it is broken. i know way to many people who have the same issue. and to the people saying "past failures have no effect on future RE's", that isn't what he's saying. he's trying to figure out what are the odds of failing X number of times in a row, which is a completely different equation as some people have pointed out.

 

either it's broken or BW is having a huge laugh at us, and i doubt the latter s true. somewhere, in some line of code, someone has misplaced a decimal or SOMETHING, because i don't care what any of the flamers or devs say, there is no way that it is actually 10/20%, it just isn't, plain and simple.

 

what would be cool is if for every failure you have, it ups the percentage of success for your next RE until you finally are successful, it resets. kinda like "well i tried taking it apart this way last time, now i've learned what i did wrong so i should have a better chance next time." unfortunately the good ideas are lost in the sea of turds...

i made a post about this same problem in the suggestion box forum . they say the devs actually look at that 1 so if you guys would like to post this there maybe we can get them to pay attention to us crafters.

I have spent way too long, and way too many credits, RE stuff on my Sniper to get the reusables.

 

And then I spend way too many credits on missions to get the purple grade medical supplies.

 

I think there needs to be some sort of streakbreaker involved, but that's just me.

I have done a ton of RE with Synthweaving and it has always seemed obvious to me the random number generator does not work correctly. It definitely is not truly random chance. The best proof of this, at least in my experience, is the chance to discover a schematic is much higher if you RE something right after you just discovered a schematic. Each time I discover a schematic I make sure to immediately RE the next item and because it seems closer to a 50% chance of success.

 

Other than that, it definitely does not feel natural. I frequently go on very long streaks of not discovering new schematics. I've always been good with statistics and the probability of this happening so often is too low. I have not been counting, but I'm confident my success rate is a bit under the stated percentages.

Edited May 3, 2012 by Vanishing

20% is a lie.

 

I find it frustrating that the only way of having reliable gear is a broken system where 20% really means 1%.

Just adding that I have had a similar experience. 20% seems far from what I've experienced REing a low level green augment, maybe 20 times.

Perhaps the RE chance is a base chance which is then scaled by level. Ie. all green to blues are 20%, all blues to purple are 10%. But factor in level of item and 10-19 items are reduced 0%, 20-29 reduced 1%, 30-39 reduced 2% etc.

 

So a blue to purple RE has a chance of 1%. This seems more in line with the results where people are doing way more than 1 out of 5.

 

Also, I think some of the items are simply no RE'able despite the tooltips.

After doing a little bit of fun internet research, I found the following link: http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~west/applets/binomialdemo.html

 

You don't need to use anything complex to calculate a 20% chance of success applied over a series of attempts.

A 20% chance of success means you have an 80% chance of failure, or .8 per attempt.

For every subsequent attempt, you multiply by another .8.

 

1 attempt = .8 failure, or 20% success

2 attempts = .64 failure rate = 36% success

3 attempts = .51 failure rate = 49% success

4 attempts = .41 failure rate = 59% success

5 attempte = .33 failure rate = 67% success

 

Over the course of five attempts, you have a 67% overall chance of discovering a new recipe.

The problem is the system and will never go away. The math provided so far is smack on, but it's missing an important point;

 

The poster is not unlucky. He isn't even have close to bad luck. Why? You have to look at the number of times this event happens. With 1.7 million players, I think it's safe to say that about a million attempts to "learn a schematic" happen every day. This means ONE IN A MILLION EVENTS happen ever day. The one in a million event for REing a 20% chance is about 70 in a row with nothing.

 

That's how probability works. The odds of winning a 6/49 lotto are extremely low, but that doesn't stop someone from winning almost every time. All that matters is enough people playing.

 

So EA and BW have set up a system for REing where ever single day 100s of people get screwed by falling on the 98% of standard distribution and needed to do 50+ REs to get a green into a blue.

 

Every single day.

 

And the design people think this is just fine and expect that guy to go "thems then breaks" and continue to enjoy playing that game. This is how detached from reality they are.