Please be truthful with us...

[Vandril]

They like to regurgitate abstract non-sense as if theory, alone, answers for everything.

It is theory, but it isn't abstract. It's as straightforward as statistics gets without delving into the actual math. The explanations given are how RNG works. I couldn't care less about whiteknighting for SE by coming to their defense, because I couldn't care less about what you or others feel about the company. The fact is that the statistics gathered in sufficient quantities in the past all point toward there being no quantifiable issue with the systems of RNG in use. Over a statistically significant quantity of attempts, the results trend very closely to the displayed chance.

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?

Fact: it does also spike high. If a system of RNG were only spiking low then the overall result of the RNG would not end up close to the displayed value, yet every test that records statistically significant numbers of attempts shows that it does. Since you end up having the chance equal to the displayed value over a very large number of gathering attempts AND you do get trends of failures, there MUST also be trends of success to accomplish this. So, assuming you believe what you're saying, a few scenarios are possible:

1: Your personal low spikes really haven't been countered so far, and your current results are lower than the displayed value. You're having bad luck. Eventually, you are statistically likely to run into a similar chain of good luck, but you simply haven't yet. It's theoretically possible to never get that high spike to counter the low spike no matter how many attempts you make, but that's possible in the same way that flipping a coin an infinite number of times and always getting heads is possible.

2: Your personal low spikes are being countered, but you just haven't noticed. As I've said before, the human brain is notoriously bad at intuitively grasping probability. People also tend to remember either negative or positive events more than the other, rather than in equal measure. It's more than likely that your brain and memory are working against you in how you perceive your RNG. Alternatively, even if your brain is an enigma that has a perfect intuitive grasp on probability, you may still not have noticed the high spikes if they weren't pronounced enough. You can have extremely strong low spikes, and then otherwise experience a very mild, constant high "spike". For example, you could fail at 50% chance 10 times in a row, then succeed at 50% chance 51% of the time over the next 200 attempts. Both the scenario of bad luck and good luck are "spikes", but the bad luck in this case is far, far more pronounced, and that's the one you'll notice and remember. You're much less likely to even notice that spike of good luck because it's so spread out and doesn't stand out.

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."

These same realities apply to crafting. The RNG is broken in neither. That quote from your FC crafters has been a crafter joke in FFXIV for a long time, but all it's saying is that it's possible to fail unless it's 100% and that you'll just have to accept what you get. Don't take the joke too seriously.

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

Start reconsidering, then.

Also, it would be in your best interest to stop with the "white knight" nonsense, as your reliance on slander belies your intentions.

Oh! As an aside:

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.

I've gotten HQ without increasing quality at all (1% chance) quite a few times. :P

Hell, I've gotten HQ at all sorts of percentages. 7% is actually one of my more memorable "failures turned wonders". I royally screwed up the rotation (pressed a macro by accident) and didn't have Reclaim slotted. Ended up with 7% Quality, and got an HQ out of it. It was one of those 2-star level 60 recipes for a piece of NIN equipment back in early Heavensward, iirc.

This doesn't prove anything, of course, but it's amusing to think about.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

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.

You're right. Statistics are not my strong point, I only took one class of them in college almost 20 years ago and haven't really used them since. One thing I know though - the larger the sample size, the better the results.

HOWEVER - you said something important here. "Carefully collected". That does not describe ANYTHING stated by anyone in this thread, on either side of the discussion, regarding the RNG. Its all anecdotal here.

[Silverbane]

You're right. Statistics are not my strong point, I only took one class of them in college almost 20 years ago and haven't really used them since. One thing I know though - the larger the sample size, the better the results.

And yet you posted:

What I am saying is - your sample sizes are WAY too small to mean anything.

That is dead wrong.
Even someone with the slightest knowledge of statistics should recall that small samples have meaning.
Actual, useful, meaning, but with large margins of error and/or low confidence (take your pick).

Flip a coin even once, and if it comes up tails, you know that it's not a two-headed coin, with 100% certainty, based on a sample size of one. What you don't know is whether it's a two-tailed coin.

The plural of anecdote is not data. But even one observation of a 98% chance failing, or a 1% chance succeeding, tells us something.
It tells us the dice are being rolled. The RNG isn't stuck at all zeroes or all ones (which can happen with defective HW or SW RNGs). The DM, rolling the dice behind the screen, may be cheating, but he or she is at least trying to hide that fact if they are.

HOWEVER - you said something important here.

I said a lot of important things, all of them based on actual knowledge of what I was talking about.
But thank you for your patronizing commentary. With your admitted and demonstrated expertise in the subject matter, you must realize how much I value it.

[Silverbane]

And now a quick note based on my 40+ years of programming computers.

Cyrypto-quality random number generation, the kind that, say, Google would use to create root key pairs for their crypto-based certification service, is very very hard. Any substantial variation from perfection makes the keys easier to crack. Amateurs need not apply.

But game-quality psuedo-RNG is dead simple. Knuth published a simple and adequate algorithm back in the 1960's, if you insist on rolling your own, but why bother? Every major programming language I know provides an adequate and dirt-simple to use pRNG function either built-in or as part of a standard library.

Could SE have screwed it up? Of course, there's nothing you can't screw up in software. But the odds that they've accidentally screwed it up in such a way that a reported 89% chance isn't an 89% chance is very low, and I don't see a reason why they would do it intentionally.

[IhzaMhaskova]

I've got a good system on the %'s.

95%+ gg.
90%-94% you might fail half of them.
<89%? gg you scrub, try again later

[ChameleonMS]

Every major programming language I know provides an adequate and dirt-simple to use pRNG function either built-in or as part of a standard library.
Could SE have screwed it up? Of course, there's nothing you can't screw up in software. But the odds that they've accidentally screwed it up in such a way that a reported 89% chance isn't an 89% chance is very low, and I don't see a reason why they would do it intentionally.

They could be doing something a silly as reseeding the RNG function based on seconds every time you strike. This greatly skews the true RNG nature of those functions. I am pretty sure they did not make such a rookie mistake though.

[Ken88]

What I've learned about SE's % system:

under 50% = ~10%
50-89% = ~30%
90-99% = ~65%
100% = 100%


Also, after reading some additional posts --- @ Vandril, your posts are full of assumptions and false equivalencies and thus make no actual sense and follow no actual logic.

[Elamys]

What I've learned about SE's % system:

under 50% = ~10%
50-89% = ~30%
90-99% = ~65%
100% = 100%


Also, after reading some additional posts --- @ Vandril, your posts are full of assumptions and false equivalencies and thus make no actual sense and follow no actual logic.

We're glad you've figured out SE's system to be some conspiracy of lies.

I find that people who complain about the RNG being grossly inaccurate are inevitably those who are fairly new to gathering/crafting and have not been doing so for very long. Every single time somebody gathers hard data, the numbers match! How can you possibly still say it's not correct?

[QT_Melon]

Also, after reading some additional posts --- @ Vandril, your posts are full of assumptions and false equivalencies and thus make no actual sense and follow no actual logic.

You dug up this post ignored a Dev's response only to throw shade at another player? What is that about?

[Ken88]

We're glad you've figured out...

Of course someone you don't agree with is new and lacks experience! Also can I see all these matching data records, like a link or something... because I've seen several and none of them match. ( I know you can't and don't worry about it, I won't be checking back here anyways )

You dug up this post...

Dug up? I wasn't aware that the first page was digging lol... and every post you've made on this thread has been a passive aggressive jab at people you disagree with. And yeah I throw a little shade, but only because like you and Elamys, he degrades others he doesn't agree with.

You three breed toxic communities.