We have theorycraft about everything, including the amount of melee hit you need depending of weaponskill.
There are even gear simulator, that are supposed to be able to predict which item is better to equip…
But do we have any serious knowledge about how drops are decided ?
We spend more time farming than raiding, so it’s even more important than other pieces of theorycrafts…
Example : I farm elemental earth in the badland.
It is said to have 8-10% droprate : I kill 100 mobs before dropping the first one.
Chance not to drop should then be : ( 0.92 ) ^ n
where n is the number of kill you make.
But maybe each event isn’tt independant ?
IE : My account dropped 1 000 elemental earth in its lifetime, so an invisible variable does affect MY droprate of elemental earth, and not the droprate of those around me ?
TLDR : Do we have serious knowledge of how droprates happen ?
This is something really interesting, but I wouldn’t expect devs to provide any details. I can’t count how much times I had a feeling that drop rates (including quest items) are dependant on some hidden variables. I always try to convince myself this is some kind of attribution bias.
0.92^100 is 0.0002, so it happens 2 times out of 10000. Not impossible.
Further, the probability to have 1 or 0 drops out of 100 is
pbinom(1, size=100, prob=0.08)
which is 0.002. 2 times out of 1000 is even more possible.
There is a bit of a deviation since it’s a (pseudo)random number generator and not a perfect purely random machine. But I don’t think there is any secret beyond that. The game simply rolls a dice a few times after every kill.
P.S. Probability of being very unlucky and getting two times less Earths than you’re supposed to get after 100 kills is
pbinom(4, size=100, prob=0.08) = 0.09
Actually quite likely. Just keep increasing the sample size!
If the mob has 8% chance to drop it and one drops, you still have an 8% chance for the next mob to drop one or the next 10,000.
That’s statistics for you. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 have an equal chance of winning the lottery as 23, 12, 42, 18, 52 and 33. But people think it’s less likely. If you win with those numbers I’ll be expecting my cut.
He haven’t made any claims. If you read his whole post you see that he made an example.
I have never made any claims. I have been VERY clear that I don’t know. This guy have started an interesting discussion and not made any claims without evidence. This is how you do it. This is a good thread.
But its very easy to answer his question.
No we don’t know and there is no evidence that point to anything other than normal RNG. If anyone have any evidence or data or can show patterns or predict loot it would be very interesting to see.
Maybe, but do you have any good reason not to believe it’s normal RNG? That reason is the interesting part, not the maybe.
Another thing that is more interesting than a maybe, is how we would go about testing the maybe hypothesis.
I don’t see any reason to provide input or knowledge into this issue as giving sweaty neckbeards the opportunity to further destroy the game would be counterproductive to the enjoyment of my gaming experience. I suggest other posters make the same reflection before contributing.
Everybody seems to assume looting follows a Poisson distribution.
In Poisson distribution, when someone, for example, loots rare world drop, there exists a time frame during which it’s not possible to loot it again. In these threads people keep repeating that the probability doesn’t change for the next mob, so they are claiming the opposite - that looting DOESN’T follow a Poisson distribution. I would say “some people have suspicions that looting may follow a Poisson distribution” and this includes me as well!
I believe my thought experiment from the other thread of loot drop patterns not changing after raiding patterns changed with opening of AQ is a strong indirect evidence of there being no underlying “secret” mechanism to loot.
Most likely it’s just (scaled) Bernoulli for a particular drop, and then just binomial for amount of drops out of N attempts. Poisson would only appear if N goes to infinity I think…? Which is an unnecessary assumption.
For “why”, because your usual rand() rolls a dice, i.e. produces a (scaled) Bernoulli distributed result. There’s no reason to complicate things and do something else.
The one has nothing to do with the other. It could still matter how many you kill even when it’s generated with mob. For example, there can still be condition like “if item X was present in last N mobs generated don’t ‘throw a dice’ to check if we need to give it to this newly spawning mob”.
Some quest items are indeed unique drops, at least per player. As long as you don’t loot the drop, it cannot drop again for you.
Nothing to do with unique loot, requiring 1, or somesuch. Unique items can drop multiple times, sometimes even from the same creature.
I think Blizzard at some point said that they had a simple system (i.e. simple random roll) and they changed it to have luck protection (can still be random roll, but eventually the chance becomes 100%).
Private servers have two levels: loot groups and specific items inside them. So there is a chance (say, 20%) to have an item from the group and then there are weights for each item, say 20-20-1, meaning the last item has 1 out of 41 (x5) chance to roll.
No, it still doesn’t matter how many mobs you kill. Even in your imaginary case, what matters is how many mobs that are generated. Those mobs can be generated after anyone kills them, or in the case of dungeons, after a reset where nothing was killed. This makes pretty much any theorycrafting on the subject pointless, since there is no realistic way to validate theories.
Any attempts of theorycrafting on the subject is pretty much pointless, unless you somehow manage to convince every single character, including all the bots, to kill every single mob in the world (including any dungeons entered) and to contribute all relevant data. Good luck confirming any theories.
Can you give any examples? I have never heard of such an item. There may be items that cannot drop again while it is lootable for that player, but that is a very different matter.
While private servers had a lot of things wrong, I have a vague memory of Kevin Jordan mentioning that something similar was the case for vanilla wow. I could be wrong though.
Not from memory, and I didn’t even find it in the code now, it’s just based on the experience I have: assume a quest with a very high drop rate, even 100%. But if you kill two mobs, only one has the item. Reliably. If, however, you loot during combat, it drops. Might as well be some other silly.
It happened enough times all throughout the levels that I learned that I better loot during combat.
So, it might be like The Sword of a Thousand Truths. It might exist, or it might be hearsay.
Let me just ask a simple counter question, why would anyone waste their time coding an account wide drop system that requires you to keep track of every item for every player when you could just use a simple RNG system and be done with it?
Who is stupid enough to do it on server hardware from 2005?
When you toss a coin, the result is not determined by the coin the other person tossed.
I.E., when I farm my elemental earth, my drops do not depend on the drops of the other player who is also farming the same thing in the same zone at the same time.
When you drop your DFT / CTS / binding / AQR / tear, your loot do not depend on the other raid’s drop.
That would lead to poisson distribution for your binding to drop over a year : (1-chance to drop) to the power of number of attempts = your chance for your item NOT to drop at your current attempt.
But maybe, if you have 20 nefarian kill on a realm in a week, only 1 tear will drop, then it will create a server wide hidden variable to prevent any drop of the tear untill 20 more nefarian kills are made.
This would ensure rarity of said item.
WoW is an MMO, and crackers teleporting are modifying the packets of informations sent between their computers and the server.
Those people may know which probability law the looting follows.
Motivation of this thread : loot is one of the most important thing in a MMORPG, knowing how it works is, obviously, important.
