This game has seriously messed up RNG

[LineageRazor]

Didn't read nine-page thread full of folks who don't know what random means, and folks trying to explain it to them. I'm going to toss in my two cents anyway.

The RNG in this game is working fine. It may seem like it's full of bad luck with all the bad luck posts on the forums - but that's because people rarely post their good luck, and NEVER their normal luck. In addition, you are much more likely to remember your bad luck streaks than your good luck streaks, so it can seem like that's all you get. That is perception bias.

I'm not against SE adjusting RNG with a "mercy" rule, stating that if you get a bad enough run of bad luck you get a guaranteed success. Some RNG-dependent games work that way. But I'm also perfectly fine with the "true" RNG system already in place. If you understand how probability works, than you start to realize that "nothing but bad luck" is significantly less likely to happen to you than being struck by a meteor.

[Elamys]

You tend to remember all the times where Hasty Touch failed 5 times in a row, and not all the ones where it succeeded every time. It's the same on AST, when people were arguing that Balance, Arrow, and Bole had a lower chance to draw than Spear, Ewer, or Spire. you don't remember the runs where all you did was draw the good cards.

My 4 star rotation gives me, with the worst luck, 7 chances to use a touch action. Usually I end up with 9 or 8. One of those can be a guaranteed Basic or Precise off the bat, with an extra for each ToT proc I get. So, yes, there's been plenty of times where Hasty Touch failed over and over and over and I had to Reclaim or did so poorly that it NQed anyways. But there's also been times where every single Hasty succeeded, and I'd say that those times happen about as often as the times where it fails a lot. Most of the time, I will only fail 1 or 2 Hasties per craft. 80% is 80%. You are just ignoring the times where the RNG was amazing.

[MN_14]

I think the bad reputation associated with RNG in crafting stems from players remembering incidents of bad RNG (6 or more misses in a synth) and more likely than not, they're probably mostly being tripped up by synths in which there are 3-4 misses. Those are normal occurrences and a crafter should be able to handle them.

Let's take a look at an 11 touch rotation. In this case, without considering RNG reducers (such as BT swaps) you can expect to see 4 or more misses around 16% of the time and 3 or more misses close to 40% of the time. With 11 touches, to recover to 11 stacks of IQ from 4 misses, you'd need to use precise touch a whopping 3 times in the synth (and you'd still wouldn't get 100% from all NQ on a 4* with or without innovation). Simply put, a crafting strategy that consists of 11 touches is not robust enough. But since you do see 3-5 misses regularly, you should be developing strategies to deal with them.

The crafting system is based on probabilities. Conditions vary so your methods should as well. The difficulty level in HW crafts is very very low, so I really don't see why there should be many issues. Start with 2000/13187 quality and 6 misses should not be a problem. Start with 4000 quality and you won't even need any of the Byregot's abilities on the majority of your 4* synths.

[Decoy_Wolff]

The fact that your gathering rate on Hidden Nodes is capped at 95% and you STILL miss 1 or 2 or even 3 hit sin a row at 95% is completely unacceptable!!

[Lambdafish]

The fact that your gathering rate on Hidden Nodes is capped at 95% and you STILL miss 1 or 2 or even 3 hit sin a row at 95% is completely unacceptable!!

Thats not how RNG works, let me out it into perspective:

95% means that if you hit 100 times you should get 5 misses, but that also means that if you hit 1000 times you should get 50 misses, and if you hit 1,000,000,000 times you should get 50,000,000 misses, the game is taking into account an infinite number of hits, so your chance of getting a miss is "infinite / 20" which is far from 0, and the chances of you getting some of those hits in a row isn't out of the question.

[Frizze]

The fact that your gathering rate on Hidden Nodes is capped at 95% and you STILL miss 1 or 2 or even 3 hit sin a row at 95% is completely unacceptable!!

Yeah, 3 misses at a 95% success rate is only a 1 in 8000 event. How many people across all the servers are making similar attempts in any given day? Its bound to happen to someone, it just sucks when its you.

[MN_14]

The fact that your gathering rate on Hidden Nodes is capped at 95% and you STILL miss 1 or 2 or even 3 hit sin a row at 95% is completely unacceptable!!

Missing 3 in a row at 95% is uncommon (I've rarely seen it if ever; maybe once), but if you're swinging 5 times at 95%, you'll see single misses regularly.

Statistically, there is close to a 25% chance that you will see 1 or more misses out of 5 swings. So on average, you'd expect 1 out of 4 of your hidden nodes to have one or more missed swings.

This seems to be in line with my experiences when I did gather before. However, most of the times I gathered at 100% so my own sample size is limited.

[Niwashi]

I used to think these sort of threads were simply people not understanding how random numbers can create streaks or simply people remembering failures more easily than successes. But having recently made a new alt and going through the early levels of crafting several times, I'm now not quite so sure.

It seems like Basic Touch has a far greater success rate once you outlevel the recipe you're making than it does before. Five levels above the recipe and it'll only occasionally miss (about as you'd expect). Yet a level below the recipe, it fails more often than it succeeds. The tooltip doesn't acknowledge any such dependency on level. It claims you get a simple 70% success rate, but the change was pretty consistent and predictable. What's more, it occurred only with the Basic Touch, and not with Basic Synthesis, which actually does seem to maintain its stated 90% success rate throughout.

So while the game seems capable of a good random number generator, I'm no longer convinced that all the tooltips and other windows that specify a success rate are really telling the whole story. It seems more like "Success Rate: 70%" can in some cases mean that if you meet other (unstated) requirements, then it will use a 70% chance RNG.

(And after all, it's not like all the game's other tooltips and explanations are kept accurate. I'm pretty sure the Active Help description of the armory bonus still claims it depends on how far apart your levels are, which has never been the case, and people have been pointing out that discrepancy ever since the game started.)

[Maxsdad]

Stat Trek's Random Number Generator is the closest thing you'll find to a TRUE RNG, what you see most of the time (especially in games) are called "pseudo random number generators" and, to put it simply, they work like this. Without looking at the faces, try to pull a "5" from a deck of 52 cards, and then try to pull the same "5"card from the same deck with all the court cards (face cards) removed and only the 40 pip (number) cards remaining. You're still pulling randomly for a specific outcome (the "5" card), but the ODDS have been manipulated by removing 12 of the cards. This is called a "manipulated variable" where you affect the RNG by changing the variables it works with. The game is just "fudging" the odds. Cuss it out and move on.

[IllyriaKnotfred]

I once missed six 97% chance gathers on the same node. I really should have bought a lottery ticket lol