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Blacksmithing minigame is rigged & buggy.

RRMRRM
Mabinogi Rep: 2,590
Posts: 118
Member
edited December 16, 2017 in Feedback and Suggestions
Introduction
Blacksmithing is a skill where players can craft items and play a minigame to improve the quality of the resulting item.
The minigame is supposed to take the player's skill & actions (opposed to just character data) and reward the player
with higher-quality items if they perform better in the minigame.

However the minigame is buggy and is rigged against the player, resulting in low quality items even if the player does well.
It takes the player's input and forcefully changes it (turning correct clicks into incorrect ones) via two major mechanics.



Issue 1: Rigged Clicking
What Happens: Mabinogi will often place a click somewhere other than where the player actually clicked.
What Should Happen Instead: Take the player's click as-is, and just add slight randomness to the quality.

TCZT28e.gif

Even without zooming in, you can tell where your click was offset based on the color mixing. The target spots on the minigame
have a red glow, and where you clicked has a blue glow. It's two components that blend, the red is the target and the blue is
where you clicked, so they make an even purple where they overlay properly, but tinted red where you didn't overlay fully and
blue where you overlapped with non-target space.

JsB9cQZ.png

In the above image, the first click was moved to the right, and the second click was moved right and down.

When looking normally, all the blurring and blending makes it hard to even tell that it chose wrong...
However by zooming in very close, we can see the clicked spot that the game chose as a brighter pixel in the center.

mDEP1Y6.gif

The chosen hit location is most often NOT where the user actually clicked!
Even if you try to clicking slightly to the side to account for it, there's still only a chance that it'll pick the right spot.

At rank F, the game pretends your click was up to 4 pixels away.
At rank 1, the game pretends your click was up to 1 pixel away.
(I don't have specific results for other ranks.)

Now here's the major problem with this functionality.

Even at rank 1, whenever you click, it could choose 4 wrong pixels or the 1 correct pixel.
The odds of the minigame choosing the pixel you actually clicked for any given hit is 20% (1/5).
The odds of the minigame choosing the pixel you actually clicked for all 5 hits in a row is (1/5)^5.
Thus, the odds of the game deciding to go with the right pixel for all 5 hits in a row is 1/3125, or 0.032%.

This is a much lower chance of getting high-quality items than other skills regardless of how well the player plays.

The reason for the game doing this is, as best as I can guess, the game wanting to add a bit of randomness to the end result.
That goal is understandable, but this is the wrong way to add randomness. A 1/5 chance per-click for the game to use
your actual result as a player lowers the player's possible contribution to the quality (which is why the quality players
can reach is limited).




Issue 2: Cursor Teleport
What Happens: Sometimes during the minigame, your mouse jumps off of the minigame area by itself.
What Should Happen Instead: The game should not teleport the cursor off the minigame at all.

U8o0hMO.gif

In this frame-by-frame examination of the raw footage, we can see that the cursor teleports.

Jo3OUfU.gif

Three things to note.

1 - It only happens once every few times.
2 - It happens even with the lowest DPI where the mouse moves individual pixels at a time.
3 - This is not something I experience with any other interface in Mabinogi.
4 - Various smiths have told me they experience it too, also only in smithing.

Update
I found that using certain screen recording software on Mabinogi will trigger the teleporting constantly as long as the minigame is going on. In my case recording blacksmithing with GifCam does it. You can see in the below gif that the mouse works just fine until the minigame starts, and the teleporting stops once the minigame ends.

NLTrQ0M.gif


Summary
Issue 1: Rigged Clicking
What Happens: Mabinogi will often place a click somewhere other than where the player actually clicked.
What Should Happen Instead: Take the player's click as-is, and just add slight randomness to the end quality.

Issue 2: Cursor Teleport
What Happens: Sometimes during the minigame, your mouse jumps off of the minigame area by itself.
What Should Happen Instead: The game should not teleport the cursor off the minigame at all.

These issues should be fixed so that a player's ability plays a bigger part in determining the result.





Also I like turtles.
IyasenuArjuneSherriJazmynSheenaOdinwolfeGremmBlissfulkillTwelie[Deleted User]and 2 others.

Comments

  • iMattxCiMattxC
    Mabinogi Rep: 1,075
    Posts: 64
    Member
    Are the results different when you get the timing right?
  • ArjuneArjune
    Mabinogi Rep: 16,890
    Posts: 1,752
    Member
    I agree with this wholeheartedly, and I have suffered from the 2nd issue constantly :/ I didn't manage to sig either of my recent borealis hammers or even get the best damage on them because the cursor was glitching around. Usually I can do the minigame fairly well so it really angers me that the game itself sabotages me!!
  • SherriSherri
    Mabinogi Rep: 18,615
    Posts: 2,817
    Member
    I have not gotten into Blacksmithing myself and this only makes me want to avoid it more.
    If it is going to be this glitchy, what is the point of even trying? :/
  • RRMRRM
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,590
    Posts: 118
    Member
    iMattxC wrote: »
    Are the results different when you get the timing right?
    The click position is sabotaged regardless of timing.
  • YangKoeteYangKoete
    Mabinogi Rep: 3,175
    Posts: 266
    Member
    I KNEW there was something wrong with it!
  • RRMRRM
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,590
    Posts: 118
    Member
    Okay so I did some more testing, and it turns out that certain screen recording programs like GifCam will trigger the teleporting constantly.

    And the moment the minigame ends, the teleporting ends.

    NLTrQ0M.gif

    So it looks like it's some anti-bot measure that's triggering on normal users, which it should not be doing.
  • SheenaSheena
    Mabinogi Rep: 5,515
    Posts: 381
    Member
    ah this happened to me when i wanted to make new shurikens after their revamp, sometimes the cursor teleports and its VERY annoying!!!
  • RRMRRM
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,590
    Posts: 118
    Member
    edited December 18, 2017
    BYNgJ1w.png

    I'm getting teleports while I have all other programs closed, no screen recorders even open, and the Windows DVR feature disabled.

    This is literally rigged and is unacceptable.
  • KokoroKokoro
    Mabinogi Rep: 3,155
    Posts: 289
    Member
    Yeah I experience the teleporting thing too. I thought it was to with with my lag but now I don't know.
  • DankspooksDankspooks
    Mabinogi Rep: 200
    Post: 1
    Member
    edited January 3, 2018
    a viewer had pointed me to this and having xsplit open causes the cursor to half the time skip over the exact middle even on the lowest dpi. all my best items are made off stream generally
  • EkaterinEkaterin
    Mabinogi Rep: 1,360
    Posts: 66
    Member
    The rigged clicking is true of the tailoring minigame as well. I get more signatures and higher grades if I put the cursor slightly off, than if I put it perfectly centered every time. It's very annoying.
  • RRMRRM
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,590
    Posts: 118
    Member
    So somebody pointed out that it's not just an NA issue, apparently JP has noticed the rigged clicking (and potentially other things but I don't speak Japanese).

    http://kataneko.com/blog-entry-63.html
  • SgiathachSgiathach
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,095
    Posts: 124
    Member
    its funny because I see people talk about this all the time and idk what you guys are doing because I do not have this problem at all... and I am a gm dan 3 blacksmith.... that trained the skill to r1 back before there was such a thing as traning pots and to this day I have never had this issue and I craft things all the time
  • GremmGremm
    Mabinogi Rep: 1,840
    Posts: 184
    Member
    Ive suffered from something similar before and that made me give up ranking Blacksmithing to begin with, fixing the 2 main problems you mentioned should really help or maybe give it an update/makeover and perhaps make a different system altogether? The minigames are old and im not sure when was the last time someone did a maintenance in the lifeskills minigames to be honest. :/
  • feaovalifeaovali
    Mabinogi Rep: 300
    Post: 1
    Member
    OK, here is a few things I want to add into this.(Don't know why you are treating this like some new discovery...but ok ~~)

    First, is that even at Dan 3, you will get up to 3 pixel of displacement, not just 1, though the chance of greater displacement is lower.

    Second, a perfect hit happen only around 1 % of the time. (not everything is equal)

    Third, the equation of the quality.

    100(Base) - (Total deduction*3) = result

    Where :
    0 pixel = 0
    1 pixel = 1
    2 pixel =1.5
    3 pixel = 2

    Hints, this is why you do finishing in HS. Cause you will be able to force close the Mini game by exiting HS.
    While the material is lost, it is still better then a bad roll high end equip.

    Now, while there is no way to combat the displacement. (Since it is a feature for anti-cheat, auto perfect finish).
    There are ways to fight the teleport. The easiest way is to set up Mouse key.

    Hope this help???
  • RRMRRM
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,590
    Posts: 118
    Member
    feaovali wrote: »
    OK, here is a few things I want to add into this.(Don't know why you are treating this like some new discovery...but ok ~~)
    This is feedback for Nexon staff (to hopefully forward to the devs), there's no pre-existing thread here with these details and when doing feedback like this it's important to be thorough in what's going on and what the problem is.
    feaovali wrote: »
    First, is that even at Dan 3, you will get up to 3 pixel of displacement, not just 1, though the chance of greater displacement is lower.
    I'm R1 but I haven't gotten more than one pixel away (in the 8x8 grid), could you record a video of this happening for examination? Best case would be a lossless (or close enough) clip uploaded somewhere but a zoomed-in video on somewhere like Youtube could work too if it's not at a reduced FPS, so I could see your cursor movement between clicks as well.
    feaovali wrote: »
    Hints, this is why you do finishing in HS. Cause you will be able to force close the Mini game by exiting HS.
    While the material is lost, it is still better then a bad roll high end equip.
    For items like Celtic Royal Knight Swords the finishing materials are easily 80%+ of the total cost... so for items like that unless the minigame was seriously derped up by rapid teleporting (which seems to have calmed down in recent game patches, thankfully) many people would prefer an item with 50 quality over a 99.9% item and the loss of the finishing mats.
  • MusicatMusicat
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,320
    Posts: 287
    Member
    edited June 28, 2018
    Huh, maybe that happens to some high-ranked Blacksmiths only, because I've never experienced such a thing on Rank E-A items. The misses only occured at times when I myself had put the cursor slightly off the point (considering that the cursor rhomb is significantly wider than the target one). Although, my Blacksmithing timely experience is quite poor - honestly, a couple of months.
  • RRMRRM
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,590
    Posts: 118
    Member
    Musicat wrote: »
    Huh, maybe that happens to some high-ranked Blacksmiths only, because I've never experienced such a thing on Rank E-A items. The misses only occured at times when I myself had put the cursor slightly off the point (considering that the cursor rhomb is significantly wider than the target one). Although, my Blacksmithing timely experience is quite poor - honestly, a couple of months.
    Since the jumping is an anti-bot mechanic, it triggers incorrectly on some systems and not others, wish I knew why.
  • AeolysAeolys
    Mabinogi Rep: 5,115
    Posts: 469
    Member
    The jumping happens to me too, but like only 2 times per minigame.
    If it is an anti-bot measure, got anything (even a little bit) suspicious running in your background?
  • ZingshifterZingshifter
    Mabinogi Rep: 325
    Posts: 3
    Member
    The cursor jumps for me as well, though it happens no more often than twice per minigame. Usually though, I can get through a minigame without it happening. I just assumed both of these issues were part of the normal gameplay. For the cursor jumping, I explain it off by saying that my hand slipped. I agree though, it would be nice if it didn't happen, and my rank and skill during the minigame were chiefly responsible for the quality of the craft.