RRM

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.

The daily bonus text that shows up...

• When you hover over the in-game clock's time.
• When you hover over the day in the Traveler's Guide.
• Scrolling across the top of the screen.

... is incorrect, misleading, or just unclear for a few of the bonuses.

This appears to be because the text has not been updated in a long time.
Since it fails to mention alchemy bonuses, it's probably been unchanged since ~2010.


Sunday

• "Increase in critical hit rate" - There's no visible bonus on the character screen, is this an invisible bonus, or a temporary increase to the 30% effective cap? Could use clarification.
• "Increase in lucky finish" - If this affects lucky gathering too, the text should be updated to say that. (Lucky gathering didn't exist back when this text was written.)

Monday

• "Increase in rank up bonus for life skills (110%)" - Should be reworded to mean that it's an increase to the character EXP you get for ranking life skills (even though the EXP for ranking skills is so small that most players don't notice it anyways).
• "Increase in quality of output for productions" - Should probably say "production skills" to be a bit clearer.

Tuesday

• "Increase in dungeon item drop rate" - Needs to be changed to make it clear that it only affects item drops from enemies. It's been years and now we know that it does not actually improve chest drops, but this text leads people to believe that it does.
• "Increase in rank-up bonus for Combat skills" - Similar to the life skill one, needs rewording.

Wednesday

• "Increase in item drop rate from animals and nature" - This is like Tuesday's bonus, but it's for all the monsters outside of dungeons. "Animals and nature" may have been an acceptable explanation back when the text was written, but it works on enemies in Shadow Missions and Baltane missions now, so the text should probably just be changed to "from enemies outside of dungeons" or something.
• "Increase in rank-up bonus for complete mastery of a skill" - Like before, should be changed to note that it's just the character EXP bonus.

Thursday

• "Increase in rank-up bonus for Magic skills" - Repeat chorus here.

Saturday

• "Food effects are increased" - Should be clarified that it's only long-term food effects, not the short-term stat buffs from cooked meals.
• "The L-Rod's effect will increase over time" - Needs to say what it actually does.
• Saturday has an increase in success rate to Alchemy skills (like Fragmentation), but it's not listed and it should be.

At the Dry Oven in Scathach Beach with no weather, on Wednesday it's 72%.

But on Saturday it's higher, 84%.



And some other lines just sound a bit awkward in general (like Thursday's proficiency increase).
I'm sure you all can make them sound better nowadays.

(Note that the Weekday Bonuses guide on the website has some misleading information as well and needs to be updated.)


Server: Ruairi
IGN: RRM

They'd need a game update to fix it, the previous maint didn't include a game patch (events can be toggled without an update) so that's probably why they specify "major".

The Control Marionette skill says that it reduces the cooldown of Act skills.
What should happen: The skill cooldown reduction should apply both server-side and client-side.
What happens instead: The skill cooldown reduction is only client-side, so you can't actually use the skills when they're supposed to be ready.



IGN: RRM
Server: Ruairi

Sorry, my time machine is broken so I can't go forward and check.

(It could go either way.)