So people have been complaining about the RNG for say 20+ years. Fooling around on Oakwynd I tried making rat steaks at 41% success level: 12 straight failures! Just using a web search and approximating coin toss, the odd of a flip coming up heads or tails 12 times in a row are .00024 or 1:4167. Yes, this doesn't prove the RNG is messed up, but something is. I don't mind the failure rate or the way the system works. At least, the success rate reported on the trades window should be accurate. I've checked brewing, tailoring, and baking, and they all reflect the same trend. Something is odd here, like there is a 2% chance of failure even at a 100% reported success probability on the menu which is fine. There is probably an oddity in the way they are calculating it i.e. they subtract the 2% from your theoretical success rate so if you skill level would be 10% chance of success, you end up with 8%. It wouldn't change anything other then calculating the potential success rate accurately. I wouldn't mind if it meant you would never hit 100% on the menu. Showing 98% when you are 200 points over trivial is fine with me and accurate to what is.
If EQ ever got a port to a real, modern game engine, one of the first things I would change is the crafting system. For example, I'm not a chef. I've never been to culinary school. But I can successfully make an omelette 99% of the time. The crafting system in many MMOs are far superior, though there isn't a perfect system. Some of us played SWG, and loved the complexity of the harvesting/acquiring the best rated resources. Some like a more straightforward system like LOTRO, where you get xp per attempt AND a successful combine, with a chance at a critical success after a time. The point is, while EQ was I think the first MMO with crafting, almost everybody after did it better. Usually, the only tradeskill I can stomach doing on a server is alchemy. I may start with good intentions, like I did on Oakwynd by doing smithing, but I never can finish any of them out to a point to be useful. I've never in almost 25 years completed the shawl quest. Yet I thrived in crafting in EVE Online, SWG, and to a moderate degree in LOTRO (still plugging away). Even EQII has a better system. So I feel your pain, especially since I just did the Elixir of Greater Concentration grind on my shaman. RNGesus hates me, and it cost me several hundred plat more than the average due to not getting skill ups.
So, because you attempted to equate it to real life, im going to play devils advocate for a moment. I would argue that out of the 99 successful omelets you make (assuming 100 for ease of math) they would drastically vary in terms of actual quality. You may only make 25 "above average omelets" with 50 or so being "average" and the rest "below average". I dont think the crafting system implies that you cant make an omelet, i imagine youre only saving the best omelets. Having done BiC on a total of 14 characters over several TLPs, several shawl quests and pretty much any other tradeskill quest you can think of... i actually think that the EQ system (now that you can see success rate) isnt all that bad. It can absolutely be frustrating, but i dont think it was ever intended to be easy.
RNG is just a fast & dirty way of doing things, there are better methods that can be used for sure. RNG is a useful tool in a developers bag of tricks to keep aspects of a game feeling more unpredictable & "fresher" but without some controls to lean the RNG towards benefitting the player you can simply end up frustrating them and at times with the tendency towards "streakiness" on any system using RNG your game can be brutally unfair to individual players while the supposed balance is some other players can have long streaks of extraordinary luck. How happy would you be if wages were RNG? Half of your colleagues get a big bump in pay while you are among the half are forced to take a big cut, how fair would that feel? How would you feel if 3 years in a row you were among those getting a pay cut & some smarmy person you can't stand got 3 pay rises in a row? And lazy developers who will just say well it isn't fair but that's RNG are just blowing off genuinely bad treatment of their players by their game like it doesn't matter. Whether EQ will do anything about it is up for debate but with a game this old & with how many things use RNG, it will have a cost to make changes.
My omelettes are ALWAYS of excellent quality. It's that 1 out of a hundred that instead ends up as a very good scramble. The point is, there are far better ways to do it that several hundred fails or even successes, without a single skill up. Your experience with the RNG-based crafting system has obviously been far better than most.
I dont think its been far better. I would wager that because i have leveled all of the tradeskills multiple times over, i have seen good RNG and bad RNG, so i understand its balanced out.
There are some (potential) faulty assumptions in the OP original post. You do not achieve 100% success until you are 200 points above trivial ... IN BASE SKILL (no mods) ... MAXIMUM OF 300 FOR THIS PURPOSE (i.e. 301-350 are treated as 300 for purposes of lowering failure rate). So for any combine with a trivial over 100, there will always be a chance for failure (unless no fail). There are some other things that can be at play as certain recipes have had higher or lower failure rates built into the combine. I think Ngreth shared the calculation at one point in a thread, but I couldn't find it. Without knowing what you were seeing 2% failure rate on a 100% shown success rate was, I cannot say if this was a factor ... but it is in the system. For the raw calculation part, there is a human assumption that 12 heads in a row is some magic event ... it's not. 2 out of 10,000 things occur all the time in daily life, much less the game. Given how many players there are in the game and how many combines are done at tradeskill containers, I would imagine that a 1 in 5,000 event occurs every single day ... and you were the lucky person it happened to today. Personally, I had a string of over 1000 combines of a Halas 10lb Meat Pie without a skillup on a character (trying to go from 195 to 196 in baking skill). A lot of moving parts, but it's safe to say that I basically had a 5% chance per attempt and failed everytime. .95 to the 1000th power is a really, really small number. And it happened.
All of you need to stop... You don't understand the consequences of your actions!! Every decision ever made, every roll of the dice... Creates an alternate reality where those outcomeswwere different. The universe can only grow soo large before the lag hits all of us
