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

[GioAvanti]

Yes but the valuable sample size changes when it's done 100 times and when it's done 2000 times

Not really. There's the thing about confidence intervals that Cowzrul mentioned earlier in this thread or another, but to shorten it. You can get a very accurate assessment of the actual probability of a system or function without needing absurdly high samples from DDO. Having extraordinarily large sample size tends to only increase the accuracy of the probability calculated by a couple of points once you reach the 95% CI threshold.

Even for political polls in the United States, 1k participants is the gold standard threshold when we have ~342M people. That's .00000292% of the entire population to get a pretty accurate read on nebulous feelings. Here we have people outlining that an easily verifiable outcome (loot/no loot) with sufficient sample size. The loot in the game is busted.

When you intimate that the drop rates may be dependent upon the player/character, that too means the loot is broken. A slot machine should pay out according to its schedule, not because Player4123 appears.

 

[Notta]

If you account for the other 1000+ flips being done by other players your logic falls apart. Sample size with a global size of 10 is much different than with a global size of 1000+. "A" getting heads twice in a row is less than 50%.

In a fair game the odds of two heads in a row is 25% (before any flips). If you have flipped heads once, assuming a fair game, the odds of rolling heads again is 50% They are independent events. That being said, if I get 10 heads in a row, I am betting it's not a fair game and putting my money on an 11th head.

 

[Lacci]

In a fair game the odds of two heads in a row is 25% (before any flips). If you have flipped heads once, assuming a fair game, the odds of rolling heads again is 50% They are independent events. That being said, if I get 10 heads in a row, I am betting it's not a fair game and putting my money on an 11th head.

correct. The odds of getting a streak get lower the longer the streak is, but every individual coin flip has a 50% chance. Even if there were 99 heads in a row, the 100th still has a 50/50 chance.

 

[Treefolk]

It´s actually the other way around. If we assume that RNG ist just tied to the chest and nothing else, it doesn´t matter if 1 character does the pulling or 1000.
Of course, 50 pulls means nothing, but 1000 should already show decent statistics. Doesn´t matter if one character does 1000 pulls or 100 characters do 10 pulls.
Unless of course, there is some secret hidden per character/account "luck" stat (which I personally don´t believe in). But in that case, any data/statistics is useless anyway.

Early on in this thread, Aelonwy linked to some experiences she's had with tracking loot between distinct accounts and observed severely differing droprates between them (i.e. she has half the drop rate of her husband's account, her husband's account has half the drop rate of her son's account).

Given my experience in other games with "cursed seeds" (i.e. Monster Hunter 3U's Cursed Charm Tables), Asheron's Call's Wi Flag, and the statistically improbable strings of loot and no loot people have reported earlier in the thread, and my own experience with "bad" dice RNG (i.e. UMD dice rolls resulting in the exactly same number 6 to 8 times in a row, repeatedly), I wouldn't be surprised to learn that:

1) The RNG in this game is set up in a way that causes observable "streakiness" (i.e. part of the seed generation is based on instance ID, the current timestamp fed into a sin function to constrain possible results, and is only updated every X time units to save on resource utilization).
2) That the algorithm responsible for loot generation has the same flaws that caused the Wi Flag (dynamically generating a list based on inverse ratios that creates a range larger than the RNG is allowed to roll, causing a truncation of the possible rewards).

Given my play habits, I'm regularly ransacking chests across multiple characters on elite and r1. My results overall, converge towards 33% (I'm not performing rigorous testing and stop farming after the item I want drops), but I have anecdotally observed that there are times that are distinctly not for farming (i.e. 8 to 12+ consecutive pulls without any named items) and conversely times for farming (i.e. 8 to 12+ pulls with an item every time). When things are "not good for farming", I do something else (sandwich, nap, other games, housework, whatever) for a while and I believe this habit of mine causes my results to skew higher than expected (again, my sample methodology is not rigorous). I haven't figured out how to automate my data collection yet (I've got a couple ideas), and ultimately I'd rather spend my time playing the game (but who doesn't love a good mystery to poke at).

There's also the story about CITW back during its release that I found super interesting to read. I do remember getting any of the loot from that raid back in the day was a massive pain because nothing was dropping but I certainly wasn't recording the number of runs (just when I rolled well on a Mornh, I immediately TR'd into a (bad) drow hammer paladin to use it). Maybe when DDO finally dies, the source will leak and I'll be able to poke around until I'm satisfied.

 

[Notta]

correct. The odds of getting a streak get lower the longer the streak is, but every individual coin flip has a 50% chance. Even if there were 99 heads in a row, the 100th still has a 50/50 chance.

That assumes, contrary what the results suggest, it is a fair game. If the only evidence was these results, I would wager it is not a fair game and put my money on heads. Absent some other basis on which one would "know" the game is fair, the better bet is that the game is weighted towards heads and, in the worst case that the game is fair, you still have a 50% chance of winning. Given the above, only a fool would bet the 100th flip will be tails.

 

[Eme]

I've seen multiple end chests in raids give me the exact same top-roll loot in both chests, multiple times when things lag, enough to make me think something else is going on rather than rolling on chest open each time

 

[Vua]

Not really. There's the thing about confidence intervals that Cowzrul mentioned earlier in this thread or another, but to shorten it. You can get a very accurate assessment of the actual probability of a system or function without needing absurdly high samples from DDO. Having extraordinarily large sample size tends to only increase the accuracy of the probability calculated by a couple of points once you reach the 95% CI threshold.

Even for political polls in the United States, 1k participants is the gold standard threshold when we have ~342M people. That's .00000292% of the entire population to get a pretty accurate read on nebulous feelings. Here we have people outlining that an easily verifiable outcome (loot/no loot) with sufficient sample size. The loot in the game is busted.

When you intimate that the drop rates may be dependent upon the player/character, that too means the loot is broken. A slot machine should pay out according to its schedule, not because Player4123 appears.

But to get those political polls to be "accurate", you can't poll 1,000 people in California or Texas exclusively. You need a broad sampling. Is that what we have here?

 

[GioAvanti]

But to get those political polls to be "accurate", you can't poll 1,000 people in California or Texas exclusively. You need a broad sampling. Is that what we have here?

You're comparing the United States (global drop rate) and California (supposed 33% drop rate) in that regard. We are interrogating the appropriate systems. These gentlepeople aren't checking the nation, they are checking JUST California. If we want to know how California is doing, we ask Californians (33% drop rates) NOT the United States as a whole. Could you trust natives of other states who have never been 10 miles away from their home on how it is to live in California? Of course not.

By the way, that comment about political polls is about the statistical numbers required for an accurate assessment and then you just tried to distract from that with this red herring which isn't applicable either. You do not need thousands of sample to get accurately determine probability in these independent probabilities. Just to reiterate using your analogy, we know that all chests in each quest do not share the 33% named item drop rate (United States) but these investigators have determined that there is something off in the State of California (33% drop rate land).

Operating under the assumption that everyone's data is factual, with no agendas, one can only conclude that there IS a problem. If one person has produced statistically significant data that one person's drop rates are okay and their contemporaries' drop rates are not that is STILL a problem. Everyone should be seeing relatively even drop rates across their characters/accounts regardless of class/race/creation time/phase of the moon/etc. Fluctuations between players is to be expected, but a 10%-15% difference from expected is unacceptable in any profession/game.

 

[Vua]

You're comparing the United States (global drop rate) and California (supposed 33% drop rate) in that regard. We are interrogating the appropriate systems. These gentlepeople aren't checking the nation, they are checking JUST California. If we want to know how California is doing, we ask Californians (33% drop rates) NOT the United States as a whole. Could you trust natives of other states who have never been 10 miles away from their home on how it is to live in California? Of course not.

By the way, that comment about political polls is about the statistical numbers required for an accurate assessment and then you just tried to distract from that with this red herring which isn't applicable either. You do not need thousands of sample to get accurately determine probability in these independent probabilities. Just to reiterate using your analogy, we know that all chests in each quest do not share the 33% named item drop rate (United States) but these investigators have determined that there is something off in the State of California (33% drop rate land).

Operating under the assumption that everyone's data is factual, with no agendas, one can only conclude that there IS a problem. If one person has produced statistically significant data that one person's drop rates are okay and their contemporaries' drop rates are not that is STILL a problem. Everyone should be seeing relatively even drop rates across their characters/accounts regardless of class/race/creation time/phase of the moon/etc. Fluctuations between players is to be expected, but a 10%-15% difference from expected is unacceptable in any profession/game.

I'm not doing this again. I've covered this subject any number of times. So you can stop with what you think my agenda is or red herrings. I don't believe people are lying, but the people that came here to post are mostly those that share the OPs experience. We don't all share it. Tests have been done before that show the basic named loot rate is right around the posted rates. So we disregard it because someone else's results don't match? Those results came from multiple accounts pulling from the same chests at the same time under identical conditions. I've shared percentages from mine and my guildmates pulls, and two of us pull at a pretty significantly higher rate than the other 3. But between the 5 of us, we average out to right around the posted numbers. Believe what you will. Some people are just luckier than others, but I can't say what the reason is.

 

[Phoenicis]

Here's the thing, even if the percentage is 33% on elite, which I don't believe for a second, that 33% is shared with all the named items available for that quest. So Myth Drannor for example, there are 2 variants of every weapon equaling 100, there's the 3-5 named items people want, and all the solar/lunar gems which are about 60ish (estimate) This adds up to be approximately 165. Now you have to divide that .33 (33%) by 165 and that's closer to .002 or .2% for an item you want. That's 2 out of 1000, or 1 out of 500 if you want to reduce it to simplest form. And have you ever opened a chest, got a named item you didn't want, reroll and got no named item? Yeah, that happens more than you'd think. How bout once you get a named item it locks you into a named item category so that next reroll guarantees you a named item.

This is so wrong it makes my head hurt.

First, weapons are on a separate roll from named items, you can get both in a single chest.
Second, not every item drops from every chest. Each chest has it's own list of items (which is still too large and hurt by the augments being on the same roll).

If you are going to start spewing numbers to make a point, please be sure you have the basics right.

 

[GioAvanti]

I'm not doing this again. I've covered this subject any number of times. So you can stop with what you think my agenda is or red herrings. I don't believe people are lying, but the people that came here to post are mostly those that share the OPs experience. We don't all share it. Tests have been done before that show the basic named loot rate is right around the posted rates. So we disregard it because someone else's results don't match? Those results came from multiple accounts pulling from the same chests at the same time under identical conditions. I've shared percentages from mine and my guildmates pulls, and two of us pull at a pretty significantly higher rate than the other 3. But between the 5 of us, we average out to right around the posted numbers. Believe what you will. Some people are just luckier than others, but I can't say what the reason is.

Some people are just luckier than others, but I can't say what the reason is.
-Vua

That is the problem. Thank you for acknowledging the problem. No one can confidently say what the reason is. We do not have SSG's source code. I cannot be confident that SSG knows what the reason is, but being "lucky" and so many others being "unlucky" is bad design and/or implementation.

 

[Cowzrul]

Some people are just luckier than others, but I can't say what the reason is.
-Vua

That is the problem. Thank you for acknowledging the problem. No one can confidently say what the reason is. We do not have SSG's source code. I cannot be confident that SSG knows what the reason is, but being "lucky" and so many others being "unlucky" is bad design and/or implementation.

To pull this thread, saying that "the average of individual's drop rates is the intended rate" shouldn't be considered a correct or desired implementation. If it was said up front that any given character or account was given a hidden luck score that determines drop rate, nobody would want to play anything but lucky characters or accounts.

I will reiterate though from earlier in the thread, the more data I've collected and started to slice it various ways, the more weird it has gotten. There's some early indications that different expansions, packs and even individual quests may have very different loot tables.

Given how many blatant copy/paste errors there are in the game, in things like incorrect or bugged modifiers on items, feats and enhancements, I would guarantee similar errors exist in loot tables, which we can't really verify with testing like we can for whether modifiers function or not.

 

[norriskwondo]

This is so wrong it makes my head hurt.

First, weapons are on a separate roll from named items, you can get both in a single chest.
Second, not every item drops from every chest. Each chest has it's own list of items (which is still too large and hurt by the augments being on the same roll).

If you are going to start spewing numbers to make a point, please be sure you have the basics right.

Weapons do have a separate slot, but I've also read they share the named slots. So fallen age age weapons occur frequently, but golden age weapons never, and they take up named item spots.

 

[Phoenicis]

Weapons do have a separate slot, but I've also read they share the named slots. So fallen age age weapons occur frequently, but golden age weapons never, and they take up named item spots.

research better.

 

[Bobbryan2]

But to get those political polls to be "accurate", you can't poll 1,000 people in California or Texas exclusively. You need a broad sampling. Is that what we have here?

Do we have reason to believe that loot sampling is not randomly distributed?
The problem with political polling is that we're not evenly distributed.

 

[Bobbryan2]

Weapons do have a separate slot, but I've also read they share the named slots. So fallen age age weapons occur frequently, but golden age weapons never, and they take up named item spots.

Fallen age and Golden age are on the same loot table, independent from the other loot.

 

[5 Other People]

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Some of the arguments on this thread center around the concept of luck, but I'd point out that we are all monkeys randomly getting loot and there should be some folks above the center of the bell curve and some folks below the center of the bell curve.

Meaning, if in ~300 pulls @Cowzrul has a drop rate of ~24%, then it's possible someone has a drop rate of ~42%...unlikely, but possible as we don't know the width of the bell curve.

So, what we could do is get a web-page that let's everyone record their observations. I know something like that is prone to a few bad monkeys intentionally tainting the data, but if you required the user to create a user name (and put a 48 hour window on new users) and only let a user add one observation every 5 mins, then you could begin to collect a very large data pool....the larger the data pool, the more significant and accurate it becomes.

I believe most folks are being honest here (my bias) and we're dealing with a loot system that SSG may or may not fully understand....looking at the state of the game, it's possible there is an issue with loot generation & it's also possible @Cowzrul is an outlier. Only more data can answer.

 

[5 Other People]

Here's a fun conspiracy theory....the game has a loot balance mechanism, it records how many times a named loot has been acquired. Once named loot has been acquired X number of times in Y time frame then the game may stop providing named loot or significantly reduce the chances. So, we've been looking at this thinking we each get a 33% chance at named loot on elite, when in reality the chest is adjusting itself to arrive at 33%. This is still fairly random, however it would make for a wide bell curve creating outliers on both sides.

What makes this theory interesting for me, is it's purpose in the game. This would make loot "feel special" b/c it would limit how many folks get some type of loot...making if feel rarer & more special in small social circles, like say a Guild

A second purpose for this theory is loot throttling for safety. Imagine SSG accidently released a bit of loot that was way more powerful than intended & folks were rushing to acquire that item...many folks would be over-farming it, but the chest would throttle the items availability, giving SSG time to change the item before to many folks acquire it. Plus if the chest re-rollers all focused on an item, it would drive up SSG profits by making it temporarily harder to acquire and netting SSG more shards.

 

[GrizzlyOso]

Here's a fun conspiracy theory....the game has a loot balance mechanism, it records how many times a named loot has been acquired. Once named loot has been acquired X number of times in Y time frame then the game may stop providing named loot or significantly reduce the chances. So, we've been looking at this thinking we each get a 33% chance at named loot on elite, when in reality the chest is adjusting itself to arrive at 33%. This is still fairly random, however it would make for a wide bell curve creating outliers on both sides.

What makes this theory interesting for me, is it's purpose in the game. This would make loot "feel special" b/c it would limit how many folks get some type of loot...making if feel rarer & more special in small social circles, like say a Guild

A second purpose for this theory is loot throttling for safety. Imagine SSG accidently released a bit of loot that was way more powerful than intended & folks were rushing to acquire that item...many folks would be over-farming it, but the chest would throttle the items availability, giving SSG time to change the item before to many folks acquire it. Plus if the chest re-rollers all focused on an item, it would drive up SSG profits by making it temporarily harder to acquire and netting SSG more shards.

This is mostly nonsense, just like most conspiracy theories.

They have no need to “limit” “accidentally” op items, they can just change them. As they have done.

This makes items no more or less special than if they were 33%.

Tracking items and trending towards percents like this is just harder, dumber, and more bug-filled to do than just making it 33%. So yeah , this is probably what they’ve done. Tinfoil hat on.

 

[norriskwondo]

Here's a fun conspiracy theory....the game has a loot balance mechanism, it records how many times a named loot has been acquired. Once named loot has been acquired X number of times in Y time frame then the game may stop providing named loot or significantly reduce the chances. So, we've been looking at this thinking we each get a 33% chance at named loot on elite, when in reality the chest is adjusting itself to arrive at 33%. This is still fairly random, however it would make for a wide bell curve creating outliers on both sides.

What makes this theory interesting for me, is it's purpose in the game. This would make loot "feel special" b/c it would limit how many folks get some type of loot...making if feel rarer & more special in small social circles, like say a Guild

A second purpose for this theory is loot throttling for safety. Imagine SSG accidently released a bit of loot that was way more powerful than intended & folks were rushing to acquire that item...many folks would be over-farming it, but the chest would throttle the items availability, giving SSG time to change the item before to many folks acquire it. Plus if the chest re-rollers all focused on an item, it would drive up SSG profits by making it temporarily harder to acquire and netting SSG more shards.

Loot only feels special if you get said loot. Just a large detail of their extremely flawed philosophy of loot drops at SSG. As of now, poeple feel like **** not special from their loot system