Quote Originally Posted by Abyraz View Post
I actually agree with you both of you, and I suspect you are both hitting close to the same point.

The problem with RNG in crafting, imo, hasn't been that RNG exists, the problem has been that the RNG is either too extreme (failed attempts, -50% bad, 400% ex, etc) and/or that we are at the mercy of bad RNG.

What if there were some upsides to failing a step? maybe an ability that you can only use after a fail, or a stacking buff?
What if there were ways to manipulation the condition or at least predict it? (ideally with less extreme/binary points)
What if for consumables, instead of nq or hq, ending quality affects yield?
etc

In my eye, crafting is, or at least could be, a gambling mini game that degrades into a math problem as you out gear, or add enough starting quality.

To make gambling fun, players need to feel that at least some aspect of luck is in their hands, smaller delta between good and bad luck, and frequent enough so that it doesn't feel like feast or famine; I think we can mostly agree that current state of crafting doesn't hit any of those points.
Part of the issue is the alrogithm SE uses for FFXIV. It's one of the better RNG generators out there and is actually really randomized- over larger sample sizes. However, it tends to be streaky is smaller samples (which is why you'll see yourself fail a gather at 99% 3 times in a row one time, but HQ it at only 15% chance 3 times in a row the next time.