It's true that Faferva is responding to some bad RNG and failing to get many crystals, but it's absolutely true that with things like zetas, the failure to get ANY is discouraging. While in some sense you're making progress - you have to roll the dice to get 6s, and you did roll the dice - the inability to count your progress towards your goal is immensely frustrating. Even though the game very specifically doesn't guarantee anything but 6 opportunities a week to try for your zeta mats, you either have the zeta mats or you don't. Ultimately your attempts don't count, only your mats do.
Consider the background for zeta mats: each player must invest huge amounts of other resources, including the player's own time, into a new branch of the game (ships) that leads absolutely nowhere and gets a player absolutely nothing in the game someone originally intended to play. Except for the zetas. The entire purpose of months of work is to get the zetas. Everybody puts in the work but by the very nature of RNG, if enough people play the game, some people are going to go two or three weeks without getting a single zeta mat.
Now, supposedly in Territory Battles there will be a use for ships that relates back to the main (original) game, but that's not here yet. I downloaded the game before ships existed, and I'm of the opinion that ships have been badly implemented - they simply aren't fun. I haven't had bad luck with zetas, but I only recently qualified for the challenge, I have 8 mats and have no full zetas/zeta'd characters. For me the drop rate is keeping up with the expectations set and I can see the progress. But I still agree with the original poster: zetas in particular require too much investment to set the game up to function in such a way that many people are going to do all that work and then see no measurable progress for weeks.
EA/CG can limit the ability of RNG to cause this kind of frustration for players who have clearly invested time and energy into this game. Imagine that the average drop in a single day (2 attempts) of zeta challenges is exactly 1. Instead of dropping 0, 1 or 2 and averaging 0.5 per attempt, it's easily possible to set the challenge to drop 1, 2, or 3 with an average of 2/attempt.
Now you have a minimum of measurable progress each time - 1 zeta mat per attempt, but you still have RNG mixing it up for folks. If you then multiply the number of zetas required to boost a single character ability by 4, you have the exact same average progress (2 per attempt, needing 80 vs. 0.5 per attempt needing 20).
The game doesn't break. RNG still plays its role. Progress for the majority of players stays exactly the same. Yet the extremes are curtailed. The progress for the lucky as compared to the unlucky is 6 per day vs. 2 per day - the best you can do is triple the minimum. In the current set-up, it's 4 per day vs 0 per day. The first is literally infinitely better than the second.
Nor is this somehow at odds with the nature of the game: In the daily challenges, once you qualify for a challenge you're guaranteed to get every possible type of reward every time you finish the challenge, though the numbers vary.
The one exception in daily challenges is Omega mats. While this seems consistent, there are other ways to get guaranteed Omegas: just completing your dailies, for instance.
There simply is no other non-shard resource where you can walk away with nothing if you do the work. And with shards even if there is only a single hard node, you get a minimum of 3 attempts per day, not 6 per week (and only on specific days, at that, so it's not like you can do all 6 of your attempts on Saturday when you have time).
Combining the unique possibility of zero progress when all other aspects of the game permit steady progress with the serious effort players have had to make just to qualify for the zeta challenge when ships offer you literally nothing else, the current zeta format is a guarantee that some number of players are going to get no measurable progress for far too long in an important area of the game.
That is a recipe for frustration.
By multiplying the zetas required to boost an ability by the same factor that average output is boosted, you can implement a minimum zeta drop (whatever the devs want that minimum to be) without affecting the average rate of zeta acquisition. That type of change guarantees everyone measurable progress if they put in the work to qualify for the challenge and is much more consistent with the gameplay in other aspects of GoH.
