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Fudged Item Upgrade Odds
rabidphilosopher
Member Posts: 66 Arc User
Dear Cryptic,
First, although I've been a member since 9/18, it still took several days to authorize me to use the forums. That's beyond frustrating.
Second, I saved RP items for weeks in prep for the X2 RP event. When I went to upgrade items, I burnt through 10 preservation stones in a row. Not on a 50% item. But on a 90% item. And it wasn't only me. Lots of other people reported this problem. I've never lost a single pres stone on a 90% item. 10 in a row suggests a design. I strongly suspect you fudged the odds so that people will spend Zen on pres stones.
Third, I don't mind spending money on a game. But I do mind it when you fudge mechanics to try and motivate me to spend money.
First, although I've been a member since 9/18, it still took several days to authorize me to use the forums. That's beyond frustrating.
Second, I saved RP items for weeks in prep for the X2 RP event. When I went to upgrade items, I burnt through 10 preservation stones in a row. Not on a 50% item. But on a 90% item. And it wasn't only me. Lots of other people reported this problem. I've never lost a single pres stone on a 90% item. 10 in a row suggests a design. I strongly suspect you fudged the odds so that people will spend Zen on pres stones.
Third, I don't mind spending money on a game. But I do mind it when you fudge mechanics to try and motivate me to spend money.
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The odds are not just for you. They get spread around to the entire playerbase. I would wager that if they were able to generate a stat list of ALL of the RNG hits in the game (crits and other stuff included, not just RP), it would be a perfect Bell Curve.
statistics suggests 90 times. If you have so far only made 20 90% upgrades you should have the 70 90% upgrades remaining.
On the other hand, I stole at least 30 of your 90% upgrades, which leaves you with only 40 left.
Yesterday, I did something simple and did not cost me an arm and leg if fails. No P-ward involves.
I upgraded a bunch of enchantment from r5 to r7. That involves 40% and 30% I believe.
Based on the experience yesterday, I found my luck was on a streak.
It started on keep on failing. Fail a lot. Like 6 to 7 in a row.
I took a break. Then, good luck came. It success 10 times in a row. I was also hurrying when it went successful.
Then, the bad luck came back. Failed 6 in a row again. Then, I stopped. Take a break.
Then, the luck went 'normal' afterward. One or two fails between success.
Based on my experience in the past (not just yesterday) I also found that I had the worst luck in 20%. I had better luck to do 10% and 5% than 20%. No, it is not scientific founding (just happens to be like that for me).
You should take 100+ attempts on a 5% about 1 in 168 upgrades. Having not done 168 upgrades at 5% but had 6 go over 100, I call shenanigans on that.
I've kept a log of every upgrade I've done in 2xRP for a long time.
Over many thousands of RNG chances at various odds, I'm consistently taking 25-30% more attempts than I should.
This 2xRP I got incredibly lucky at 25% took 17 such upgrades before one took more than 4 attempts (18 upgrades, 47 total attempts), but (5% 4 upgrades, 137 attempts) was less friendly. 20%s and 10%s were about 20% worse than average which is insignificant on the number of attempts I had.
The total 32 successes, expected 227 attempts, actual 273 attempts is fairly consistent with what I would expect from experience, if anything a bit better.
In the end - nobody knows. Since there is no realistic way to test the system, and the data is not available to be parsed, all we have is their word that the numbers are accurate.
My opinion is, the RNG gets stuck. best example is, go on a skill node hunt. Note down how many times you get it with the first try, how many times you fail and how many times you failed repeatedly on the same node. Your numbers will look something like this (number of kits used till success):
1 Kit Used
1 Kit Used
1 Kit Used
1 Kit Used
1 Kit Used
4 Kits Used
1 Kit Used
1 Kit Used
1 Kit Used
3 Kits Used
1 Kit Used
1 Kit Used
Most skill nodes have a 75% success rate, but the numbers won't add up to that.
Anyways, this comes up a lot and they aren't going to provide any acceptable proof that it is working. Just have to suck it up and understand that in general, the RNG gods will make it up to you eventually.
For example, opening those RP bags.
Using my isolated instance and hurry up when success method, I can get like 6 to 10 green in a row. No, it is not just once or twice. I got it very often. Yes, I slow down when I see a bunch of white.
No, I don't know what the chance percentage for getting a green should be. However, I did not get anything like that if I opened the boxes in PE.
Of course, the nature of RNG and our tendency to look for patterns in chaos could also generate "observer error" as we really have no idea what the RNG patterns are across every single RNG roll being made all day, every day. All we can see our our own rolls, and we have no idea how many numbers are being generated between each attempt at a skill node, for example.
Also, just because the chance is 50% does NOT mean that if you perform the RNG check twice you are guaranteed to get a positive result. Each individual attempt has a 50% chance to succeed, that is all the percentage chance means. I have had a 50% chance fail 8 times in a row, while my partner has managed to land a 1% chance using preservation wards in less than 10 attempts 4 times, and 1 time where it took almost 20.
All that said, when upgrading a 90% item, why are you using a ward? The actual upgrade components themselves are cheaper to buy than a preservation ward itself. You could sell the preservation ward on the AH, buy the green upgrade components and still have change left over!
I've have done four toons worth of upgrades to R11/R12/mythic. For the low percentage tries, I've had a few that hit early. I even once made two R12s with a single 10-pack of pres wards. Sadly what happens more often are upgrades that took four, five, or more times the expected number of wards to do. These outlier results happen way more often than I think it should. During the last double-RP, my last two upgrades were for R12s which I blew well over three 99 stacks of pres wards on. It was so aggravating. This double-RP, I didn't buy one pres ward; I bought 21 coal wards instead. Probably cost a bit more than the pres ward route, but I figure the premium saves some sanity and time.
I measured the results of 200-ish 10% upgrade attempts a while ago (not during this weekend) and got a result pretty close to statistical expectation.
My gut tells me the RNG might be streaky (though fair in the mid-term ... streaks of good and bad rolls that do balance out) but I don't have any evidence to back up that theory. To understand how that could happen (not saying it does), check out https://www.random.org/analysis/
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
There is plenty of evidence that RNG isn't flawed in this game. If anyone is interested, then I'll explain how and why.
I have no confidence that the stated odds are correct, and I suspect it's because the trials are not independent (ie if the previous attempt failed, the chance of a failure on the next attempt is higher than it should be), hence my suggestion that the RNG is not being regenerated. This lowers the overall success rate because you probably do some mucking around after a success which may reset it but not after a failure.
Interestingly, I used to play another originally Cryptic game (CoH) and the RNG there was dodgy as hell, I got streaks of 24 successes then 5 failures in a row at a mixture of 75/80/85% chances for example, I wonder if we're using the same one here.
Also, something to consider is how the player experiences the upgrade process, I usually take a break after upgrading a large number of enchants, due to being annoyed by the wonky rng.
By then I am in no mood what so ever to give any real money to Cryptic, but had the upgrade process felt fair and acceptable, I would be in a completely different spending mood...
An algorithm that generates a number or sequence of numbers, isn't random at all. The algorithm is always the same. Something is used as a seed to determine which permutation of results are generated from that algorithm (the simplest being a small time interval). In an MMO where an enormous number of results need to be generated, the algorithm can't be overly complicated and resource intensive.
Anyway. Failing 75 times in a row on 5% seems like TOO MUCH, right? WRONG. 75 fails in a row on 5% happens about 2.1% of the time - which is to say, we would EXPECT 2% of people upgrading a R10->R11 to fail 75 times in a row. Put another way, "of every 50 people upgrading enchants, one of them is me."
Consider how _fricking many_ RNG rolls are done server-side every second with people all over the place in combat. As far as I'm aware upgrades/lockboxes/everything uses the same computationally unintensive RNG. In theory it should be almost truly random given the chaotic interactions of human players with the generator. In reality... there at least _appear_ to be some server side deficiencies with the way the RNG is shared.
Unfortunately to really get a grasp on how the server passes out numbers, one would have to use it in upgrades thousands of times each in different places and situations _on live_. Testing on preview would not be sufficient. The moral of the story is, yes, the RNG is deficient, no, there isn't much you can constructively do about it, and likely, due to the codebase there is probably very little even Cryptic can do to introduce a second RNG just for upgrades without destabilizing the already fragile servers.
My advice? If you want to approch true randomness to the RNG, do a cupple things:
1) don't spam upgrade, wait a bit between upgrades to get a fully new RNG seed and calculation.
2) MAYBE -- and I stress this is a maybe that could very well have no effect at all -- go to a zone with lots of combat, say WoD. Some people report doing so makes the RNG more stable, I for one have noticed no difference, though I don't use it much anyway.
But at the end of the day, there isn't much you can really do. It's a computationally weak RNG by design. It has to be for the game to work without far more expensive servers. You can blame PWE for not paying for hardware, stripping Neverwinter profit for new game development, anything you want, but at the end of the day you're pretty much stuck with it.