The X-45 Heartbreaker: a rant about randomness

But that’s a bad example, because that wouldn’t be the case. Using your math from the post above:

After 100 attempts, there’s still 36% chance to not loot it - which I wouldn’t even think of as the threshold for bad luck. I would say that when bad luck would probably kick in when there’s a 10%, of even 5% chance of when you haven’t been able to loot it. According to a chance calculator I looked up, it would take roughly 230~ runs in order to get to 10%, or 300 to get to 5%. If we use the latter as an example, you would have 299 chances to get an OMG moment before the game decides that you’ve suffered enough. Heck, they might even decide to put it at 1000 attempts for a 1% item - but it should exist somewhere.

The point of BLP isn’t to remove OMG moments, a hard deterministic means of doing so would do that, but BLP doesn’t, because you’ll probably get it before even reaching the threshold. BLP caters only to players who never received their OMG moment, because by the time they actually get it, almost everyone else that put in the same effort already has it. Their OMG moment is less an exciting moment of looting an item, and more a shot of relief that their journey is finally over.

Sure, it’s a little less exciting when you know that if you just put it the hours, you can get it - but you will have to put in the hours to actually get it.

My rant about randomness isn’t really about rarity, it’s about time/work. There’s a threshold when the amount of effort you put into a game becomes harmful, even if it is for a trivial reward. Defined end goals are a good way of psychologically countering this problem; it’s the same problem that we had in Legion and BFA with the infinite AP grinds, but in a different avenue of the game.

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