I remember they brought Darth Maul back in Clone Wars (cartoon) but he had spider-robot legs... I can't make this stuff up. :-/

I wont debate semamtics over the interweb - but i feel we are both on the same page reguardless. To me NODROP = Bound. The only thing you could do with NODROP was destroy the item, Bound you can sell to an NPC or Destroy it. bassically the same thing. Early in EQ1, NODROP was pretty rare but it became more and more common over the years. I only played for teh first 2 years, so after that who knows... I didn't stick around.. heh. Case and point though - there were level 12 paladins running round with Soul Fires till they buttoned it down. Edit: another example - "multi-questing"... ask someone what that means now and very few will know.. now ask why? heh.

EQ2 had bound items almost from the start (minus a week or so from launch) - EQ1 did not have bound items but in time introduced them several years after launch.

To stop level 12 paladins from running around with their Soul Fire (level 50 epic weapon). I saw this a few times in EQ1 and it was pretty bad. How do you balance a game around a low level paladin single-hit killing stuff (just a single example)? Later on even EQ added "levels" to items to limit this, you cuold place it on "early" in levels but you would not gain anything from doing so. Current age mmos have level locked gear and lock the gear per character once equiped. Just the way the genre has evolved.

It's almost like there is "too much console" in the game and not "enough mmo". it's hard to explain but this is the best way I can put it. Console players want to "beat the game and move on" while mmo players want "to live in a breathing presistant world". Not that there is anything aganst each genre - but in the end, it is why they are seprate genres. Port this to playstation or xbox live and it will do awesome...

Just jumped on then off again... Less then 30 people on the republic fleet (Darth Bandon server). It's 8pm, prime time! Ug... And from the sounds of it, 30 people is a lot these days for the republic side. :-/

I've seen Rich Underworld Trading Missions for Metals. They are, well, rare. :-/

Hey all, just dropping by to say I've canceled my subscription. No huge reason "why", I just haven't played much in the past month or two. I enjoyed the game and will probabilly return at somepoint but I see no reason to pay a reaccurring bill when I spend so little time in the game. But anyway, yeah... I just didn't want to up and dissapear on everyone.. With the free month they gave us, I'll still be around till 6/18 but as of the moment my account is set to turn off at that point. You guys are a fantastic community. I think I'm going to miss the forums more then the game itself.

The only coin I make from crafting these days is from selling Augments. For the past several weeks I've only been crafting the level 49 purple Surge augment and setting them for 50k each. I have Slicing so I only craft with the materials I can get myself- otherwise I would not be able to sell them for that low of a price (normally 1 T6 purple slicing resource costs 15k each on my server). It's not a "get rich quick" thing but I sell a few ever day or so.. So it's a steady source of income.. Though there is nothing I want to buy in the game (legacy stuff dosent look that great to me) so my personal vaults are only growing and growing..

Aye thats the wrench in the gears at the moment and the 10 million taun-taun question; it could be the root of all the issues (or preceved issues). I hope they know better though, a random system based solely off a system clock (client or server) is a very bad idea. If other variables are also mixed in then the system becomes stronger and the more the better. Based solely off a system clock can cause patterens in the randomness like those that play at a certin time of the day have a higher probablility of "succeeding" that those that play at different times. This is becasue there is only so much data a "seed" can pull from a clock and that clock repeats pretty often and has only limited numbers. Example: If the clock says 12:00 for our seed, the "random number", lets say, returns a "4".... The issues is that this happens every time we "ping" the clock at 12:00. The numbers appear random becsaue the clock is in motion. Ping the system clock fast enough and you can get say a dozen "4's" becsaue the clock hasn't changed. So when asking for several random numbers add an artificial pause in ms giving the seed source enough time to change. A good solution is to use the clock as a base source then add several other sources that can also change on their own and tie them all together as a source for a single seed. long story short - Yeah.

Balsalvis all the way up north in the world boss area. Tons of silver critters to kill and a ton of pretty fast spawning nods.

It's a bummer no doubt about it.... On the other hand Artificing was shown to be the #1 chosen crafting skill even beating out Bio - and Arms, Armor, Syth have to compete with raid and pvp gear so their market is much smaller. Still a bummer but it might be part of the reasoning...

Just to add to the issue is that most programmers use the built in random() method which mainly, and possibally only, uses the system clock - or they generally program one themselves that only uses the system clock -- both are the worst kind of random seed one could use. Their not even good for six sided die rolling unless motified. If used in a MMO, it's just asking for trouble. :-/ You can use the clock as a base, then modify by mouse position, average pixel color of the screen, or any other source someone can think of.... but system clock by itself - bad, bad idea... Then never, ever round whole numbers.. that's another whole issue.. that causes other, differnt issues and is bad for results..

That was the condition I was going for... though I did a 0 instead of the 1 and it changed from 99.99% to the correct 99.40%. Good enough for NASA. See I knew we were on the same page someplace - I blame myself though, there are times I can't spit out what I'm trying to say, or even spit out the wrong things when i meant something else. But it sounds like, given the quote above, we are on the same page afterall. The overal problem is, and why I take all of this to heart, is that I have been "unlicky" so many times now it breaks all the odds. I seem to be in the 0.4% a lot which in and of itself defies probability. It is better since patch 1.2 but there are still times i want to smash my keyboard becsaue I just wasted a few hundred thoustand credits of resources (not even including endgame resourses, just normal T6 stuff.) :-/ I understand 0.4% of 1.7 million players is still a large number... but i think it's time for someone else to fall into the 0.4%, I'm tired of it.. I'd say I've been in that precentage for a goot 80% of all my REing attempts, T6+.. Which of course have even lower odds, not the 20% which we've been talking about.. :-/

The simple fix would be removing the "random" alltogeher and replacing it with a crafting XP system. RE 15 or so of a green, you can now choose which blue you wish to unlock. Burn the crafting xp and start building it back up to unlock a purple. Unlock all schematics of a single item and the xp bar dissapears (the xp is per item). Now people still need to invest time, resources and effort but all the randomess is completely gone.

This is the 10 million taun-taun question... :-/

I agree completely and fully.. People are pulling in far too large of a sample size in some of their examples - the 20% should be true for both a large and small sample size - It should also be true on an individule basis and not "everyone on the saver" or "everyone playing the game". The -only- way that could be true is if you rolled for a random number, another random number would be generated for each person playing the game. That's silly, people are not connected like that in any game, so the rolls have to be looked at individully. My example was flipping a coin - if someone can flip a coin 25 times and only ever get "tails" within those flips, they are in the <1% realm. Probability tells us that, in those 25 flips, the odds of at least one of those flips being "Heads" is nearing 98%+. People do not want to chain the events, but they must be chained, no ways around it. We have the probability of 20% for the rolls, but then we have the probability of the chain - people are getting confused.

I think the simplest way would be the addition of "Crafting XP".. it would only add a single variable to the object and would have pretty low overhead in probramming. Bassically if you RE 15 of a single item you gained enough XP for that item to unlock the next stage. Since going from green to blue gives three different schematics and going from blue to purple gives 5 (just an example) - just let the player choose which they wish to unlock. Remove the randomness altogether but still make people invest time, effort and resources. Clean and simple and wouldn't add much overhead to the code of done correctly. [edit: bassically the crafting xp would be the representation of the "simulation of learning from mistakes"]

We all know with the examples this thread is using, we have a 1 in 5 chance of getting a "schematic or crit" in a single attempt - but us as players are stringing the events together so probability-chaining has to come into play. It's valid to chain the events because nothing is changing but the random number that's being generated by the RNG system, all other factors are the same including us at our computers. We know flipping a coin once is 50/50. Flipping the coin and asking for at least 1 in 25 flips be "heads" is another ballgame. Could you flip the coin 25 times and only ever get Tails, yes, but it is the odds are ungodly low of that happening. This is the issue people are having when they RE 40 items without hitting that 20% - it can happen but the probability is extremely low. We can't ignore the chain. A coin never changes its 50/50 chance (probability) on each roll. But it sure dose change when you are looking for chains or patterns or desired results (example rolling at least a single "head" on a coin after 25 flips). We can't ignore that people are REing over 20 tiems without hitting that 20% result. If you can sit down and flip a coin 25 times in a row and never get a "Heads" as results you are a very lucky person. Now if the coin was 20/80 odds and you flip it 25 times and still only ever get "Tails" (80%) you are still extremely luckly. The probabilty of at least 1 "Head" showing up in either event is extremely good, infact it's -almost- 100% probability. Lets not confuse the probability of a single event with that of chaining events and the odds of not hitting 20% after a few dozen rolls. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong here, I believe we are all correct in what we are saying, we are just using different lens when looking at the ussue at hand. It's fun chatting theory.

Brought to you by those that made DAoC and WAR..... yeah TOR will have endless CC with limited invulnerability. Out of the three games TOR is better but people are still "stun-locked" all the time. The best PvP experiance are in games that have zero crowd-control abilities. CC in MMO PvP has never been a good idea and I have no clue why devs insist on adding it to every game - no one likes it and if no one likes it, it shouldnt be in the game but yet it is there each and every MMO. :-/

True true - I forgot that there are several schematics per base schematics. To save a ton of database space all the derived should just be another "variable-switch or setting" in the root schematic object. Example: you have 3 green schematics that you learned all the possible derived schematics from, you'd have something like 45 total schematics. If all derived schems were just nested in the root schematic object, the total would be 3 unique schematics. Sure these objects would be slightly larger memory wise but they would be significantly smaller then 45 unique schematics. How dose Bioware store their schematics objects.. No one knows. So right now either 3 unique schematics or 45 unique schematics is the correct answer using the above example. :-/

If i had to make a educated guess, I'd go for a power of two and have a limit around 1024 schematics. This is just a guess though. Technically, there could be no upper limit but an artificial limit was set to solidify stubility of the crafting schematic system. An artifical limit would also keep loading lag of said system within reason. If object oriantated programming is being used a long with memory arrays, there is only so much you want to load at once or even store in system memory. Being a 32bit peice of software there is also a limit on how much system memory the OS can alucate to the game.. i believe the limit was around 3GB.. even if you have 16GB system memory the game is still limited. Of course to get around this teh game itself could detect how much system memory you have and if you do indeed have 8, 12, or 16GB memory it, itself, could create a RAMdrive to store highly accessed data - this would bypass the 32bit limit. As far as we know though, TOR dose not do this (nor dose any mmo or game). It would be awesome if they did since, as of patch 1.2, we are loading all resources from scratch every zone. Pre-1.2 you could of disabled the splashscreen and zone faster and when changing characters, change before the game unloaded resources making total character swap times under 10 seconds (thats on my 7 year old computer). Ahh well.. tl;dr - My guess is the limit is around 1024 schematics and is artificially limited to optimize the sub-system. The game is 32bit this it has memory restictions and you don't want to store huge chunks of crafting data in limited memory. A ram drive could be created by the game to store this data as long as the game can detect the end-user has extra system memory to use.

I like it and it's far closer to cannon then Zombies.... Ok they call them something else but they are still Zombies. If it looks like a Zombie and quacks like a Zombie, it's a Zombie. :-/ Sadly "creative freedom" is something I doubt we'll see any time soon if at all. If we ever do get high level of "creative freedom" in crafting i'll eat a raw "Trinidad Scorpion Butch T" hot pepper (worlds hottest) on video and upload it to youtube.. heh.

That could of been it. Depressing, definitely. What makes it worst is that pre-1.2 the chances could of only of been 5%... who knows.. :-/

Just as a side note.... The results I posted and the link I linked are not matched.. I did not realize the link I posted saved old entry data.. Calculate the probability P(A), where A − "there will between a and b successes in t trials". t = 25 a = 0 b = 25 s = 0.20 20% success chance between a and b success (0 and 25) and trials is 25 attempts. What did I enter incorrectly?