Major Issue w/Carfting, this needs a FIX ..

Dear Dev Team

I write this with major frustration and a bit of sadness. I've been crafting in this game since Rel. 9 and it's a fun system until you start noticing a very strange and unfriendly pattern. The pattern is an artificial RNG manipulation so that FAILURES on the 3rd Enchant or Masterwork are WAY lower than the stated Percentage.

I just finished trying to craft a wand for a guild mate and it was ridicules, and this is how it goes ALL THE TIME. (mind u I have done this a few thousand times)
Tonight I made 24 wands and I witnessed 14 Failed 3rd Enchants consecutively with a { 50% success chance } Please take a coin and get it to land 5 or 6 times heads or tails in a row, you will be there for a month trying. Yet in this game this happens ALL THE TIME.
One would think it's a bad luck streak and just wait till a GOOD luck streak hits, well this is something I never witness, EVER. On all my crafting that I've done over the years in this game I never got 5 or 6 (forget 10 or 12) Consecutive Successes on the 3rd Enchant or masterwork..
It's really a SHAME that the Dev Team has Rigged the RNG to be like this and waste our time & resources not to mention deceiving us by displaying fake success chances.
I have mention this to Chris many times and he insists that it's all good, this than makes me loose confidence in our SoTA team as they seem to be unable to check deeper and fix this.

Currently we have the ability to Enchant & Masterwork Weapons and Armor FIVE times. With the current percentages for success this is basically impossible. (Over all my crafting I have made 2 items that were five times Enchanted but it was just as a goof as I would not try to take intentionally any items pass the already manipulated (Rigged) 3rd Enchant. The percentage for the 4th Ench. is around 15 - 17% depending on your skill & 5th is a Stupid low 6-7%. Why even have this in game if NOBODY can do it correctly, it's a deceptive way to waste time and resources. There are no Crafting items that can meaningfully raise the success percentage or materials that can help you in some way.

This needs to change if the Dev Team expects this game to survive into Episode 2 and beyond.

(I'm fully aware that this topic has been written about before but I hope to raise awareness so maybe Chris & Team, who now will be home I their PJs, can look into this AND FIX IT)

To all other crafters out there who understand my frustration and can identity what I'm saying here, please comment your experience.​

 

I've never seen anyone official say they've tested it and its working....I always feel like all the tinfoil hattery on this is ignored by Port.

 

Welcome to the rng that wasn't !
Really pathetic that we have to live under what is called rng, but is absolutely NOT !

 

I made 12 bows last night and had bad rng hit. Got one +3, the rest +2. Had 3 fails on the first enchant on three of them. Very upsetting to get a failure on the first enchant , but on three of them!

 

totally agree that there is something very un-random about the rng in this game. not only in crafting, but in things like chopping trees, mining ore veins, harvesting wild reagents/cotton, skinning animals... where the success rate is shown on the circle to be very high (80-100%) failures still seem to happen way too often.

 

It definitely does feel a bit fishy from time to time....

 

As a customer, it is very frustrating as well. Especially, When you plan out how many mats you should need to render the desired quality and quantity of equipment at the percentages of success/failure the crafter has achieved by leveling up a specific skill i.e. enchanting a third time at 50%. Then watching them fail 19 times in a row. IN A ROW! Go in Visual Basic and create a random number generator and see if it lands on only heads or tails all 19 times or do this with a real quarter if you prefer. This is what a true 50% chance should represent, unless of course the code has been manipulated to "reset" based on other variables i.e. getting major enchant first, or certain types of enchants. If the latter is the "if then" case statement then the percentage should be adjusted to show its true percentage, which according to the number of enchantment possibilities would be more accurate to the commensurate failure rate of 19 in a row. So, the percentage should be adjusted to show the true rate of success. Please address this soon. It has gone on long enough. You should have more time to work on these things now that you don't have to fight Austin traffic during a commute to the "office".

 

Its well established that the state of crafting is ridiculous, and sadly, the only hope on the horizon is going to require every serious crafter of gear to have 4 accounts to compete since specialization will be mandatory to bypass the poorly implemented rng system. Don't want 4 accounts? Too bad, forget about being a gear-crafter. Maybe you can get away with 2 accounts if you only want to make 1 type of gear...

The question of whether or not the % chances are legit - I do see my 'good streaks' outweigh the bad, but just getting 'success' doesnt mean its a positive result. Getting success on 3rd enchant and getting 3 pointless, useless choices it may as well have failed. But I do agree something is seriously wrong with the RNG, it seems to get "stuck" in a fail loop whose probability is astronomically low. Failing a 99% harvest FOUR TIMES IN A ROW is extremely unlikely, you'd be more likely to get struck by lightning while harvesting.

That aside, the percentages are just far too low for the amount of XP investment required. I would expect a grandmaster to succeed 100% of the time on the first and even second masterworks, and failure to drop off a bit after that when you start pushing for 3rd, 4th, 5th attempts. Someone who has enough xp to grandmaster it 50 times over should be nearing 100% on those 3rd and even 4th attempts. There's no reason to punish players with the really crappy % rates and the lack of any choice/control over what they make. It is both illogical and unrealistic.

FIX the success rng, or adjust the rates to be more reflective of a player's time investment in their skill. Then you don't need specialization - players will naturally specialise if raising skills vertically was actually worth the xp investment.

REMOVE the random choices and let players actually make what they want. Crank up the material cost for doing so - there's been many suggestions as to how, such as needing additional ingredients to force a particular effect for example.

THEN add specializations that make your chosen school more efficient.

Specialization should augment a crafting tree, not make it the only viable option and forget about crafting anything else.

 

Good post.

Wish we could see Bzus sometimes talking with us, but everytime we talk about crafting Chris tries to fill that role, and with all my respect to him, he has too many things to work with, and I don't think he has enough knowledge about crafting like Bzus or even some hardcore players. A deep and good crafting system needs someone listening to the players, talking with them, even testing with them and I must be honest on this, Bzus is probably the hardest dev to see playing or here posting.

So basically its really hard and frustrating to give good feedback and try to help to fix/improve the crafting without the communication of the main crafting developer.

 

Due to a suspicion that the rng doesn't work right I usually stop if it fails more than once. Hard to do butost rng stuff is based of the clock so if I let the bad times go by, then the good times can roll.

 

I wonder if the RNG is being applied to all clients all over, all the time. That is, if you have two rolls in quick succession, there might actually be a thousand other rolls that occurred between them.

I have a 47% chance to cast a spell. I regularly fail six or seven times in a row. The all-time record is twelve fails in a row.

I rarely craft anything I want to keep with less than an 80% chance. So most of my crafted equipment-- that only I use-- isn't all that great. If I'm crafting to level, I take it all the way down because I don't care.

 

sorry my eyes keep reading the title of this thread mentioning 'carfting' You can edit titles of a thread. I am guilty of not proofreading before I send to0 but I do try to correct as I notice my mistypes or mispells. A word search would not find this thread due to this mispelling.

 

I am in favor of the deRNGification of the game... or at least a drastic reduction.

 

Also, So the devs know, a term has been coined to explain this phenomenon. We refer to these ridiculous occurrences of absurdity as "SOTA Math"! That's right it has its own name...

 

Ah yes the famous SOTA Math. It is costly and frustrating. The only way to make half way decent gear is to, not only grind for a year or more for the xp, but then deal with the SOTA math RNG. That blows up most of your materials. At least they changed it so they do not go completely poof. I hope someone can look at the RNG and give it a good kick in the pants for us. We love the game just hate the SOTA Math.

 

I have stated this before for a lot of other calculations, the RNG algorithm in SotA is utterly broken. Even gear, char stats calculations are pretty bugged. Something is very very wrong.
It is insane that crafted gear should be our end game gear while creating high end gear is impossible even with high crafting levels.
But yeah, this will get ignored again and in a year we will see the exact same post again..

 

GM black smith failed to make iron bindings, at an expert crafting station 3 times in a row. Shroud Math.
Hope they so something to mitigate the mess that is the RNG.

 

Not all randoms are equal, and to be fair to the dev team, they probably just use some convenient random generator without paying too much attention to it.

For example there is random.org random and then there is PHP(rand) on microsoft windows random. End result for both over large statistocal analysis would be 50% for both, but one is not obviously random and has an inherent pattern.

I've done thousands of enchants and I'd say big picture analysis it would look fine to someone studying the stats, but for someone playing the game seeing the results every day it is streaky.

 

I've often had 10 unsuccessful attempts in a row at harvesting something like a tree or cotton bush when the chance of success is supposed to be in the upper 90s. I understand that mathematically, this is all ok, but the fact is, it doesn't feel ok. I can't imagine trying to earn a living by enchanting gear in this game. I don't even bother with enchanting stuff in my offline game. The frustration is too daunting.

 

Over extremely large sample sizes, I'm pretty sure it "evens out."

That being said, to the player who has just burned a week's worth of mined materials and has nothing to show for it, they don't give a toss about "large sample sizes" they care about their crafting experience on the ground. RNG has always felt like a lazy way to try and add variety or unpredictability, the reality is, it is not needed, and does not work, and just creates anything from a "poor experience" to "ragequit inducing frustration."

The fact that specialization is meant to band-aid this problem is pretty much an admission that there IS a problem. I just wish they'd fix it, instead of using specialization as the wall to viability. Some of us have put years of effort into raising producer levels that will under this new regime be completely pointless. Who cares if I'm 130 in carpentry if I can't choose bonuses? Its kinda like replacing the candles with lightbulbs but then not actually having electricity.

I have to admit I'm starting to lose hope with crafting. What started out as a really insightful, deep system has been made completely dependent on "killing" for recipes at a low drop, RNG-heavy rate (really bad/lazy decision when it was implemented, and still bad), even some of the best crafted gear has been marginilized by "best in slot" artifacts or breaks so fast there's no point in investing the time/effort/materials to make anything better than mediocre. Its depressing.