Full-Plate Helmet enchant fail OEing to +4
another Full-Plate helmet enchant fail OEing to +5
Blue-Wolf Helmet craft (60%) fail
another Blue-Wolf Helmet craft (60%) fail
Result: 11 millions lost... complete stop in gathering B-armor (not even talking about a weapon).
After all this I'm really starting to think that no matter where you look in the game, there's always: "a chance of this, a chance of that". Do you sometimes get a feeling that successful players differ from others by just... being lucky?
Is this a luck-based game only or it is possible to succeed, setting ebayers aside, in another, different way?
Truly the risk of catastrophic failure is a big part of the design.
To a lesser degree, great good luck is possible, too, in Augments and in rare item drops, and in many events. There's quests with randomness, too. It strikes me an interesting philosophical world view, but of course randomness has been a big part of RPG since the very beginnings.
i wrote a post about this not too long ago but in your case it seems to be more greed than what i wrote about which is basically how character development is nothing more than a roll of the dice
i know ppl who have enchanted skills to +9 first try at 78
i have failed 5 skills going to +1
i handed in 8 lots of ketra teeth and got the 8 worst rewards (4x adena 3 arcana 1 IC shield)
i have failed 6 weapons in a row at +4
i failed 3 maj boots 60% in a row
i failed 7 BW helm 60% (3/4 in a row)
my friend failed 7 tallum plates in a row back when they sold for 70 mil each
in every one of those cases the odds of the "good thing" happening is higher than the "bad thing"
which makes you think. is there someone out there who done what i did but instead of getting fail FAIL. FAIL!!! got success. SUCCESS. SUCCESS!!!! and how much more advanced would their toon be?
if you add up all those fails there is a fair few million worth of gear, prolly close to the billion mark on a good day so is the difference between a leet legit toon and a crap legit toon nothing more than a dice roll?
Through out the whole time I've played so far, none of the toons I've ever had were able to get a full weapon drop above grade D. As far as Items, I've gotten 2 to show for it, 1 was a cheap Avadon robe, and a BO ring. So I have virtually no luck with item drops. ><
i wrote a post about this not too long ago but in your case it seems to be more greed than what i wrote about which is basically how character development is nothing more than a roll of the dice
i know ppl who have enchanted skills to +9 first try at 78
i have failed 5 skills going to +1
i handed in 8 lots of ketra teeth and got the 8 worst rewards (4x adena 3 arcana 1 IC shield)
i have failed 6 weapons in a row at +4
i failed 3 maj boots 60% in a row
i failed 7 BW helm 60% (3/4 in a row)
my friend failed 7 tallum plates in a row back when they sold for 70 mil each
in every one of those cases the odds of the "good thing" happening is higher than the "bad thing"
which makes you think. is there someone out there who done what i did but instead of getting fail FAIL. FAIL!!! got success. SUCCESS. SUCCESS!!!! and how much more advanced would their toon be?
if you add up all those fails there is a fair few million worth of gear, prolly close to the billion mark on a good day so is the difference between a leet legit toon and a crap legit toon nothing more than a dice roll?
i might be one of the those people that u talk about. i've gotten 3 weapons to +10 in one day without one failing.
1 set of 107's
1 Mithril dagger
1 ELS
maybe its cuz they were Dgrade...
The only luck I have is finding mispriced items in stores..Im too chicken to try and OE, period. I have such bad luck I tell people not to even be TALKING to me when they try and OE...matter of fact, I should log out! Its bad, so sad. :(
Full-Plate Helmet enchant fail OEing to +4
another Full-Plate helmet enchant fail OEing to +5
Blue-Wolf Helmet craft (60%) fail
another Blue-Wolf Helmet craft (60%) fail
Result: 11 millions lost... complete stop in gathering B-armor (not even talking about a weapon).
After all this I'm really starting to think that no matter where you look in the game, there's always: "a chance of this, a chance of that". Do you sometimes get a feeling that successful players differ from others by just... being lucky?
Is this a luck-based game only or it is possible to succeed, setting ebayers aside, in another, different way?
Yes, for a large part, L2 relies on luck and chance when it comes to alot of things.
You can either go with the flow and hope you turn out lucky, you can brute-force your way out by ebaying, or you can ignore all chance/luck instances and simply take twice as long for the "guaranteed" route.
Myself, I've always preferred taking twice as long just to be assured of a guarantee. I've known people who crafted their entire B armor sets without fail, and known others who failed so much they could've bought A grade straight off the market instead. So, I'll keep saving, and by the time I buy that B grade off the market I'll know that I have probably saved myself many millions and frustration of losing pretty much my whole warehouse worth of mats on a single item/armor set :)
You can alwaus use your brain and don't take risks if you don't like to lose money..
Yes, many things are based on "luck", or curse if you will, in this game.
well for example that forgotten blade i tryed 5 times to make i needed for olympiad and no one was handing in for the recipie cos drac bow/arcana mace got alot more adena for it.
There also hadnt been one on the market for a month so yea i had to craft
ironically I found one the next week and had to take out a loan from friends =/
Luck plays a very large role in the evolution in this game, I will vouch for that.
Most if not all things (in this game) are more or less related to.. *gasp* luck.
You can alwaus use your brain and don't take risks if you don't like to lose money..
Yes, many things are based on "luck", or curse if you will, in this game.
not so much an option at higher lvls
you get your ketra/silenos quest and hand it in. luck decides if you earn 80 million adena or 5
you go to enchant skills and luck decides if you go +1 or -X. next chron we will have the blessed skill enchant option but for someone who fails skills as often as me it just means i can lose xp/sp 3x faster!!
actually buying yourself S grade as opposed to crafting it would easily be a price difference into the hundreds of millions
The odd part is that in real life it's very rare to find anyone whose success or failure was based on luck.
Sure, there's accidents of birth that let people with no visible skills get an easy path, but even that was the result of his daddy being president and very successful grandparents, etc. And of course there's Britneys and Avrils who're wildly successful with just being the right look at the right time. But what makes them notable is that they're the exception to the general principle that you gotta work hard and have some intelligence/talent to rise to the top.
Other games, luck isn't such a big factor. Drops are basically always off a random drop table, but not so much the other stuff the way it is in lin2.
All I ever enchanted (or tried to, anyway) was D grade. I had this Clan Oath armor that I wanted to cristalise and I didn't have a dwarf. So as I had some EAD that I didn't need, so I said wth... I got it to +7 before it failed... it failed with my last EAD. And when I tried to enchant my duals to +4 it failed... talk about bad luck :)
so imagine 2 ppl both the same class lvl to 78
one fails everything he enchants/crafts while the other succeeds.
one gets doom/WM/anchor augment of the first few trys while the other gets +10 pdef +1.1 mp recovery
imagine the character development gap that forms between the players just because of a few bad dice rolls
Oh yeah, Augments are a huge luck factor.. combined a little bit with economic strength. If you're rich enough, you'll most likely get what you want.
Just read about a guy that had WM passive on his Arcana mace and WM Active on an SoeS.. 100% magical crit rate without Valakas for 2 minutes >.<;
Today I was trying to get a recipe that spoils 1/300. It's not that bad but each time you kill the monster and spoil failed you wonder if this one had the recipe. Got it after 100 kills so I've been quite lucky on that.
The whole idea of a luck-based game is quite interesting. It is something that keeps some people playing. A game where you know you are gonna be able to get somewhere in N days will eventually become boring. You never know what will happen next. One of my clannies got a Full Plate set enchanted to +3 all (body to +4) for 1.5kk and he gave it to me (**** cool guy, I tell you, but not just because of that). I was really worried about C Grade and the next minute it was in my inventory :eek:
It's not necessary in any way to have full plate equipment for C-grade that is over enchanted. I understand why someone might 'want' the +6 benefits but that doesn't mean they are needed.
There was no "need" therefore, for you to put 2 full plate helmets at risk. You could have used them just fine at +3. If you were making them only for sale, again you could have chosen to sell them clean for less profit and still made a profit.
I suppose what I'm saying is that if 5 friends are in a raid party and 2 get great drops and 3 get crappy drops, then 'yes', that is often a function of luck.
Alternately, when you play the chance parts of the game those are "decisions" you make to try to gain an advantage. When it doesn't work out that isn't bad luck--it was a decision that perhaps shouldn't have been made.
Enchanting items, except in a few circumstances, is incredibly risky and I try to tell everyone not to do it. The one exception I can see is the +4 on duals to release their SA. Other than that, you could have spent LESS and bought a fullplate helm, you could have left the fp helm at +3, it completed the set clean and could have been left completely alone.
BW helm is just more of the same. You tried 2 60% crafts--which isn't the only way to acquire a BW helm.
I assume you are a dwarf trying to sell these items? If so, remember that what you decide to offer is a choice--not a function of luck. You get to decide.
Your main point is probably valid but you don't really describe bad luck here--you describe not-so-good choices (at least in part).
@DrakkosIV: Don't know why, but the frase "No pain, no gain" comes to my mind.
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but it actually depends on what kind of person you are. Overenchanting, for example, is something that people (such as myself) do because it pumps adrenaline in your body. I know it sounds weird.
I tend to think that there are two kinds of people in this game: some that like risking (me, for example) and hope that maybe one day their luck will change, and people that go the safe way and they know that they are gonna get there (whatever their target is).
I believe that's one of the reasons why people play the lottery. They know the chances of winning are weak, but they keep on doing it. And while I agree there should be a limit with this, there shouldn't be any in game, because, yes, it's a game and they play their luck without losing anything in reality. It;s fun :) But that all depends on your way of thinking. Disagree with me if you feel you have to, but at the end of the day the way I play makes me happy :)
The odd part is that in real life it's very rare to find anyone whose success or failure was based on luck.
I actually disagree with this. Life is full of 'be at the right place at the right time' kind of incidents. How many people have lived or died in accidents based on something as small as where they were located when it happened?
Many things in real life are based on hard work, but a huge number of them seem to be based on luck.
Luck is just a word we like to use instead of the word coincidence, chaos or random events, you just happen to be there at that moment in time. Actually it's us humans that are the wild card!! OK I should log off before I get any deeper than that :p
This game is as much luck based as you yourself make it. There's no requirement to everenchant or craft 60% crafts to be successful. It helps, yes but it's not required.
This game is as much luck based as you yourself make it. There's no requirement to everenchant or craft 60% crafts to be successful. It helps, yes but it's not required.
once again at end gain you are not given an option and as far as augments go you have to continually roll the dice if you ever want to compete
BW helm is just more of the same. You tried 2 60% crafts - which isn't the only way to acquire a BW helm.
I assume you are a dwarf trying to sell these items? If so, remember that what you decide to offer is a choice--not a function of luck. You get to decide.
Your main point is probably valid but you don't really describe bad luck here--you describe not-so-good choices (at least in part).
It's not about choice, but about necessity. I am striving to obtain that helmet to complete my BlueWolf set. Not to resell, but for own use.
This game is as much luck based as you yourself make it. There's no requirement to everenchant or craft 60% crafts to be successful. It helps, yes but it's not required.
Regarding different ways to obtain a helmet: the helmet costs 25-30mil adena on Frantz (too expensive to purchase). A 100% recipe has some 1/2000 chance of dropping from aggressive group mobs near Oren which are surrounded by even more aggressive mobs... noone sells that recipe... so in my case crafting with 60% chance is the best option.
It's pretty much the same with many other items starting from B-grade so you just have to "roll the dice" in order to go higher in the game or stay on low levels reselling-reselling and see all your friends becoming noblesse and forgetting you...
I do agree that unexpected result makes the game more exciting, but just thinking of the fact that spending all evenings of 2-3 weeks obtaining materials to craft a 60% A-grade weapon to fail at crafting... it's like yay!
I don't disagree with all you've said here! You are correct.
Adding to your comments though is my belief that the choices/decisions you make actually predispose you to trouble (or gain, it must be admitted).
Can you use Blue Wolf effectively (is it still a reasonable armor) without the set bonus? Depends. If you're just going PvE for a few more levels (52-58 for instance) then you don't even need the set completed. You may WANT the set completed but it isn't required.
So in my thinking you made a choice--first when you decided BlueWolf and second when you decided it had to be a complete set.
There's nothing wrong with that at all! I'm just saying that your decisions forced you down a road--which has now had some unintended consequences.
Most of my alts don't have glowie weapons--most of them don't have and have never worn an actual complete armor set. Up to A-grade that has never been a problem.
Obviously my toons don't look the coolest to other players and are hopeless in PvP against others...but I also haven't "lost" 10's of millions of hard earned Adena chasing momentary gains and rainbows.
In some ways L2 is like the stock market. You can take steady gains over time or go for broke. The success stories of the guys who craft the 120 million adena bow on the first try constantly remind us that 'big win' is out there. It's the more steady and careful who are generally (not always) the richest players on the servers.
In my experience in L2 every time I "really needed" something was exactly the time I made the mistakes or went down the wrong path.
Certainly there is luck in the game....lots of it. But some 'bad luck' is simply the result of decisions we perhaps should not have made.
((I'm still too embarrassed to admit my "lux shop C-grade Jewel Idea"....suffice it to say I had a grand scheme and did some quick math only to discover I'd missed something HUGE and pathetically OBVIOUS--which cost me a few million before I slapped my forehead! Lmao--that's all the more I'll say on this stupid choice I made! :))
Right now my luck seems to be concentrated in one place;
When OEing weapons, I hardly ever get anything to +4 without it breaking, the highest i've ever gotten a weapon was to +6 (they were a pair of 107s which I OEd with all the EWDs from pig event). I've tried to OE many weapons, and usually most break when trying for +4 or +5.
When it comes to crafting however, I currently have a 100% success record (no lies), this includes:
Doom Boots (60%), Doom Shield (60%), Maj Ring (60%) x3, Maj Earring (60%), Maj Necklace (60%), Dark Crystal Boots (60%), Soul Bow (60%), Kris (60%) x2, Keshanberk (60%), Tateossian Ring (70%) x2, Tateossian Necklace (70%).
I know its not the most impressive craft list, but not one of them failed :)
As for drops, for a long while I had no luck at all, but in the last few weeks on my sub i've gotten a few. This includes some D grade rubbish, Eminence Bow, Katana, Samurai Long Sword, Eldarake.
I really don't know how luck works in this game, but right now i'm not doing so badly... I just know never bother trying to OE :)
Oh, and i'm sure that now i've told people of my luck, it will dissapear - in the UK, that's called sod's law ><
gotta love how the human mind works.
being lucky is thought of as a skill almost, or a feature you received at birth
being unlucky is always the "higher power"s fault, never your own.
personally i don't believe in randomness, not with things like these anyway. the randomness is calculated by a computer somewhere, and at the exact time it was calculated with the exact circumstances it could not have been anything else. It just seems random because you don't know/can't affect the variables it uses to get the final number.
It's possible to fail 100 99% chances in a row. and its possible to succeed 100 1% chances in a row, not very likely, but possible
for me the word "Luck" is just the word coincidence with a positive/negative emotional value attached.
Absolutely every RPG is a game of chance. You roll dices every time you attack or are attacked. As for the chance of success fro enchanting and such - this serves for 2 purposes.
1. This is one of the adena sinks which helps regulate the economy of the game.
2. Getting highly enchanted weapon (like Elven long sword +16) gives you tremendous satisfaction. If this was not chancy then everyone will just buy scrolls (or will use bots to grind for them) and enchant his armor and weapons to +100 or +1000 or what else you want. This of course will entirely destroy the idea of having armor/weapons of higher grades.
You are as lucky in this game as you make yourself. You, by your examples, have been opening yourself up to failure right at the get-go. There are better things to OE, and also, the timing of your OE'ing needs to be in good tune with your current adena count and possible loss margin.
Working out when and when not to OE is an art if you want to a). never OE and lose and b). make decent cash. Once you have 500 mil adena its easy to lose 4 times in a row, who cares. When you have 20mil, its a very bad idea to OE B grade 4 times in a row.
For the record, over nearly 15 months playing, I've OE'd 5 times and crafted twice and had 100% success. Even if I had not had that success, at every point if I lost the item I was able to recover.
Full-Plate Helmet enchant fail OEing to +4
another Full-Plate helmet enchant fail OEing to +5
Blue-Wolf Helmet craft (60%) fail
another Blue-Wolf Helmet craft (60%) fail
Result: 11 millions lost... complete stop in gathering B-armor (not even talking about a weapon).
After all this I'm really starting to think that no matter where you look in the game, there's always: "a chance of this, a chance of that". Do you sometimes get a feeling that successful players differ from others by just... being lucky?
Is this a luck-based game only or it is possible to succeed, setting ebayers aside, in another, different way?
There is an element of luck in everything. Even in real life. But no so much that you have to set your watch by it. If you work hard, you will still get just as far in game as the luckiest Over-Enchanter. Just have to be determined and resilient.