Hardmode Flashpoints; No loot variance for premade groups

[daveytech]

I didn't really think about it until now...

 

My companions, and my other guild mates companions are probably better geared than us players.

 

These drops either need to be made completely 100% random, or change whatever formula is being used to determine drops.

 

While it would be nice to make it so more Inquisitor gear would drop if 3/4 of the group is inquisitors, I don't think it's necessary. That's asking for too much.

 

I'd like to see more randomness in the drops across the board.

 

We are actually thinking about making a 4 BH HM group. We'd already have been heavily geared in Columi gear by now if we were all BH's.

 

Screw it. I'm going to roll a BH healer tonight and start leveling him ASAP.

[Chesterinex]

11 out of 13 runs is not just unlucky.. It's ridiculously unlucky. If the system is using something static to set the seed, or we are somehow getting the same "random" seed, it's not going to be random loot.

 

It's not just false emp... If we use the same 4 guys, we seems to get nearly identical loot from most bosses. We're talking 2-3 hard modes a day.

 

It's pretty easy to say RNG is RNG when you don't do the math. We're talking a 1 in hundreds of thousands of chance to see 11 out of 13 be the same. Hell, we might be into the millions by now.

 

Had a similar experience.

Our premade group was running BT to get an Operative guild member the bracers to finish his set. We always ran Jugernaught, Marauder, Operative, Sorc and had BH drop 9/9 times. Ran once with Powertech (tank), Jugernaught (dps), Operative (dps), Sorc and the IA bracers dropped.

 

It's too coincidental to be RNG.

Edited January 30, 2012 by Chesterinex

[daveytech]

Had a similar experience.

Our premade group was running BT to get an Operative guild member the bracers to finish his set. We always ran Jugernaught, Marauder, Operative, Sorc and had BH drop 9/9 times. Ran once with Powertech (tank), Jugernaught (dps), Operative (dps), Sorc and the IA bracers dropped.

 

It's too coincidental to be RNG.

 

When you refer to "pre-made" group, what do you mean? Just curious.

 

We always seem to run our same group every night. We're close friends and we don't want to reroll just to get gear and have a little reward for kicking tail in HM.

[FishGod]

Loot tables don't work in my opnion, nothing more frustating than getting through a run and getting the same drops everyone already has.

 

These issues didn't start with the HM's me and my guild found them running FP's whilst leveling upto 50. However now were 50 and want nice gear, its turning from a grindfest into a rantfest.

 

Personally i'd think its better for bioware to get rid of gear drops and replace them with a increased drop of tokens so we can buy our gear. Certainly beats grinding the same FP's over and over and getting nothing out of it. In the end people will stop running them, and if people arn't doing things at end level chances are they will end up leaving the game.

 

Bioware you need to look at it and fix it. Pretty please.

[Vyvian]

Loot tables don't work in my opnion, nothing more frustating than getting through a run and getting the same drops everyone already has.

 

These issues didn't start with the HM's me and my guild found them running FP's whilst leveling upto 50. However now were 50 and want nice gear, its turning from a grindfest into a rantfest.

 

Personally i'd think its better for bioware to get rid of gear drops and replace them with a increased drop of tokens so we can buy our gear. Certainly beats grinding the same FP's over and over and getting nothing out of it. In the end people will stop running them, and if people arn't doing things at end level chances are they will end up leaving the game.

 

Bioware you need to look at it and fix it. Pretty please.

 

I completely agree with you on the token option. I know a lot of players will disagree, but it's better than what we have now. I honestly have no desire to bother logging in anymore.

 

The game is already stale. I have two level 50's, a few in the high 30's, 20's and some in the teens. I log one in, sigh and log another in, sigh and then turn the game off. I didn't rush through to the end, it was just TOO easy. And now that people are at the end, it's dull. Just my opinion though...

[DaveMcG]

When you refer to "pre-made" group, what do you mean? Just curious.

 

We always seem to run our same group every night. We're close friends and we don't want to reroll just to get gear and have a little reward for kicking tail in HM.

 

That's what we are talking about. Running with the same group all the time.

[wifeaggro]

That's what we are talking about. Running with the same group all the time.

 

What your refering to is called a static . we run in a static and the only place that drops Force user gear is foundry . other then that you can get some energized force user gear a bit more. but for the end boss set over 35 HM under my belt ranging from BT to kaon and none have dropped a force user columi piece or weapon except Revan. The only 2 pieces of force user gear my static has came from him .

[DaveMcG]

What your refering to is called a static . we run in a static and the only place that drops Force user gear is foundry . other then that you can get some energized force user gear a bit more. but for the end boss set over 35 HM under my belt ranging from BT to kaon and none have dropped a force user columi piece or weapon except Revan. The only 2 pieces of force user gear my static has came from him .

 

Premade or static means the same thing in this case. I mean the group is already formed before it begins.. you aren't looking for random members to make it, as it is pre made by you and your usual crew.

[Raeken]

We are doing False Imp for the last 2 1/2 weeks (1 Jedi-Knight Tank,1 Shadow and 2 Sages) and it's droping the same shiat in every run ... chest for the soldier. I guess, 20 times the Soldier-Chest, 4 times Smuggler-Chest and only 2 times the Jedi-Knight-Chest. we never saw the sage chest ... NEVER.

 

And we did up to 3 runs per night ... same shiat in the other hardmodes ... soldier and smuggler gear in 90% of the time ... interrupted by some jedi-knight gear. But NOOOOOO Sage or Shadow gear.

 

It's very frustrating.

[DaveMcG]

No way this could be a real bug though right Mavery? Still just random is random right?

[Thinias]

Before I start, I play a shadow tank. I ran Esseles 7 times, Taral V 5 times, Directive 7 twice, and maelstrom prison + battle for ilum + false emperor once each... and all of this was AFTER I got frustrated with the excessive absence of consular tokens I was experiencing; I have no idea how many runs it took me to get frustrated enough to start keeping count in the first place. So... in that light I completely understand the frustration with HM FP loot. You would think that when there are only 4 people in the group, you'd have a pretty good chance of getting gear. And you're right! You do.

 

...So does everybody else.

 

Story: 5 years ago World of Warcraft launched its first expansion, The Burning Crusade. I was an avid player at this point, and a prot warrior. I put together my pre-raid list like everybody else and I hit the instances and heroics hard on nights that we weren't slated to head into raid. One specific piece consistently eluded me - which I still remember because it was so frustrating - the Devilshark Cape off of Warlord Kalithresh in the Steamvault. I ran that instance every day for almost a year (well after I didn't need the cape anymore) out of spite before it finally dropped... and this was BEFORE the LFG system. I vendored it a few days later.

 

Getting screwed by loot happens. I ran at least 17 instances and got 0 consular tokens. My sage healer buddy jokingly claimed he wouldn't heal for me anymore because if he goes with me he already knows won't see his token. And then I ran 3 more last night and went 2/3 on consular tokens.

 

I ran with varied players and varied compositions. I ran at varied times and with varied calibers of players, at varied calibers of gear. I ran with the same group multiple times, too. I ran while queued for pvp, I ran while not queued for pvp. I ran while companions were collecting and while companions weren't collecting. I bet if I tried really hard, I could postulate multiple dozens of random theories as to "what's wrong"... but what's the point?

 

Have you ever stopped to consider the fact that most people winding up on this thread only got here because they are the vocal minority QQing about their loot not dropping? They came looking for this thread in the first place (much like I did, in a moment of weakness). Every time I've seen someone saying "It's 85% aim gear!" on this thread it's only because they can't use aim gear. People with very-clearly-Sage avatars under their names complaining about no sage gear, force-sensitives complaining about no force-sensitive gear, even flipping the coin and troopers complaining about no trooper gear. One guy even claimed to have run 40 instances without anything dropping, but couldn't include any details as to what those instances were, how often he ran them, who he ran them with. I don't trust that number for a second, because there's nothing behind it. I wouldn't expect BioWare to either.

 

And at the end of the day, all these arguments about "probability" are ridiculous. In a truly random system, not-getting <x> last run has absolutely 0 impact on whether or not <x> drops this run. None. You can argue semantics all you want but you can't get around that fact. The fact that I have seen 18 hundred bajillion smuggler tokens already doesn't make it any more likely that I'll see the token I want this time... it doesn't even make it less likely that I'll see another smuggler token. Saying its a less than 1 in 2 million chance is meaningless, because that's how PROBABILITY works. Not how RANDOM works.

 

I will agree. Everytime I click on a boss and see another freaking smuggler token, I cry a little on the inside. I think "Why doesn't my stuff ever drop!!!!" I even have some real numbers to backup the fact that I am pretty freaking unlucky! And then I remember the Devilshark Cape, and go "yeah yeah, I know... it happens"

 

The game doesn't hate you. It's not a bug. The myriad of hundreds of thousands of other dice rolls that *have* gone your way since you started this game *do* count. And at the risk of sounding like a jerk, the time you spend on these forums hoping someone else will vindicate your self-pity is honestly time that could be much better spent.

[Novastinger]

You're wrong, this issue has nothing to do with statistics or probabilities or anything mathematical, but rather the RNG design/implementation in place not having varied results when running the same HM flashpoints with the same 4 people in group.

 

Trying to bring up obvious points to anyone familiar with statistics is not changing the fact that this is programming problem, not probability/statistical in nature. The results are as expected when changing group members, but not while running with the same 4 people repeatedly.

[Gunzwei]

On the opposite side of the spectrum I've been running HM's with all pug groups on two different characters. The group make-up is very random and it seems the drops vary quite a bit.

 

-

Off-topic I think the "repeat loot" also happens with PVP gear bags. My two 50's get different items from each other but repeats for themselves fairly consistently.

[daveytech]

We've run about 40 HM FP's.

 

Our main group consists of: PT Tank, DPS Sorc, DPS Sin, Healer Sorc.

 

Our other group we run less often with is: PT Tank, DPS Sin x2, Healer Sorc.

 

We've run all FP's in a single day (minus D7).

 

We've run them all multiple times (minus D7 - not sure why we aren't interested in it I guess). Yes, 40 is an accurate number. We run several every night and hit them hard on the weekends.

 

Zero Inquisitor Columi drops. Absolutely zero. We did get 1 pair of Tionese Sorc Healer gloves on FE off of the BH w/ship boss. 1 pair.

 

We have gotten 2x non-Tionese but same grade legs for Assassin tank and 1x helm for Assasin tank (Energized or Xenotech? You know what I mean). I think they mostly came from the zombie horde encounter in Kaon. The legs are now on our companions.

 

Zero Columi tokens for our Inquisitor heavy guild is terrible. Any which way you put it.

 

We're looking at switching to Normal Mode Ops now. Don't get me wrong, we do enjoy the challenge of the HM FP's. We're still not overly geared up for them so they are challenging at some stages.

 

We want to get our Columi pieces and work on our alts. We love this game, but it's this kind of thing that really puts a damper on our enjoyment of playing our main characters.

 

I'm going to try to bring a Sniper with us more often in place of one of the DPS classes to see if the drops get changed up at all. The group make-up seems to be the key for most everyone else having this issue.

 

Personally, I don't like the idea that loot is being pre-determined. Yes, I'd like to gain some loot on my healer so I'm more effective at healing, but I also get excited when my guild mates get new gear too. My complaint isn't for me, it's for my entire guild. I speak on their behalf as their leader.

 

I will say that last night we ran Kaon HM and brought a Sniper with us for the first time. On his first run he got his Columi hat. I was very happy for him because it helps us overall.

Edited January 31, 2012 by daveytech

[KiranK]

I have noticed a trend when it comes to running with a static team. We run Guardian Tank, Commando Healer, Sentinel, and Gunslinger. The majority of our drops have been for Consulars. We don't have one. In fact, every Columi drop from Kaon has been been a consular token. Every single one. We've run it every day for the past week and all have our willpower companions decked out with Columi head pieces. When does someone else get their head piece? How is that random? I fail to see the "randomness" in that formula.

[daveytech]

I have noticed a trend when it comes to running with a static team. We run Guardian Tank, Commando Healer, Sentinel, and Gunslinger. The majority of our drops have been for Consulars. We don't have one. In fact, every Columi drop from Kaon has been been a consular token. Every single one. We've run it every day for the past week and all have our willpower companions decked out with Columi head pieces. When does someone else get their head piece? How is that random? I fail to see the "randomness" in that formula.

 

Wow. That's a perfect example of backwardness.

 

We would love to get your drops. We'll trade you our Trooper/Smuggler Columi tokens for yours.

 

I'm starting to wonder if being a Sorc healer in all these HM's is the issue.

[Eveline]

I have run Kaon just about every day with relatively the same group (it was for the first 5 days), and we have seen a very varied columi token drop.

 

In those first 5 days we were running with a Sent(DPS), Sage(DPS), Vanguard(Tank), Commando(Heals), and we got 2 knight, 3 consular, 3 smuggler, 2 trooper helm drops. (This is including the bonus boss)

 

We started bringing in new people after that to get their head pieces, and it still stayed pretty random, didn't streak on any one class.

[Chat]

So I guess loot is completely broken unless you have a "perfect" setup, meaning 1 of each class. What's the situation if you run like that, any info?

 

Still doesn't work out. My pre-made was Jugg (Tank) Sorc (Heals) IA (Dps) Merc (Dps).

One of each class type.

The Sorc has it's gear (picked up 4 piece within a week), while the Jugg and IA get crap.

The Sorc hands dropped sooo many times that the Sorc had a heal/dps set, their companion has a set, my companion has a set, on top of a few more dropping.

 

At that point, Both the Jugg and IA had only 1 piece on Columi.

 

The bonus boss in BT has ALWAYS dropped the same 1 item, all of our companions have it.

[Dargtraln]

Been running Taral V HM now for 16 days straight with a static/premade group.

Group is made up out me, me(jk guardian), sage healer, sentinal dps and gunslinger dps.

 

We have also noticed there is little to no variations in the loot we are getting, which are as follows:

1st boss: Defense relic once, all the other times it was Crit/Surge one

2nd boss: Aim boots ONLY

last boss: 2 trooper gloves, all the others where smugglers

 

Ran false emperor like 5 times now, with same group, and all ive seen sofar was the smugglers chest, not anything else.

[Thinias]

You're wrong, this issue has nothing to do with statistics or probabilities or anything mathematical, but rather the RNG design/implementation in place not having varied results when running the same HM flashpoints with the same 4 people in group.

 

Trying to bring up obvious points to anyone familiar with statistics is not changing the fact that this is programming problem, not probability/statistical in nature. The results are as expected when changing group members, but not while running with the same 4 people repeatedly.

 

You've clearly already decided that not only must there 100% definitely for sure be an issue, but that you already know exactly what the issue is! Maybe you should call up BioWare, I'm sure they have a job for a man with your apparently keenly astute capacity for formulating amazing conclusions. Particularly conclusions with no basis besides *extremely* suspect speculation supported by two other people (on the internet) with illegitimate and undocumented claims on minute sample sizes, and *simultaneously* rejected by two other members (albeit also on the internet) with similarly illegitimate claims on similarly ineffectual sample sizes.

 

You have absolutely no idea what the implementation looks like. Maybe there's a TakeADiceMachine object floating around on some central server which handles every dice roll in the game! Maybe it gets seeded once every maintenance window at startup, and your constant smuggler rolls are just what that DiceMachine has for you everytime you reach for a number. Or *maybe* there's an over-arching analytics function trying to ensure even distribution and at the times of day that you are running your instances it has gone haywire because a flood of European traffic just logged off for the night. Maybe the loot tables on non-token bosses are just WAY SMALLER than you think. Really for all you (or I) know, everytime we kill a boss some monkey in Thailand presses a button.

 

But maybe you're right! Maybe the designers did choose some crazy hashing of your character names, classes, and talent specializations and non-arbitrarily assigns you a seed that is simultaneously significantly harder to compute than time(), and will inevitably lead some clever hacker to expose BioWare's attempts to skew loot distributions per-party and destroy their reputation *and* their multi-hundred-million dollar investment before the game is even two months old. That really sounds like a solution the entire company can get behind.

 

Frankly, I think the monkey sounds more plausible.

 

 

 

I'm not (really) trying to be a jerk, but the fact that you choose to start your responses with "you're wrong" simply because I don't blindly accept your completely unfounded (as of this point) opinions already makes me not care. I apologize to everyone else who that may have been simultaneously directed at.

[dinwitt]

You're wrong, this issue has nothing to do with statistics or probabilities or anything mathematical, but rather the RNG design/implementation in place not having varied results when running the same HM flashpoints with the same 4 people in group.

 

Trying to bring up obvious points to anyone familiar with statistics is not changing the fact that this is programming problem, not probability/statistical in nature. The results are as expected when changing group members, but not while running with the same 4 people repeatedly.

 

You say that the same group results in the same drops. I've run Kaon twice, with the exact same members (I think classes are Sniper, Marauder, Sorceror, and Juggernaut but I'm not sure as I recognize the people by name and not class), and the boss drops were completely different. So you're wrong.

 

Trying to bring up obvious causation/correlation confusion to anyone familiar with statistics is not changing the fact that this is a problem of humans seeing patterns where none actually exist. Anecdotal evidence does not a statistical test make, and if you tried to do one off the data in this thread your margin of error would make any result meaningless.

 

No way this could be a real bug though right Mavery? Still just random is random right?

 

The real issue is that this thread is a giant echoing chamber that only attracts people with a similar problem, and the people in it think they are a valid population sample to base ridiculous conclusions on. Believe it or not, the subset of the population that visits forums is not representative of the whole, and the subset of those that would be interested enough in this thread to read and post in it is even less representative.

 

If you want to actually be convincing, get some hard numbers. Get actual group make ups and their actual drops. And get a lot of them, from different groups of people. Don't guess at a pattern, find it and prove it.

 

And at the end of the day, all these arguments about "probability" are ridiculous. In a truly random system, not-getting <x> last run has absolutely 0 impact on whether or not <x> drops this run. None. You can argue semantics all you want but you can't get around that fact. The fact that I have seen 18 hundred bajillion smuggler tokens already doesn't make it any more likely that I'll see the token I want this time... it doesn't even make it less likely that I'll see another smuggler token. Saying its a less than 1 in 2 million chance is meaningless, because that's how PROBABILITY works. Not how RANDOM works.

 

This on so many levels. Its always amusing that these sorts of threads are usually asking to make things less random by removing random, independent variables from the loot equation. The fact is that the TC's specific set of 15+ smuggler tokens in a row is as likely as any other specific set of 15+ tokens, and its only a problem because he didn't have a smuggler in the group.

[Thinias]

The real issue is that this thread is a giant echoing chamber that only attracts people with a similar problem, and the people in it think they are a valid population sample to base ridiculous conclusions on. Believe it or not, the subset of the population that visits forums is not representative of the whole, and the subset of those that would be interested enough in this thread to read and post in it is even less representative.

 

That is actually exactly what I was trying to say, but much more effectively expressed.

 

Thank you for the help.

[Novastinger]

Suppose my group keeps running FE: HM once a day, with identical drops everytime, for a month straight. 3 months straight. A year straight. 10 years straight. No changes in loot drops anytime. How many samples would it take for you to start questioning that the system is not working as intended? What if 10, 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 other people posted here seeing the same problem? At some point, you must use some critical thinking, to come to the conclusion that the actual results are not aligning with the expected results.

 

You may think it's a small sample size if you just stopped by this thread of recent, but the more people are running HM flashpoints with any sort of regularity, the more the evidence piles up that the system is skewed as is. There's far more than two other people seeing this problem as you alluded. Also I've mentioned False Emperor is the only HM flashpoint I've personally run sufficiently enough times with the same group to come to the conclusion it's loot table RNG system is broken (FE: HM). Other HMs might also have problems, but I can't say that with absolute confidence like with False Emperor HM.

[Thinias]

You may think it's a small sample size if you just stopped by this thread of recent, but the more people are running HM flashpoints with any sort of regularity, the more the evidence piles up that the system is skewed as is.

 

 

Have you ever lead a hardcore raiding guild? It's a thankless job. It really is the worst of both worlds: everytime something goes right, things are just running as usual; everytime something goes wrong, it's all your fault. In successful guilds, the ratio is over 1000:1... but that 1 is the only thing you ever hear about.

 

Why? Because when things are working as expected noone ever stops to think about it.

 

The more people running HM flashpoints with any sort of regularity and *actually believing* they experience issues, the more evidence piles up that the system is skewed. Because for the 1000:1 ratio of people who aren't experiencing issues... they never make their way to this thread. They never have a reason to.

 

This thread is composed of the 1. The vocal minority, complaining because they think something isn't working.

 

The fact that this thread has been open for over a week and isn't hundreds of pages long is your proof that, in fact, the evidence disagrees with you. I'm not even on a very high population server, and there have been multiple HM groups farming regularly on my server for 3 weeks now. You are seeing the evidence you want to see, and that is understandable. Sadly, the evidence *actually* suggests that the system is working just fine.

[Novastinger]

Hundreds of pages long? That would be over a 1,000 replies, more than double the highest of any thread in the "Flashpoints, Operations, and Heroic Missions" section of forums (the highest replied thread in here as of now has 497 replies, in the thread about add-ons).