What numbers are considered low, medium, high rarity rate

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3 comments, last by LorenzoGatti 1 year, 3 months ago

This might be related to my first post about percentages. I just want to ask what numbers are generally accepted as a low percentage, medium percentage, and high percentage? There was once a game development I was a part of (as a QA Lead) way back that used exact percentage, then they changed it to “low”, “medium”, and “high” instead of showing the actual numbers, or maybe it was the other way around. I know it could be up to me, but generally, what is it? Is 10% low or medium? Is 20% considered high? Something like that.

Thanks.

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@mikuro It depends ? If you would give me 20% odds on winning the lottery, that's insanely high. On the other hand, if you gave me a 20% chance to live another day, that's insanely low. Percentages are meaningless without context.

Well, lacking any context, the answer can only be:

low = 25%

med. = 50%

high = 75%

My reasoning is: ‘low’ is more than nothing, and ‘high’ is still not all. So 0 and 100% can't exist, thus i'm left with above assumption.

m_waddams said:

@mikuro It depends ? If you would give me 20% odds on winning the lottery, that's insanely high. On the other hand, if you gave me a 20% chance to live another day, that's insanely low. Percentages are meaningless without context.

In a QA context, probabilities are usually probabilities that something bad happens: they are not simply high or low by themselves, they are acceptable or unacceptable depending on the gravity of the attached event (e.g. one skipped frame per minute should be unnoticeable, one crash with loss of progress every 10 hours in a 60 hours RPG is terrible despite being 600 times less likely).

Likewise, if probabilities are rarity of game content one should care about the subjective experience of players: are they spending too much time grinding and searching to get something too rare, or flooded and bored by something too common?

Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru

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