Originally Posted by
Vodelle
Well, I wrote a really long post earlier my thoughts on RNG, probability, statistics, and whether FFS is 'fair' across all accounts. I just joined up so I can't really comment on how FFS has changed or any recent debacles, sorry. But I'll go into my RNG spiel.
I've seen this across TONS of games that involve some form of luck in terms of breeding chances or rare items chances or whatever (which, really, is what most of the f2p games are built upon to get you to spend, obviously). I've observed that most people don't seem to really understand the underlying statistics/probability and are thus more prone to looking to other things to blame for their 'poor' luck -- such as the idea that certain accounts have better breeding/rare rates than others.
I think this is just paranoia and most likely doesn't make real sense. First, it would be a lot more of a programming task to have different breeding rates across different accounts. There is no benefit to doing it randomly, either -- someone who has really bad luck for a long period of time might alleviate that pressure with spending... or they might keep going, or they might just flat out quit. There's no way to know that on account creation, so the other option would be to change rates once you know more about the consumer. Think about the programming effort involved here. (Most f2p games are not exactly known to be the most rigorous at squashing bugs or implementing new features, so...) Even then, what could be attributed to calculated malice may just as easily and more realistically be attributed to built in RNG.
But mostly, I want to come at this from a probability perspective. Imagine that the chance to breed something really rare, like a legendary, is just 1%. For what it's worth, I have played quite a few f2p games that have that low of a chance to either breed or get rare items (often with a 'gacha' style system where pulling for an item takes, you know, like $2 each time...) so this is not an entirely unrealistic number. What does this mean? It means on average, it would take you 100 breeding attempts (or gacha rolls, or whatever it is) to get whatever this rare item is. However, you could just as easily get it on your 3rd try, or go 150 tries without getting it, as that would fall within normal RNG variation. That's how you can easily have some people who seem to have streaks of good luck while others fall by the wayside. Especially since odds are independent -- if it remains 1% each time you breed, then each time you have that low of a chance to strike gold. Breeding more times doesn't magically give you better odds (unless this was programmed, like Diablo 3 loot, but this is very rare). And even if you DID breed 100 times -- that's a really small sample size on an individual level.
Lastly, it's simply human nature to want to see patterns where in reality there are none. It's also human nature to remember the negatives (boy, I can't breed anything good for a month) and discount the positives (well, yeah, I got this super rare, but I already had it, so it doesn't really count). Even more so, we look for explanation -- it's way easier to blame something (the game has different rates! etc) than it is to accept that all that's causing our pain is just the roll of the figurative dice, over and over. I think the fickleness of RNG and low probability explains away the frustration people are feeling with far less conspiracy-like thought than the idea that FFS is actively screwing a bunch of people over. (Which they might be. I just think in this case, they don't need to, because RNG can screw you over perfectly fine on its own, even if everyone has the same rates for everything.)