RNG: How fake is it?

[chrillix]

I agree something else is going on behind the scenes. In the last week, on 6 different occasions I failed more than 14 melds in a row on a 45% success chance.
I do not believe the number they show for melds/crafts is correct.

[Logo]

So you get a craft going, or a materia meld set up, and you are about to hit the button.

You look at your gil and your material supply, and checked the market board and retainers. Your good stuff probably isn't selling for 3 days, maybe 3 weeks, and you know if you miss this hit, you're probably out quite a bit of time and money.

90%. Can you trust it? NQ.
5% meld? well 5x20 is 100, so 25 should probably work, right? LOL. No.

For those of us who haven't been Sleeping with Tyche on our off hours, there's probably something fundamentally fake about RNG used by FF!4.

The numbers they display are so hideously off, and the cycles so unreliable, you just have to ask, is anyone else experiencing this?

Math. Please look forward to it.

[Sibyll]

Why would anyone think that percent is out of 100?

If I had to guess it's because percent literally translates to per 100 and because in school people are generally taught that x% is the same as x/100. Not everyone has taken a statistics course and understand sample sizes.

Some one has already stated this, but I don't see why they even bother showing the percentage if the statistics are going to be based on 50,000 tries. At that point what meaning does this have? With the exception of Good/Excellent procs, the way RNG is handled in melding/crafting is very binary and that's part of the reason it's so easy to complain about. If you fail 20 melds on a 45% chance there isn't much you can do. If you fail 80% of your Hasty Touch + Steady Hand II spam and then fail your Reclaim, there isn't much you can do.

[Shadygrove]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the mistaken belief that if something happens more frequently than normal during some period, then it will happen less frequently in the future, or that if something happens less frequently than normal during some period, then it will happen more frequently in the future (presumably as a means of balancing nature). In situations where what is being observed is truly random (i.e. independent trials of a random process), this belief, though appealing to the human mind, is false. This fallacy can arise in many practical situations although it is most strongly associated with gambling where such mistakes are common among players.

[Giantbane]

LOL, that's not how statistics works man, not even close. 5% is abysmally low and if you manage to get it in 20 attempts than you are very VERY lucky.

This is also false.

There's a ~65% chance you'll get it in 20 attempts with a 5% success rate. That makes it very possible to not get it in 20 attempts, but you're still unlucky if you don't stick your meld by then as the chance of success is almost double that of failure.

I don't see why they don't just make higher melds take more materia of that type and tier rather than continue to use dice rolls. For example, first overmeld would be x2, second overmeld would be x4, third overmeld would be x8, 4th overmeld would be x16.

I mean it's not like RNG materia melding is a deep and engrossing gameplay mechanic, unless you are a masochist. Either that or rework it into a mini-game like crafting so there is some type of element that the player interacts with besides throwing money at the Market Board.

I wish it were more like this at least. It's fine to have some RNG in things as long as there's some kind of reasonable upper bound to the failure rate. RNG can be fun, but there's a certain point where you fail too often that it really detracts from your enjoyment of the game.

For instance, lets say that overmelds were a progress bar instead of pass fail. When you meld it would fill up that bar by some random amount, which would be dependent on how far you were overmelding.

So say, first overmeld, instead of having 40% (or whatever) chance at full success, will give some random amount of progress between 25% to 100%. That way you can randomly get a meld where you complete it in 1 attempt, but worst case will only take you 4 attempts. To take this further, they could skew the results such that it will more often end up closer to that 25% progress instead of the 100% progress depending on how they want to control the output so you're not getting a success in 1-2 melds too often (whatever the devs determine is too often).

While I enjoy the customization options provided by melded equipment, the heavy RNG makes the whole process very off putting. I would enjoy the process more (while still feeling like I was working toward the equipment) if I knew there was some lower bound for my failure rate. If you've failed a meld 40 times in a row, the knowledge you have the same chance of repeating that feat makes you really want to walk away from the game.

[nbiscuitz]

My personal feelings is that they probably have some sort of hidden skewed factor (math function) on the percentage. like high success rate but it has low factor, it forces Player to work against the factor. Just like the crafting quality where 1000/2000 is 50% of the bar but not 50% quality. Only 100% is absolute.

The function is probably something like y=x^2/100. Here is a quick excel calculation. SR is the success rate we see, the factor is what I feel it's happening behind the scene.

SR factor
1 0.01
2 0.04
3 0.09
4 0.16
5 0.25
10 1
12 1.44
14 1.96
16 2.56
18 3.24
20 4
25 6.25
30 9
40 16
50 25
60 36
70 49
80 64
90 81
100 100

I may be speak nonsense, just a thought.

[CallaQ]

The explanation doesn't have to be so complicated and mathy. If you have a 40 percent chance at Whatever, that's 40 out of 100, or 400 out of 1000, or 4000 out of... etc. We don't know the sample size. For the sake of this example we'll stick with 40 out of 100. So you make your attempt and fail. Here's where a lot of people go wrong. Just because you had a 40 in 100 chance and your first try failed, that does NOT mean your second try is now a 41 in 100 chance, your third a 42 in 100, and so on until you're at a 99 out of 100 chance because you've failed 59 times. That's not how it works. It doesn't mean that your chance of success gets higher with every failure. Your second attempt has the exact same odds. Every single attempt has the exact same odds totally regardless of how many times you've tried.

[Sibyll]

I mean they could just implement PRD if they really wanted to keep the RNG factor in the game, but I think it'd be better to just find a more engrossing mechanic than RNG.

RNG is a very binary design. You succeed or you fail and the player has little impact on this. Even in crafting when you can use skills like Steady Hand and Steady Hand II I feel like RNG dictates my success far more than it should.

I'd like to see more instances of Good/Excellent condition proccing and less percentage based succeed/fail scenarios in crafting. I'd like to see materia melding revamped to either be a mini-game similar to crafting or a scaling system where progressive overmelds require more materia of a given type/tier to successfully meld. Just anything to make it so that my choices dictate whether I succeed or fail rather than some dice rolls behind the curtains.

[nbiscuitz]

of course. its called a mutually exclusive event. But the problem is how does the game translate that 40% success rate to a 0 (fail) or 1 (success), how the game decides that. Does it roll a random number between 0 to 100 then compare to your success rate, or calculate it somehow.

[Razzlie]

Fun fact: The odds of success for something with a 5% success rate after 20 tries is 64.15%. In order to get enough tries so that the odds of failure become insignificant is 69. Have fun.

Also note that no matter how many tries you attempt, the odds of success will never be 100%, just ever closer to 100, but never touching.

Oh my god.

Somebody who understands dice rolls and RNG!