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.
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.
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.
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.
In this frame-by-frame examination of the raw footage, we can see that the cursor teleports.
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.
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.
and 2 others.
Comments
If it is going to be this glitchy, what is the point of even trying?
And the moment the minigame ends, the teleporting ends.
So it looks like it's some anti-bot measure that's triggering on normal users, which it should not be doing.
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.
http://kataneko.com/blog-entry-63.html
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???
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.
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.
If it is an anti-bot measure, got anything (even a little bit) suspicious running in your background?