The named item drop rate in this game is broken (with proof)

[Cowzrul]

I am starting a new thread on this topic because the RNG poll includes a lot of discussion about pseudorandom number generators and particular items that are not the focus of this discussion.

I have suspected there to be an issue with named item drop rates for some time, and decided to collect data on my named item drops.

This data is collected on the four characters I regularly play, all on the same account. (Cowzrul, Cowzrule, Cowzrul-1 and Sneakycow)

All runs were completed on at least Elite, and many of them on R1 or higher. None of these runs include drop rate boosts of any kind.

I only logged drops in quests from Ravenloft, Sharn, Feywild, Isle of Dread, Vecna and Myth Drannor, which the developers have stated should have a drop rate of 33% on elite, with an additional 1% per reaper skull. I did not record specifically which runs were conducted at which difficulties, but my theoretical named item drop rate should be at least 34%, and likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 36% or higher.

I have created this Google Sheet to share the data I've been collecting recently.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRcOSqdHfGgKFIAhm4MsrMm_IA_PlbSTyGh8Sa8d3SApFg2SYun-en9O9gdXdS8pwpXS6rWFL6I6DVJ/pubhtml

As shown, the rate at which I actually receive named items is 24% across 222 chest pulls. This, in itself, is not really compelling evidence of the drop rate being broken. I expect many of you would simply say "well, you're just unlucky". The likelihood of getting this outcome is incredibly low - 0.0464%, or 1 in 2153. There's more than a few thousand players of this game, I could simply be that super unlucky guy who stumbled across that 1 in 2153 chance, right?

Well, when you examine the outcomes in a little more detail, particularly the streaks in which I received no items, it becomes pretty obvious that the theoretical drop rate simply can't be the developer's intended 33%+. The likelihood of these outcomes occurring is so rare as to be unbelievable.

During these 222 chest pulls, I had notably long streaks without a named item of 18, 16, 15, 14, 10 and 11. There were also shorter streaks with no drops, but those are not particularly noteworthy.

The equation for the expected value of quest runs before encountering a particular streak of "no drops" of named items is given by ((p^-n)-1)/(1-p), where p is the probability of not getting a named item, and n is the number of chests in a row with no named item. I used a value of 67% chance of not getting a named item, although my rate *should* be lower than that when you factor in reaper bonuses.

For a streak of 18, this is 4090 chest pulls.
For a streak of 16, this is 1834 chest pulls.
For a streak of 15, this is 1228 chest pulls.
For a streak of 14, this is 822 chest pulls.
For a streak of 11, this is 245 chest pulls.
For a streak of 10, this is 163 chest pulls.

If you add all of these together to get a number of chest pulls, on average, that one would have to pull to observe these streaks within, you get 8384 chest pulls. I experienced all of these streaks in 222 chest pulls. This is a factor of over 37x more likely than expected to experience these streaks without receiving a named item. If this was occurring at a rate of 2x, or 5x, that would be within the realm of reasonable for a very unlucky person's experience. A factor of 37x means that something is fundamentally broken in the game. It does not require many thousands of pulls to demonstrate, as I've just shown. I'm essentially experiencing something with a probability of 1 in thousands, most times that I play the game, that I should be experiencing very rarely. The entire reason that I started logging this data is because I would regularly run entire sagas of expansion content, and get zero named items that dropped to me, so the logged data here is not cherry picked or some unusual streak of bad luck, it is my normal experience playing this game.

If anyone responds to this with "The probability of getting 10 heads flipped in a row is the same probability as any other sequence of coin flips", I will cry, tell you that's stupid and irrelevant, and point you to post #20 in this thread where I explain why. https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/what-is-the-named-item-drop-rate-really.15872/

 

[Lominal]

If you want more data, I massively tracked RL+fey+sharn+ content post RL. Sample size was 6000 r10 chests (no discovery pots or weekend bonuses that mattered). I ignored artifacts/the xpac weapons because those should be a separate roll, and ended up with 2256 items (37.6%). This is below the alleged 43% rate, and is statistically significant to the point where I can certainly say that the drop rate is not 43%.

My personal guess is that its 25 Elite %+1/skull, but I havent done the same scale of testing on other difficulties

 

[kmoustakas]

I am starting a new thread on this topic because the RNG poll includes a lot of discussion about pseudorandom number generators and particular items that are not the focus of this discussion.

I have suspected there to be an issue with named item drop rates for some time, and decided to collect data on my named item drops.

This data is collected on the four characters I regularly play, all on the same account. (Cowzrul, Cowzrule, Cowzrul-1 and Sneakycow)

All runs were completed on at least Elite, and many of them on R1 or higher. None of these runs include drop rate boosts of any kind.

I only logged drops in quests from Ravenloft, Sharn, Feywild, Isle of Dread, Vecna and Myth Drannor, which the developers have stated should have a drop rate of 33% on elite, with an additional 1% per reaper skull. I did not record specifically which runs were conducted at which difficulties, but my theoretical named item drop rate should be at least 34%, and likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 36% or higher.

I have created this Google Sheet to share the data I've been collecting recently.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRcOSqdHfGgKFIAhm4MsrMm_IA_PlbSTyGh8Sa8d3SApFg2SYun-en9O9gdXdS8pwpXS6rWFL6I6DVJ/pubhtml

As shown, the rate at which I actually receive named items is 24% across 222 chest pulls. This, in itself, is not really compelling evidence of the drop rate being broken. I expect many of you would simply say "well, you're just unlucky". The likelihood of getting this outcome is incredibly low - 0.0464%, or 1 in 2153. There's more than a few thousand players of this game, I could simply be that super unlucky guy who stumbled across that 1 in 2153 chance, right?

Well, when you examine the outcomes in a little more detail, particularly the streaks in which I received no items, it becomes pretty obvious that the theoretical drop rate simply can't be the developer's intended 33%+. The likelihood of these outcomes occurring is so rare as to be unbelievable.

During these 222 chest pulls, I had notably long streaks without a named item of 18, 16, 15, 14, 10 and 11. There were also shorter streaks with no drops, but those are not particularly noteworthy.

The equation for the expected value of quest runs before encountering a particular streak of "no drops" of named items is given by ((p^-n)-1)/(1-p), where p is the probability of not getting a named item, and n is the number of chests in a row with no named item. I used a value of 67% chance of not getting a named item, although my rate *should* be lower than that when you factor in reaper bonuses.

For a streak of 18, this is 4090 chest pulls.
For a streak of 16, this is 1834 chest pulls.
For a streak of 15, this is 1228 chest pulls.
For a streak of 14, this is 822 chest pulls.
For a streak of 11, this is 245 chest pulls.
For a streak of 10, this is 163 chest pulls.

If you add all of these together to get a number of chest pulls, on average, that one would have to pull to observe these streaks within, you get 8384 chest pulls. I experienced all of these streaks in 222 chest pulls. This is a factor of over 37x more likely than expected to experience these streaks without receiving a named item. If this was occurring at a rate of 2x, or 5x, that would be within the realm of reasonable for a very unlucky person's experience. A factor of 37x means that something is fundamentally broken in the game. It does not require many thousands of pulls to demonstrate, as I've just shown. I'm essentially experiencing something with a probability of 1 in thousands, most times that I play the game, that I should be experiencing very rarely. The entire reason that I started logging this data is because I would regularly run entire sagas of expansion content, and get zero named items that dropped to me, so the logged data here is not cherry picked or some unusual streak of bad luck, it is my normal experience playing this game.

If anyone responds to this with "The probability of getting 10 heads flipped in a row is the same probability as any other sequence of coin flips", I will cry, tell you that's stupid and irrelevant, and point you to post #20 in this thread where I explain why. https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/what-is-the-named-item-drop-rate-really.15872/

You probably shouldn't have done all that.

 

[Cowzrul]

If you want more data, I massively tracked RL+fey+sharn+ content post RL. Sample size was 6000 r10 chests (no discovery pots or weekend bonuses that mattered). I ignored artifacts/the xpac weapons because those should be a separate roll, and ended up with 2256 items (37.6%). This is below the alleged 43% rate, and is statistically significant to the point where I can certainly say that the drop rate is not 43%.

My personal guess is that its 25 Elite %+1/skull, but I havent done the same scale of testing on other difficulties

Do you have the raw data of this where I could look at it? This is also more than enough samples that it should have converged to within a percentage point of the real drop rate, so the fact that it was approximately 6% off is incredibly unlikely.

 

[Buddha5440]

You can't join data from 4 characters.

 

[Cowzrul]

You can't join data from 4 characters.

Why? What statistical or mathematical principle demands this?

Is there some reason that the drop rate should be different on a per character basis? Are some characters inherently more lucky than others? Why? A chest pull should be an entirely independent event that is not influenced by the character or account doing the pull.

 

[Kimbere]

I am starting a new thread on this topic because the RNG poll includes a lot of discussion about pseudorandom number generators and particular items that are not the focus of this discussion.

I have suspected there to be an issue with named item drop rates for some time, and decided to collect data on my named item drops.

This data is collected on the four characters I regularly play, all on the same account. (Cowzrul, Cowzrule, Cowzrul-1 and Sneakycow)

All runs were completed on at least Elite, and many of them on R1 or higher. None of these runs include drop rate boosts of any kind.

I only logged drops in quests from Ravenloft, Sharn, Feywild, Isle of Dread, Vecna and Myth Drannor, which the developers have stated should have a drop rate of 33% on elite, with an additional 1% per reaper skull. I did not record specifically which runs were conducted at which difficulties, but my theoretical named item drop rate should be at least 34%, and likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 36% or higher.

I have created this Google Sheet to share the data I've been collecting recently.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRcOSqdHfGgKFIAhm4MsrMm_IA_PlbSTyGh8Sa8d3SApFg2SYun-en9O9gdXdS8pwpXS6rWFL6I6DVJ/pubhtml

As shown, the rate at which I actually receive named items is 24% across 222 chest pulls. This, in itself, is not really compelling evidence of the drop rate being broken. I expect many of you would simply say "well, you're just unlucky". The likelihood of getting this outcome is incredibly low - 0.0464%, or 1 in 2153. There's more than a few thousand players of this game, I could simply be that super unlucky guy who stumbled across that 1 in 2153 chance, right?

Well, when you examine the outcomes in a little more detail, particularly the streaks in which I received no items, it becomes pretty obvious that the theoretical drop rate simply can't be the developer's intended 33%+. The likelihood of these outcomes occurring is so rare as to be unbelievable.

During these 222 chest pulls, I had notably long streaks without a named item of 18, 16, 15, 14, 10 and 11. There were also shorter streaks with no drops, but those are not particularly noteworthy.

The equation for the expected value of quest runs before encountering a particular streak of "no drops" of named items is given by ((p^-n)-1)/(1-p), where p is the probability of not getting a named item, and n is the number of chests in a row with no named item. I used a value of 67% chance of not getting a named item, although my rate *should* be lower than that when you factor in reaper bonuses.

For a streak of 18, this is 4090 chest pulls.
For a streak of 16, this is 1834 chest pulls.
For a streak of 15, this is 1228 chest pulls.
For a streak of 14, this is 822 chest pulls.
For a streak of 11, this is 245 chest pulls.
For a streak of 10, this is 163 chest pulls.

If you add all of these together to get a number of chest pulls, on average, that one would have to pull to observe these streaks within, you get 8384 chest pulls. I experienced all of these streaks in 222 chest pulls. This is a factor of over 37x more likely than expected to experience these streaks without receiving a named item. If this was occurring at a rate of 2x, or 5x, that would be within the realm of reasonable for a very unlucky person's experience. A factor of 37x means that something is fundamentally broken in the game. It does not require many thousands of pulls to demonstrate, as I've just shown. I'm essentially experiencing something with a probability of 1 in thousands, most times that I play the game, that I should be experiencing very rarely. The entire reason that I started logging this data is because I would regularly run entire sagas of expansion content, and get zero named items that dropped to me, so the logged data here is not cherry picked or some unusual streak of bad luck, it is my normal experience playing this game.

If anyone responds to this with "The probability of getting 10 heads flipped in a row is the same probability as any other sequence of coin flips", I will cry, tell you that's stupid and irrelevant, and point you to post #20 in this thread where I explain why. https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/what-is-the-named-item-drop-rate-really.15872/

Players have been telling the devs that something's off with the loot drops for many years. Everytime, two things happen.
1) A certain group of forumites argues against it.
2) If the devs deign to respond, they pinky swear they've checked it and everything is correct and working exactly as intended.

The devs probably do/did give the loot drop tables a cursory glance and verify they're set to the correct percentages.

I suspect part of the problem is that what they didn't/don't do (and maybe even don't know how to do at this point) is dig back through all the legacy code and verify that there's nothing leftover from years ago that might be altering the loot rates between when the loot table is read and the results show up in the chests.

Good luck getting a dev to care enough to actually put effort into digging into the old code to truly verify it's working correctly.


Years ago, one of the previous devs confirmed that code existed which modified loot drop rates in the first few weeks of new content releases. That was related to VIP perks being different and VIPs getting early access to new conent for a few weeks before it was released to the public.

Also, we know that code currently exists within the game that modifies loot drops - it's the ransack code. Granted it's not supposed to modify the drop percentages, it just shuts the named drops off when the ransack limit is hit but it does show that code other than just the loot percentage tables is in play.

Now consider that SSG can't even release new content/code that's even remotely bug-free, what are the chances that there are loot-related bugs in the old code that they know nothing about?

Personally, I suspect there's some sort of legacy global ransack code that's leftover which the current devs are unaware of.


Here's the best anecdotal evidence I can give:

Back in the days of MotU, the CitW raid was run multiple times weekly because the weapons from there were best-in-slot for many builds. That raid got farmed and it got farmed hard.

A few months after it was released, it had gotten to the point where a full raid on Elite (this was pre-reaper days) would be lucky to pull more than 1-2 named items per full 12-person raid with all the bonus chests. That was 6 chests x 12 toons for a total of 72 rolls per raid. It was even a semi-regular occurence to have a full raid that pulled 0 named items.

I ran this raid hundreds of times when it was popular and current and the drop rates were consistently 0-2 named items per run. Ocassionally a run would pull 3-4 but that was rare.

Fast forward a few years of newer content that obsoleted moste of MotU and where CitW might go weeks without a public LFM being posted. A guildie asked to run it, so we ran it as a guild. We pulled 12 named items and two stat tomes. The difference in drop rates was shocking.

We ran it a few times over the next couple weeks for the guildy and we continued to pull an abnormally high number of named items versus CitW's heyday.

I 100% believe that if CitW suddenly started being ran multiple times per day by various groups/guilds, the drop rates would slowly taper back down to 0-2 per run on average instead of the 6+ we were seeing.

 

[Cowzrul]

You probably shouldn't have done all that.

Is this some sort of threat?

 

[Cowzrul]

Players have been telling the devs that something's off with the loot drops for many years. Everytime, two things happen.
1) A certain group of forumites argues against it.
2) If the devs deign to respond, they pinky swear they've checked it and everything is correct and working exactly as intended.

The devs probably do/did give the loot drop tables a cursory glance and verify they're set to the correct percentages.

I suspect part of the problem is that what they didn't/don't do (and maybe even don't know how to do at this point) is dig back through all the legacy code and verify that there's nothing leftover from years ago that might be altering the loot rates between when the loot table is read and the results show up in the chests.

Good luck getting a dev to care enough to actually put effort into digging into the old code to truly verify it's working correctly.


Years ago, one of the previous devs confirmed that code existed which modified loot drop rates in the first few weeks of new content releases. That was related to VIP perks being different and VIPs getting early access to new conent for a few weeks before it was released to the public.

Also, we know that code currently exists within the game that modifies loot drops - it's the ransack code. Granted it's not supposed to modify the drop percentages, it just shuts the named drops off when the ransack limit is hit but it does show that code other just the loot percentage tables is in play.

Now consider that SSG can't even release new content/code that's even remotely bug-free, what are the chances that there are loot-related bugs in the old code that they know nothing about?

Personally, I suspect there's some sort of legacy global ransack code that's leftover which the current devs are unaware of.


Here's the best anecdotal evidence I can give:

Back in the days of MotU, the CitW raid was run multiple times weekly because the weapons from there were best-in-slot for many builds. That raid got farmed and it got farmed hard.

A few months after it was released, it had gotten to the point where a full raid on Elite (this was pre-reaper days) would be lucky to pull more than 1-2 named items per full 12-person raid with all the bonus chests. That was 6 chests x 12 toons for a total of 72 rolls per raid. It was even a semi-regular occurence to have a full raid that pulled 0 named items.

I ran this raid hundreds of times when it was popular and current and the drop rates were consistently 0-2 named items per run. Ocassionally a run would pull 3-4 but that was rare.

Fast forward a few years of newer content that obsoleted moste of MotU and where CitW might go weeks without a public LFM being posted. A guildie asked to run it, so we ran it as a guild. We pulled 12 named items and two stat tomes. The difference in drop rates was shocking.

We ran it a few times over the next couple weeks for the guildy and we continued to pull an abnormally high number of named items versus CitW's heyday.

I 100% believe that CitW suddenly started being ran multiple times per day by various groups/guilds, the drop rates would slowly taper back down to 0-2 per run on average instead of the 6+ we were seeing.

This is very interesting. I remember playing CiTW back in the days when it was new, I used to regularly post and run public LFMs for it, and I have the same memories that drops were very rare. It would be quite difficult to test that, I think. I'm not even sure I understand why that is even a thing that code was written to implement, given that chest ransack already limits the number of drop chances that can be obtained. It seems to just punish other players for trying to obtain items that other players are already ransacking.

I agree on all other counts as well, the rabid forumite response that insists there can't be a problem, and the shocking amount of bugs and broken functionality in the game, I am confident that there is something not working correctly in the drop rate code. I don't want to believe the devs are just flat out lying to us, but that's the only other plausible reason I can think of.

 

[J1NG]

2) If the devs deign to respond, they pinky swear they've checked it and everything is correct and working exactly as intended.

The devs probably do/did give the loot drop tables a cursory glance and verify they're set to the correct percentages.

This is why I was performing so many tests spread out to try and build up a picture of what is going on in DDO, and then comparing it up to what the Devs say happens.

If you don't have backing up behind you, the Devs can just check the basics and show nothing is wrong. Key example, Tonquin with the Draconic Incarnation Core II and IV taking spell components even though without any it would still allow spells to work. So they checked and it's 100% working. We checked and what we say is 100% right also. But the missing piece of the puzzle is somewhere close by, and without tracking that down, you might have a hard time convincing the Devs to do anything when their tests don't show something being off.

J1NG

 

[Aelonwy]

Is there some reason that the drop rate should be different on a per character basis? Are some characters inherently more lucky than others? Why? A chest pull should be an entirely independent event that is not influenced by the character or account doing the pull.

Should be. Doesn't seem to be in my experience.

I had been keeping track of how much named loot drops for me and my hubby and my kids from Ravenloft U37 until just after IoD dropped U54 though I stopped tracking my daughter after Feywild. My results indicated my son got approximately 4x as many named items dropping for his characters as opposed to my characters. My hubby got about twice as many named items than I.

I regularly have long streaks of nothing dropping in my characters' name even though I am running the same quests and same difficulty as hubby and son, running with them. I have completed multiple sagas on elite with nothing dropping for me. Hubby occasionally has a streak of poor loot, son is the opposite... he will have long streaks of nearly every chest giving him something. But please keep in mind the trends I have seen are across years of playing with them and across lots of varied content. It is my opinion that there is something that makes an account lucky or unlucky. Server might also be a factor, that is if the flag is server bound perhaps an account is lucky on one server and unlucky on another.

See this post:

I'm not going to read through this entire thread. I just don't have the excess time or desire. Since Ravenloft I had been tracking what named loot I pulled, what named loot my hubby pulls and what named loot each of my kids pulled but not how many times we ran the quests together. Together is important, because I only wrote down what I myself witnessed not any questing they ran on their own. Just after Feywild I stopped keep tracking of my daughter because she doesn't play much. After Isle of Dread dropped I took a break from keeping track and only recently started making my named loot charts again this last fall. My charts are hand-written in a spiral with checkmarks, initials and a tiny M by items with Mythic boosts. I am not keeping track of items with Reaper boosts because I refuse to run Reaper under most circumstances and have to be cajoled into it when other friends want us to run with them.

From my charts I can say this with some certainty... regardless of the content my son's characters are always the most lucky. He pulls named items twice as frequently as hubby and hubby seems twice as lucky as my characters. Its difficult to say with complete certainty about my daughter because she plays so much less... but I think her characters are even less lucky than mine. This isn't about pulling a specific item only about the number of named items that drop for that person's characters.

My son is the only one of us to have a Jack Jibber's Blade drop for him not that we have ever farmed for it in particular. He passed it to hubby. Son also gets the most mythic boosted drops. That is detailed in my charts. Oh and this one time we were farming for Feytwisted chests he opened an instance and got 4 in ONE wilderness instance... I've never seen that before or since. I'm lucky to see 2 Feytwisted chests by the time I finish a Feywild saga.

I suspect there is something in the code that flags an entire account as lucky or unlucky. It might be a server flag though. If its a server thing... I wonder if upgrading to the 64 bit servers might change the trends in my charts? If its account-flagged then the data should stay consistent even after the upgrade.

 

[bgddy5]

Great job with this. We needed some of the mathematicians that play this game to double check and do random blind testing of the loot drops to determine that the loot drops are indeed not what the devs are stating. For the last couple of years I have been experiencing less and less named loot dropping as well. Ever since Myth Drannor dropped. Everyone was complaining about the abysmal loot rate dropping of that expansion. I started noticing that it wasn't just Myth Drannor it was all of the modules. It had been suggested that they were boosting revenue through astral shard sales. I hate to believe that they would start fleecing us like that considering the game has been in decline for years now. I understand that they need to make money to keep the game going, but that just seems grimey. I hope that by giving them proof of the drop rates experienced by all of us that they will realize it and adjust things accordingly. This game doesn't attract the new players like it used to so the ones keeping this game afloat are the people like us that have enjoyed the game since the beginning. I haven't been here from the very beginning like alot of you have but I've been here since 08 when it went free to play. And having been at a game for that long you tend to notice when things aren't behaving the way they had been previously. I hope that the devs will see this and take to this to heart and find other ways to boost revenue. I don't mind stuff like the patron coffers and the like. I totally get it. just don't be grimey.

 

[Cowzrul]

Should be. Doesn't seem to be in my experience.

I had been keeping track of how much named loot drops for me and my hubby and my kids from Ravenloft U37 until just after IoD dropped U54 though I stopped tracking my daughter after Feywild. My results indicated my son got approximately 4x as many named items dropping for his characters as opposed to my characters. My hubby got about twice as many named items than I.

I regularly have long streaks of nothing dropping in my characters' name even though I am running the same quests and same difficulty as hubby and son, running with them. I have completed multiple sagas on elite with nothing dropping for me. Hubby occasionally has a streak of poor loot, son is the opposite... he will have long streaks of nearly every chest giving him something. But please keep in mind the trends I have seen are across years of playing with them and across lots of varied content. It is my opinion that there is something that makes an account lucky or unlucky. Server might also be a factor, that is if the flag is server bound perhaps an account is lucky on one server and unlucky on another.

See this post:

Variability from character to character or account to account like this is just further evidence that *something* is not working as intended. Unless the developers are intentionally biasing named item drop rates on a per character or account basis, and I can't think of a rational reason why they would do that.

 

[Teth]

Variability from character to character or account to account like this is just further evidence that *something* is not working as intended. Unless the developers are intentionally biasing named item drop rates on a per character or account basis, and I can't think of a rational reason why they would do that.

Well there was a discussion on this many many years ago because the game is coded exactly like an older game that Turbine did. That game had a loot anomaly that certain characters when initially created were luckier based on a hidden character ID, lots of people, myself included, believed DDO had this same implementation.

 

[Phoenicis]

Turbine devs (the same folks that built the core engine for DDO) swore for literally YEARS that the aggro formula was working correctly and the 'Wi' flag did not exist.

They were epically wrong.

The devs say they check something, I take it they looked at the code and as far as they can tell it's working as advertised. But they may well be wrong.

 

[vryxnr]

Part of the issue is there are so many potential variables that we are trying to navigate without being able to see under the hood.

random anecdote:
This last week I ransacked The Safehold on 30 characters (spread over 6 accounts, yes, I multibox). My goal was to get 2 x Legendary Medium Armor of the Artblade, so I was only paying attention to when I got something form the "rare table". The results: 1 L. Medium Armor of the Artblade (acquired fairly early on), 2 L. Solar Gems of Swift Charging (both acquired with 30 minutes of each other near the end of the week), and 9 L. Docents of the Warblade. NINE!

I know, a sample size of 240 chest pulls is rather small for statistical analysis... but what can I assume from this?
Well, 5% for rare table access, but this was WITH the djinni loot buff on all of them the whole time, so blargh. Probably still within error margins for the low sample size.
As for distribution, I can see 3 possibilities:
1) It is truly random, as true random will sometimes result in clumps of "results".
2) The items have uneven weights. Instead of 1/3rd 1/3rd 1/3rd it's something like 1/4th, 1/6th, 1/12th.
3) There is a complicated issue with how the game generates "randomness", and some factor or variety of factors can cause unintended clumping.

Option 3 is very possible imo, as not only have people seen similar behavior when farming loot in other quests (the one item they want never shows up, but they get the same different item over and over again... then at a later time, or a different person, has the opposite, getting repeats of what the first person wanted, but not the thing they were constantly getting)... but this is something that is known to happen in other games, and speedrunners and TAS creators exploit this knowledge to their advantage by manipulating RNG to get results they want.

 

[Buddha5440]

Why? What statistical or mathematical principle demands this?

Is there some reason that the drop rate should be different on a per character basis? Are some characters inherently more lucky than others? Why? A chest pull should be an entirely independent event that is not influenced by the character or account doing the pull.

Each instance in an experiment has it's own data set. If player A flips a coin and gets heads, they have a less than 50% chance to get heads on the next flip. Player B still has a 50% chance to get heads.

 

[Cowzrul]

Each instance in an experiment has it's own data set. If player A flips a coin and gets heads, they have a less than 50% chance to get heads on the next flip. Player B still has a 50% chance to get heads.

This is not how probability works. This is also not how well functioning pseudorandom number generators work. This is not how the chances of getting named loot in this game should work.

 

[vryxnr]

In a perfect scenario, each coin flip is 50/50, regardless of if it was previously flipped or not. The coin does not "remember" previous flips.

 

[rabidfox]

In a perfect scenario, each coin flip is 50/50, regardless of if it was previously flipped or not. The coin does not "remember" previous flips.

SSG uses a Kobold coin so it remembers...