Quote Originally Posted by CookiesNCreams View Post
RNG is not skill.
RNG is, however, difficult, in its own way.

You don’t know if you’ll be lucky or not when competing in a contest. Why? Because there are other competitors better than you. That makes it difficult to win the contest.

You don’t know if you’ll be lucky or not when crafting endgame. Why? Because the procs are not guaranteed to happen. You could fail it. That makes it difficult.

The term “difficult” is really easy to understand. Not sure why there’s so many people trying to uncover some sort of “secret” to it. dif·fi·cult
/ˈdifəkəlt/
adjective
needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.

That is the definition of the word difficult. Crafting needed much effort to accomplish, therefore it was difficult. To argue otherwise is nonsense, that is the definition of the word. Did it take skill? No. Did it take understanding? Only if you wanted to improve your HQ chances. But it was difficult because of the large amount of time/effort needed.

But now? Buy a few NQ materials for like 20,000 gil on the market, click a one button macro you found online and bam, 100% guaranteed you get a piece of end game crafting gear that can be used by all crafting classes. A few minutes of effort right now get you what would have taken dozens of hours to get back then.
Hmm, so I'm reading your definition here and it doesn't mention luck. I believe my concern was that RNG is luck and has nothing to do with skill or effort. Unless your definition of difficulty just means bashing your face into something over and over again until it happens to come out just right irrespective of anything you actually did. That's not difficulty, that's luck.

luck
/lək/
noun
success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.