Am I imagining this?

AnnaUK · July 2018

I have a max lvl Sorc who is my farmer/crafter. She's maxed out in everything apart from Blacksmithing and alchemy atm.

I'm trying to farm cloth and wood for upgrading alts gear to legendary, I can spend days doing this and my luck from refining is terribad. 1 legendary mat per 3-400.

What I discovered however, is that if I farm mats on a lowbie leveling character, then swap to main crafter I get way more mats.... anyone else found this?

VaranisArano · July 2018

No. There's no statistical difference in refining rate of lower level and higher level mats. Its just bad RNG.

That is pretty bad RNG though. The last time I test refined low level and high level mats, the average was around 1 gold per stack.

Prabooo · July 2018

I noticed the same, specially with jewelry mats

Wildberryjack · July 2018

I've noticed I get a lot more Perfect Roe if I fish and clean them on a lowbie toon. Also, every Aetherial Dust I've gotten was on a lowbie.

AnnaUK · July 2018

DjinnRa wrote: »

I've noticed I get a lot more Perfect Roe if I fish and clean them on a lowbie toon. Also, every Aetherial Dust I've gotten was on a lowbie.

It's funny you should say that.. I have had two of those two weeks apart in Auridon, one from a herb, one from a rune.. and both toons were level 7!

idk · July 2018

That is pretty bad luck.

It is still a 5% chance to get a legendary. Hopefully your luck turns around.

VaranisArano · July 2018

DjinnRa wrote: »

I've noticed I get a lot more Perfect Roe if I fish and clean them on a lowbie toon. Also, every Aetherial Dust I've gotten was on a lowbie.

And since we're trading anecdotes like they're data, every Aetherial Dust I've gotten (4 total) has been on a CP 160+ character.

Xerikten · July 2018

if I don't get a gold or purple from refining the first 100 I stop. the rng is streaking bad luck right now. fyi these mmo rngs are very streaky. this can be good or bad.

John_Falstaff · July 2018

I feel that stopping after bad streak is mostly superstition. ^^ That said, I think that a well-designed random number generator for such context should be (and maybe it is) not entirely random, it'd be just a bad design. There should be factors that nudge probability this way and that. I'll even go as far as to say that there should be (but in this case, probably isn't) some kind or another of 'fairness' built in - the longer you're not getting a certain drop, the greater probability of the drop becomes (while retaining the same average drop rate over time / resource amount), to eliminate unfortunate outliers that keep rolling 1 dozens of times in a row.

JKorr · July 2018

I wish the devs would explain the proper sacrifice to make to the rng gremlins.

I've refined a 100 raw mats and gotten nothing besides the refined ingots/bolts/hides . I've refined 24 and gotten both a purple and gold temper.

ghastley · July 2018

RNG Ai is simple. You never get something when you need it.

That's probably why the low-level characters get things they can't use, and higher-level ones don't.

Beamer_Miasma · July 2018

If you don't like maths or the psychology behind human understanding of randomness skip to the last paragraph

It's lengthy but I tried to keep it light, just something that fascinates me as a former maths and psychology student.

Superstition surrounding RNG is rampant in both games and gambling, but it really is nothing more than superstition, mixed in with a bit of misunderstanding of what 'random' precisely means. ZoS doesn't have their own special version of an RNG, they are simply using the extensively tested compiler provided enterprise approved yadayada standard library function call that every other application written in the same development studio uses. All of these have been statistically tested and mathematically proven to provide an endless stream of (repeatable) random numbers.

Random in this case means the mathematical definition, which is simply saying that the next value in the sequence cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty*. When you look at an infinite sequence of numbers produced by such an algorithm, the frequency of any particular number or sequence of numbers appearing within that infinite sequence will be perfectly fair to our more emotional and much less mathematical human understanding of fairness. When you only look at a finite part of the infinite sequence though, it will often be a different matter.

*

"But what about the '(repeatable)' part that you snuck in there? Doesn't that make it predictable?" you might wonder. In computing, and especially in gaming, it is often necessary to be able to produce a repeatable sequence. Consider a poker tournament game. If the sequence was not repeatable, then you could simply stack the deck by reloading your last save until you got a favourable hand. Being able to produce a repeatable sequence prevents this sort of cheating.

In order to reproduce the sequence you would need to know 2 things:
- the algorithm that is being used to generate the sequence
- the seed number that the algorithm takes as parameter and uses to seed the sequence

Although theoretically a hacker could be able to obtain both these pieces of information, and thus "look ahead" and decide not to refine their mats if they saw a particularly bad streak coming up, it would be an extremely roundabout and most likely a very unreliable way of trying to get expensive items through hacking in any game. Most existing hacks are much simpler in nature.

The important part to remember is that without knowing these pieces of information, the sequence is indistinguishable from a true random sequence. This is why it is called pseudo-random and not quasi-random

Consider the following, let's say we are randomly rolling single digit 0-9 numbers, and we're creating an infinite sequence of those (I'm still rolling

), then somewhere in that infinite sequence:
- your phone number, followed by your date of birth, followed by both your parent's dates of birth will be in there
- the exact number of grains of sand on the planet will be in there (as well as tomorrow's count, and next week's)
- the first thousand digits of pi will be in there
- there will be a sequence of a thousand 0s in a row

If you are refining mats and your slice of the infinite sequence happens to be the first thousand digits of pi, you're probably not going to notice much, but if your slice happens to be the thousand 0s, well you can do the math, you're either going to be very lucky or very unlucky depending on whether the code is checking for a high or low roll

It's important to remember that 'random' does not mean 'without pattern'. If a random sequence did not contain patterns, then you could predict the next digit in the sequence with some certainty. If you saw the digits 1 and 2 then you could say well the next one is not going to be a 3, because that would be a pattern (it all depends a bit on how you define 'pattern' of course but you get the idea). In an infinite sequence of random numbers, every possible pattern occurs, not just once, but an infinite number of times. They just occur as often as can be expected given the no predictability principle.

TL;DR conclusion:

So what do you do? Nothing at all. You could wait after getting nothing out of 100 mats like some suggested, but the chance that your waiting would put you right at the start of a next bad streak is just as big as the chance that your bad streak had just ended after those 100. Just keep in mind that the more you refine, the less influence each bad streak will have on your total yield percentage. Of course this also unfortunately means that the more you refine, the less influence each good streak will have on your total success rate. Randomness is a game you just can't win, so don't try and take solace in the fact that it's a game you also can't lose. The only choice you have is to stop or to keep playing.