I understand the RNG is exciting and all but...

[Gallus]

It's getting ridiculous, for anything you want to do in this game there is a massive amount of RNG it's not even funny, you spend more time crossing your fingers than playing the game xD.
Take chocobos as an example. You breed 2 chocobos.

Stars of the offspring: Random.
Abilities inherited: Random between mother and father.
Preferred weather: Random.

And once you start leveling it, the fledging learns a random ability at level 10...and if it's not the desired one, lethe water and keep leveling for another random one.

Seriously, can there be a single, just a mother freaking single thing we don't have to cross our fingers or pray to god for it to happen?

[MilesSaintboroguh]

A friend of mine told me that abilities and possibly stats take from the chocobo that's a lower generation (by 1 to 3 gens I think), so you'd either have to get a covering chocobo whose generation is higher than your racing chocobo or get a lower gen covering bird if your racer's gen is a lot higher. I can't confirm if this is true, but give it a shot I suppose.

[MomomiMomi]

Stars of the offspring: Random.
Abilities inherited: Random between mother and father.

You can influence these, though, so I don't think it's that bad.

[Gallus]

I can't confirm if this is true, but give it a shot I suppose.

I can confirm myself this is not true.

[Hexy]

By the way, the stars inherited come from both your chocobo's parents and the cover bird's parents. It's not completely random, and you definitely have the choice of what birds you breed. I've bred over 15 birds and am currently racing a G5 and I've never gotten any 1 star stats simply because I don't breed my birds with covers that have 1 star stats on either side.

As far as skills inherited goes, it's a 50/50 chance regardless of pedigree. My first G2 inherited Choco Cure 3 from his G9 mother. I do NOT suggest breeding higher pedigrees however since the sheer cost gets very expensive. What I've done is teach my breeder birds Headstart to pass down since it's not a tiered skill.

If anyone wants to know more, you are welcome to contact me on Gilgamesh server. I'm part of a chocobo breeding linkshell and would love to share my experiences and statistics with anyone that asks politely

[Kimura410]

i agree with OP. ive been saying this since gold saucer launched. the rng factor that plays into almost all of the content is getting a little old. its fine for mounts and stuff thats basically cosmetic. but when it involves progression of some sort, or your "ultimate weapon", its kinda lame. nothing that will make a person more bitter and resentful to either the devs or their own friends or both, when they farm for hours on end to get something and it only takes another person 2-3 tries to get said item. for me, cards were the big disappointment. firstly, i dont want to do dungeons.trials ive done a million times for a CHANCE at a card drop. i want to play cards to win cards.



not only that, but spending hours on end playing npcs and not getting the card drop is pretty demoralizing. and it just seems theres no real incentive to play humans. i gave up because its not worth my time. a man can only take so much rng dependent grind. the broken tournament pretty much sealed the deal for me. i know its being fixed, but the big picture is that gating things behind rng almost every time there is something to gate just isnt fun at all

[Welsper59]

i agree with OP. ive been saying this since gold saucer launched. the rng factor that plays into almost all of the content is getting a little old. its fine for mounts and stuff thats basically cosmetic. but when it involves progression of some sort, or your "ultimate weapon", its kinda lame. nothing that will make a person more bitter and resentful to either the devs or their own friends or both, when they farm for hours on end to get something and it only takes another person 2-3 tries to get said item. for me, cards were the big disappointment. firstly, i dont want to do dungeons.trials ive done a million times for a CHANCE at a card drop. i want to play cards to win cards.



not only that, but spending hours on end playing npcs and not getting the card drop is pretty demoralizing. and it just seems theres no real incentive to play humans. i gave up because its not worth my time. a man can only take so much rng dependent grind. the broken tournament pretty much sealed the deal for me. i know its being fixed, but the big picture is that gating things behind rng almost every time there is something to gate just isnt fun at all

While I can sympathize on the demoralizing aspect of the RNG card drops when you win a match, that's the name of the game lol. Did you expect the cards to be obtained immediately upon victory? Did you expect them all to be made only available through purchasing MGP? That, btw, would be HORRIBLE if so lol. It was really frustrating to collect the cards I have, but it was definitely worth the sense of accomplishment IMO, especially having beat Rowena and Swift in getting all of the cards they have.

The card drops from dungeons though, you really DON'T need to do them. In fact, I'm mostly proof of that. I have zero cards that only drop from normal dungeons when I was on my quest to hit 60. Meaning I have no Tonberry, Siren, and Ahriman cards. I attempted to do raids for some cards (Hildibrand related and WoD only), but only managed to get Greg and Onion Knight, both of which seem to be fairly decent drop rates. Every single other card I have, I earned through TT matches or MGP. I've got nearly all of the NPC drop ones, including every primal and NPC card from the three GCs, Rowena, Landenel, and Hab. The only one I'm missing is Gaius, as far as NPC win cards are concerned. I don't have Vaan, so there's one that someone could do in short time with a guarantee. Again, with the exception of Greg and the Onion Knight, every one of my 60 cards were from winning TT matches and MGP.

RNG, in general, is a part of the MMORPG genre. It goes hand in hand with it. You remove it, or minimize the occasions that it exists, it's no longer much of an MMORPG. It's the nature of the game, and in fact, the nature RPGs in general. Can they overdo it? Of course. But right now, given how new the content is, I really don't think it's right to make that claim. Many of us have put a lot of effort into it, but we did manage to get 60+ cards already. Was RNG in our favor? Most definitely in some cases. But that's not to say that it won't be in yours today... tomorrow... next week lol.

[PotatoTree]

The issue with RNG is how it doesn't necessarily reward work. You can have one player grind all day and never get a drop, and you can have another player go up and get the drop on their first run. Yes I know it's a casino, and it's supposed to be RNG. But it's also supposed to be a game, and it's supposed to be fun, not frustrating.

There can be a balance between outrageous RNG and extending game time. As a random example, you can have a system where something like you need to win 100 times to have a chance at the drop, but if you go over 200 wins you are guaranteed a drop. That keeps the RNG in there, but reduces the standard deviation among players.

In the end, it's about extending play time for SE, and having fun for the players. Pure RNG is just frustrating to deal with, and may not even extend play time when players end up giving up or quitting. Something that splits it half half between grind and RNG may be a better solution.

Of course, no one NEEDS any of these things, but people want them and people have fun getting them. Keep in mind that no one needs to play the game either, we can take our money elsewhere.

[RobinRethiel]

By the way, the stars inherited come from both your chocobo's parents and the cover bird's parents. It's not completely random, and you definitely have the choice of what birds you breed. I've bred over 15 birds and am currently racing a G5 and I've never gotten any 1 star stats simply because I don't breed my birds with covers that have 1 star stats on either side.

You are lucky, when you get good chocobos for breeding. Just today I got four chocobos in a row with 6-8 1 Star Ratings and well, MGP do not fall from heaven.

The biggest RNG starts at the moment you are buying it and I never saw any good skill to inherit.

While I can sympathize on the demoralizing aspect of the RNG card drops when you win a match, that's the name of the game lol.

There are many ways. For example, achievements: win against NPC x y times and you get the rare card.
Or balanced luck, you can get lucky and gain the card before the 100th victory, but you will get it for sure at the 100th.

I don't care much about the Gaius card, since I got the 60 card achievement, but by simply farming MGP for chocobo racing, I beat this guy at least 300-400 times. None.

I also never even saw a single pony drop. I don't like their look anyway and would not roll on them, but hell...

RNG, in general, is a part of the MMORPG genre.

It's not. It's just a simple mechanic to avoid using better mechanics which need more work. You don't have to balance RNG, because it's all about luck/bad luck anyway, so who cares. This makes it easy to deploy without all the necessary fine-tuning a system without RNG would need.

RNG simply destroys many other game mechanics.

There ARE good ways to use RNG, for example, that you got difference mobs at different positions for a different experience, giving a world a living touch.

Example:
Good RNG: Chocobo Race: you don't have the same plates, chests and enemies at the same positions, but they are randomly placed on the curse, so every race is a bit different. The game gives you a challenge by a random factor.
Bad RNG: You get a bad items/weather, which will simply cost you 20s of time, without anything you can do about it. Or you are grinding an area for an Atma, but even after 500 fates, you do not get it. You did nothing wrong you can not do anything better in any way, the game just hates you.

Bad RNG is also often there to "buy some time". No content for the next year? Just give them something to grind and put some RNG in it. Finished. Yeah. Many MMOs and other games use such mechanics. It does not make them any better.

[Erudain]

snip

IIRC the are only 53 cards you can win from NPCs, 54 if you add Squall (since if you got all the NPCs cards you beat them all).
Yeah the drop is RNG too but at least that's fun (yeah right....looking at you Landenel and Rowena) or you can practice other strategies and you're farming MGP while you're doing it.

But, you're still RNG bound to get 6 more to unlock the 60 allowance.....either pray to RNGesus for silver/gold packs drops, dungeons/trials/raids drops, or win the weekly cacpot to buy Cloud and Nanamo.