It will also depend on your skill level. Something that is high on your skill list will not RE very well. Greens get you the standard tool tip 20%. You go grey and well below your skill and you can RE with quite a bit of success, I have frequently done that and got 3 new schematics out of 5 chances or less. Stacked items like stims can almost always get you a schematic doing 5-10 at a time.

Say you have 100,000 people (around 1/10th of the number of accounts), who reverse engineer stuff. WIth a 20% chance, each tries to get a blue, any blue, from a green.

 

10737 of them will require more than 10 tries.

377 of them will require more than 25 tries.

1 of them (well, 1.4) will require more than 50 tries!

 

That one is highly likely to come on the forum to complain about the RNG being broken, even though what it actually proves is the RNG is working as expected!

no.. succeeding 1 in 10 attempts in 10% chance, not 20...

 

 

by the way i realise it's not guaranteed.. im just saying it should approximate a 1 in 5 win.. and it's not even close to that.. maybe my losses are making up for everyone else 1 shotting them

 

 

It is approximate a 1 in 5 chance. RE something around 10000 times and track your results. You should see around 20% success rate.

RNG is R

 

RNG is Pseudo-R. YMMV.

Those laws of probability only apply if you were to say reverse engineer about 500 to 1000 of those items, and in that case it should come out to be 1 out of 5 tries on average for a success. But if you want to break it down on a single individual attempt, there is a 1 - (1024/3125) or about a 67% chance of getting a success in your first five tries. Honestly the probability of 10 failures is high enough that I can say it is not an outrageous result for it to happen every so often. Basically one out of every three items should take more than five tries. Edited July 11, 2012 by Amendial

I'm off to do the lottery, I can't tell you the number of times i have got the numbers wrong, so therefore I am more or less guaranteed to win it surely?

What's that, you say?

Each draw is mutually exclusive?

Previous results do not affect the next result?

 

Damn.

RNG is Pseudo-R. YMMV.

 

With modern number generation, there's no functional difference between pseudorandom and random.

So instead of 20% x 5 = 100% success in RE. You are facing 80% x 5 = 400% FAIL!!! in RE.

 

this is actually a very good way of looking at it

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

My record for RE fails is 22 straight. Sometimes I get 3/5 on the next item. Random numbers are random.

After 1.3 I went thro a real bad spell of RE'ing and thought that summing was up but tbh the very next day... DING! I got lucky more than unlucky, so for me it seems to be working as intended... its a game of chance sometimes its seems in your favor, other times the gods appear to be conspiring against you..

With modern number generation, there's no functional difference between pseudorandom and random.

 

With cutting edge RNG probably not (mostly because the include a geniunely random external variable), with MMORPG RNG there most likely is.

Yeah sometimes it took me to RE 10 to 15 items till it hit but there have been times when I hit on the first one so yeah its whatever is randomly rolled so....

Yesterday I RE 22 green "might augment 22" until I got the blue schematic. I RE 1 blue and got the purple. It all works out in the end. People fall into the gambler's fallacy all the time (trust me I work in a casino) just because on roulette you have a 50/50 chance on red or black (I know there is a 0 and 00 but lets keep it simple) based on the OP theory the wheel should alternate red and black every spin. I've dealt on a wheel and spun black 18 times in a row. Every event is independent of the previous events.

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).

 

I have several crafting alts and i tested this across all of them and a fairly large number of items (412 to be exact).

While on some characters i got a rate of 12% from 70ish items, on others i got rates of 36%.

When i made the average across all of them it was 21.6% so actually better than the tooltip.

I had bouts of needing to RE 12-15 items for a success, and that 2-3 times in a row, but also bouts of success from first or second try.

Given a sufficient number of tries, the overall percentage is fairly accurate.

Its irritating when you need to RE 15 items several time in a row to get a success, but thats the problem with RNG systems and that doesnt automatically mean the system is broken.

It's amazing what people start imagining when random events come into play. The only way to cut through the fantasy is to keep records of every single event and every single outcome over a very large sample of trials, and then you can start to see what patterns there are. For me, after tracking several thousand REs, I'm finding that my success rate does approach that of what the tool tips say to within a few percent, no matter what my feelings are about luck or fairness at any given time ... and a few thousand trials are no where near what is needed for the Law of Large Numbers to come into play.

 

And no, unlike what someone posted earlier, whether your items are "gray" in difficulty to craft or "red", it does not matter. Another fantasy ... your level of "skill" has nothing to do with whether you will succeed in an RE or not. My crafters are all skill 400 and it does not matter whether they are REing items that require a skill of 40 or 400, the stated chances are what the rates hold to.

 

So, I maintain, although the OP's reasoning was incorrect his premise was still correct: RE is broken.

 

Why? "Skill" has nothing to do with it. We are supposed to have crew "skills", but increasing that "skill" does nothing but increase the range of schematics we can learn. It does not affect RE chance. It does not affect item quality. It does not affect your chance to get an augment slot. An RNG-based system for a "skill" is a terrible idea, a failure on the part of BioWare to produce a meaningful system that allows people to demonstrate some skill. Calling these functions "skills" does not make them so.

 

It has nothing to do with what your rates or chances are ... RE is broken simply because a random process has nothing to do with skill.

 

I have posted elsewhere my suggestions about modifying the RE system in a way that would allow some measure of skill to be introduced. It would not completely replace REing or crafting as it is right now -- people who enjoy the crafting RNG minigame as it is could continue on in ignorant bliss -- but it would enhance the experience for those who wanted it AND allow for an improvement in crafted items. Please check it out if you enjoy crafting in MMOs and would like to see this aspect of SWTOR improved.

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

 

I guess that I am one of the poor souls. After 1.3 hit, I had a streak of 57 misses before I hit and then another into the 40s misses before I gave up. I see two problems.

 

The first is after all that has been said in this thread, there is no way for the individual player to tell if the system is working or if you are playing with loaded dice (or a broken wheel). Remember this is BW and there are more bugs in swtor per square inch than can be concieved. If BW is looking at the numbers over the entire player base we do not know what they are seeing. Even if the system is not working, the problem may be sitting somewhere on a list of things to be eventally fixed (when they get to it). So when 1 in 10,000,000 (or other such improbable) things continue to happen to me as a single player, I don't get warm and fuzzies and feel a good deal of confidence that things are "working as intended". And yes, I have REed things and sometimes hit two ot three times in a row with just one, two, or three tries per pattern.

 

The second problem is that even if everything is hunky dory, any system that can produce long streaks of failure which will happen over the player base on a regular basis is flawed and is poor design. REing a purple or critting should not be easy or a given, but a mechanic should be in place that after a number of failures (could be ten, twenty, thirty, or some appropiate number), the chance for success ramps up and and an end to the streak becomes more and more likely. I see no value to the game or crafting in general to have a number of very pissed poor souls who feel deep down that the system is broken. The system rewards lucky players and screws unlucky players to an over large degree.

 

tl;dr - The system may or may not be broken and no player will ever be able to tell and the system even if not broken can frustrate unlucky players.

 

Edit - It hit me after hitting submit, that I have seen more threads claiming that some rng aspect of crafting is broken than I can count. Yet, I have never seen one response from any BW dev.

Edited July 11, 2012 by asbalana

...

 

Edit - It hit me after hitting submit, that I have seen more threads claiming that some rng aspect of crafting is broken than I can count. Yet, I have never seen one response from any BW dev.

What could any Bioware staff ever say that would ever mollify someone who has had a bad luck streak?

 

Patrick Malott described the chance here:

http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-april-27th-2012

 

Anyone who isn't experiencing the 20% is going to feel cheated. I've seen these posts come up time and time again, and many people have attempted to respond with clear and concise information explaining probability theory or giving their own experiences where the 20% was correct (myself included)

 

Not once have I ever seem a complainer about RE ever say, "You know that makes sense, the 20% is probably right and I'll just keep on going"

 

The correct answer, "Working as intended", just isn't the answer they want to hear.

Edited July 11, 2012 by JeffKretz

If anyone didn't know, the RE was bonked when the game first came out. I suspect that it is still off a bit. Though, it is MUCH better than it was. I sure am curious as to what algorithm and seed they are using.

 

Actually, we don't know "how" the RE system was originally "bonked". From what I remember, the phrase used was NOT "it isn't working as designed". It was "The reverse engineering return rate is NOT currently working as intended. In an upcoming patch, we are improving the reverse engineering rates – especially for the higher-level items."

 

Which to me strongly suggests that the flaw was with the design, not the implementation. (i.e. the designer intended that having a low success rate on high end stuff would make the system more challenging and rewarding when you finally succeed, and make those rare items a huge plus. In reality, the low success rate wasn't recieved by the player base as fun and challenging, but rather annoying and frustrating. So, the low success rate wasn't resulting in the intended enjoyment.)

Just means you weren't very lucky. I remember a night when I've managed to get successful RE about 8 times out of 10 for Cybertech.

 

Good times. Good times....

 

There's a reason this kind of system is bad design, particularly when you throw in trash like redoubt going on dps gear and overkill/critical going on tank gear.

 

The simple fix would be to say tht you have a base 20% chance to get a pattern, however each failure adds a small percentage to your success probability.

 

I've gotten 3 patterns when re'ing 4 things, and I didn't want any of the 3 patterns, and then I went 27 re's before my next pattern. THAT is a rubbish system, especially when you toss in the fact that a blue metal mission takes an hour, and it may only give you 2 pieces of metal (and you can even fail and get 0, even with 400 skill), and 1 item takes 4 pieces of metal AND sometimes you CAN'T get more than 1 metal mission at a time.

 

Its a very bad system, there's no other way to put it.

I don't know why people always like to point out about how RNG are only psuedo random as if this somehow isn't good enough when pretty much every random event in a game uses a psuedo RNG. It might not be right if you're looking to simulate something truly random in nature (say simulate the climate model of Earth) but that's not what we're dealing with here.

 

Let's say the RNG isn't random at all. It's actually this master server that keeps a sequence. Every 5 requests you'll get a success in RE to this master server. This is totally not random so we should expect a success every 5 REs, right? No because unless you're the only person doing REs at a certain time of day, it's actually completely random who else happens to be REing at the same time so you could get some totally random results just depending on who requsted another sequence from this definitely-not random 'RNG' and then the result, to you, looks pretty random.

 

Let's say the RNG just seeds on the time of the day to the millisecond (a fairly simple process)and you know the exact algorithm involved, it's going to be really hard to time your RE at certain milliseconds to ensure you get the result you want. The end result is still random to you because you cannot possibly time your REs accurate to the milisecond.

Edited July 11, 2012 by Astarica

I hate ALL rng because I'm ultra unlucky. Seriously, my roomate & I duo drop quests, and I *****always****** will take 3 times longer than him. ALWAYS. From 1 to 50, there wasn't a single drop quest that I finished when he did, i was always between 2 and up to 40 pulls after him, NOT an exaggeration.

 

Likewise, with RE's, VERY RARELY I'll get an RE quickly. It's almost ALWAYS the 10th to 30th (again, not an exaggeration) .

 

It could be that it's something about my computer, my room, I don't know, or maybe there is such a thing as "luck" and I don't have it. But whenever something has a 20% chance of success for me that really means I'll have to do it 15 to 20 times to get the desire result - and I'm kind of tired of it.

I hate ALL rng because I'm ultra unlucky. Seriously, my roomate & I duo drop quests, and I *****always****** will take 3 times longer than him. ALWAYS. From 1 to 50, there wasn't a single drop quest that I finished when he did, i was always between 2 and up to 40 pulls after him, NOT an exaggeration.

 

Likewise, with RE's, VERY RARELY I'll get an RE quickly. It's almost ALWAYS the 10th to 30th (again, not an exaggeration) .

 

It could be that it's something about my computer, my room, I don't know, or maybe there is such a thing as "luck" and I don't have it. But whenever something has a 20% chance of success for me that really means I'll have to do it 15 to 20 times to get the desire result - and I'm kind of tired of it.

 

In an interview with WoW designers they said they originally made say a drop 25% but then people will just complain about being unlucky so they made the drop say 20% but +5% for each mob that didn't drop it so that the overall % is the same but you will eventaully get your drop no matter how unlucky you are because that number will hit 100% eventually.

 

It seems like this is the system people prefer. By the way if this system is in, your initial chance to RE has to be less than 20% because it increases on failures so it can't be 20% to start, assuming the goal is still to ensure 20% success rate on average.

The correct answer, "Working as intended", just isn't the answer they want to hear.

So, I've got 136 Augmentation Slot Component Mk-4's in my inventory for my latest project, a level 39 piece of head gear. What do I have to show for it? The Redoubt schematic and 1 purple schematic with PRESENCE as a secondary ... like I need more presence (1) on a PVP server where (2) my presence is already 413 at level 39.

 

And yes, I know, it is working as intended. That is exactly the problem.

 

For an MMO on which BW has spent, what, north of $100mil in development? They gave us a crafting system not even worthy of a game that launches F2P. It's a joke. It should be a point of embarrassment for the Doctors. That something so awful is working as intended shows just how little research BW did into the crafting aspect of this game or, even worse, how atrocious the research they did was.

Edited July 12, 2012 by finelinebob

Edit - It hit me after hitting submit, that I have seen more threads claiming that some rng aspect of crafting is broken than I can count. Yet, I have never seen one response from any BW dev.

 

I've seen the same in every other game where RNG comes into play, especially around crafting. Always pointing to long unlucky streaks as evidence that RNG is broken, rarely understanding that long unlucky streaks is a sign of actual random behaviour too.

 

There have been games in which RNG was broken, generally early ones. Nowadays it'd be more effort to create a broken RNG system than just to reuse a working one. The sign of a broken one was "if I do this, or craft in this area, or just after zoning, or at this time past the hour, I'll always succeed or always fail", basically ways to inflence success that shouldn't have been possible with RNG.