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

[Cowzrul]

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.

Yes, the chances of getting a named item in this game should function as a coin flip with a biased coin, with a 33% (on elite, plus 1% per reaper skull) chance of flipping "heads", meaning you get an item. This probability should be exactly the same regardless of previous results, the character, the account, the day of the week, the phases of the 13 moons, etc, because they are independent random trials. The developers have never indicated that any of these things are intended to impact drop rates.

 

[Weaponalpha]

LMFAO the only thing "proved" is that people are hilarious! TYVM for spending so much time "proving" your belief. Do Bigfoot next.

 

[GrizzlyOso]

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.

Wow, wait is this a joke?

My stats teacher would love you. Casinos probably do also.

 

[Cowzrul]

LMFAO the only thing "proved" is that people are hilarious! TYVM for spending so much time "proving" your belief. Do Bigfoot next.

I had a hunch based on anecdotal experiences, so I designed an experiment, collected data, performed analysis on that data, and formed a conclusion that is well backed by the evidence. You have ... done none of those things. If you want to debate the merit of the work I've done I'd happily do so, and if I've done something erroneous, would look forward to being corrected and leaning something in the process. If you have any data and logged observations of Bigfoot I'd enjoy helping you perform statistical analysis on it. Otherwise I'm going to ignore you and your trolling.

 

[Jasparius]

LMFAO the only thing "proved" is that people are hilarious! TYVM for spending so much time "proving" your belief. Do Bigfoot next.

Statistical analysis is fake news eh?

I once went 20 x R1 dungeons without a drop. A number of times 15 x R1. And MANY times 10 x R1.

Ive never had 6 in a row drop.

Its amazing how many people have evidence of drop rates not matching the claimed rates and it not meaning anything.

Would any level of evidence have you thinking maybe there is something wrong? Or do you just trust everything SSG claims?

 

[Elminster]

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/

 

[Elminster]

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 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.

No one is saying the Devs are intentionally putting a hand on the scale against the players getting named drops.

That’s asinine, they are running a business and doing something so petty in the long term will turn off their customers and hurt profits more than anything extra they can make off shard sales.

However . . .

That does not excuse the fact that the numbers are far off what they are advertised. (No amount of blind fanboi’ing is going to refute these numbers. And if you don’t believe these numbers what about the enormous anecdotal evidence over the years from all walks of life of players going, “hmmmm… something seems off.”)

My guess is that it’s a BUG that even the Devs are not quite sure about. The chest named loot drop code is probably up there in terms of both importance and the amount of hands that had a go at it.

It’s going to be hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. Who knows if it’ll ever get resolved?

 

[GrizzlyOso]

No one is saying the Devs are intentionally putting a hand on the scale against the players getting named drops.

That’s asinine, they are running a business and doing something so petty in the long term will turn off their customers and hurt profits more than anything extra they can make off shard sales.

However . . .

That does not excuse the fact that the numbers are far off what they are advertised. (No amount of blind fanboi’ing is going to refute these numbers. And if you don’t believe these numbers what about the enormous anecdotal evidence over the years from all walks of life of players going, “hmmmm… something seems off.”)

My guess is that it’s a BUG that even the Devs are not quite sure about. The chest named loot drop code is probably up there in terms of both importance and the amount of hands that had a go at it.

It’s going to be hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. Who knows if it’ll ever get resolved?

It seems clear MD is an intentional affront to the players from petty producers. The only bug that got fixed IMMEDIATELY was because it hurt their petty loot design system.

And MD drop rates are clearly not as advertised, the amount of full sagas with zero to 1 named at this point is absurd.

 

[Elminster]

It seems clear MD is an intentional affront to the players from petty producers. The only bug that got fixed IMMEDIATELY was because it hurt their petty loot design system.

And MD drop rates are clearly not as advertised, the amount of full sagas with zero to 1 named at this point is absurd.

Yeah, I forgot about the MD debacle. (I don’t own it and refuse to do so)

I am… not so sure anymore. Hmm..

Whatever. Nothing will get done about it probably.

 

[Finngon]

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/

A little bit of in me would say that there might not be enough sample size here yet to 100% determine anything wrong yet. Only like a pilot experiment if anything.

However, I do say that I do have experienced the same kind of long streaks of nothing. At worst it's been 20 quests without any drops when I was trying to farm Through the Tulgey Wood on elite with a friend.

I do think given the huge long streaks of nothing, and barely any streaks of getting like 3-6 in a row is enough of a reason to ask devs just how exactly the named loots are generated, and make a bigger scale test.

 

[Cowzrul]

Statistical analysis is fake news eh?

I once went 20 x R1 dungeons without a drop. A number of times 15 x R1. And MANY times 10 x R1.

Ive never had 6 in a row drop.

Its amazing how many people have evidence of drop rates not matching the claimed rates and it not meaning anything.

Would any level of evidence have you thinking maybe there is something wrong? Or do you just trust everything SSG claims?

If I was the only person across the entire player base that experienced these things, there might be some merit to chalking this up to me being extraordinarily unlucky, but if other people like yourself are also getting 15, 20 chest streaks without getting items, that provides even more evidence that things are not working as intended. Your point about getting drops in a row is also interesting, in the data I logged i never got more than three in a row, and rarely got two in a row, significantly less likely than expected as well.

If my quick math is correct, you should on average get two items in a row every 12 chests, and three in a row every 37 pulls, and four in a row every 112, five in a row 332, and six in a row every 979. (I am not saying that a streak of these is "due" at these numbers, just that these are the expected number of runs to encounter that streak, on average. I can't recall having ever gotten 6 items in a row myself either, and I'm sure I've run several thousands of quests.)

 

[droid327]

You should be able to do a test of fitness to get the likelihood that your outcome still lies within a "true" range consistent with expectations. If that's less than 5% or 1%, you can say that something seems demonstrably amiss

 

[Mindos]

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.

It was even a semi-regular occurence to have a full raid that pulled 0 named items.

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 don't know when you ran CITW for the guildy, but I can state that the drop rates in CITW were increased from the original release. I believe it was Steel when he did some cleanup, but I don't remember exactly or know if it made it to the release notes. As always, I could be wrong/misremembering.

 

[Felsyn]

I got 6 filigrees out of 6 chests while running Into the Mists. It doesn't have anything to do with this thread but I have been waiting to brag about it for a couple days.

 

[Jasparius]

I got 6 filigrees out of 6 chests while running Into the Mists. It doesn't have anything to do with this thread but I have been waiting to brag about it for a couple days.

Actually I think it does belong in the thread. If there are people with positive experiences on loot drops that's as important as those having poor experiences.

However, Im unsure how Filigrees are worked out separate to / inclusive with named items. So maybe 6 can happen a lot with Filigrees, but named items would be a rare event.

 

[rabidfox]

I have zero of pretty much any gen2 rare filigree... so odds for some stuff is so bad.

 

[Felsyn]

I have zero of pretty much any gen2 rare filigree... so odds for some stuff is so bad.

last I heard there was a bug in sharn preventing them from dropping AND they do not drop in reaper so we do not see them.

 

[rabidfox]

last I heard there was a bug in sharn preventing them from dropping AND they do not drop in reaper so we do not see them.

Yeah, that's the last I heard too. But it's a good example of never knowing what's going on with loot as a player.

 

[nenetteblackmoor]

I've taken statistics on named item drops multiple times.

What I found is that "as long as an unfortunate wave of bad RNG doesn't hit, the drop rate converges to the expected value."

When I farm items, I use six accounts and the same six characters, always joining them in the same order before starting and keeping track of the drop count.

If I feel like I'm experiencing a bad RNG wave, I stop farming.
When the wave isn't there, the drop rates seem to follow the expected statistics.

I believe the issue in DDO is not with the drop rate itself, but rather with an algorithmic problem that causes bias in the RNG.
Whether this is an issue within the random number subroutine, if it's caused by reusing a single random seed across multiple players and locations, or if factors like names or classes are affecting it, no one, including SSG, knows for sure.

Note: I also stopped praying for the Human's Treasure Finding. When I pray, items often don't drop.

 

[Cowzrul]

A little bit of in me would say that there might not be enough sample size here yet to 100% determine anything wrong yet. Only like a pilot experiment if anything.

However, I do say that I do have experienced the same kind of long streaks of nothing. At worst it's been 20 quests without any drops when I was trying to farm Through the Tulgey Wood on elite with a friend.

I do think given the huge long streaks of nothing, and barely any streaks of getting like 3-6 in a row is enough of a reason to ask devs just how exactly the named loots are generated, and make a bigger scale test.

I do intend to keep tracking this data, the problem is that I don't have huge amounts of play time, and when I do play, I don't exclusively play the content that is supposed to follow this "known" drop rate that was provided by the developers. So the rate at which I can personally generate more data is probably 500 a year or so. (It's easier for me to post on this forum via phone than it necessarily is to log in and play the game) I've added a handful of additional runs to the spreadsheet, although it does include the djinn buff, which doesn't appear to be doing anything for me in the limited samples I've recorded.

I will say though, that the odds of getting 20 no drops in a row on elite are around 1 in 4000. I have no idea what the rate is that you play content at with these drop rates, so maybe you've run so many quests it's not unusual to have encountered that because you've got tens of thousands of chest pulls under your belt, but for me and the fairly slow rate that I pull chests it would be unexpected.