RNG: How fake is it?

[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.