Yoshi P, is this what you wanted? (Terra Branford Blues)

[thendcomes]

Welp, it happened. After 3 weeks, a ballpark 650-700 kills, and 145 Ultros cards, Terra dropped for me tonight.


(Only 134 shown since I didn't start keeping my cards until after my first farm session.)

I made many friends, and even some enemies along the way. I mostly stayed patient but sometimes lost my cool. I questioned my sanity, my faith, my life choices, and at one point I even submitted a bug report.

This wasn't a totally new phenomenon. It took me something like 25 windows to catch a Bombardfish of all fishes. I lost 34 Neptos before I finally caught one. Bahamut took me 18 hours of Elmer and one zodiac item took me 42 runs of Stone Vigil.

I know I don't need the card, I just wanted it. But to see a hundred Terras drop in the very same fights I was in, to see person after person join my party to get Terra within a couple kills, it ate away at me. Most people just laughed or cried with me, but some teased and taunted. And what was I getting through all of this? Feeble light and 15 soldiery per kill.

The thing is, I don't believe this should happen. Is this what Yoshi P wants? For some people to suffer while achieving their in-game goals? Nobody should have to play for hundreds of hours to accomplish the very same thing that was accomplished by thousands of others after only a few minutes. This game needs a safety net for their RNG. I wouldn't be mad if I knew Terra had an abysmal drop rate, but she doesn't. I was just abysmally unlucky.

FWIW, in my experience, Terra seemed to be roughly a 5-10% drop rate and Ultros is about 20-25%. The actual chance of not getting her in my first 650 kills at 5% drop rate was 3.3x10^-15, or .0000000000033%.

In conclusion, the horror stories are true, and you don't want to wish them on your worst enemy. If you don't believe it, then it simply hasn't happened to you... yet.

[ZellosWilder]

Took me 48 Ultros cards before i got Terra was over 300 runs I was doing my nexus lights on ninja though so wasn't so bad in the end but 134+...

If the card exchange MGP was worth more then it would of been alot better but 10 MGP per Ultros is a little low you can't even buy a gold pack with all those Ultros.

Terra felt more like 1-2% though I only ever saw 1 other person say they got it in all the runs I did.

[juniglee]

I totally feel your pain, after all my pony farming. I haven't gotten round to farming Bartz' and Terra's cards yet, but congratulations.

[Tsukino]

Holy crap.

I saw you several times during my first 30 or so runs. I have largely given up on the drops from trials myself, but this alone should stand to show that this needs to be fixed.

[Zanarken]

Is this what Yoshi P wants? For some people to suffer while achieving their in-game goals? Nobody should have to play for hundreds of hours to accomplish the very same thing that was accomplished by thousands of others after only a few minutes.

I 100% agree with you. With that said, where do you draw the line? This experience is apart of almost every faucet of the game. I've spent 23 hours farming atma right now & have only had 2 drop. Took me 64 wins against Elmer to get Bahamut card & nearly 1500 for Gaius. I still have yet to win a 3,600 or 10,000 MGP mini-cacpot simply because the cards I receive do not allot me the opportunity. I do believe there should be a safety net, but the 1% will be vehemently opposed to it & thus it will not happen.

[thendcomes]

I 100% agree with you. With that said, where do you draw the line? This experience is apart of almost every faucet of the game. I've spent 23 hours farming atma right now & have only had 2 drop. Took me 64 wins against Elmer to get Bahamut card & nearly 1500 for Gaius. I still have yet to win a 3,600 or 10,000 MGP mini-cacpot simply because the cards I receive do not allot me the opportunity. I do believe there should be a safety net, but the 1% will be vehemently opposed to it & thus it will not happen.

That's a really good question, and not one I have an answer to. Square on occasion has said that when they planned the RNG steps of the relic, they had in mind a certain amount of time that they felt was sufficient for players to spend on each step. Individual steps may take longer than others, but overall the length of time would approach a mean that they were comfortable with.

So if they know what the mean will be for the overall experience, maybe just chop it off based on standard deviations. If the process is involved over many steps (dungeon atmas, relic atmas, card atmas), maybe once your total farm time or your total win/kills/victories reaches a critical mass, make everything after that 100%. Maybe just cutting off individual steps after one standard deviation is the answer. I don't know if that's a viable solution for this game, and it could even present more problems than it solves.

[Zanarken]

So if they know what the mean will be for the overall experience, maybe just chop it off based on standard deviations.

Here is the problem:

From the programmer's perspective it is a consistent random formula because when you look at ALL PLAYERS drop rates, there is a clear pattern and enough drops are happening per hour (or whatever criteria they are using as the barometer) that the devs feel the system is balanced. Programmers however... tend to be the absolute worst people at designing any kind of content involving randomness because they look at it purely from a mathematical perspective, not from the individual user experience level. This is because of the unique way engineers think about problems; they tend to take a top-down approach rather than a bottom-up approach. They tend to start with "this is how our numbers will work" rather than "this is how the user experience should be".

As such, you have individuals like yourself who get completely screwed in the process. I'm in a similar predicament. Meanwhile, there are those who are blessed by the RNG gods, who have everything imaginable showered down upon them. It has become so commonplace they believe they are entitled to it & that everything is working as intended. The mere mention of a safety net, or any mechanism that might curb this disparity is quickly struck down by these individuals.

[RobinRethiel]

[B]H
As such, you have individuals like yourself who get completely screwed in the process. I'm in a similar predicament. Meanwhile, there are those who are blessed by the RNG gods, who have everything imaginable showered down upon them. It has become so commonplace they believe they are entitled to it & that everything is working as intended. The mere mention of a safety net, or any mechanism that might curb this disparity is quickly struck down by these individuals.

There are many ways for workarounds. You could even make it an active one. Some kind of personal "Luck Limit Break", slowly building up or just a safety net inside the code (like the one above this post), to smoothen this brutal differences a bit.

[Nova_Dresden]

It just wouldn't be FFXIV without RNG.

Just because something bad exists doesn't mean it should. Pure RNG based gaming can and usually will destroy the player's desire to play the game instead of finding something else to play which lowers your overall profit from losing subscribers. Zanarken hit the nail on the head.

From the programmer's perspective it is a consistent random formula because when you look at ALL PLAYERS drop rates, there is a clear pattern and enough drops are happening per hour (or whatever criteria they are using as the barometer) that the devs feel the system is balanced.

A pure RNG sytem relies heavily on the law of large numbers where when thousands or millions of players are grinding something the overall drop rate for the item falls in line with the intended drop rate averaged across all players. This however causes a problem where you end up with a decent sized group of players who fall outside the standard deviation and have a drop rate of 0%. This is where safety nets and timers come in where if the RNG doesn't pay out as expected within the time determined to be fair the rate steadily should increase until reaching 100% and providing you with your item. FFXIV has none of that and you are completely capable of never getting a drop ever if the game just doesn't like you.

Do you really believe people would enjoy the grind more if they knew they would get said item at this exact moment latest?

Absolutely. I've never seen anyone complain about books, light grind, or mahatma anywhere near as much as Atma and dungeon "atma". What I actually heard instead as a huge sigh of relief on both parts that the next phase was quantifiable and plannable. Pure RNG is absolute crap and defending it is just as dumb.

[Madigari]

Just because something bad exists doesn't mean it should. Pure RNG based gaming can and usually will destroy the player's desire to play the game instead of finding something else to play which lowers your overall profit from losing subscribers.

Well, I think I said just that in the rest of my post, but, just to clarify, I agree. I might not have started farming Terra yet, but I have my own RNG headache with the Moggle Mog XII card.