Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Great RNG Gripe Once Again

This is something I have touched on many times in posts and in part of many posts in the past few years and I feel it is time once again for me to be grumpy and rant, as it is what I love to do, so if I can't get loot I might as well enjoy myself complaining about it.

The random number generator and me have had a long relationship together.  Be it with drops or with things dropping and me losing the roll.  Random is random and random hates me.  Every expansion I like to think that perhaps this time will be different.  Maybe this time around I might be lucky.  I've seen people get everything they want and I get nothing.

Like the day I was sitting in org trying to fish up that crafty fish for nine hours and when someone asked me what I was doing there and I said fishing they said they would come and try too.  Five minutes later they get the achievement I had been trying forever to get, nine hours that day and six hours the previous day not to mention a few hours here and there for years and many more hours on horde characters only to never see one in my entire life of game play and they get it in less than 15 minutes.

Then there is the recent run of a few scenarios with some guild mates that in 6 runs I saw someone get something each run, except me.  Two of those runs both people got something.  So 6 runs, 8 pieces, none in my bag at all.

I've been running heroics the last few days, after finally having gotten my pattern for dailies in I figured it was time to enter the heroics into the mix instead of only doing them after I finish my dailies.  When I was first learning where all the daily mobs were I would just do the dailies before running anything.  Now that I know where everything is I do both at one time instead of waiting until I am done before entering a heroic.

In a guild run a few days ago I got one piece.  In every random I have run I have never, repeat never, seen one thing drop that I could use.  I've only even seen one mail piece drop at all and it had spirit on it.  Not even one agility neck, trinket, ring or back that could have been lost to others.  Not even something I could roll on.

I've run the direbrew thing more than a few times and lets not even get into the fact I have not seen a mount on my main ever from there being there are now shared mounts and I at least have the ram because another character got it a few years back.  I've seen the DPS trinket drop once and lost it.  Just once.  I've seen the stamina one enough that I can't even count them any more.

I've said it before and I will say it again.  The game needs something for people like me.  This is why I always loved valor and justice gear.  It is like mercy for the unlucky.  It allows people like me to grind my gear and earn it because my luck is lacking.  I have always believed and still believe that every single slot should be available for purchase with points of some sort. 

You should never have to be held hostage by the random number generator.  There is no decent reason I should not have every single slot with at least 463 by now.  With the amount of things I have run anyone that is not me would be rocking at least a few pieces, even those that say they have bad luck.  I've got one.  Just one.

I hate the random number generator and I am really considering just giving up and raiding with sub par gear and trying to get my gear from raiding only but that is not in my nature.  If I can not give my best effort I don't feel I have the right to ask others to give their best effort.

But when do you reach the point where you have to say enough is enough?  When do you reach the point where you have to surrender and admit the random number generator won?

All I ask if that the gear drops, even if I lose it, just let me see it, let me know that it exists.

Do you think luck is linked to characters?

I know it is not linked to a person because I have been lucky on other characters, just not my main.  My shaman wins everything.  Got the ram a few years back, my main never saw it.  Got the horseman mount, my main never saw it.  Geared up two specs in less than a dozen runs in both cataclysm and wrath.  Won nearly every BoE and lock box that ever dropped in a random.  So it is not me, it is my hunter that the random number generator hates.

I am not sure what the random number generator has against my hunter but if my hunter and the random number generator ever meet up in a dark alley we will never have this problem again because the random number generator would be dead.  I would even revive the random number generator just so I could kill it again.

And again.

/rant

15 comments:

  1. I definitely feel your pain. RNG is tied into characters. The worst luck I get is on my Warrior and Death Knight. The 3 extra Heroic Dungeons in WotLK (Trial of the Champion) always used to drop Plate and Strength items, with the exception of when my Plate wearers went in.

    The seasonal events have been particularly cruel. I have only won 1 Headless Horseman Mount and 1 Kodo, and I used to run the instances on all characters every day of the holiday event for at least 3 years. Thankfully the mounts can be used by all characters now.

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    1. The mounts being shared is a blessing because my others had them but my main never did. Gear, yeap, that is my story. Run stuff on my priest all the mail agility gear drops, run it on my hunter, all the cloth healing gear drops. :(

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  2. In my observation the luck seems to be tied to a characters name. My daughter uses the same few names and even when she made her first character on my account she had great luck and then when she remade the character after getting her own account on another server she still had the same luck. My priest in vanilla was known for her amazingly bad luck, such that it was a joke in my guild. I changed her name and, her luck got better. Last spring I noticed her old name was available on my old server so I made a different race priest with her name , by level 60 it was obvious she had abysmal luck too.

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    1. That is an interesting thing, I wonder if we could get more feedback on that. Would be interesting to see if luck is indeed tied to name.

      I would hate to think the name I like and use deems me to a life of horrible luck but seeing that other characters have luck it is possible I guess.

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  3. I actually posted about this exact topic yesterday- gear and RNG. I was 90 literally 50 hours after release. I have run a lot of heroics. A LOT. Granted, I did have enough to do this weekend that I didn't farm instances all weekend long, but I have run heroics with a large percentage of my spare time, there is no excuse for me to be missing so much 463 gear. I showed up for raid last night and I was afraid I was undergeared compared to most of my raid mates. :( Fortunately providing devo aura and being the third tank saved my spot I suspect. And let's talk about offspecs! My tanking gear is far superior to my mainspec gear! Aghhhhhh! I should be in perfect 463 now! I know of raiders who have run less than half the heroics I

    Anyways, I feel your pain. I absolutely agree that JP gear should not be sub par with comparison to heroics gear. Those of us that RNG shits on should have points-purchasable options which at least provide an equal ilvl alternative.

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    1. I am still working on rocking my one 463 piece. At least I got the 478 boots from sha but of course with my luck I did not win anything from it or from the extra roll. Oh well, I will get there.

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  4. Heh. I've tanked what around 80 dungeons with my guildies and it seemed like only cloth healing gear dropped when we had the shaman healing, only spirit plate when we had the priest healing and only spirit mail when we had the paladin healing. Only agility leather when we didn't have the rogue, only agility mail when we didn't have the hunter with us.

    Seems like the game is trying to tell you your shaman should be your main ;)

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    1. I guess I have to level my shaman, but my druid is next.

      If you want to gear up a tank run with me. I ran three more yesterday and did not see one mail piece drop but I did see a plate piece on every single boss. Yes, every... single... boss.

      :(

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  5. One thing in games that has always bothered me is "gear drops from monsters/bosses". It reduces the immersion in the game. Why does a boss that wears plate and uses axes drop cloth gear and a crossbow? Why does a giant monster rabbit drop any gear at all? Is it from the last person that he ate???

    I really believe the the primary sources for gear should be vendors and crafters and not RNG. Have bosses drop rare materials which can be used for crafting and have bounties on the them for special currency used to get gear. Or someother equally viable solution that it's FU RNG...

    That's why I had so much better luck in cata raids because of Tokens and VP. Of course now, vendor gear isn't as good as dropped gear so you must get bosses to randomly drop gear, that makes no sense for the boss, which you can actually use and then win the roll on.

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    1. Grr... typos...

      "Have bosses drop rare materials which can be used for crafting and have bounties on them for special currency used to get gear. Or someother equally viable solution that isn't FU RNG..."

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    2. I agree, I have been saying for a long time that we should get something from bosses that allows us to buy gear. Not to poke a boss with a stick and get gear. It just makes no sense.

      Like the dogs in the MF dailies drop a few copper. Do I really want to know where these dogs were keeping it? Or getting a mace off a raptor. Just the thought of were that mace might have been hiding I do not want to touch it.

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  6. Rule of thumb in my experience is that the Item I want on a specific character will always be the last to drop on that character.

    I know how it sounds but it's one of the reasons I started to run multiple accounts, my % still stink but at least that way I don't have to roll against other players as well.

    Vanity Items I don't want have a tendency to drop compartively soon, however.

    OT but I really think you ought to read this, personally I have some probably ban-worthy (if expressed) thoughts on this, especially considering what went down before with the game already.

    http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6794350230?page=1#1

    Yes they may have mucked up things with the MoP Reps/Badge gear, but why don't they fix those instead of ruining the rest of the game further because of it, especially considering less than a third of the subscribers ( 2.7 out of 9+ million) have so far bought MoP to begin with

    http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/10/04/blizzard-moves-2-7-million-mists-of-pandaria-units-in-first-week/

    (yup, so far Expansion Holdouts are now the clear majority. Won't expect the Devs to pick that up in a good way, though)

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    1. People are misrepresenting that 2.7M number. That is 2.7M hard copies, the box. I don't know about you but I can say for sure that I nearly every single person in my guild bought digital. Everyone I have read here online have bought digital. Everyone I have spoken to have brought digital. I can probably count the people that bought boxes on one hand. We will know the true number when they release the digital number. The box sales mean nothing and quite honestly that 2.7M boxes is a HUGE number considering you could buy it digital cheaper.

      I've been having a fair deal of luck with vanity items so far. Most likely because I don't want most of them and they are just bag clutter.

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    2. The number of boxes was, according to earlier posts at Massively, less than a million.

      http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/10/01/analysts-mists-of-pandaria-sales-not-so-disappointing/

      I might be wrong, but given that earlier number and Blizz now saying it's over three times as high makes me think that Blizz is talking digital units as well, especially because the analysts suggested 'just wait for the digital sales, than the number will climb above a million'.

      But I agree that the number of box copies may be frightingly low, with several retail chains in the Netherlands for example Diablo III boxes are currently still bigger sellers than MoP boxes.

      It's also funny how Blizz makes a 10% subscriber jump after a highly-marketted Expansion launch seem like a Big Deal, the big question is wether those people stay.

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    3. I think anything less than a 10% jump would have been a complete failure. It should be closer to 20% with all the people they lost and all the new people there were angling for with some new additions like panda and pets.

      They are not doing as well as they should, I agree, but I do not trust their numbers. Never have.

      I do think that mists is off to a massively better start than cataclysm was even if the box sales seem to be much less.

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