A Random Comment

[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.