This might be a bit simplistic, so please tell me how I'm approaching wrong: Change Guard from a flat damage reduction to mirror your current defense chance? If you're wearing gear that gives you a 31% chance to avoid, your guarded target takes 31% less damage?

I've seen success chance issues in other games, too...that is, there were issues where a parameter was input wrong like I mentioned (one particular category was supposed to be 100%, while some others had a failure chance...the 100% didn't get set). I've also seen issues where a player was supposed to have an improving chance over time (like the baseline is 5%, but can be increased via some rating), and the improvement wasn't reflecting. What we're talking about here is a bit different...everybody has the same 60% RE chance. That chance has been at that level for quite awhile....and it's incredibly likely (not guaranteed, but likely) that's a parameter, which is unlikely to be messed up unless a change is made to it. All that said, as you tried to corner me with, I don't have access to any part of the engine code...sure, it's possible the RNG is implemented in such a convoluted, unusual fashion that it applies inconsistent results to different people intermittently. The most likely behavior for anything even close to that would be everybody seeing 100% success, 100% failure, or rolls just crapping out and not happening at all, and we're not seeing that, but sure, it's possible. But what's more likely? Concepts like the gambler's fallacy and human beings' general struggle to deal with randomness are well documented, and computer RNG is fairly basic to implement. On the other hand, people anecdotally complain that it doesn't "feel right"....and only ever when they have poor luck, not good luck. So which do you feel is the more likely cause? I've never in my life claimed developers don't made mistakes. On the contrary, I'm all too painfully aware that bug-free software doesn't exist outside of 100-level classroom assignments of a hundred lines or less. But I do know what's more likely here. Basically, one of us is suggesting that the OP's observation is just that...an anecdote, driven by some well-understood bias phenomena. That person has provided some context and explanation for why they feel that's the case. The other made the immediate assumption that the system's somehow flawed (with the extra implication that we might even have been misled). That person's supporting their assumption with demands for negative proof they know nobody can provide. So, in lieu of your credible evidence (or really, any evidence) otherwise, I'm going to stick by what I said....it's unlikely to be a bad parameter specific to augments, and vanishingly unlikely to be a "broken RNG".

I would be stunned...and I mean absolutely beyond floored....If anybody at BW wrote a spec of "RNG code". Why would they? That would be like taking your car in for an oil change, and having the tech go drill and refine the oil, and reengineer a new filter from scratch. Again, this isn't 1975; random number generation doesn't require custom code. Most languages have RNG utility functionality that works perfectly fine to generate "random enough" results. So do operating systems, DBMS.....It would be beyond ridiculous to "code" RNG. Maybe you meant there was a decimal misplaced somewhere in the comparison parameter? Think that through....does anybody have any results indicating a 600% success chance? Or 6%? Ever notice that the people who're most willing to assume a developer screwed up somewhere are usually the ones who least understand how things work?

I've found REing to be especially bad, in terms of bias, both because you're more focused on the result, and because bad luck hurts more. Most crafting, you set it and forget it. You tend not to notice if your luck was especially good or bad when you mass-craft a stack of components, for example....when it's done, you end up with one stack, and if you had a run of good luck on crits, that stack is just a little bigger than normal; it doesn't stick out. REing, you tend to craft each item one at a time (why craft more blues than you need to?). Once the item is made, you open your inventory and look for that specific item, click a separate button, then click on the item again. You look and listen for the successful learn result. Those things all focus your mind on the result more than normal. If it's a success, you move on. If it's a failure you have to recraft that item, and go through all the same steps again. You have to keep repeating that more focused set of activities more times, making failures stick out more....and that's all on top of the fact that our brains are wired to pay attention to negative results more than positive ones as it is.

Quality stuff right here.

But your experience is within a guild setting. The guy you're talking about had an investment in the guild, and in developing the players in it, with an immediately accessible benefit in it for him (readily available, competent players). He was also doing it voluntarily, and (one presumes) after being asked or directed to by guild leadership. ....none of which translates to an essentially PUG scenario.

And before anybody's tempted to remind anybody that computers can't REALLY do random numbers, or how easy it would be for there to be a mistake somewhere.... No. Just no. This isn't a newfangled thing people started wrangling with on the advent of MMOs and game forums. Methods of generating pseudo-random numbers that very closely approximate truly random systems have been around for a long time. They're sufficiently random that a human being can't tell the difference, and they usually have less deterministic error that would result from wear on the edge of a physical die, or casting variations in a flipped coin. This isn't 1975....for any given application, computer RNG can be considered more than "random enough".

Tag...I'm in. I haven't burnt myself out with it recently. Any random system (or simulated random system, like computer RNG) requires streaks to be considered truly random....several consecutive results that seem to defy the stated odds. Even a 99% chance of success must occasionally encounter several failures in a row. If the system doesn't contain those streaks, it's not random...it's deterministic. That's how probability works. Not even going to go into the notions of sample size as it regards statistical relevance, or confirmation bias.....Google is a robust tool. All you need to understand is: Streaks mean the system's working, not broken.

Subscriber reward...

The forum timestamps are in GMT, not your time zone. So far as connection, I've been on for a few hours, no unusual lag. It may or may not be your ISP (your router showing connection means just that: it's connected), but whatever the issue is, it's not the server.

So... Because other people who aren't them rage quit in the past (or yelled at and belittled, in the case of the other poster), everybody's just assumed to be responsible for teaching or just dealing with the miscues...just in case they might also be a horrible person? Wouldn't it be more rational and adult to write the previous folks off as being the problem, instead of pushing the uncomfortable off on every new person? You might as well just say "I don't want to momentarily risk feeling bad, so Ima make it this other guy's problem instead." ...and people are calling the OP selfish. Look, I'm truly sorry lousy people play this game and feel the need to belittle everybody that's not them....I really, truly am. There's no need for it, and I know its uncomfortable when it happens. But that solution's just downright passive-aggressive. It makes the overall problem worse, not better.

And there's no such thing as an auto lease, right? Setting that aside, that comparison is flawed because the business models are not the same. If the car dealer intended to develop and install new or upgraded options to your car post-purchase, it'd be a little bit closer, while still not the same: a driver doesn't get bored with their car, stop driving it, and impact the dealer's revenue by doing so if there aren't enough enjoyable roads and places to go with it. So, you either didn't actually make your point, or you accidentally made the opposite point.

This. I'll go a step further: if you join a content run (Op, FP, whatever), don't know what you're doing, and don't speak up, courtesy and obligation concerns stop. At that moment, you've shifted the burden of your performance to somebody else. Well, mostly....that doesn't excuse anybody from basic "dont be an aggressive toolbag" expectations, but that's universal regardless.

I was reacting to the quoted poster's implication that the people who're applauding this delay would continue to defend further delays ad nauseum. That's extremely hyperbolic to the point of entirely nonsensical...and I suspect it comes from playing a forum persona, more than from a real rational process. I wasn't measuring the probability that there will be further delays. I agree, it could happen. If it did, the devs would have to provide some awfully compelling reasoning to get me to support it.

This thread has been fascinating to watch. If I queue GF as a tank, the only expectation I'm taking on is to tank any Op I might get. Most folks reasonably assume that includes at least enough general knowledge (class, gearing, boss, etc) to be minimally competent doing so. If I can't fulfill that expectation (end up not being able to finish the run, don't know the Op, etc), it's on me to communicate that, so the group can figure out what to do about it (replace me, teach me, whatever). That's it. Exactly zero additional expectations (teaching, etc) are assumed. If anybody has any expectations beyond that, that's on them, not me. I have no responsibility to communicate my inability or unwillingness to meet any of those additional, imposed expectations....again, those invalid expectations are owned by whomever put them on me....if they want me to take them on, they have the burden of communication. That's our baseline. Expectations are a little different for premade runs. Guild leaders (including guild Ops leaders) have different expectations, based on how that guild runs. Non-Guild premade (Fleet PUGs, etc) have expectations based on discussions while building it. But if those discussions don't occur, you default to the above baseline...your responsibility it to do your job, and communicate when you can't. That's what happened here. The OP received no extra communication when joining the guild run to tank. They executed their only resulting expectation: tank it. When they couldn't do so because the group didn't know what they were doing, they communicated it. That's it. Job done. Anything they did after that, so long as it wasn't belittling, is entirely kosher. TLDR: yes, there are a lot of entitled attitudes in this thread. Mostly, that entitlement surrounds wanting the community to assume extra expectations that are favorable to "them" ("them" having a variable definition), but without wanting to actually communicate those expectations. Be an adult. Say what you need, and will/won't do. The OP did. The rest of the raid didnt.

Right. That's not hyperbolic at all. Did you know that you can be generally critical of the state of the game, and still say "hey, this one thing this one time was a good move?" It doesn't make you a white knight. It doesn't make you a mindless defender drone, or cause you to immediately change forum faction, or anything like that. Your online persona stays secure.

"Employing teams of coders" isn't a horribly meaningful term. It's not unusual for developers to report to business-side managers, or for consultants to bring them in on a project basis. I'll say this much: in all my years, I've never once heard a developer refer to themselves as "coders". Project managers call them that, as do business managers. Different critter all together, but it explains an awful lot. At any rate, congratulations on your (suddenly claimed) industry success. May you continue to hire competent people.

Without a trace of snark....you prolly wouldn't last long in the business, then. One more anecdote, then I need to drop it. Several years back, the company I was with at the time landed a massive client conversion. The way we did those was to programmatically pull all of their existingn records onto our system in one day, to minimize partial processing. This project was easily 10 times larger than any we'd ever done...millions of records, instead of hundreds of thousands. It'd require custom code for the actual conversion, and a hundred moving parts. Problem was, they wanted it done faster than we were really ready for. We were going to lose the contract, though, so we went ahead anyway. The conversion itself went off without a hitch. Code performed beautifully, application and database server kept up, everybody was thrilled. Then, that overnight, a regularly scheduled database optimization ran long...of course it did; those tables were now massive. That ran into a scheduled delta pull (basically a pull from the database of everything that changed), which was also way more intensive than normal. Because we'd never configured the DBMS to prioritize one over the other, it tried to run both, choked, then put itself out of its misery to avoid data corruption, as configured. Our new client's billing didn't run. They lost millions, that we had to cover. It wasn't a code issue. It wasn't a server issue or a DBMS issue. All of those things did exactly what we'd designed or configured them to do. We just didn't have enough time to see that coming. I can't guarantee we'd have thought to make a change to account for it if we'd had another week of planning, but it's awfully likely. Management threw the best DBA manager we'd ever had under the bus, and fired him, when the problem really was that we should have stood our ground on timeframe. Turns out we couldn't replace him with anybody near as talented, and it cost us clients and real money over time. That company's out of business now. But technically, it WAS a database issue, at first glance...

Here's what really sucks....it probably can't be fixed for you. And that's not a knock on you, implying that you're unreasonable (it's your head...not for me to say), or that you can't be pleased. It IS saying that BW probably can't do enough to make you happy. I've seen it several times...you've not had your expectations met for too long, and been playing mostly due to inertia. All that time you've kept logging in, it's been to something that disappoints you....over time, resentment's been building up. At this point, even if BW did everything you'd ever asked for, it might not be enough to undo that time....it'd probably just feel a day late and a dollar short. I get it. I don't agree with you on the state of the game...I'm having fun...but I respect that your opinion is different, and I recognize the corner you're in. That sucks. The one thing every game has in common is that nobody ever plays any game regularly forever, or even just forever. Everybody burns out sometimes, and everybody decides they're done eventually. Sounds like, ready for it or not, you're there. I don't say this often, but I honestly think the best thing for you is to get out, go do something fun. Easier said than done, but I hate seeing anybody play a game to not have fun. G'luck man.

I didn't see any bad manners. Set aside whatever the OP's motivation for coming to the forums was...I don't wanna go down that rabbit hole. If it went down exactly as described, there was no yelling, no belittling...just realization of a situation they didn't want to be in, and a quiet drop. They could have stuck it out and explained it. But they had no obligation to do that, and they weren't under any obligation to explain why or justify the decision. I don't blame them for feeling like it was assumed (without asking) that they'd do it. They had to persist just to get an answer and eventually be asked. I've been in that situation in other games, and I've gone both ways. Sometimes I stuck it out and tried to be helpful. Sometimes, it just wasn't worth it.

Actually, code is auto parts. They're still standardized mechanical objects that need to be put together correctly (optimally if possible) to work correctly as a whole. A car is more complex than a brick wall, but in the end, it's just chunks of metal, plastic, and rubber. But unlike a brick wall, a car is useless just standing there. To be valuable, it needs fuel. A road. A competent driver. Even with those things, there are variables like weather. Potholes. Other drivers, all driving basically similar but slightly different cars. The conversation in question was rather like coming up to you after another driver hit a pothole, lost control on an icy road, and rear-ended you, and saying "wow....your car must suck. The guys who made the parts should be fired." While we're being all philosophical, that's always been my biggest professional struggle with enterprise developers....they forget that their code has no value until realized by a number of non-code factors and efforts. End users often have a very similar myopia...it's what makes them pretty bad at estimating problems, causes, and reasons at a system level.

Great job. Well supported. I'm impressed by your depth of knowledge on how this all works. For what it's worth, I'd be willing to buy the "time with Izax" thing, too. That's nice, sensible, and likely to be at least part of the reason. I'm gathering that's why you dumped the whole "this week means nothing's done, and proves even their mailman is incompetent" tripe as fast as you did. But seriously man (woman?)...next time, if you're just plain butthurt over waiting a week, there's nothing wrong with just saying so. I've never really groked the need to attach it to a Deep Dark truth.

*sigh* I'm going to hate myself... Yes, that's best practice. I explained it rather exhaustively upthread. There are a lot of shared resources on projects like this. Art/visual assets. Sound assets. QA folks. Testers (those aren't the same thing). Ops folks that move things around. Dependencies (some bit of code or configuration that's being written for 5.8 that'll be leveraged to do something else in 5.9, and that's now potentially being changed). A whole list more. Do you have any reason to believe, especially given the release cadence we've been seeing and that you've stated your disappointment in many times, that they have two fully functional teams covering all of those needs? If they did, they'd be unique...at least in my 15 years of living the same world. A 20% shift in delivery expectations isn't trivial. Can it be done? Sure...but it introduces risk way out of proportion to the week they'd deliver sooner. Ever notice how frequently emergency patches get screwed up, or don't really fix the issue? That's what happens when you rush that kind of thing...and that's why they're reserved for emergency fixes. I mean, we could talk about how I keep offering concrete examples of a lot of different reasons why just pushing it a week is a better idea, and you just keep repeating your belief, based on nothing other than your perception of how things should work (that's why I called it faith). I'm experienced, but I'm no guru....feel free to offer something concrete to rebut it. Should be easy given how obvious it is, yes? But I suspect that won't get us anywhere, so let's try this instead: As you've repeatedly stated, releases have been slow. Even with the new date, we'll have had more delivered in a 5-week period than in the previous 4-5 months combined. Given that, can you explain why a week's delay is so massive, so staggering, that it can't possibly mean anything other than massive systemic breakdown that BW is trying to cover up? You keep repeating it like it's self-evident, and repeating it will make it more true. Got anything more?

Questionable. Look, it's not like I have some investment in calling you a liar. But if you're running SO much content that repair bills are an issue....yet also aren't gaining enough income from that content to cover those repair...and also aren't dying that often....something else is going on that's incredibly unusual. Some part of all this isn't adding up.

Other than resources. And best practice. And common sense. But, whatever. I try to avoid arguing against faith, and this "something rotten" theory seems very important to you.