the Gambler's fallacy.

This states that when a person observes multiple events over the course of time, they will begin to expect that the results in the future will be affected by what happened in the past, and will either feel convinced that the results were due to a cause-and-effect relationship, or have a feeling of strangeness.

When you flip a coin 5 times in a row, the rate in which you land either heads or tails for the 6th flip will be 50%. However, our gut feeling says “this time for sure!” and we modify this with an expected value, and as a result when it lands heads we think “No way!” or when it lands tails we think “Just as I thought!” This is cognitive bias.

As I stated in b) above, the feeling that something is strange even though it is not is our brains are trying to create a cause-and-effect relationship that we anticipate, but the rate behaves in a completely unrelated manner.

(I’m writing this in a definitive matter, but please be aware that I am regurgitating what I read from a book.)

Cognitive bias is similar to a bug in humans’ cognitive capability, but it seems like it’s a system that was acquired for our survival to decide things efficiently in times of emergency.

The whole topic of cognitive bias is really fascinating, so if you are interested I recommend reading
this book.
　
This pretty much sums up why we often think something is up with the probability we encounter in games.
　

Bonus info: An aspect I didn’t touch on earlier in regards to random number algorithms.

Amongst the random number algorithms, one method that is often adopted that has a high cost to efficiency ratio is the linear congruential method; however, it’s well known by implementers that there is an issue where large bias arises.

In fact, there was a game that mistook the use of this function, and as the sample size grew larger the more bias increased. Meaning that just because it’s a well-known method doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s proof of it being accurate.

Additionally, even if a random number sequence is generated properly, depending on how the application uses this value, ultimately there may be cases where strange patterns arise.

So with all of this said, this is not one big post about the evidence of the accuracy of XIV’s various probability calculations. As I mentioned that the beginning of this post, the latter portion of this long comment is mainly just chitchat, but in response to the question as to whether there is something wrong with the probability in XIV, the answer is no, there is nothing wrong.

[Almalexia]

Fishing

Three words:

Faster Than Light

[Kiara1]

Dungeon drops are just as RNG. Sitting on 25+ Garuda HMs without a card now. Managed to get half a dozen weapons and a feather in that time. Not seen a card from any other duty yet either, with about 20 of those done.

You may be right! At least you get something out of doing dungeons and trials and if you get the card its a big bonus! You get poetics, soldiery, gil, light, zeta, items to turn in for gc/vanity, crafting mats and minions.
But playing the same npc for hours you barely get anything unless you are really good and win most of the time. In my case I usually go +/- 0 so im not gaining anything