5 months to get full Battlemaster gear. Working as intended..

[Lerdoc]

You (and apparently the devs) overlooked a very important fact. Throughout the lifetime of this game NO ONE will EVER get 1000 Battlemaster boxes. They're probably running their tests with a 1000+ sample sizes and saying to themselves: "oh everything is fine." They need to re-run their tests with a REALISTIC sample size of 45 (roughly a month of pvp), and see just how badly they fcked up on this one.

 

And this is why some people get BM gear in first two weeks while others have got one comm out of 20 bags. Besides they are going away from daily quest system, so we might want to wait for the patch and see what they plan instead of QQing on something that might actually be worked on right now?

[Duffer]

On page 10 I mentioned that the 1.1.4 notes are already up with no mention of BM. Again.

 

Edit: Also this isn't a new issue. People have been complaining, rightly, about this system for a couple months.

Edited February 16, 2012 by Duffer

[bellok]

The problem with this system is that it's left with chance. Which is a bad system. It's actually gambling in disguise. You gamble over the fact that the BM bag you get will have something in it. However most of the time nothing is in it. I personally think there should be 1 definite in there. Just 1 token in there to show you that you are making progress. They can increase the token cost for the gear, I don't care. Just don't waste people's time, and money by literally forcing them to gamble for their hard work if they want the gear.

[AchiliesPrime]

Lol if you think 5 months is a long time to get a set try playing FFXI. You felt good when you finished though.

[Metalmac]

So you make claims that are easily explained by only one thing, STATISTICS...yet refuse to listen to reality. That makes no sense whatsoever.

 

It's like a guy breaking a leg saying "don't wanna see a doctor, go away" :pr

 

Hint: It's all about sample size and variance.

 

You truely do not understand that when you restart a Server it will repeat the same numbers over again. Computers are not random and no one EVER has written a Random Number Generator that is truely random.

 

Hence the TERM: Pseudo Random Number as it is NOT RANDOM it repeats over time. Also each time you restart the computer the numbers are almost ALWAYS the SAME.

[lexiekaboom]

I've opened 15 bags and gotten 6 tokens

 

THAT IS NOT 25%

 

I DEMAND THEY DECEASE THE DROP RATE OR I'M QUITTING!

 

I don't understand why everyone else in my case isn't all over the forums talking about this! Guys we were PROMISED a 25% drop rate and yet my own, personal, statistical insignificant experience is a drop rate HIGHER then that!

 

It seems like the only people coming to the forums to complain on the ones who get it LESS then 25%

 

WHY IS THAT!???!!!???!!!????

[lexiekaboom]

You truely do not understand that when you restart a Server it will repeat the same numbers over again. Computers are not random and no one EVER has written a Random Number Generator that is truely random.

 

Hence the TERM: Pseudo Random Number as it is NOT RANDOM it repeats over time. Also each time you restart the computer the numbers are almost ALWAYS the SAME.

 

You win most wrong statement this year on the SW:TOR forums this year. That's a HUGE accomplishment. You are more wrong then the people QQing about these classes. An amount of wrong that, in all honestly, is nothing short of legend

 

Wrong number 1: A pseudo random number generator uses math to produce a sequence of numbers that appear random. There is no need to ever repeat them; you can make the output contain as many numbers as you want with no repetition, up to the limits of your ability to do math (and make complex equations that do not repeat). Simple techniques like layering (using two or more "seed" values at once to create more then one random string and outputting from each strings first result before going to the next value) can eliminate any meaningful repetition altogether. In fact determining if any string of numbers is pseudo random or truly random based only on the output is a pretty hefty statistics problem that isn't always going to yield the correct answer, unless the RNG sucks.

 

Wrong number 2: You also get different numbers every time you change the seed value. So they are not the same everyone time you restart the computer, unless your RNG is set to never change it's seed value.

 

Wrong number 3: SW likely uses a true RNG, seeing they are no more costly to use. True RNG use a mensurable real world event to modify a pseudo-random number in a truly random way, and are pretty much the norm now.

Edited February 17, 2012 by lexiekaboom

[Merikolikotis]

It would be so much better if gear would cost 8 instead of 2 tokens and you get token in every bag theres your 25% instead of RNG that if you are unlucky you could get **** out of 20 bags.

[Anduiin]

I thought they were RNG. With that said, you can't "expect" anything. You could have full BM by the end of next weeks weeklies. You never know.

 

EDIT: Perhaps you need to learn what the laws of percentage really are. It isn't I have a 1 in 4 chance of winning therefor 1 in 4 bags WILL give me a token. Hell, you could get 1,000 bags and even at 50% have all 1,000 give you nothing.

 

thats a terrible system for people dedicating time for rewards in an mmo, there should be a chance but there should also be a progressive but fair way to do it as well

[Turlinde]

As others have said, there is little functional difference between Chamption and Battlemaster gear. Just do your dailies and be consistent. I have full BM and am presently working on my second set of BM for an offspec. 2 of my compansions have full champion gear. One has full Centurian gear.

 

Compared to WoW and LOTRO, it is super EASY to get gear in this game.

[Duffer]

I'm glad Terl that you've got your gear. Would you say gear is easy to get after grinding every day for nearly a month with only one piece of that gear to show for your effort?

[Gnarl]

25% is not 1 in 4 when it comes to a comm dropping once out of 4 tries. that is just worded badly. What it should say is that each bag has its own 25% chance to contain a comm. If it was 1 in 4 then they would say one in four. a 25% chance means that with each bag there is a 25% chance that it will contain a comm, not a 100% chance that out of 4 bags you will get a comm. Sorry if the wording is strange here, but in my head it makes sense...

Basically if you open 1 bag, you have a 25% chance. That said, you can get a million bags and still miss out if youre really unlucky. There is no guarantee that every fourth bag will get you a comm, there is only a 25% chance that each bag will contain one.

 

 

A 25% drop rate does NOT mean that 1 in 4 gets a drop

[Oxissistic]

thats right. it ISN'T one in four and according to BW it should be,

Its not hard to write that into code, even if they made it on the 5th bag you get a guarenteed token. hey even the 7th or 8th bag would make the drop rates better than some poeple are getting. Although I am at the moment bang on 25% with 2 from 8 bags. but according to everyone here, my sample size is too small so disregard

I HATE RNG. its the worst way to distribute tokens.

if they really wanted 1 in 4, they should remove the need for BM's to do dailies and give us 2 bags for each weekly and those both contain a BM token.

 

At the moment

7x2 dailies

2x1 weekly

= 16 bags

25% of 16 is 4

 

give us 4 bags that will always contain a token, that would also mean Less BM's trying to smash out their daily for gear they dont want and maybe then the fresh 50's would stopped getting smashed by premade War Hero's trying to still get BM gear.

 

Edit: They took out the RNG factor for Champ gear but left it as is for BM. what was the thinking behind that?

Edited February 17, 2012 by Oxissistic

[glenbruton]

Why is it a problem that the top teir of PvP gear is hard to get? it took me 2 YEARS to get second from top gear in WAR and I didnt care. It took me YEARS to get the good WoW gear (back in the day ).

 

Random is Rnadmo

 

If I had my way BM gear would drop randomly in the bags. No tokens just helmet after helmet after helmet.

Edited February 17, 2012 by glenbruton

[Smashbrother]

I'm at 3 bm tokens out of 36 BM boxes. That's 1 token per week. It takes 20 tokens to get a full set of BM. The drop rate is supposed to be 25%, but for me and a lot of others (who have made dozens of similar threads) I'm around 9%. If the trend stays current then it will take me 5 months straight of daily/weekly pvp quests.

 

Over on the Customer Service forums there was an official response to this concern:

 

 

Unfortunately there was a followup response later in the same thread:

 

 

To recap: 5 months to get full Battlemaster is working as intended. Do not reply to this post with a statistics lecture. Nobody wants to hear it. The point of this thread is to draw attention to how absurd this system is. It needs to change.

 

EDIT: Hopefully someone will actually see this (buried on page 10)..

 

 

You (and apparently the devs) overlooked a very important fact. Throughout the lifetime of this game NO ONE will EVER get 1000 Battlemaster boxes. They're probably running their tests with a 1000+ sample sizes and saying to themselves: "oh everything is fine." They need to re-run their tests with a REALISTIC sample size of 45 (roughly a month of pvp), and see just how badly they fcked up on this one.

 

**EDIT TWO** I posted this in the Customer Support forum:

 

There was a similar thread a few days ago, but I'd like a bit more info. In that thread they said the drop rate was tested, and that the system is working correctly. I'd like to know what sample size they're using for their test. It seems fairly obvious to anyone who is trying to grind out their Battlemaster gear that the drop rate is much less than 25%. This is likely due to Bioware testing their system with an unrealistic sample size of 1000+ battlemaster boxes or more.

 

NO ONE WILL EVER get 1000 Battlemaster boxes over the lifetime of this game. Bioware needs to test it's system with a sample that would equal a month or two of pvp quests; a sample size of 45-60 tops. Please just run your test with a sample size equal to one month of boxes gained. I'd bet money you'll see the probability of getting a 25% drop rate will be significantly lower than 1 in 4.

 

Why this is important:

Bioware stated that they want 1 token to drop out of every 4 bags you get. Reality proves that there is not 1 token in every 4 bags. I'm 3 tokens out of 36 bags. That's 1 in 12; roughly 9% chance for me so far. There actually cannot be 1 token in every 4 bags unless Bioware implemented a system to force their game to do that. They did not do this obviously, but what they did do is miss their mark by a longshot by relying completely on RNG (instead of a forced 1 in 4), and (probably) used an extremely unrealistic test sample size (1000+) to test their system.

 

To get the most amount of people close to a 25% drop rate (what they claim it currently is) in a one month period Bioware would have to up the chance of getting a token to 1 in 3 (ish), and even that wouldn't fix the problem because it would still be RNG reliant and there would still be people at the bottom of the curve (like me) getting screwed.

 

UPDATE THREE

After today's dailies I'm at 5 out of 38. (13ish%) drop.

 

I was at 10% drop rate on champ pieces before the pvp bag changes, and I included the duplicates I got. If I discounted the duplicates my rate would be lower than 10%. RNG is a merciless *****.

 

Having said that, BW really needs to make BM bags do the 15:7 ratio that champ bags have, and up the cost on BM gear appropriately.

[Killamanjaroo]

I am 3/33 as of tonight.

 

Pretty crappy system =(

[patatt]

The system just doesn't make sense. No where in the real world are there systems in place like this, mainly because they do not work realistically. Show me one real world successful system which uses this type of RNG process, and I might think more highly of how BW is going about their PvP gearing.

 

It's just logically a very poor system, especially within the bounds of such a small sample size (the amount of bags you'll eventually open). If they changed it to a linear progression, people would not be complaining. At least not those who understand logic, or those who actually enjoy pvp and the effort/reward system that usually supports it.

 

I mean, take for example an Operation. If every time you downed a boss you had a 25% chance to get some loot. PvErs would be friggen pissed, no?

 

Why is this type of system acceptable in PvP then?

[rbguy]

Yea! 2 more bags with nothing to go with my 4 bags of nothing yesterday. Brings me to 2/22.

The important thing is statistically other people should be at about 5-6 tokens by now which does me tons of good and certainly makes me want to keep playing!.

 

I'm not arguing the statistics, they are what they are, I just whole completely disagree with whomever made the decision to gear up battlemasters this way and I would love for them to come to the forums, explain their reasoning and let us know what, if anything is going to change in the future. That doesn't seem too much to ask since customers actually determine success or failure of a game, not some guy hiding in a boardroom.

[Metric_Tensor]

I'd say don't get too worked up about the 25% thing. In theory, a certain drop may have a certain probability on paper, but the actual yield normally is far less than that. It's just like if they made a 1% drop rate for a certain item. Theoretical probability states that 1 will drop out of 100, but in practice, a 1% drop rate will feel like never.

 

I remember back in the Diablo 2 days, some items had seemingly a 0.1% drop rate. That's 1/1000 drops. I played the game for over 10 years and never got it once.

[Deusmortis]

4/34 in the new system. By my math, there's a whole 3.2% chance of that happening with a 25% success rate system. Impossible? Certainly not. Unlikely? Certainly. And therein lies the problem of the system.

 

As others have said, random is random. It is not biased, nor is it fair. It cares not for the amount of work you put in. It cares not who is more deserving. This is why the system is terrible.

 

Nobody will ever open enough bags to defeat Standard Deviation. StDev is massive in the small sample sizes that we're dealing with here. That means we're going to see wide variance across the board, resulting in some people scoring well above the 25% success rate, and others scoring well below. This should be obvious to anyone with a high school education, but apparently BioWare just can't see it.

 

The BM system should be exactly the same as the Centurion and Champion systems. X# of commendations per bag, Y# of commendations to buy each piece of gear. That way, it takes a uniform amount of time to earn pieces. The guy who does his quests every day is guaranteed to get his gear twice as fast as the guy who does his quest every other day.

 

Oh, and while we're at it, why do BM offhands cost as many comms as BM mainhands? Offhands are cheaper than almost everything else at the other two tiers.

[Anti_Bodies]

I don't like the current system myself either and I'm dreading when I hit Valor 60 at going through the BS to get a BM set. But I won't go around saying that the system is "broken" when it's not. I'd rather say the system could be improved. Personally I'd like to see that 25% chance of a token increase by a % for each bag that you get nothing. For example....

 

Bag 1. 25%

Bag 2. 30%

Bag 3. 35%

Bag 4. 40%

Bag 5. 45%

Bag 6. 50%

Bag 7. 55%

Bag 8. 60%

Bag 9. 65%

Bag 10. 70%

Bag 11. 75%

Bag 12. 80%

Bag 13. 82%

Bag 14. 85%

Bag 15. 87%

Bag 16. 90%

Bag 17. 92%

Bag 18. 95%

Bag 19. 97%

Bag 20. 100%

 

This way you'd never go over 20 bags without a token, and you'd have a better than even chance on your 7th bag. This would put the odds in your favor of getting at least 2-3 tokens a week.

 

This seems pretty fair to me. Would ease a lot of the pain people are going through.

[AzKnc]

as i said in another thread

 

Not to mention, dailies/weeklys being the only source of bm bags, people are actually inclined to play less instead of more(or at least the same) doesn't make any sense.

 

A few soultions i could think of:

 

a)double the items cost but have one bm token always present inside the bags, with a slight chance of a second token, and make bm bags purchasable at the pvp vendor for 400-400 or something like that.

 

b)scrap the silly bm bags entirely and let players buy all bm gear with commendations the same way it is for neck/implants, just with different prices depending from the piece.

 

Anything would be better than the current lotto bs. The rng system was retarded for champion bags and they changed it, i don't see what made them think that it was fine to leave it rng for bm bags.

[cenx]

Game released 3 months ago and half of the population have battlemaster title/gear...

 

Its damn sad that ppl still whining that they couldnt get HIGH-END gear in like 1-2 months...

 

Its Battlemaster gear! That gear must require at least 6 month of play imo...

Battlemaster ppl ("no life" ppl) should be almost unique..

 

I see ppl AFK'ing in Ilum and whining "i opened xx bags and got nothing"... those ppl; what PVP did u do and expecting a token exaclty?

[aishiki]

Game released 3 months ago and half of the population have battlemaster title/gear...

 

Its damn sad that ppl still whining that they couldnt get HIGH-END gear in like 1-2 months...

 

Its Battlemaster gear! That gear must require at least 6 month of play imo...

Battlemaster ppl ("no life" ppl) should be almost unique..

 

I see ppl AFK'ing in Ilum and whining "i opened xx bags and got nothing"... those ppl; what PVP did u do and expecting a token exaclty?

 

The problem isn't how long we should take to get the full set. Problem is, there're people who just dinged 60 and get comms every other day or box while there're valor lv 68++ who aren't even near to full set. Isn't effort = reward? This doesn't ring true in this game!

[Delphis]

The RNG for a reward system is a horrible idea. How did someone at BW think that would make for a fun and equitable gaming experience?

 

BW has made a lot of really bad design decisions in this game with regards to pvp. They clearly do not have a firm grasp on how to make pvp entertaining.

 

However, it sounds like the March patch will change things up. Hopefully for the better.