97 attempts and counting to upgrade to R11

btairborne

greywynd said:

But it is also a business. Improving the chances cuts down on the sale of coal wards.

Any mercy cap on the RNG system would cut coalescent ward sales to just about zero (save for the ignorant buyers). Basically, it makes coal wards obsolete, might as well take them out of the game. Now why would Cryptic do that? Right. They won't.

qexotic

kreatyve said:

Ok, here is a good analogy in common English of how the RNG currently works.

Let's say you have a box with 100 papers inside. 80 of the papers are white. 20 of the papers are red. (choose whatever colors don't offend you, whatever). If you draw a white paper, your refining fails. If you draw a red paper, your refining will succeed. You stick your hand in the box and draw a paper. If it's red, great, you got really lucky. If it's white - YOU PUT IT BACK IN THE BOX before drawing again. I think this is the part most people get confused on. If you were keeping that white piece of paper out of the box, your odds would improve greatly every time. However, that is not the case, and it may take you over 100 times in order to get that red piece of paper, because your odds are the same every single time.

To be honest, good idea but using a poor analogy. A box of papers could be sheets of paper and the removed sheet could be put back on top of the pile and easily pulled out again, along with other permutations. Better to think of a black bag of 100 marbles, all identical in terms of size and shape but with 80 white and 20 red. Shake the bag up, reach in and pull out a marble. Red you win, white you lose and try again. Drop the marble back in the bag, give it a another shake and pull out another marble. Rinse and repeat. As long as the marble you pull goes back in the bag before your next attempt the chances of pulling either colour remains exactly the same.

kreatyve

qexotic said:

kreatyve said:

Ok, here is a good analogy in common English of how the RNG currently works.

Let's say you have a box with 100 papers inside. 80 of the papers are white. 20 of the papers are red. (choose whatever colors don't offend you, whatever). If you draw a white paper, your refining fails. If you draw a red paper, your refining will succeed. You stick your hand in the box and draw a paper. If it's red, great, you got really lucky. If it's white - YOU PUT IT BACK IN THE BOX before drawing again. I think this is the part most people get confused on. If you were keeping that white piece of paper out of the box, your odds would improve greatly every time. However, that is not the case, and it may take you over 100 times in order to get that red piece of paper, because your odds are the same every single time.

To be honest, good idea but using a poor analogy. A box of papers could be sheets of paper and the removed sheet could be put back on top of the pile and easily pulled out again, along with other permutations. Better to think of a black bag of 100 marbles, all identical in terms of size and shape but with 80 white and 20 red. Shake the bag up, reach in and pull out a marble. Red you win, white you lose and try again. Drop the marble back in the bag, give it a another shake and pull out another marble. Rinse and repeat. As long as the marble you pull goes back in the bag before your next attempt the chances of pulling either colour remains exactly the same.

It's been rumored (and I have no clue the validity of this rumor) that if you are attempting the refinement really fast, you will keep getting a fail result, which is part of the reason why I said paper, because it's like you keep grabbing the same paper over and over if you do it too fast. I just kinda lost my train of thought trying to get it all typed up. But as I said, that's only rumor and pretty hard to prove.

feanor70118

btairborne said:

greywynd said:

But it is also a business. Improving the chances cuts down on the sale of coal wards.

Any mercy cap on the RNG system would cut coalescent ward sales to just about zero (save for the ignorant buyers). Basically, it makes coal wards obsolete, might as well take them out of the game. Now why would Cryptic do that? Right. They won't.

Fine. Get rid of the 1% chance to refine a weapon/armor enchant without a coalescent ward. There's the sales preserved.

The absolute obnoxious tedium of 33 attempts to refine an R12 even on the rare occasion that it does work according to the supposed odds is enough to make people use coal wards for the purpose already.

lordwhitetiger

feanor70118, I feel your pain! Last double rp, I went through 150+ preservation wards to go from rank 9 to 10. I WAS FURIOUS!

indalord

feanor70118 said:

vlek91 said:

urabask said:

IMO at the very least any upgrade that has a better than 1% chance should be guaranteed to succeed at 100 preservation wards.

That's not how it works (100x 1% != 1x 100%), here check it out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution

For 100 wards at 1% chance we have:
n = 100
k = 1
p = 0.01
q = 0.99 (also known as 1-p)
f(k;n,p) = {n!/[k!*(n-k)!]} * { [p^k]*[(1-p)^(n-k)]}
f(k;n,p) = {100!/[1!*(100-1)!]} * { [0.01^1]*[(1-0.01)^(100-1)]}
f(k;n,p) = {100} * {[0.01^1]*[0.99^99]}
f(k;n,p) = 0.36972963765
So, 100 wards give you a 36,97% chance of being sucessful

And again, what did I say about patronizing the reader with your comment on elementary statistics? Besides which, there's no reason to believe that Cryptic's RNG code works that way.

First, TY to trying to 'bring the devs' attention'. Ok ty.
But i do not agree on that remark ! This comment is interesting as is not so elementary for all and could bring Devs to answer more accurately (or not, or never...)

stark760

18 straight fails on a black ice rank 6 to 7, supposed a 30% chance. To upgrade 4 of them, I burned through 36 wards. That's a 10% chance, not 30%. I understand that you get unlucky once and a while, but every time?

greyhawk

The RNG us HAMSTER, I agree. But you can't discount that it can work in your favor sometimes...

At the risk if offending the OP, I'll relate a good experience.

I've made probably 50 weapon or armor enchants. Either making lessers or combining same ranks to make a higher rank. I've used preservation wards for all but five of those. I've never used more than about 120 wards on any one upgrade, and there have been at LEAST 15 of those upgrades where I used less than 10 pres wards. I've made a weapon or armor enchant on the tries 1-3 at least 5 times. That's less than 3 pres wards on 1% chances several times...

I've also gone through over 30 wards on 25% chances, so I hate it too. I just understand the situation and plan on spending a lot of wards lol.

I've only purchased two coal wards during 50% off sales, and the other coal wards were from the RNG of the Celestial coffers.

Plan to spend a lot or buy a coal ward. It's by design to make coal wards something people feel they 'need' to buy. That's their money maker.

Just try some 1%s with just pres wards, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Good luck!

jonkoca

So anyway, yesterday I levelled my legendary artifact to mythic with 2 preswards...

Sorry, I know, I feel your pain. Levelling r11s to 12 always makes me insane too.

namelesshero347

I blew over 250 pres wards doing R11 -> R12 upgrades. Only got two done. 3% my HAMSTER. More like under 1% rate for this batch. No more using pres wards for R12 for me. Going to save my AD for Black Friday coal wards. I would spend RL money for pres wards if I believed the posted rate was honest.

santralafax

Went over 100 pres wards upgrading R10 to R11.

groglast

There is no way the RNG for these upgrades is true RNG. It's some kind of formula.

If it's true RNG (as in if it says 5% then it's really 5% and nothing else in the equation), then they would tell us here. But they won't, because it isn't.

diogene0

I think I'm above 70 for one of my rank 11 upgrades. Still not done yet. That's what i call a scam. I want a refund.

stark760

The odds of failing a rank 6 to 7, 18 straight times is .70^18. Or 0.162% chance of ever happening, 16 in 10,000. Right after burned 12 more, a 1.38% chance of ever happening, 14 in 1,000. Odds of both happening back to back.....me going to Mars. Support's response:
"I can only give my best wishes and hope that the lady luck will smile upon you when you refine/upgrade. As a man once said "Luck follows the hopeful, ill luck the fearful". I could only suggest that you keep on trying until you hit the sweet spot of success."
So eventually, to even out, I'll get 3 rank 9's to upgrade to rank 10 on the 1st try each to make up for the 1st and then 2 more 9's to 10 on first try. So I'll hold my breath until I get 5 straight 9's to upgrade on 1st shot. Gotta hope for that "sweet spot". lmao

Odds of both happening, 22 in a million, or 1 in 45k. Man, that sweet spot is tough to hit.

tripsofthrymr

feanor70118 said:

People who've had a semester of economics or statistics and feel like patronizing me and all other readers by sharing something from your education, also please refrain. I've read it all before, I'm not impressed, I have more education in those areas than most and, again, I don't care.

If you don't care to hear feedback, I'm not sure the point of your post.

I have more than a semester of statistics. In fact, my full-time job is statistics based market research. You had bad luck. In poker, it's called a bad beat. Given the game population that we have, this will happen to some people with a perfectly unbiased RNG. I'm sorry that it happened to you (no sarcasm intended) but it's a fair outcome given the rules.

Sometime back around module 2, I measured hundreds of 10% upgrade rolls. The RNG result was very close to expectation. My gut tells me that it is streaky, but I didn't retain the individual rolls, only a tally of success and failure, so I can't measure the streakiness from that sample.

Note that streaky RNG's are not that uncommon in programming. For example, check out the behavior of PHP's rand() function (on Windows) compared to a true random number generator.

http://boallen.com/random-numbers.html

sobac

I'll take as example an upgrade from green artifact to blue (90%) and skill nodes (65%). So what I experienced so far (3 years of playing): in case one of those two mentioned above fails, in 80% of cases or EVEN MORE, i'll fail AT LEAST 1 more time. I've failed from green to blue upgrade... about 4 times (i have plenty of alters so i did this many times): 3 out of those 4 fails, needed 3 times to upgrade (i.e. 2 fails and then success) and one time it was 3 fails and success. Same ·$&$" with skill nodes... 65% they say. While i success more than said 65% (i'd say it's >80% which is good), if i fail to open a skill node, in 8 out of 10 failed nodes (just to put some sort of comparison), i will fail TWO OR MORE times!!! And yes. i've opened more than a thousands of nodes. RNG isn't working as true RNG.

feanor70118

tripsofthrymr said:

If you don't care to hear feedback, I'm not sure the point of your post.

I think it's pretty obvious that the point is to get the devs to either improve the RNG or give us a better alternative (possibly restructure the entire upgrade system, since the 10% chance of upgrading to R10 is really as small as it should ever get in my opinion), something I have tried to do with other threads in the past. As I have said repeatdly above, I have tried to discourage certain types of post because they are a nonproductive distraction. They are not feedback. They are irritatingly predictable noise, like finding the Macarena on the radio in 1996 when you were looking for news.

tripsofthrymr said:

I have more than a semester of statistics. In fact, my full-time job is statistics based market research. You had bad luck. In poker, it's called a bad beat. Given the game population that we have, this will happen to some people with a perfectly unbiased RNG. I'm sorry that it happened to you (no sarcasm intended) but it's a fair outcome given the rules.

Sometime back around module 2, I measured hundreds of 10% upgrade rolls. The RNG result was very close to expectation. My gut tells me that it is streaky, but I didn't retain the individual rolls, only a tally of success and failure, so I can't measure the streakiness from that sample.

Well, again, that misses the point. First, I don't believe this RNG is perfectly unbiased and even if it were, it wouldn't be ideal. The awful failure streaks shouldn't happen at all. We should have a way to avoid gambling with the RNG.

I'm at the point where I don't have any upgrades to make that are less then R10 to R11 or R11 to R12. That means every time I want to make an upgrade I accept the siege training quest, rest my chin on my hand and click on the upgrade button with my eyes rolled way back in my head waiting for the torture to end. To repeat my original post, for all of us endgame players, the option to simply spend 20 or 33 preservation wards all at once would save us a lot of time and trouble. 33 preservation wards is 165k AD with the ZAX stuck at 500. The other upgrade materials cost a R12 VIP player 375k-435k depending on how much you have to buy from the AH. At the rate no one really cares about the chance of getting lucky by using fewer than 33 wards. We just want the upgrade done.

Now, in mod 2 there was no upgrade chance smaller than 10%, so obviously you have a smaller sample size than you would need to test a 3% chance. Even so, if the RNG actually is fair, then what I'm proposing would ONLY BENEFIT PWE and Cryptic. People like me would rather just buy a certain number of ward than waste our time sighing over endless RNG failures. This means more preservation wards sold.

tripsofthrymr said:

Note that streaky RNG's are not that uncommon in programming. For example, check out the behavior of PHP's rand() function (on Windows) compared to a true random number generator.

http://boallen.com/random-numbers.html

Again, the point of this is that there are options preferable to streaky RNGs or even those that conform to the advertised odds perfectly. Whether this one does so really is NOT the issue.

stark760

I was just asked by support to define "chance", and told to buy coalescent wards if I wanted a guarantee...on a rank 6 black ice enchantment upgrade? Really? Chance/probability if a 30% is listed should mean "around" 3 in 10. Not 30 out of 32 fails/. Or 1 in 40+k "chance" of happening. A rank 7 upgrade says 25% success rate, I'd take that to mean 1 in 4. Not 1 in 13. I can at least stomach the 30+ failures on 10% chance of rank 9 to 10. At least the 3% chance of ever happening is at within range of the 10% chance to upgrade. 18 straight failures on a 30% chance, .70^18= 0.162% of ever happening in any legitimate scenario. And then I'm told it's one of the most exciting aspects of neverwinter....to get 1/3 or worse of the actual % shown? Sorry, I don't find getting shafted exciting.

btbsaul40

i'm with OP and his frustrations over the upgrade apologists. the system has always been terrible--terrible enough to run off every friend i have coerced into playing with me--but the failures are all the more glaring with wards costing an arm and a leg. i don't know how typical a player i am, but if you want me to spend actual money on this game, you're going to need either a polished, satisfying endgame or something that i want, not something that i need. i would imagine that spending cash on this game is less satisfying than buying a book of stamps or paying for an auto inspection.

superent666

+1 to grumpy cats´ request. ESPECIALLY (but not only) if the RNG is "streaky" and not "true rng" there MUST be an alternative.

nameexpired

superent666 said:

+1 to grumpy cats´ request. ESPECIALLY (but not only) if the RNG is "streaky" and not "true rng" there MUST be an alternative.

There is an alternative, it's a coal ward. Expensive, but working.

oggycz

I burned 36 wards for my first upgrade from 7 to 8. And few days ago I burned only 63 wards for 3x from 11 to 12. So RNG is a HAMSTER.

loboguild

tripsofthrymr wrote: »

If you don't care to hear feedback, I'm not sure the point of your post.

I have more than a semester of statistics. In fact, my full-time job is statistics based market research. You had bad luck. In poker, it's called a bad beat. Given the game population that we have, this will happen to some people with a perfectly unbiased RNG. I'm sorry that it happened to you (no sarcasm intended) but it's a fair outcome given the rules.

Sometime back around module 2, I measured hundreds of 10% upgrade rolls. The RNG result was very close to expectation. My gut tells me that it is streaky, but I didn't retain the individual rolls, only a tally of success and failure, so I can't measure the streakiness from that sample.

Note that streaky RNG's are not that uncommon in programming. For example, check out the behavior of PHP's rand() function (on Windows) compared to a true random number generator.

http://boallen.com/random-numbers.html

It's not about mathematical percentages, but about frustration. It simply shouldn't happen that you need to click for minutes until you can upgrade an enchantment even if that's within the statistical variance. The system has been designed to purposefully frustrate players and bait them into spending to speed up the process. I think that's pretty obvious.

It's simply a cruel mechanic. The system needs to get reworked so that the average Wards spend stays the same, but with way fewer variance.​​

nameexpired

loboguild said:

It's not about mathematical percentages, but about frustration.​​

If you put your hope into RNG (betting, luck) you are heading for frustration sooner or later.
The math is right, your expectation is wrong. And I am sure you did not want to hear this.

urabask

nameexpired said:

loboguild said:

It's not about mathematical percentages, but about frustration.​​

If you put your hope into RNG (betting, luck) you are heading for frustration sooner or later.
The math is right, your expectation is wrong. And I am sure you did not want to hear this.

You people are obtuse. He said that it's a bad system in spite of the math being correct. Games with unforgiving systems based on RNG bleed players and die. This whole "dur stupid the math is right" ignores the fact that Cryptic is dealing with customers on the other end that will quit a game in the blink of an eye.

micky1p00

urabask said:

nameexpired said:

loboguild said:

It's not about mathematical percentages, but about frustration.​​

If you put your hope into RNG (betting, luck) you are heading for frustration sooner or later.
The math is right, your expectation is wrong. And I am sure you did not want to hear this.

You people are obtuse. He said that it's a bad system in spite of the math being correct. Games with unforgiving systems based on RNG bleed players and die. This whole "dur stupid the math is right" ignores the fact that Cryptic is dealing with customers on the other end that will quit a game in the blink of an eye.

The OP, clearly states that the RNG is broken and buggy, hence mathematically incorrect, and he has more education in the area than all of us plebeians so we shouldn't even comment on his claims. So, no, others may have suggested that the whole RNG system should have a cap or a modifier against streaks, but it was not the op in his initial post.

Here for your convenience:

feanor70118 said:

Even doing this in an instanced lair since conventional wisdom has it that such places and the siege training quest are the best places to avoid being robbed by the buggy RNG. This is disgusting and frustrating and I'm sick of the way that the RNG is the only real endgame opponent in NWO.

I have made the reasonable suggestion before that those of us who wish to avoid gambling with the broken RNG should simply have the option

Commenters, please refrain from posting your "I got lucky with the RNG" stories. I don't care. People who've had a semester of economics or statistics and feel like patronizing me and all other readers by sharing something from your education, also please refrain. I've read it all before, I'm not impressed, I have more education in those areas than most and, again, I don't care.

I haven't seen such arrogant post, I think, ever around here.

nameexpired

urabask said:

nameexpired said:

loboguild said:

It's not about mathematical percentages, but about frustration.​​

If you put your hope into RNG (betting, luck) you are heading for frustration sooner or later.
The math is right, your expectation is wrong. And I am sure you did not want to hear this.

You people are obtuse. He said that it's a bad system in spite of the math being correct. Games with unforgiving systems based on RNG bleed players and die. This whole "dur stupid the math is right" ignores the fact that Cryptic is dealing with customers on the other end that will quit a game in the blink of an eye.

Sorry, you are aware that Cryptic is a company that has the players well being in highest esteem as every casino has the good fortune of the customers in their primary focus. No one there "bleeds players and die[s]", right? Might be the reason why there are only cheap shacks in Las Vegas.
Just because its labelled "game" does not mean that it is suitable for children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_gambling
"Problem gamblers suffer from a number of cognitive biases, including the illusion of control, unrealistic optimism, overconfidence and the gambler's fallacy (the incorrect belief that a series of random events tends to self-correct so that the absolute frequencies of each of various outcomes balance each other out)."

urabask

nameexpired said:

urabask said:

nameexpired said:

loboguild said:

It's not about mathematical percentages, but about frustration.​​

If you put your hope into RNG (betting, luck) you are heading for frustration sooner or later.
The math is right, your expectation is wrong. And I am sure you did not want to hear this.

You people are obtuse. He said that it's a bad system in spite of the math being correct. Games with unforgiving systems based on RNG bleed players and die. This whole "dur stupid the math is right" ignores the fact that Cryptic is dealing with customers on the other end that will quit a game in the blink of an eye.

Sorry, you are aware that Cryptic is a company that has the players well being in highest esteem as every casino has the good fortune of the customers in their primary focus. No one there "bleeds players and die[s]", right? Might be the reason why there are only cheap shacks in Las Vegas.
Just because its labelled "game" does not mean that it is suitable for children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_gambling
"Problem gamblers suffer from a number of cognitive biases, including the illusion of control, unrealistic optimism, overconfidence and the gambler's fallacy (the incorrect belief that a series of random events tends to self-correct so that the absolute frequencies of each of various outcomes balance each other out)."

The intent of refinement isn't even there to keep players gambling money towards success. It's there to prolong the amount of time players have to spend playing the game to progress. That's why coal wards are there. It follows the basic model of progression in all F2P MMOs, if you want to progress faster you spend money. You're trying to insert some sort of stupid gambling argument into a conversation that really has nothing to do with it.

micky1p00 said:

urabask said:

nameexpired said:

loboguild said:

It's not about mathematical percentages, but about frustration.​​

If you put your hope into RNG (betting, luck) you are heading for frustration sooner or later.
The math is right, your expectation is wrong. And I am sure you did not want to hear this.

You people are obtuse. He said that it's a bad system in spite of the math being correct. Games with unforgiving systems based on RNG bleed players and die. This whole "dur stupid the math is right" ignores the fact that Cryptic is dealing with customers on the other end that will quit a game in the blink of an eye.

The OP, clearly states that the RNG is broken and buggy, hence mathematically incorrect, and he has more education in the area than all of us plebeians so we shouldn't even comment on his claims. So, no, others may have suggested that the whole RNG system should have a cap or a modifier against streaks, but it was not the op in his initial post.

Here for your convenience:

feanor70118 said:

Even doing this in an instanced lair since conventional wisdom has it that such places and the siege training quest are the best places to avoid being robbed by the buggy RNG. This is disgusting and frustrating and I'm sick of the way that the RNG is the only real endgame opponent in NWO.

I have made the reasonable suggestion before that those of us who wish to avoid gambling with the broken RNG should simply have the option

Commenters, please refrain from posting your "I got lucky with the RNG" stories. I don't care. People who've had a semester of economics or statistics and feel like patronizing me and all other readers by sharing something from your education, also please refrain. I've read it all before, I'm not impressed, I have more education in those areas than most and, again, I don't care.

I haven't seen such arrogant post, I think, ever around here.

It's a good thing the post I was quoting wasn't from the OP : \

feanor70118

nameexpired said:

superent666 said:

+1 to grumpy cats´ request. ESPECIALLY (but not only) if the RNG is "streaky" and not "true rng" there MUST be an alternative.

There is an alternative, it's a coal ward. Expensive, but working.

No kidding. The point of this thread is that there should be a better solution. You're not even the first person even in this thread to bring up this 'point.'

kreatyve

feanor70118 said:

nameexpired said:

superent666 said:

+1 to grumpy cats´ request. ESPECIALLY (but not only) if the RNG is "streaky" and not "true rng" there MUST be an alternative.

There is an alternative, it's a coal ward. Expensive, but working.

No kidding. The point of this thread is that there should be a better solution. You're not even the first person even in this thread to bring up this 'point.'

That is a good point. What would you suggest if you were in charge?