Examples of Luck-Based Mission on MMORPGs.
See also 20 Bear Asses.
- MUD II, descendant of the very first MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon) requires the player to touch the touchstone in order to obtain the ability to use spells. Failure means instant death, with the chance of success being a function of the player's level. Since the use of magic becomes almost essential in later levels, most players touch it with an approximately one-in-six chance of dying, having spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time grinding to that level.
- Back around Christmas 2011 a Steam promotion for Champions Online involved a gathering mission. The basic idea was that players had to get through the tutorial mission and then go around the main HUB finding Christmas gifts in typical packaging, and take the items from said packages after taking 5 seconds to open them. The main problem was that straying too far from the hub would probably get you killed instantly by mooks at a higher level than you. Most of the gifts appeared in areas right next to combat zones, so coming down in an area with a gift and waiting for it to be picked up would probably get you slaughtered before you could retrieve the quest items. Add to the fact that gifts may not contain the required item 100% of the time, and also add to the fact that other players would be going around looking for the gifts too, and ALSO add that you might be attacked from one of these crates as well, made this a slog that could take well over 3 hours to finish.
- EVE Online: Apocrypha introduces reverse-engineering which is doubly luck-based. You have approximately 30% chance of a successful job, then a 25% chance of that job producing the desired result. That's right, a net 7.5% chance of getting the desired result.
- The crafting in Final Fantasy XI is entirely based on equations depending on your level in a particular craft, the level of the recipe you're trying to make, and luck. And there is a cap on your success rate below 100%. So your level 110+3 Cook could catastrophically fail to boil a carrot, though the chance is very slim. Whether or not you "HQ'ed" a synth was also dependent on certain factors plugged and a random number generator.
- Final Fantasy XIV crafting is slightly different in that it comes with a Luck Manipulation Mechanic. You essentially have a progress bar and an quality bar. When the progress bar is filled, the synthesis is successfully completed, and if the quality bar is filled, it's a 100% high quality chance. If the quality bar is less than full, you get a certain percentage chance for an HQ result based on how full the bar is (albeit at a bell curve). However, the abilities you use to fill these bars, particularly the ones of either high completion rate or cost no CP (the action points) to use, have a chance of failing. Gear has no effect on the failure rate of these abilities. So it's still mathematically possible (though if you're smart with your abilities, it's less than .0001%) for a capped crafter to botch a level 2 item synthesis. It doesn't help that players swear that 98% chance of HQ synths result in NQs more often than 2% chance of HQs actually HQ.
- Worse in FFXIV is Atma Farming. You need 12 Atma as to upgrade a relic weapon past a certain point. These Atma drop from completing Full Active Time Events (FATEs), which are little scenario battles that pop up in the overworld. The Atma dropping is entirely luck based, and your luck is going to absolutely suck. It's entirely common to spend 5 hours FATE grinding to not get a damn thing. Not helping the "I'm Not Having Fun" factor is the fact that FATE grinding is widely believed to be the most sole crushingly tedious thing in the game. Also, you have to do this for every relic weapon you want upgraded, and every job has their own relic weapon.
- While Atma farming is still entirely RNG based, SE has patched it so the drop rate is much higher, turning potentially many weeks of farming into a few days of it. Bad news is that they added a step to the relic weapon upgrade process that was even worse than the original Atma grind. To upgrade one's relic to a Zodiac Weapon, one must collect an item from each of 16 dungeons, among a pile of other crap that is just bought with some form of in-game currency or another. The items that drop from dungeons are charitably assumed to have a drop rate of 15%, and it takes at least 10 minutes to do even the fastest dungeon involved, at least 30 minutes for Aurum Vale and Dzemael Darkhold. The math ends painfully. Naturally, you have to do this for 'every' Zodiac Weapon you want. As of Heavensward, the dungeon items have become a guaranteed drop, substantially improving (but not removing) the grind.
- One quest in Shadowbringers takes a jab at this with a quest involving a miner that needs you to pass a message to a merchant, which then leads you to paying the merchant with a drop from a specific monster for the miner's ale. The issue is that said item is explicitly not a guaranteed drop, in a game where minor sidequest item drops are guaranteed to by design. When you finally get cover the cost of the ale, you have the option to hand it over, or just smash it in front of him. Considering you could potentially waste a few minutes of your time finding the damn item, smashing the bottle provides a bit of catharsis from the annoyance.
- Granblue Fantasy introduces this mechanic with the release of the Arcarum Expeditions, as you'll never know what kind of gimmicks do the stages have in store for you, nor the elements of the enemies and their drop lists. This takes in full effect if you are aiming for a specific Arcarum Summon and are planning to farm the element-specific materials related to it. The final bosses you encounter at the third, sixth, and ninth stage of every expedition is random, and may or may not change on the next day. However, there is an item that allows the players to freely select the Arcarum boss that they want to fight on the ninth stage.
- Guild Wars has a particularly frustrating example. During the Divinity Coast mission, the bonus objective is to find five villagers throughout the countryside and take them with you. If all five reach the end safely, you're rewarded. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. Sometimes, one (or several) of the villagers will spawn in the middle of a group enemies, typically dying long before you can get anywhere near them. It's entirely possible to fail the bonus objective and have to restart the entire mission, simply because the game didn't feel like playing fair. A luck-based mission, indeed.
- Kingdom of Loathing is full of Fetch Quests that require you to obtain randomly-dropping items. Sometimes you can plan things so you're levelling up decently while searching for that elusive item, but sometimes you'll find yourself looking for it in an area several levels below where you "should" be.
- Also parodied with one subquest which consists entirely of "press a button until you roll an 11 on 2d6. If you roll anything else, you take damage". Of course, a 10-leaf clover, which has already been introduced by that point as an item granting the player luck for an adventure, will make you always roll an 11. (Except in one mode where clovers aren't available - so loaded dice are substituted.)
- However, if you're in Hardcore and want to go to Bad Moon, you must not use 10-leaf clovers. Including the above. What used to be harmless is now not so harmless.
- There have been multiple incarnations of delay features implemented; completely divorced from the whims of the RNG, you won't find the thing you're looking for for a certain number of adventures in the appropriate area after you've been told to find it. Of course, once you've expended those adventures, you still have the RNG to contend with, and it is a fickle beast indeed. The delay system has met with varying levels of outrage, so the devs rigged the formula for determining the delay so that it's always "5" until they can come up with a better solution.
- The RNG got so famous/infamous that it became a character.
It sometimes applies "blessings" or "curses" to players for being polite or rude to it, though these effects don't actually do anything. Probably. - To get the Brass Bowling Trophy Trophy, all you have to do is pick it up during the Strange Leaflet Quest. Problem is, it isn't always there. There's 4 other items that can appear in its place, all of which are useless note . If the trophy isn't there, you have to play through the entire game again, which takes a few days at the very least, for another 1-in-5 shot at getting it.
- Also parodied with one subquest which consists entirely of "press a button until you roll an 11 on 2d6. If you roll anything else, you take damage". Of course, a 10-leaf clover, which has already been introduced by that point as an item granting the player luck for an adventure, will make you always roll an 11. (Except in one mode where clovers aren't available - so loaded dice are substituted.)
- In one high level RuneScape quest, you confront The Dragon with a companion, who enrages said Dragon and gets attacked. The luck comes in when you realize your companion has fairly low HP, and can easily get trashed by the boss in a few good hits. Since you can't give your companion food, it all comes down to whether or not you'll whittle the boss' health down before he kills your companion.
- Dungeoneering achievement "And I Want It Now" requires you to finish a Complexity 6 dungeon (that is, find and defeat the boss) alone in 6 minutes. Dungeons are randomly generated, so you literally have to cross your fingers and hope for a simple floorplan.
- Star Trek Online: The raid "Azure Nebula Rescue" requires the players to free Romulan ships captured by Tholians: a T'liss-class warbird is worth 1 point, a Dhelan is worth 2, a Ha'apax is worth 3, and a Falchion is worth 5. The ships spawn randomly, so it's entirely possible to miss optional objectives by simple bad luck, which has a significant effect on the payout.
- There are several World of Warcraft raid bosses that are luck based. Kel'Thuzad in 25-man mode Naxxramas will periodically Mind Control two raid members at a time, and frequently picks healers. Other examples are bosses that require strategic movement but rather then using a timer to time their abilities, have a cooldown, and free choice whether to use an ability or not. The most annoying aspect of this is Akil'zon in Zul'aman, where you must collapse to avoid his Electric Storm, but often, he will instead use several Static Discharges, annihilating your group.
- A better example might be the Valentine's Day "Be Mine!" achievement, which required you to create eight candies from an item that generated one at random ten times. The random number generator was fickle that week.
- Holiday achievements in general can be these sometimes, especially the infamously aggravating Hallow's End holiday, which requires no less than three achievements that are completely reliant on the RNG to gain progress towards (Getting toothpicks, getting enough tricky treats to eat yourself sick, and getting an impossibly rare drop of both a pumpkin vine companion pet and a jack-o-lantern helmet.)
- The "How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies" quest in the Death Knight area requires the player to extract information from Scarlet Crusaders. This is done by equipping a pair of pokers and attacking the mobs, with a chance on a hit that they'll talk. The enemy talking is so completely random that the quest can take anywhere from a few seconds to over an hour.
- WoW's end-game consists of your raid doing one dungeon or group of dungeons until you gear up enough to do the next higher difficulty. Early on, the gear was class-specific and dropped completely randomly from bosses, meaning you could have Molten Core on farm but still not be able to move on because you keep getting hunter gear and your tank just can't get that helmet he needs. This has been improved since then, with gear/class homogenization making you more likely to be able to use a drop and tier sets being bought with looted tokens that can be used by multiple classes.
- One of the best and still most relevant examples of luck in WoW are mount drops. Certain raid or dungeon bosses have a very small chance to drop a rare mount, the odds of you winning the mount are even less than that due to there usually being anywhere between 4 - 24 other people who can all lay claim to it. The most (in?)famous example being the Rivendare Deathcharger, it used to have a 0.1% chance of dropping (now has a 1% chance) and guilds were known to have split up over who got to have it. Right now it is solo-farmable, but people still often kill him several hundred times and get nothing. Honorable mention being the Ashes of Al'ar, which still has a 0.1% drop from a boss that can only be defeated once per week (and still requiring at least some teammates) as opposed to Rivendare who could be fought several times per hour.
- Some of the daily quests are based on random drops, particularly the fishing dailies in which players must catch a certain type of fish that can only be caught on the quest. In the Icecrown daily Slaves of Saronite, the player must talk to and free slaves, who will either 1)run to freedom, 2)commit suicide or 3)attack you. Only the first counts toward your total.
- Halfus Wyrmbreaker was this in the early stages of Cataclysm, depending on your raid configuration. He would have a random set of three out of five drakes each week, which would influence what abilities he would use, and would have to be released and killed to weaken his abilities and put a damage increasing debuff on him. General consensus is that the Slate Dragon (who gives him the abilty to inflict a healing debuff) and the Storm Rider (which gives him the ability to launch a powerful AOE that is cast too quickly to be interrupted until the Storm Rider is released) gave him the most deadly abilites out of the five, and the presence of either would make winning nearly impossible for a group just starting Cataclysm raiding.
- Lord Rhyolith. Success on this boss is entirely dependant on where he chooses to spawn and then ignite volcanos that he must then be guided to break by stepping on. These volcanos apply a constantly stacking debuff that increases the raid's fire damage taken. Basically, he can spawn and activate a volcano right in front of him and then step on it causing minimal damage or he will spawn it on the other side of the map which he won't get to any time soon as he moves very slowly. This sheer luck based fight earned the ire of many players who considered him harder than Ragnaros (the final boss of this raid) depending on how lucky they were. It also earned him the nickname Lord Random. Since his release he was toned down various times and is now more managable, but can still wipe a raid with an ill-placed volcano or two.
- The sandstone drake alchemy mount had three levels of RNG smeared on it. First, you had to get an archaeology dig site in Uldum. Then you had to get the Canopic Jar as your item to solve. If you didn't get that, you waste a bunch of fragments and start over. And then, if you do get the canopic jar, it has a tiny chance of containing the alchemy recipe. Some people got it the first day of the expansion it was added in... and some still haven't gotten it, years later.
- The achievement "Dropping Some Eaves." Just before the last boss of the Court of Stars dungeon, you will overhear part of a conversation between Grand Magistrix Elisande and Advisor Melandrus. In most cases, Elisande is just about to leave, but under certain circumstances, you may hear her reprimand Melandrus for failing to kill Thalyssra, before noticing your party. Unfortunately, no one is certain what those circumstances are, as while some have theorized that you have to identify the Legion spy at the party quickly and/or without being caught, among other things, general consensus is that the conversation is entirely random.
- Torgash (Twisted Corridor wings, in particular). The entire layers(which equals to 18 floors each, and you have to clear 8 to get all the rewards) are MASSIVE luck-based trips. Each layer of 18 floors takes around 2+ hours to clear if done right. Problem is that you need to obtain power-ups along the way to go forward, and its entirely possible to be Unwinnable by Design because you got screwed in terms of anima powers. The final bosses of floor 18 and even regular mobs from the floors before that hits for over twice the base health anyone actually has at point of release(as of this writting), meaning you need AT LEAST enough power-ups to have triple your base health AND traits that allows you to constantly self heal in order to finish. As if that wasn't enough of a pain, any argument about Torgash being "skill-based" is completely thrown out of the window because floors are not even in terms of difficult. Floors and bosses varies entirely per each run, and some bosses are nigh-impossible to kill because of massive scaling, borderline on Unintentionally Unwinnable, while others are a complete cakewalk by comparison. Losing the run is especially possible, and completely rage-inducing to lose 2 hours or more of your time with nothing to show for it, which earned the feature a extremely negative reception, even more since you need to complete a entire layer of Twisted Corridors as part of the story questline.
