RNG are working properly?

@Barugon

This amounts to saying that a plane cannot fly and land when we can see the plane flying and landing. What you want to do is ask How the plane can be flying and landing instead of coming up with reason after reason why it really should be crashing.
Yes improper design or improper maintenance of a plane could potentially lead to a crash. That however does not prevent planes from flying nor landing, nor does it change planes from being a preferred method of transport for specific uses. Instead it is the very reason why there are experts who design planes or maintain planes.

So in a discussion whether or not planes can fly and land then asking "Wouldn't the plane crash if it runs out of fuel?" isn't really going to give a relevant answer compared to asking "How do experts prevent fuel shortages?". This since yes planes crash if they run out of fuel, but proper design and maintenance prevents that.


In the case of How you prevent high vs low betting when running in a hot/cold streak is usually threefold.
1. You "weigh" the bets worth and average sum that versus which tier the roll is in
2. You add a multiplier based on the odds of the roll, compared to the luck/unluck metric
3. You use an unlucky/lucky threshold on the value of the sum of the smaller sample size, this you reset after use

What this does is that it obfuscates the trigger points for the user, making it (near) impossible for them to guess when it is happening.

Which is why in my 1d6 roll example above you ignore the rolls of 2-5 even though they also result in fail/success.
Edit:
To clarify: That way the user doesn't know if 5 50% successes in a row really was a 44564 and they should continue rolling with the same bet weight, or a 45446 where they should try to lower the bet weight while still rolling in the same tier.
But the user doesn't know the weight tiers, nor the difference between a 4 or a 5 or a 6 because it all looks the same in their end.

 

Yes you could soften the blow of cold luck by adding a state machine to each players rolls to reroll or add bardic inspiration or use explosion die or any other mechanic stolen from TRPG. But that is not likely in a game where we are removing NPCs because their idle state machines are consuming server resources.

But to fair you would also need to cool hot luck by doing the same thing on the other end, since the entire point is to get short runs odds closer to long run norms. And that is not going to happen in a RNG system that enables RMT gambling, that people are going after that big win and placing that big bet.

You cannot make the system more predictable so that everyone gets similar failure and success rate over small runs. It is random by design of this being ultimate collector 2.0. For every person rage quitting over their cold luck, there is another stuffing more gold (and thus cash) into their bank because they got lucky. Remove the luck from the equation, then people are less likely to gamble on resources (which they paid money and or/time for), because they know they can never get that big win.

 

If you want people to continue to gamble you want to trigger that skinner box function and prevent triggering that loss aversion in our wetware.
Slot machines would be a grand example.

Slot machines add small high probability Wins to keep triggering the skinner box.
They also make the single bet you make small compared to the potential jackpot to prevent the loss aversion from triggering.

So you bet one $. Most of your wins are every now and then a two to five $, but the jackpot you are looking and hoping for is thousands of $.

If the slot machines would work like crafting rolls in sota, then you would pay a hundred $ up front then it would be a diminishing double or nothing bet, where the payout is doubling but where the chance of winning is lower and lower the more you double up. (and where you only can cash out after 5-10 doubles in a row).
Since you are tempting the player with a double they will try to play, but due to the diminishing return chance they will eventually lose enough times in a row to stop playing because it feels like they cannot win.


Edit:
check out these vids:

 

But the players are heavily invested in this game by design of addictive mechanics (quoting RG) and cash decorations/cash shop, thus the threshold for rage quitting failure streaks is much higher than it would be for the slot machine. They basically have more to lose by quitting the game than sticking with the game.

It is the payoff of getting on a lucky streak that justifies the time and money spent that keeps them crafting. They might rage on the forum about their cold streak but they are unlikely to quit the game over it. They might stop crafting but not the game, but that is unlikely because they will end up paying even more to someone that did not quit crafting and won the jackpot instead.

 

I Don't know how RNG work even in combat but Yesterday looking at the tournament organized in mynwent i seen many fight solved by something i personally disagree totally, cause make the skills, the deck composition, the gear totally useless.

Basically what i mean to say is that, and that's just an example i do with ice Arrow but there was many things like this with other abilities.

Ice Arrow hit 143 CRIT
Ice Arrow hit 80
Ice Arrow hit 75
Ice Arrow hit 84
Ice Arrow hit 151 CRIT
Ice Arrow hit 70
Ice Arrow hit 76
Ice Arrow hit 273 CRIT
Ice Arrow hit 321 CRIT

Now i can understand critical, critical multiplier etc. but duels or fight totally solved by dice rolls is something just weird. if you have average 650 hp and you receive 2 hit like this in a row is just Game Over, and seem dice roll influence too much something. If it is by design just pls ask developers to make a clear post about that, so if we know we can decide what to do. Cause have a bonus from 151 to 170/180 crit is a thing, and i accept a dice roll can do that, but the lasst 2 hits are something out of my concerns and out of what can i accept in RNG.

 

@Spoon said:

"If the slot machines would work like crafting rolls in sota, then you would pay a hundred $ up front then it would be a diminishing double or nothing bet, where the payout is doubling but where the chance of winning is lower and lower the more you double up. (and where you only can cash out after 5-10 doubles in a row).

Since you are tempting the player with a double they will try to play, but due to the diminishing return chance they will eventually lose enough times in a row to stop playing because it feels like they cannot win."

Just to add to this excellent analogy, the goal of any mastercraftsman is to hit a "jackpot" of a +9-12 item well suited for his/her target market. But if the price for getting there is too steep in terms of wasted or destroyed material then we will end up with a tiny pool of mastercraftsmen making stuff for the virtually very wealthy. With all the imbalances that implies.

 

This argument only works if we don't look at the data we get from those who quit. Since we do we know that hypothesis isn't true. If it was true then the higher the investment the more likely that they will stay and we wouldn't see high profile high value pledge stuff sold in the marketplace. Since we do we know that hypothesis isn't true.

Yes there is an invested interest in staying. That however doesn't stop a lot of players and especially competetive players from quitting the game. That is because the Player Marketplace allows you to sell off your stuff reducing any investment loss.
This means that we see them selling off their big cash stuff, keep a minimum account and gradually fade away.


Again, please check out what that loss aversion thing I keep refering to really means.
Essentially if you have equally long losing/winning streaks the player will feel that they lose twice as much as they win. Ask any miner what their fail streaks are and they will ramble on, ask them about their win streaks and they don't really know (unless they are those rare spreadsheet people).
That means that over time you will remember much more all the times you lose, not the times you won.

Again I explained what slot machines does to not make you feel this effect.
In the crafting system we don't have a small ante, we do not have small frequent wins, we don't have a big jackpot from a small ante.
In a double up system you don't feel like the jackpot is worth as much since your ante doubles as well every time. That means that loss aversion hits you every time you lose.
So you don't feel the "win" as much, and you kinda maximize the feeling of loss.
That isn't a good thing if you want those pigeons to keep pecking on that button. (Skinner box reference).
If I put in a dollar and win 500 that is a huge adrenaline high. Regardless whether it took me 250 tries for a dollar each to get there. While if I bet 250 on a coin toss and doulbe up that doesn't feel as good. Even though the ratio is the same.

But here is the kicker, if you are a gambling person, then a double up loss will make you try that bet again to cancel out the loss.
Thus a person with a problematic gambling habit will regularly lose much more than they can afford.
However even that doesn't work here since the crafter will run out of material to keep "gambling" thus ending with the feeling you had when the materials ran out.

We have about 50 regular forum users who no longer play the game. A lot of those used to be competetive players - either crafters or pvprs.
This tells us that they are indeed heavily invested in the game and that they would love for it to become more enjoyable - they are still here for a reason - but that after selling their stuff they simply don't feel that need to go riftside any more.

But that isn't all, instead when we take a happy active player then they are more than willing to plunk down a buck or two in the addon store every now and then. But when they get disillusioned then they take an extra look at the game and maybe pause for a bit. When they come back they are much more passive, play only now and then, plus barring some drastic change they no longer feel invested enough to make any purchases at all.

So we want to limit or mitigate any reason for taking such a hiatus, we also want to add features that welcome you back if you have been away, plus add such features that would intice a returnee to become more active again.
For PvE or decorators or social players we have some such mitigation.
For PvP or Crafting we don't.

 

Hmm, I think I should rest from this topic since it isn't really productive due to all the misconceptions and entrenched positions.

If you have any specifc questions for me then I will answer but otherwise I will just step away.

Happy hunting

 

The design of the game is indeed one where the ones that succeed are those that treat this as their day job that can craft enough that the hot/cold streaks become irrelevant and balance out to long run odds. Since those players are the ones that funded the game, this design is unlikely to change. Everyone else that plays the game as less than a job will find themselves exposed to the hot/cold streaks. They either succumb to the grind or pull out their wallets to keep gambling, because by that point they are addicted they do not want to give up on that goal of making that uber bow. As long as the game is not yet released when it gets review slammed into non-existence, there is the faint hope that it will all be worth it later.

@Spoon many players that have left said it was because of toxic community, lack of proper moderation and the infestation of RMT, you cannot extrapolate the number of account sells to mean they left because of RNG crafting. You cannot use the forum rage about RNG because the facts are only the bad luck players will post, the good luck players will not, and the day players have moved beyond good/back luck streaks into predictable odds.

If they do quit crafting there is still other things to do, such as decorate their house with the better goods from the store. They can go grind mobs to make the gold to get store credit or buy the gear from players that did not quit crafting. There is much more to do than quit the game, even if all they have left to do is dance with their fairy wings, that is fun they are not having IRL.

 

As I'm one of those who sold off the thousands I had pledged and now play quite infrequently, I can honestly say that this is pretty accurate about why. So no, it isn't a blanket statement for everyone, or even most (blanket statements are always wrong, just like this one). But that doesn't mean it isn't accurate for some of us who have, and @Spoon was clear that it wasn't just crafting for all of them:

Once the houses were furnished, all that was left was tedious grind of mobs (not fun), slow gathering rates (not fun), and constant loss of materials that took a long time to gather (not fun) when trying to craft... That isn't fun (in case you didn't pick up on that) and real life (or other video games in my case) will fill the hole that SotA used to fill. I still pop in quite a bit and keep an eye on it because I genuinely want this to be what I hoped it was and enjoy the community quite a lot, but I am no longer putting 1000's of hours or money into the game like I used to. For those of us who really wanted to have a crafter primary, getting disillusioned about one of the primary features of the game that drew me in is disappointing. I know many PvP players who walked away because they felt the same way about PvP as I do about crafting. A system is in place, but it isn't fun yet. If we make the system more fun or involved then I'd probably start living in game like I used to. Having other features is really nice, but when one of the main things I want to play isn't there to draw me in and keep me involved, other features aren't going to cut it for very long.