Reverse Engineer 20% Broken

[asbalana]

That's a fair point.

 

I've seen a number of discussions of crafting systems in other MMOs, and the various pros and cons. It's been very interesting to read about it, as TOR is my first MMO, so what I get here on the crafting system is all I've had experience with.

 

I suppose due to this fact, the current system doesn't really bother me, as I have worked around it's limitations (I have 6 crafting alts with complementary skills, yada yada yada). I generally seem to have the materials, money and equipment that I need, for the most part.

 

This isn't to say that I wouldn't be thrilled with an improved crafting system, however!

 

Athough you will find this stange, I agree.

 

To me, swtor is a strange duck. If I take a step back, I see much that is downright brilliant, compelling, and just plain wonderful. Some things in this game are worlds beyond any mmo out there. Unforntunately, I also see much of that clouded by very poor conceptualization, implemtation, and grossly inadequate testing. In my limited experience, the game is buggy beyond any expectation and many significant bugs / problems that have existed from beta just go on and on without fix. New bugs appear every day and every patch is scary. My comments in this thead were based on my belief that there is no reason to believe that crafting is not bugged / broken as so many other things are.

 

Yet I find crafting in swtor wonderful in the sense that I can actually craft things of value and RE scematics that are purple. Once gained, no matter what the system is like, I have the recipie forever and that has great value. I maxed crafting in that other game in all possible skills and found that while leveling alts or for my max leveled characters, I could not craft anything of worth or that I could use. The exception being one or two BOP items specific to each crafting skill at max level in that skill. In swtor I have the choice with respect to gathering of going out into the world for mats or running crew missions. That is good. While leveling an alt, I can gather along the way and collect mats that I can sell and actually make meaningful credits. LOL, at times leveling has stalled when I have come into an area rich in mats and gone into a gatherng frenzy. I find that the concept (allthough not new) of crafting skills with complimentary gathering and mission skill pretty well done in swtor. That is so even though as pointed out above with respect to Diplomacy, the implementataon of the crafting missions is pretty poor.

 

So much like you, I work around the limitations and problems (real or not) of the crafting system. I would not change it for the one in that other game because no matter what, in the end, it produces value to me as a crafter. I have eight characters, each with three 400 level crew skills, and my wife has six. I have more credits than I know what t do with and each character has two cargo bays bursting with mats. LOL, crafting has been good to me. I can see it being just about undoable for the player who plays just a few hours a week and it is ultra frustrating for al at times.

[Cleet_Xia]

I RE'd 25 blue level 48 offhands on my Artificer last night when I logged, and got 6 purple patterns.

 

That is a 24% critical success rate. My RE success rate has been about the same since I started playing this game in December. They didn't change the mechanic one bit when they added the 20% chance to RE notices to the game.

[VigDiath]

While I know 1 out of 5 isn't right, cause believe me I've tried, but if I don't hit something on the 6th or 7th roll I'm pissed!!! lol But so far I've been lucky on most of my toons to RE an item within 3-4 tries and learn 1-2 ways of making that item better. I've had times when I have a comp craft 5 items and when the first one is done I hit RE and it works first time. Others not so much. It's a game of numbers. Not logical numbers I would use for gambling but numbers nonetheless

[obi-wan-kaneobi]

Here's the number of tries you need to make with the associated probability of success (to get at LEAST one success).

1 try = 20%

2 tries = 36%

3 tries = 49%

4 tries = 59%

5 tries = 67%

10 tries = 89%

15 tries = 96%

 

The probability of failure on each try is 0.8 (80%). The number in the table above (to get at LEAST 1 success) is calculated as the difference between 1 (100%) and the probability of N consecutive failures (e.g. for 4 tries that would be 1 - 0.8^4 = 0.5904 or 59%).

Edited July 16, 2012 by obi-wan-kaneobi

[leroyray]

Consider: One, probability is a factor which operates *within* natural forces. Two, probability is *not* operating as a factor. Three, we are now held within un-, sub- or super-natural forces. Discuss.

[Endymionsama]

I have already un-subbed due to this crafting madness. Believe me this isnt a case of just wanting the item now. One of my previous MMOs was Aion so I know all too well about the RNG crafting time and dedication. I never found crafting in Aion as frustrating as I do in this game. So many credits wasted for nothing. I could see if the items you were making last really long or something but by the time you make something you already out leveled it. Then when you step back in look at the end game how the bulk of the gear is better from instance or dailies than the crafted its just a slap in the face. That there was the straw that broke the camels back.

[finelinebob]

I RE'd 25 blue level 48 offhands on my Artificer last night when I logged, and got 6 purple patterns.

 

That is a 24% critical success rate. My RE success rate has been about the same since I started playing this game in December. They didn't change the mechanic one bit when they added the 20% chance to RE notices to the game.

 

I guess you haven't been paying attention to the posts that talk about how probability works. 25 trials is a meaninglessly small number. 25,000 trials is a meaninglessly small number. Go ahead and assume that your rate will stay at 24% -- you'll just be making an @ss out of you.

 

And me? Nope. Your assumption, leave me out of it.

 

Your numbers don't show that the process is working "better" for you. The fact that it is an RNG process means your results are mundanely possible. It is simply working. With probability, there is no such thing as "better" or "worse" ... you can compare all you want against an expected rate of return and all your results will indicate is that for a small (i.e., finite) set of numbers ANY comparison is working as intended.

 

Even if you were somehow gifted beyond the rest of us, you'd be failing 76% of the time. Do you really think a 76% fail rate is appropriate for someone who has "mastered" a particular skill?

 

Sorry if it sounds like I am flogging a dead horse here, but that's crafting in SWTOR for you -- flogging a dead horse. All the same, people keep responding with numbers that "show" either that it's "broke" for them and they are winning or, more likely, that it's "broke" for them and they are losing. It simply is, regardless of your short-term numbers ... and short-term includes every craft or RE you will do over the entire course of how many years you may play this game ... and that is plain crap.

Edited July 16, 2012 by finelinebob

[arestesian]

First some quotes on the subject that give me warm fuzzy feelings,

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

—Robert R. Coveyou

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random.

—Donald Knuth

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

—John von Neumann

Odds are the algorithm used to generate the random numbers hasn't been proven out to be 'statistically' random, because well it's a game.

Since we don't know what's going on in the guts of the game it's hard to say either way if the RE'ing is broken or not. You could be unlucky in that 99 of your 100 one in five chances to win were losers. Or the prng may not be random enough and after it jumps through all of the hoops and it is developing patterning. Personally I think people would have noticed if there was patterening there would be threads talking about the best time of day to RE or other things like Re'ing 8 items counting to four then RE'ing five.

[IIIGinoIII]

The tool tips say the chance to successfully reverse engineer a green item as being 20%. This is clearly rubbish. I've produced MANY MANY more greens than needed for a 1 in 5 hit rate.

 

I'm not sure if it's the SWTOR random number generator that's broken, or if the tool tip is wrong. Either way it should be fixed..

 

(and yes I know, 20% chance doesn't guarentee a 1 in 5 hit, but it should average out to that over time - and clearly, in this game it doesn't).

 

You have nothing to complain about. I had two different types of augments at 20% I was REing and one took me 27 times the other took me 25 times. This was all the same night. I wished I recorded it. I was pretty heated that night. I have had times where I was REing 10% armor and got 3 pieces in a row reengineered. It really is dumb luck. I wonder if anyone can beat my 20% 27 times story. I wonder what the odds of having that bad luck are? Any mathmaticians?

Edited July 16, 2012 by IIIGinoIII

[Darzil]

I wonder what the odds of having that bad luck are? Any mathmaticians?

 

Probably, the odds are around 0.3% of getting 26 fails in a row, starting at a particular time. So if 330 people tried to RE an item, you'd expect 1 to take 27 or longer tries. Or if, say 33 people tried to RE 10 items, you'd expect one to take 27 or longer tries. Assuming we have, say 100,000 crafters, and that they RE, say 100 items each, you'd expect that around 30,000 of them would take 27 or longer tries on one of those items. You'd expect one to take 72 tries or more! I guess they'd post and say the RNG is broken.

Edited July 16, 2012 by Darzil

[finelinebob]

I wonder if anyone can beat my 20% 27 times story.

 

Over 100 Blue 10%'s ... lower odds, but much longer losing streak.

 

As for the RNG not being truly random ... true enough, but as others have said computer random number generators have become fairly sophisticated. Add to that if it was NOT truly random, then non-random means it has a pattern or is weighted. Because it would be determined by a non-changing equation or algorithm, it would not be affected by the current server population, by the time of day, by your location, or by the tides of the moon. With enough data from the community, we would see a definite "slant" indicating that the process is off to a certain degree. But since we'd probably only hear about people's failures (because they're the ones who will want to mention it AND because this system weights outcomes heavily towards failure in the first place) I doubt we'd get a representative sample.

[BaronV]

I think the reason people are arguing so much is because no one quite understands exactly how the probability system for the REing works. Based on my understanding of how computer RNGs work and my experience with REing im starting to believe that REing isnt a flat 20%, but rather if you were to take a sample of say 1 million RE tries, and plot the number of times you had to RE before getting a schematic you would get a normal distribution where the MEAN is at the 20% mark.

 

Problem is I suspect that the variance can be HUGE. Hence the reason why there are people who have REd 100 times in a row and not gotten anything, whereas other people have gotten 5 or even 10 schematics in a short span of time. That varience needs to be tightened down to say within +/-1 or 2% to be less frustrating, but really the whole RE system sucks the way it is right now. There should be a learning curve where subsequent failures increase your chances of success with the next try.

 

People keep banging on about how the system is working as intended, I doubt it, but even if it was that doesnt change the fact that its broken. It just means the person who designed it is an idiot.

[Mathias_Varr]

I'm pretty sure a lot of people complaining about this mechanic also do not understand that the probability is independent. You attempt to Reverse Engineer. The game rolls a random number between 1 and 100 and if that number is 20 or less, you succeed. Whether or not that attempt succeeds has no bearing on further attempts to Reverse Engineer so RE'ing 100 items will not yield 20 successes.

 

However, if you take the numbers of successes to losses from many people and plot them on a graph, you will get a bell curve, with the majority close to the center that represents that 20% chance and other, less frequent outliers that represent low to no success and the other end of the spectrum which is above average to high success.

 

Keep at it and eventually numbers will be on your side. If not, you can always wait for the 100% RE chance items...from the Cash Shop.

[asbalana]

......

 

Problem is I suspect that the variance can be HUGE. Hence the reason why there are people who have REd 100 times in a row and not gotten anything, whereas other people have gotten 5 or even 10 schematics in a short span of time. That varience needs to be tightened down to say within +/-1 or 2% to be less frustrating, but really the whole RE system sucks the way it is right now. There should be a learning curve where subsequent failures increase your chances of success with the next try.

.

 

Perhaps bingo there. Nothing can be proven, but indeed long streaks of failure exist and subjectively to many players exist to an unsuspected degree. So yesterday, I got three 10% hits in a row while my wife finally gave up on REing a helmet to purple after three days and 250K worth of credits of trying. Neither of us ended up being overjoyed at the tought that we may have averaged each other out.

 

The system is good in that there is a path to get to purple and crapolla in the way it was done. Long and inevitable fail streaks will and do have a bad perception affect on players and discourages crafting and crafters.

 

One aspect of the system that has not been discussed (even on the off chance that it is working as represented) is the built in waste. By that I mean that I do not sit there (and I suspect most players do not as wel) while my companions are crafting greens or blues for me to RE. I set them out crafting and then go on to other things. I don't think that most of us sit and stare at the screen while five of our companions produce a blue object every fifteen to twenty minutes (averages three minutes each) and click RE when the item appears. My rule of thumb is that I usually produce about ten to fifteen items if the RE chance is 20% and fifteen to twenty five if the chance is 10%. To me that gives (I know the math says differentt but that is the way it seems) about an even chance of a successful RE. So if I end up hitting on the first few tries, I end up with a bag full of worthless junk that sometimes I can sell but more often just RE back for the mats. The system then most times ends up in frustration if I go through all fifteen to twenty five items without a hit or with me staring at a large amount of sometimes costly junk that is useless. Whether or not I hit the average, I find that I have to play as if I will not. I could try producing and REing a few items at a time, but then a long fail streak would mean that it would take forever to get one item to purple.

 

I have two final comments. The first is that when you are leveling a character and trying to build gear for him/her, it is not unusual to finally get the purple when that character has progressed far beyond the point where it is of any value. Not good for people who want to be self sufficient crafters. The other is that I do not have have one character that needs shield, yet it seems that the vast majority of my hits have sheild and not a stat that I can use. What's up with that and can you think of anything more frustrating than going through a long string of fails to finally get a hit and then see that the result is totally useless to you.

[Cirinia]

This is what I do:

1. Step one: remove any desire for success before RE item (attain peace of mind).

2. Step two: perform reverse engineering. If You have really managed to get rid of success desire game will detect through mind scan and grant a success otherwise if will detect cheat attempt and make RE fail:)

[Tickdoff-Tank]

There are probably close to 10 million RE event taking place across the game every day. Which means people have the possibility of seeing all sorts of statistically unlikely events.

 

So there is probably at least 1 poor soul out there every so often who sees no crits after 60 RE's(~1 in 10 million chance)... just be glad you aren't that guy.

 

The devs have access to the overall numbers (sample size hundreds of millions, not the 50 or so yours is) and see a 20% rate, so there is no problem

 

Back in January I used Fraps to record my attempts at REing an item. I RE'd 134 of the same green to get it to blue. I was pretty annoyed by this.

 

Of course I got the next 2 blues from that green in about 10 more tries, and got several purples (including the one I wanted) quickly as well. I know I should have just given up when it took me so many greens, but I decided that I would NOT let the game beat me. Irrational, but there it is.

[finelinebob]

... I know I should have just given up when it took me so many greens, but I decided that I would NOT let the game beat me. Irrational, but there it is.

 

I know EXACTLY how you feel, and it's one of the things that makes me even angrier about crafting in this game. I'm too stupid to stop.