A Random Comment

[axemtitanium]

Atma drop rate is low, but that's *extremely* unlikely.

Please, please PLEASE tell me you had a "Zenith" weapon equipped and you weren't trying to farm atma with just your unupgraded Thyrus. Because you MUST have a Zenith weapon equipped or you simply cannot get Atma, RNG be damned.

Also you have to complete the unlock quest. I've seen so many people complain about not getting atma drops and they haven't even flagged the atma weapon quest!

[MeiUshu]

I do have a zenith you know, yet believe it Atma isnt something I will do since is just frustrating to know that despite all the efforts put forth you get nothing whereas others without efforts or little compared to mine attempts get it in no time, there is no rational explanation to it, none, other then I am extremely unlucky and I am not the only one in this case, there is nothing rewarding in doing Atmas's grinding, none whatsoever, at least in my case, is just a loss of time and I stopped doing it, the only exception is me going beating a few mobs IF and WHEN I come accross fates on my way to something else.

Mei

[Cyrus-Wallace]

I'm one of these people who failed 5 attempts in a row with 90% of success chance or got 5 HQ gathering items in a row with 15% of success chance. Also, this happened today:



I know these things are fully random, when you always face the same circunstances, like the same drops in Coil or the examples I mentioned above, it makes you wonder.

[therpgfanatic]

There is nearly always disconnect between programmers and players over issues of randomness.

*From the player's perspective, the random is not equal because they spent 14 hours trying to get an Atma to drop, and someone else got it on the first FATE in that map.

*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.


In my limited experience working in a game studio, programmers 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".

Based on that forum post explanation, I'm pretty sure that designer is never going to understand the problem because he's not starting with the user experience; he's just looking at the numbers. He was tasked with making a random drop rate for the Atma's and that's what he did.

Someone should have told him it needed to be done in such a way that it won't take 36 hours of grinding to get a single orb to drop.

I did the Atma farming already, almost done with my Animus upgrade. But I will never, ever do it again for my alt Jobs. This content was designed to demand too much of a time investment for too little of a stat boost over the weapons that drop in raids.

[Mattlex]

What totally boggles my mind is that I can craft HQ items with NQ materials using quick synth... if i make a big batch of an item I will often get 1 - 2 HQ items. That just tells me that the % of quality when doing normal synths is broken surely it shoudl be 0% chance of HQ?. Too many times I have had 96 - 98% HQ and failed! Failing on that same 1-2 % chance soo many times is impossible! nobody can be that unlucky!

I don't know what the percentage drop rate is for the Mirror in Levi EX is but if it was even 1-2% surely i woudl have seen it more times than just once in 100+ runs if the same rules applied to how many times a HQ synth can fail on just 1-2%?!

[VitaminMT]

What totally boggles my mind is that I can craft HQ items with NQ materials using quick synth... if i make a big batch of an item I will often get 1 - 2 HQ items. That just tells me that the % of quality when doing normal synths is broken surely it shoudl be 0% chance of HQ?. Too many times I have had 96 - 98% HQ and failed! Failing on that same 1-2 % chance soo many times is impossible! nobody can be that unlucky!

Starting a craft with all NQ materials puts HQ chance at 1%.

I do think we remember the failures more often than the successes, and that sticks with our bias. I know for a fact that I've produced HQ many times off of low percentages before, but those don't stick with me as long as a 95/98% NQ that I'll be stewing over for a while, especially if it was an important craft.

Ya'll gotta learn to control ya'll biases.

[Kyros]

The issue here isn't that the RNG isn't random enough, it is that it is.

The system implemented here is complete a utter RNG, without any algorithms in place to remove outliers. Outliers is what make people feel bad, because it feels (And is) unfair. That one guy that took 60+ hours to get an Atma is going to feel like he got treated unfairly no matter how good his understanding of RNG is.

This is why games nowadays implement smart RNG. A common example: League of Legends. In league they implemented a system so that critical hits wouldn't behave outside the norm (Basically eliminate outliers). If you had a 5% chance, you wouldn't for example get 3 critical hits in a row, even if it is completely possible mathematically. On the same token, if you had 90% crit, you wouldn't see streaks of 15 shots without a crit (Which again, is completely possible on a true RNG).

We, the players, want smart RNG. Because it is unfair both to those who are hindered and those who are favored by the RNG.

[Sanne]

In my opinion you can only see the % amount versus random good when you do 100+ items.

But when do you do such a large amount of crafting? I only when I got a huge amount of low level normal ingredients.
Luck stays luck, an increase % like from 30 to 70 does increase it, in the end it is still about luck.

I do understand the frustration a lot, it made me stop leveling crafting, and only focus on supply missions.

Do I want to change it? No, I am no real crafter, I just want all classes to 50. So now with supply missions I will get there, but it will take much longer.
Give a better succes rate, and I would level all crafting classes so much faster. Which I don't deserve, in my honest opinion.

With atma I want to keep this random thing. I don't want guaranteed win, this is about patience and the will to go on.
While very frustrating, I don't want it to change. I am still busy with it myself, but I really would hate it if they made it easier.

[Felessan]

But when do you do such a large amount of crafting? I only when I got a huge amount of low level normal ingredients.

I craft 2* food for sale, usually 1-2 stacks per day.
Dealing with randomness is tough, but the first important thing ppl should know that if a random doesn't cluster good/bad results, it's not a random.

With atma I want to keep this random thing. I don't want guaranteed win, this is about patience and the will to go on.
While very frustrating, I don't want it to change.

I would suggest a general tips with randomness. Make breaks often, change a zone if no drops for a long time, don't let it burn you.

[LineageRazor]

Dealing with randomness is tough, but the first important thing ppl should know that if a random doesn't cluster good/bad results, it's not a random.

Unless it randomly happens to NOT cluster good/bad results.



Anyway, OP was an interesting read and pretty much confirmed what I already believed to be true about the RNG in this game: Random is random. Nothing is "broken", there are no "tricks" for getting better winning streaks, etc., etc. All such instances are just people spotting momentary patterns.

This post should be stickied to the front page, so every time someone comes up with a harebrained "If you desynth while facing west during sunset you're 10% more likely to get demimateria!1!" theory, we can point them to this post.