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Essay over The Watcher Set's RNG, or "the crazyness of NW chances"
gormenghast1
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 88 Arc User
So, even if there have been different threads regarding the Watcher's Weapon Set I think the discussion over one of the most relevant issues regarding it deserves a thread on its own.
Some time has passed since the release of all the content related to expeditions that allows to obtain said weapons and it has been possible to infer the magnitude of the chance to obtain those weapons. Some small math to explain:
10%: the chances to see a wraith spawn in a single Master Expedition run. Summing up personal experiences of many players running lots of expeditions per day, it appears quite reasonable to set the odds of summoning a wraith around the 1 in 10 chance. Obviously there is no possibility to confirm the exact number and personal experiences can vary greatly, but a growing statistical population of data tend to converge on that number.
20%: the chances to be one in the group to be awarded a single weapon of the Watcher's Set. This is easily confirmed, as only one of the 5 players running the Master Expedition and successful in defeating the special boss will obtain one of the Watcher's weapons.
6,25%: chance of being awarded a particular weapon/offhand: there are 8 classes at the moment in NW, each with its own mainhand and offhand weapon. This means a particular mainhand or offhand represents 1/16 of all the items in that particular class, or 6,25%. The drop from special bosses in ME is random and can award any weapon (mainhand or offhand) of any class to any single player in the group.
0,125%: the chances to drop a particular mainhand/offhand, class related weapon in any run of a ME. It means each player has 1 chance in 800 to run a single Master Expedition and find the mainhand or offhand he/she's looking for.
Here, there are our chances. Obviously, any player without a single item of the weapon set has double the chance to get one of his liking (either mainhand or offhand), which brings the chance of obtaining one at 1 in 400 runs. The second one will have the 1 in 800 runs chance shown before, as duplicates will be useless as other classes weapons.
For a full set, statistically speaking, each player will need around 1200 successful runs and sucessful fights the the special bosses. Naturally this is statistics, so there will be people that won't ever get to see a single Watcher weapon ever, even running ME beyond the boundaries of mental sanity. Let's say that a player will run 3 ME per character per day; this means that it would take the most people around 400 days to get the set. Yep, 1 year and 1 month if you represent the middle range of luck in the population.
On top of that, the obvious lack of manpower in the dev team working at Cryptic for the other project on which the company is invested on means we don't have to get any lore tactics over the special bosses in expeditions. There are some mechanics related to those fights that seem to be impossible to overcome, such as 30 millions heals by bosses low on health; any fight gives limited chances to be studied, as they are not repeatable after a wipe. This lowers even more the chances for a group to get a single Watcher weapon in that 1 in 10 run where the wraith will care to show up.
Personally I find all of this very disheartening and frustrating. The set has a nice look to it but it's in no way so dramatically different from the others in mod 16 to put us in such a predicament to get it. Whoever decided that was ok to have such a matrioska of RNG for those weapons has either overestimated the worth of that set, the will of players to invest an insane amount of time just for that or has not considered in the least the real numbers when compiling the related code.
Nobody will have the need of those weapons in more than a year from now. Nobody will likely grind for them with such miserable chances. All the mess related to the "easter egg" has already let part of the community feel like fools for thinking that there was a puzzle related to it (well, there has been a moderator to lead everyone on that assumption but nobody corrected him); now that the set is "available", chances are that in a year someone will have it for trasmutes over the weapon sets coming out in mod 17 or 18.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is not what we heard in the streams or read on the forum about "not frustrating the player base, as we care for you and want you to enjoy our game". Please devs, reconsider your choices.
Some time has passed since the release of all the content related to expeditions that allows to obtain said weapons and it has been possible to infer the magnitude of the chance to obtain those weapons. Some small math to explain:
10%: the chances to see a wraith spawn in a single Master Expedition run. Summing up personal experiences of many players running lots of expeditions per day, it appears quite reasonable to set the odds of summoning a wraith around the 1 in 10 chance. Obviously there is no possibility to confirm the exact number and personal experiences can vary greatly, but a growing statistical population of data tend to converge on that number.
20%: the chances to be one in the group to be awarded a single weapon of the Watcher's Set. This is easily confirmed, as only one of the 5 players running the Master Expedition and successful in defeating the special boss will obtain one of the Watcher's weapons.
6,25%: chance of being awarded a particular weapon/offhand: there are 8 classes at the moment in NW, each with its own mainhand and offhand weapon. This means a particular mainhand or offhand represents 1/16 of all the items in that particular class, or 6,25%. The drop from special bosses in ME is random and can award any weapon (mainhand or offhand) of any class to any single player in the group.
0,125%: the chances to drop a particular mainhand/offhand, class related weapon in any run of a ME. It means each player has 1 chance in 800 to run a single Master Expedition and find the mainhand or offhand he/she's looking for.
Here, there are our chances. Obviously, any player without a single item of the weapon set has double the chance to get one of his liking (either mainhand or offhand), which brings the chance of obtaining one at 1 in 400 runs. The second one will have the 1 in 800 runs chance shown before, as duplicates will be useless as other classes weapons.
For a full set, statistically speaking, each player will need around 1200 successful runs and sucessful fights the the special bosses. Naturally this is statistics, so there will be people that won't ever get to see a single Watcher weapon ever, even running ME beyond the boundaries of mental sanity. Let's say that a player will run 3 ME per character per day; this means that it would take the most people around 400 days to get the set. Yep, 1 year and 1 month if you represent the middle range of luck in the population.
On top of that, the obvious lack of manpower in the dev team working at Cryptic for the other project on which the company is invested on means we don't have to get any lore tactics over the special bosses in expeditions. There are some mechanics related to those fights that seem to be impossible to overcome, such as 30 millions heals by bosses low on health; any fight gives limited chances to be studied, as they are not repeatable after a wipe. This lowers even more the chances for a group to get a single Watcher weapon in that 1 in 10 run where the wraith will care to show up.
Personally I find all of this very disheartening and frustrating. The set has a nice look to it but it's in no way so dramatically different from the others in mod 16 to put us in such a predicament to get it. Whoever decided that was ok to have such a matrioska of RNG for those weapons has either overestimated the worth of that set, the will of players to invest an insane amount of time just for that or has not considered in the least the real numbers when compiling the related code.
Nobody will have the need of those weapons in more than a year from now. Nobody will likely grind for them with such miserable chances. All the mess related to the "easter egg" has already let part of the community feel like fools for thinking that there was a puzzle related to it (well, there has been a moderator to lead everyone on that assumption but nobody corrected him); now that the set is "available", chances are that in a year someone will have it for trasmutes over the weapon sets coming out in mod 17 or 18.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is not what we heard in the streams or read on the forum about "not frustrating the player base, as we care for you and want you to enjoy our game". Please devs, reconsider your choices.
5
Comments
The Alabaster set is everyone's starter level 80 weapon set.
I am *still* missing my Alabaster offhand after running 3 MEs a day since mod 16 launched.
Such crucial gear should at least have a streak breaker.
The essence used to summon a boss is not a 100% drop as well.
Figure I would add that in.
¿Why are they limiting player satisfaction with so much bound items? The best times of this game were the ones when you could sell practically everything, so running anything could be worthwile.
I still have to see an explanation of why we cant sell lots of things to improve game health and help players that cant farm the items but have money.
This basic thing worked in the past:
People that have no money but are skilled (or not necessarily) and have time -> Farm items and sell
People that have money but no time or arent skilled -> Introduce money in the game, buy the items.
Why was this removed from the game long time ago?
all the work done by de devs with the watcher set, will be forgotten soon. Instead if people could sell the items, this content will be relevant longer, even as transmutes.
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Still, if we consider that there are many essence bosses that have not been figured out yet and summoning them doesn't lead to a reward, there could be some issues with the limited number of essences spawning beatable bosses. I can't say what are the odds of finding an "Essence of Sorrow" among 5 people running a certain amount of ME per day, still it has never occurred to me to be in a party unable to summon Ryf.
I'm still fully agreeing that essences are another redundant and unnecessary RNG that sums up with the pile of RNGs needed to drop a Watcher weapon. Cerainly it doesn't help with the feeling that instead of trying to let players enjoy content, the main objective is to frustrate them with as much RNG as possible.