Please be truthful with us...

[Vandril]

Any good RNG will have clumps/streaks. Otherwise it is not a good RNG.

To expand on this, RNG without clumps/streaks would be bad RNG because the lack of streaks would mean that the system of RNG is taking into account previous attempts and augmenting your next attempt in order to keep the results constantly close to the displayed amount. In other words, your chance of success will increase if you had bad luck and decrease if you had good luck. This adds a pattern to the RNG, thus making it less random and a bad system of RNG.

In a good system of RNG, the chances of every single gather attempt is taken in a bubble. Your success and fail rate history don't matter. Your previous gathering attempts don't change the chance of success of your next attempt. No matter if you've been having a good luck streak or a bad luck streak, the chance of your next attempt is still the displayed value. This "each attempt's chance is taken in a bubble" is what will result in streaks, and it's a sign of properly implemented RNG.

Edit: Note that what I mean by "good" and "bad" RNG is how true to being random it is. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to implement an augmented RNG system, only that it's "bad" in that it's not actually random.

[QT_Melon]

I do know that WoW added some bad luck streak protection, but FFXIV has done no such thing, opting for more pure pRNG.

[ChameleonMS]

To expand on this, RNG without clumps/streaks would be bad RNG because the lack of streaks would mean that the system of RNG is taking into account previous attempts and augmenting your next attempt in order to keep the results constantly close to the displayed amount. In other words, your chance of success will increase if you had bad luck and decrease if you had good luck. This adds a pattern to the RNG, thus making it less random and a bad system of RNG.

A non-gathering example, during the first ATMA relic phase, there much hue and cry for the RNG system to be changed to one like this and SE stuck to the pure RNG from the beginning on everything.
Know the pain, endure the pain, embrace the pain.

[Elamys]

To expand on this, RNG without clumps/streaks would be bad RNG because the lack of streaks would mean that the system of RNG is taking into account previous attempts and augmenting your next attempt in order to keep the results constantly close to the displayed amount.

On the subject of this, clumps/streaks happen in real life too. The gambler's/monte carlo fallacy has been brought up in threads about this before; a really good example of streaking comes from the exact situation that gave it the name "monte carlo" from the casino where it happened: the ball fell on black 26 times in a row, and people lost millions betting red, assuming that red HAD to happen after that.

For a more mundane example, I see it in my job (I'm a tech support rep at a call center - glamorous, i know); I would say that of the 30 or so calls I worked on today, 15 of those were simply people calling in to make an appointment to work with someone in person, and nearly all of those were in the morning. I had 3 calls in a row where someone refused to provide me with an e-mail address, a situation that rarely happens. Everything has to be taken in a bubble if you want it to be as realistic as possible.

[Ziggyzapps]

You don't have to believe in RNGesus, RNGesus believes in you.

[Riyshn]

Any good RNG will have clumps/streaks. Otherwise it is not a good RNG.

"Good RNG will have clumps" does not adequately explain why I have seen both events of [failed a 98% 5 times in a row] (0.02^5=0.000000032% chance of occurring) and [failed a 75% chance 20 times in a row] (0.25^20=0.0000000000009094947% chance of occurring). Especially that second one (occurred while trying to do the first time reveal of one of the logs in HW) is just such a low chance of that set occurring that it makes me have trouble believing that FFXIV's RNG is really as pure as they want us to believe.

[Frizze]

On the subject of this, clumps/streaks happen in real life too. The gambler's/monte carlo fallacy has been brought up in threads about this before; a really good example of streaking comes from the exact situation that gave it the name "monte carlo" from the casino where it happened: the ball fell on black 26 times in a row, and people lost millions betting red, assuming that red HAD to happen after that.

This is why to this day many(most?) casino's will put up a history board at a roulette table showing the results of the last 10-20 spins. When a random streak occurs the people who dont understand probability will start placing more and bigger bets on the other side because "red is due to hit" or whatever. They win/lose at the same rate they do on every other spin. And since the odds are the same on every spin, more and bigger bets means the house takes in more money.

[Ramath]

I have had this issue since the launch of 2.0. Yes, white knights will champion the cause that the RNG is fine. But it simply isn't. They like to regurgitate abstract non-sense as if theory, alone, answers for everything. But you know what.... I have yet to see anyone explain my repeated counter to their abstract garbage:

How can they explain the clear lack of the opposite possibility? Yes, RNG can spike low and spike high. No one is arguing that. But if it consistently spikes low (which it does! Missing between one and two times out of ever four with 90%, for example), why does it never spike high?

When I uncover items at a new node, I only have a base chance of 25%. I'll go through five to six nodes before I uncover the item. That's 0/20-24. That is hardly a result of 25%. If the white knights are to be believed, then why have I never seen myself uncover new items 4/4 times? If it spikes low, why does it never spike high?

This same issue is present in crafting. I have three different insanely dedicated crafters in my FC. They all laugh at me when I ask why I always fail to HQ an item at 97%. "If it's not 100%, it's 0%. Just accept it." They have all witnessed the same issue with their endless experience in leveling all of their gathering and crafting classes. Sure, technically and mathematically, with a 97% success, I'm bound to get a failure now and again. But not at the rate at which I fail, in practical application. And yet, I have never seen a successful HQ when I only had a 3% chance. When I asked my known crafting associates if they ever had, they all laughed me right off the internet. They have never seen that happen to them.

When these vomit-spewing RNG white knights can adequately answer that, I'll reconsider their claim that the RNG is correct in this game.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Anecdotal evidence is merely that : anecdotal.

If you want a good anecdote, how's this for you : quickly manually synthing refined materials for my weaver, I HAVE had 1% HQ (no Quality added, just Progress) come out as HQ rather than NQ. I've also had bad luck with Hasty Touch and only come out with 19% chance, or 10% chance, and still get HQ.

Or how about this one for gathering : on a +1 Gathering Attempt node, with 14% chance of HQ, getting 4 of the 5 swings to be HQ.

Or how about having a 6% chance of the fourth overmeld on crafting gear, and getting it first try?
Or how about having a 35% chance on the first overmeld on crafting gear, and taking 57 materia before one finally sticks?

What I am saying is - your sample sizes are WAY too small to mean anything. Come back and complain when you miss 25% things more than 250,000 times out of 1,000,000.

Flip a coin. Its got a 50/50 shot at being Heads or Tails, right? If you flip a coin 2 times and come up 2 Heads and 0 Tails, or 2 Tails and 0 Heads, would you call that "bad RNG"? Would you call it "good RNG"? Or would you understand that merely flipping it twice is two separate calls to the RNG and can go either way regardless of any previous outcome?

When you flip a coin, you are NOT guaranteed to have an exact, 50/50 split between Heads and Tails. If you were, it would not truly be "Random" would it? Because guaranteeing an exact 50/50 split would mean if you had 2 Heads and 1 Tails after 3 flips, your fourth would have to be Tails. Yet, you can easily get streaks of 4-6 in a row.

Now, imagine that you are guaranteed that 50/50 split, but you are one of a thousand people all grabbing for that coin for their own personal coin flips. Are you guaranteed, given that you have limited control over how soon you can regain control of the coin for another flip, to have a personal 50/50 split? Or could the coin come up Heads 100% of the time for half the people and Tails for the other half? The COIN is still giving its 50/50 split, but none of the thousand people are seeing it under those circumstances, are they?

Final question : you DO understand that the RNG in any video game is a lot more complex, and in any MMO gets called upon by a lot more than merely 1000 people, right? Your view of the situation, even that of your circle of 100 friends, is extremely limited. For another analogy, you literally cannot see the forest for the trees. You see the results you personally get. You hear about the results that others get. But you cannot, I cannot, no one can see ALL the results of ALL the RNG calls, even for a certain action such as discovering an Unknown item on a gathering node.

Oh, for what its worth, the specific questions you asked are the kinds of things that are answered either anecdotally, or through that same theorycrafting you dismiss.

[Silverbane]

What I am saying is - your sample sizes are WAY too small to mean anything. Come back and complain when you miss 25% things more than 250,000 times out of 1,000,000.

Don't be ridiculous, that's an absurd requirement. Depending on how tight you want the error bars to be, the quality of an RNG can be determined with orders of magnitude fewer samples. For example, a mere 665 carefully collected samples was enough to establish the rate of G/E procs for L58 mats to within +/-2.7% with 93% confidence. (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ar-L60-recipes)

So please don't make statements about things you don't understand. You're not going to convince anyone that the FFXIV RNG is a good one by demanding impossible numbers of samples for proof. Instead, you should encourage them to carefully collect a few thousand samples and share the results. Then we'll have some good scientific data to discuss, instead of dueling beliefs.

For example, if someone wants to craft a large number of items to 50% HQ chance and record how many come out HQ, whether the actual odds are near 50% (say, between 48 and 52%: close enough, I think) can be determined with 95% confidence by a mere 2500 craftings. Alternatively, you could determine if the true odds are in the 47 to 53% range with a 95% confidence with under a thousand craftings -- the less tight a bound you want and the less confidence you require, the fewer samples you need.

You see the results you personally get. You hear about the results that others get. But you cannot, I cannot, no one can see ALL the results of ALL the RNG calls

If the RNG is worth a damn, this critique is irrelevant. Any valid sample of the RNG, any at all, should have the same statistical qualities as any other sample or of all other samples of the same size. Not the same results, of course, but the same statistical qualities. That's basic statistics.