Awful RNG Related Experiences

[AverageOliver98 | 720]

I'm almost certain that I'm not the only person who's pulled their hair out just hoping for the RNG to be in their favor only for it not to be. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And I"VE BEEN BASHING STARMAN SUPERS FOR THE PAST 3 HOURS! WHERES MY SWORD OF KINGS?!!

Yeah, Earthbound has a good chunk of the best equipment stuck as 1/128 drops: Sword of Kings, Gaia Beam, Magic Fry Pan, Star Pendant, Goddess Ribbon, and Gutsy Bat (a moment of silence for anyone who used the Earthbound Player's Guide). I don't remember ever getting any one these items on my first play through and, it might just be me, but for whatever reason  when I did try to go after them, its always taken me at least an hour or more to finally obtain it.

Most recently, I spent 3 hours EACH trying to get the Sword of Kings and Gaia Beam on a play through I started back in February and in the midst of trying to get the first of three Star Pendants (an hour in at the time), just sort of gave up on the hunt, went and bashed Gyigas and Porky back into Mother 1 and 3 respectively, and called it a day. 

Anyway, anyone else have a horrible RNG experience to share? 

[Link | 2,732]

In Dope Wars (iOS Drug Wars clone) you can go several days with multiple drugs having no change in price or being off the market entirely. 

[ifightdragons | 234]

One of the biggest caveats of JRPGs is the overly monotonous grinding for items that are way too rare. Any game or hack that seeks to remedy this, is a blessing to the entire genre.

[Kguillemette | 1,547]

I love jrpgs, but having rare drops for anything other than consumable items is just bad game design in my opinion.

[scaryice | 596]

I love this sort of thing, actually. It gives you a reason to do another playthrough, or to come back to your old save. You're not meant to actually sit there and grind out every single rare item on your first time through - no rpg requires that to finish the game.

[RH | 4,973]

Interesting discussion topic, more so than it might seem.  Back around 1999/2000 when I was going into college, I wanted to go to the "Nintendo Video Game" school, Digipen.  Well, I couldn't afford it and after I learned that video game developers were some of the sharpest in the industry, but also paid the least I abandoned that dream.   Still, it didn't cause me to lose interest so I went to Digipen's site and pulled their list of text books and bought a few of the ones I was most interested in.

One of the books about good programming principles had an entire chapter dedicated to randomness.  One of the things that's stuck to me to this day is that it pointed out that randomness in gaming does not have to be (or simulate) true randomness.  This can frustrate the player depending on the context and that at times "random number washing" might be appropriate so that players don't feel cheated by exceptionally bad dice rolls, location respawns, etc.  Instead, a good RNG engine for any given context needs to think about the outcome from a players perspective and prevent to many, numerous similar outcomes.

In all my days, I feel like I run into the problem of NOT having RNG washing rather than seeing it, however, there is one case where I am positive it exists.  About the same time I read that text book, my sister had a copy of Mario Party.  I played it a good bit with her and I noticed on the 6-sided player dice roll for movements, you could see the same number rolled twice in a row but never, ever did it appear a third time in a row.  It was interesting to see this type of advice used in a textbook for a school Nintendo endorsed for budding video gaming programmers and the only, blatant case of "Random Number Washing" I've ever seen with certainty was a Nintendo game.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

This will probably be considered peripheral to the topic at hand, but I've noticed, and proved on at least one occasion that while many games claim to have RNG built into them, some don't, putting in only the appearance of such--sometimes occasionally, sometimes all the time.

The time that I caught the computer red handed at it, was when I had just gotten my physical copy of Casino Kid II and decided I'd use my Everdrive to speedrun through the game to see what the "plot"/"story" was by utilizing the save state feature.  I started out with Blackjack (I can't remember if that's just what the game forces you into or if I had a choice), and while I played decently enough, I'm nowhere near enough of a card shark to win any sort of gambling situation quickly, and soon enough was having to restore my per-win save states multiple times.  During those restores, I noticed that both the computer and I would usually end up with totally different cards and hands from what we had the prior time around, and sometimes I would win the hand first time and sometimes I'd have to restore and repeat the hand several times to win, save, then move on.

I can't remember what hand we were on specifically, but I want to say it was 10-15 hands in, with me having won every hand up to that point, when the computer kept beating me, no matter what, and always with the exact same hand (ace of spades and a face card that I can't remember to make blackjack).  No matter how many times I restored, the CPU would always get the same two cards after my turn, and I would always get the same two sets of 2-3 cards, giving the illusion that what was happening was random.  I want to say one hand was 17 and the other was 18, and if you hit on either hand you would end up busting, but with each differing hand producing the same card (unique to each set of cards per "random" hand) each time.

This made me incredibly angry at the game, as it appeared Nintendo may have engineered a deliberate forcible loss into the game, so after discussing the matter (I believe on NA, but it might have been in the incredibly early days of VGS), I started the game back up, restored that save, took the loss, then continued the pattern for a while longer.  Well, the behavior repeated.  I would win so many hands "in a row" using save states to restore my winning streak until "RNG" worked in my favor, and then the game would throw up a hard stop where the dealer would just pull an instant win off of the bottom of the deck and screw me into 1-2 static losing hands no matter how many times the game got reset.  At the time I brought this up in a forum post, it was suggested that restoring the state caused an issue with the memory/CPU state on the game which resulted in only one possible outcome, but the thing is that the same process produced seemingly legitimately random results for 10-15 hands, sometimes for multiples of some of those hands, and then suddenly would only throw up a static winning hand for the CPU and 1-2 static losing hands for the player.

Something to keep in mind should folks get stuck lin a seemingly endless loop trying to accomplish something with "RNG" just continually failing to favor them.  Sometimes the game is just written to screw the player, or appear to be using RNG but actually having other invisible, unstated requirements that the player must meet for whatever they're trying to get or get to happen to actually show up in the RNG table, all while giving the outward appearance of "true" and fair randomness.

[Makar | 1,946]

This never happened to me but I have heard horror stories of players encountering shiny Pokémon in the very beginning of the game before they can even get pokeballs, and they’re forced to kill the shiny Pokémon rather than catch it. For those unfamiliar with shiny Pokémon rarity, in the early games, the odds of finding a shiny Pokémon were 1/8192

[Reed Rothchild | 9,586]

Anything in WoW.  Especially solo grinding the Baron's mount...

[Tanooki | 4,952]

Out of at least a dozen attempts over the years, and back when it came out a yearly play of it, I've only maybe 2-3x ever got the pink tail needed for the ultimate rare piece of gear you can get out of Final Fantasy II US(FF4j-SFC) because it has a 1/32 chance not only of the right monster popping, but then the same odds that monster drops the necessary item.

[CMR | 522]

There's something about my original NES, that I've owned since childhood, that makes the wall in stage 4 of Double Dragon almost impassible.  I thought for years that the game was designed this way until I heard of other people getting past it like it was no problem.  Playing it on my toploader and modded toaster it's a breeze, but if I plug that same cart into my original Nintendo, that wall turns into Chuck Norris.  I've literally gotten there with full health and all my lives and been completely obliterated.

As strange as it sounds, after all these years, I wouldn't want it any other way.  If my original NES let me through that wall area easy, I would honestly be disappointed.  As for a real reason for this, I can only assume it has something to do with the ram chips and their initial state at startup.

[themisfit138 | 523]

Unlocking the Rare blades in Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

[RH | 4,973]

12 hours ago, themisfit138 said:

Unlocking the Rare blades in Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Yeah, I know that's brutal.  Any clue what their rates of pulling them are? Have those details ever been posted?

[themisfit138 | 523]

1 hour ago, RH said:

Yeah, I know that's brutal.  Any clue what their rates of pulling them are? Have those details ever been posted?

There is a lot of speculation, but I haven’t seen much solid data. Here is an example of detail people go into to unlock blades.

 

[RH | 4,973]

15 minutes ago, themisfit138 said:

There is a lot of speculation, but I haven’t seen much solid data. Here is an example of detail people go into to unlock blades.

 

He... wrote.. that... in... Poppi's.... voice...

[NostalgicMachine | 247]

On 4/6/2022 at 2:56 AM, ifightdragons said:

One of the biggest caveats of JRPGs is the overly monotonous grinding for items that are way too rare. Any game or hack that seeks to remedy this, is a blessing to the entire genre.

This is it right here for me. Pink Tail in FFII was 1/64 I think? Not as bad as it could be but definitely a chore!

[OptOut | 8,892]

Two words.

Pokémon. Stadium.

RIP 

[RH | 4,973]

You all are acting like you've never heard of a GameShark.

In all seriousness though, I loved RPGs so much as a kid, but I also wanted to 100% stuff. More rather, I wanted to experience everything the game provided.  I think I spent my time actually earning everything in Final Fantasy VII, but after that I'd play a game to completion, I might work on some side quests but if getting a God-tier item was rare or hard to find, I would "cheat" it into my inventory.  It's one thing to have to make it through a really hard dungeon, but it's something else to have to fight a "sneezy death worm" (or whatever) 284 times before learning that special monster attack that has a high chance of OHKing anything in the game.  Forget that, I'm just going cheat my save file AFTER I've beaten the game.

[Hammerfestus | 3,886]

Any time I’m critically wounded in Dragon Warrior.  How about a battle every step?  Running away? Forget it.

[rdrunner | 422]

With the few RPGs I've played, I've only cared about reaching the end of the story, usually at a reasonably low level.  Most of the time I didn't even know that there were "rare" things to find and collect (about the only one I can even think of is the WarMech encounter in Final Fantasy 1).

Not that I would have cared.  The idea of grinding experience in RPGs is bad enough, but to grind even more for an item drop or overpowered monster?  No thanks!

I will say that the RNG does get to me in one area: Death spells.  I swear despite the advertised hit rate of 10% or whatnot, the spells work almost every time a monster uses them, but never when I try them myself.  I'm sure this has something to do with me being under-leveled, but still.

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

On 4/6/2022 at 8:20 PM, Tanooki said:

Out of at least a dozen attempts over the years, and back when it came out a yearly play of it, I've only maybe 2-3x ever got the pink tail needed for the ultimate rare piece of gear you can get out of Final Fantasy II US(FF4j-SFC) because it has a 1/32 chance not only of the right monster popping, but then the same odds that monster drops the necessary item.

 

On 4/8/2022 at 3:02 AM, Van Jackson said:

This is it right here for me. Pink Tail in FFII was 1/64 I think? Not as bad as it could be but definitely a chore!

Same.

What is the deal with this one? I must've tried for at least ten hours and never got it back in the early 2000s. I wonder if some revisions of the game just didn't drop this correctly.

[Tanooki | 4,952]

Maybe, or it's just really REALLY bad luck.  I mean I remember seeing it in NP or something that said 1/32 for the creature to appear, then if it did, it was a 1/32 chance that creature would drop it.

1/32 is around a 3% chance, so you're at a 3% within a 3% chance.  That's very very SLIM odds indeed that 10 hours doesn't seem unreasonable to get nothing out of it.

I asked google calculator what 3% of 3% is, and it said 0.0009%  -- yeah good luck getting that tail.  That's 9 ten-thousandths of 1%.  That's got to be mocking powerball odds or something of the sort.

[G-type | 2,525]

I sometimes gets screwed waiting for those straight pieces in Tetris

[T-Pac | 7,588]

On 4/8/2022 at 10:10 AM, Hammerfestus said:

Any time I’m critically wounded in Dragon Warrior.  How about a battle every step?  Running away? Forget it.

[NostalgicMachine | 247]

On 4/9/2022 at 3:56 PM, DoctorEncore said:

 

Same.

What is the deal with this one? I must've tried for at least ten hours and never got it back in the early 2000s. I wonder if some revisions of the game just didn't drop this correctly.

Likewise! I've never gotten it. I think I made an honest effort ONCE during a winter storm/break like, 2011ish. No such luck! I love that game though.