Amazing RNG on Loot... /sarcasm

[Daltin]

Here is my experience with the off balance loot drops.

 

For the last 2 weeks I have been doing a late night HM Taval V run every night with members of the guild I'm in. The group is always 1 X Guardian tank, 2 x Commando DPS and either a Commando or Smuggler healer.

 

Out of all those runs, the trooper gloves have never dropped. If we are using a Commando healer, it is always Jedi gloves (light and heavy versions). If we are using the Smuggler healer, it is always Smuggler gloves.

 

^ chalk up another person that knows what's going on.

[RDeanOU]

Patch notes for 1.2 PTR are up and I found this little gem.

 

 

 

"Items and Economy

 

General

Loot drops from endgame activities, such as Operations and Flashpoints, now take group composition into account."

Edited March 17, 2012 by RDeanOU

[Viceroye]

Patch notes for 1.2 PTR are up and I found this little gem.

 

 

 

"Items and Economy

 

General

Loot drops from endgame activities, such as Operations and Flashpoints, now take group composition into account."

 

Haha, it looks like they've realized their mistake. What happened to the "Random" aspect of RNG?

[SoonerJBD]

Haha, it looks like they've realized their mistake. What happened to the "Random" aspect of RNG?

 

People whine about it, so they are making it less random.

[ounkeo]

It seems to me like there are 2 different parts to this discussion.

 

The first part is this question of whether the RNG is truly working as randomly as it is supposed to be. Unfortunately, this is an unresolvable question and I think both sides are overstating their case.

 

The people claiming that it isn't properly random are really arguing that it doesn't *seem* random. They only have anecdotal evidence and that simply doesn't prove anything. They are only able to say how the RNG feels...they cannot definitively say what it *is* in terms of randomness.

 

On the other side we have the people that are claiming everything is fine, randomness is random, and the other group should quit whining. This case is overstated too. How do you know everything is fine? You dismiss the anecdotes of things being broken, but you have nothing better than anecdotal evidence suggesting that everything is fine. It isn't as though there are any hard numbers disputing the claims that the RNG isn't being random enough.

 

Who is at fault for this lack of evidence? Bioware is. Since we cannot get independent data mining in this game I can't go to a site like torhead and verify that the drops are actually properly randomizing. If we could then this first question would be open and shut.

 

There is, however, another question that I think is being overlooked. Even if the system is properly random, is an RNG system the right way to go? The people claiming everything is fine are largely assuming that if the system is properly random that it is fair and nothing should be done to change it. They are equating random with fair and that is simply foolish. Randomness by its very nature is unfair. Someone will always get screwed by the probabilities and someone else will be the fortunate beneficiary of those same probabilities. Is it in the interest of Bioware or the community at large for people to get frustrated and angry because they can't catch a break from the RNG?

 

For those people claiming everything is fine, ask yourself something. How many operations in a row with you getting zero drops for your class would it take to suck all of the fun out of the game for you? Would it matter that randomness was to blame rather than design? I think that seeing other people constantly being rewarded while you get nothing is frustrating and the opposite of fun and I don't think it matters whether it is random or not.

 

I understand that not knowing fully what will drop can be part of the fun. That's why I like the idea of tying things like relics, mounts, offhands, and even weapons to the RNG. That way there are drops that you are looking for and you get that excitement when you down a boss wondering what is going to drop, but you don't rely fully on a random system that can be terribly unfair.

 

Thanks for this mature response.

 

The reality is, loot tables do come broken in what are supposed to be RNG systems. I recall Warhammer had issues with their RNG as well where they had to correct it and at one point they made it seem that they had to remove 100% random numbers altogether and load the dice.

 

Especially when creating a game; your primary intent is fun, reward from effort and persistence. To that end, often, it's best to create the illussion. It works against the system when there are players who one-shot completely gear themselves up while there are those on the opposite end who do it for months on end (or even years) to get nothing. In one end, you've broken the illussion of effort, risk and reward (essentially were handed the reward) and in the other instance, you've burned out the player and he is completely numb and disenfranchised with the system.

 

RNG systems can be tweaked and as WAR has shown, you can load the dice so it forces a more even distribution (something random is supposed to do but also has the unintended effect of also creating very extreme ends). Tweaking the system to ensure that extremes don't happen as often is a much better system than pure RNG.

 

Heck, SWTOR already does this with the general loot in the game. It's random but it's rolled with a loaded dice.

 

Pure RNG has no real place in proper game design. There needs to be systems in place that checks and balances the RNG.

 

example of raw suckage of pure RNG? Running Scholomance 74 time to get 1 lightforge helm. Back in the days, it took 3-3.5 hrs to complete with PUG. Some PUGs (many) would take upwards of 4 hours depending on wipes (how many newbies joined).

 

By that point, the RNG ensured that the actual game, is no longer fun. nearly 300 hours just to get 1 helm is insane and broken by ALL measures in game terms. In that time, I saw hordes of newly capped players comign in for the first time and walking out with set pieces. Systems to even out the raw RNG would have helped immensively even if some players had to still run it 2 dozen times. Obviously 300 hours to get 1 piece is a broken mechanic and saying "it's the fairness of random generator" is simply not a good enough excuse--we're playing a game here, not gambling in vegas.

[KingOMonkeys]

I dont have any real evidence but last night we were running foundry and everyone in the group was joking once the first piece of BH gear dropped with no BH in the group that everything would be BH including the last boss. Sure enough it was all BH gear. Its funny bad sad at the same time.

 

I've been on both sides of this, one HM all the gear that dropped was mine and I was excited. But I've seen so many more runs where all the gear was for someone else or was all for a class not in the group. Again no proof but it does seem broken to me and I have given up getting loot from HM's and having to buy the pieces with the comm's.

 

More often than not once that first piece drops we can predict what the other pieces are going to be. I would love to see how they do the random on these drops because I dont think its true random.

[Chnmmr]

We've changed our Hardmode OP team up a bit and now has a Jedi Knight or 2, a smuggler, and the rest troopers and consulars. It's been a month since more than 1 consular piece dropped. 50% of the loot is Jedi Knight, 30% Trooper, 15% Smuggler and 5% Consular (by my rough calculations. Quite a few times, a boss would drop two identical JK pieces.

[krinaman]

Same for republic side.

We have been running EV and KP HM's for 7-8 weeks now. Each week we down every boss and yet we have seen the following Jedi Knight drops.....

0-Chest

2-Legs

2-Head

 

For us we get nothing but Jedi Knight. Half the raid is sages with 1 piece of gear each and the Knights got full sets twice over. We literally had more Knight pieces than every other class combined with Sages getting 1 piece for every 4 Knight pieces.

[pointvector]

What people fail to realize is that RNG numbers match every single roll. If you have a 99% chance of winning something, that percentage only holds true if increased to infinity. You still have a 1% chance of losing in reality on each discision. So if you have bad luck your RNG will bring you bad luck for the rest of your life. Maybe the math behind the rng is to blame...idk. Anyway, I will stay away from that failsauce alap.

[Daltin]

Cleared EV tonight.

 

15 Warrior drops, 3 Agent, 2 BH, 0 Inq.

 

Cleared Bone Thrasher before we stopped for the night.

 

4 Warrior drops.

 

This is consistent with my previous posts.

 

Feel free to debate for another week that the system is "working as intended". I'll check back next Tuesday when we get 16+ warrior drops again.

[LKaras]

We have pretty good luck if it is true RNG. It rarely drops smuggler gear, drops consular and trooper the most. Which is consistent with our group composition.

[defendurname]

Just did 4/5 EV HM for the 1st time (ignored buggy Soa) and every single boss dropped trooper gear... sometimes even 2 pieces of trooper gear!

 

 

Needless to say, the single trooper healer in our raid now has awesome healing and dps gear

 

 

Bioware plz fix the looting system. This sort of crap was seen in vanilla WoW years and years ago - and removed for obvious reasons - yet you still decide to implement a similar system? I understand you need to make players raid a lot because of lack of content but this is an incredibly cheap way of doing it.

[Turst]

My guild does 8 man Ops. Our team is: 1 Assassin, 1 Jugg, 3 Sorc, 1 Sniper, 1 Merc, and 1 Powertech. Our 2 BHs have seen ~3 (if that many) gear drops for them since we started operations over a month ago. I'm even including to level 56 tank mod that dropped that neither of them needed. Oh, did I mention we run twice a week? My assassin and the 3 sorcs getting gear like crazy though.

[Eileithia]

The EASIEST way for BW to fix this is to completely remove the class restriction from the commendations and reduce the drop rate to 1 per boss for 8-man, and 2 per boss for 16 man.

 

An 8-man group would take ~2 months (8 weeks) to gear everyone in every slot (Assuming you can clear once per week), and you would never run into the issue of XX Class/member getting fully geared in 1 run unless that's how you CHOOSE to do it.

 

HM FP/Normal Ops should still drop columi with VERY RARE chance of rakata

HM Ops/NMM Ops should drop Rakata

[Xitium]

Just killed Karagga (8 man NMM after running the first bosses in HM) again last night, for the 3rd time in 6 weeks, he dropped TWO Cunning main hands. We have a two ops, a sniper and a healer and only in the last two weeks started bringing the sniper.

 

Going back 2 months:

 

Cunning/Willpower 2/7

Willpower/Aim 2/14

Cunning/Cunning 2/21

Aim/Cunning 2/28

Cunning/Cunning 3/6

Strength/Willpower 3/13

Cunning/Cunning 3/20

 

I realize its small sample size but getting slapped in the face by the RNG sucks. =(

[Jaksith]

patch 1.2 - flashpoint loot drops will now consider group composition

 

/endthread

 

(Except for those ranting now on how they can't gear their companions)

[krinaman]

patch 1.2 - flashpoint loot drops will now consider group composition

 

/endthread

 

(Except for those ranting now on how they can't gear their companions)

 

Honestly, it really depends on exaclty what this means.

 

- it says flashpoint, nothing about operations which is the bigger concern

 

- If it does apply to operation does it take numbers of each class in consideration. I.E. you have 5 sages, 1 knight, 1 trooper, 1 smuggler is sage gear 5 times as likely to drop?

 

The second point is my major concern as some classes are far more popular than the others. IE sorcs/sages.

 

Frankly, I wish they would just get rid of the whole class based loot and drop tokens any class can use.

[Daltin]

Finished Nightmare KP tonight.

 

Don't worry, our Warrior everything(Thrasher, Jarg, Foreman, G4) is here to stay. Though we did get two Agent weapons off of Karagga.

 

Working as intended!

 

<./sarcasm>

 

It is pretty fun clearing Nightmare mode with 4 Inquisitors in Columi gear. I started to wonder tonight if we're being punished for not bringing a balanced raid.

 

4 Inquisitors, 2 Bounty Hunter, 1 Agent, 1 Warrior.. And we see the most Agent and Warrior drops.. and NEVER see Inquisitor drops.

 

I wonder if it's weighted in any such way (higher drop chance for lowest represented gear), and the system is horrendously off? Can anyone else post their raid comps that have different skewed drop rates?

 

Like the group that says they get nothing but Agent, are you running 4 agents? etc. Am curious to hear the results of this.

Edited March 22, 2012 by Daltin

[Lostpenguins]

patch 1.2 - flashpoint loot drops will now consider group composition

 

/endthread

 

(Except for those ranting now on how they can't gear their companions)

 

This statement means almost nothing to me.

 

1 - As someone pointed out, that doesn't mean it applies to Operations.

2 - We always bring at least one of each class. So, the fact that we've seen so many IA gloves drop that even some of our companions have the Rakata Gloves while I'm still missing mine is ridiculous. And the system described above won't change that. It doesn't say anything about checking to see if everyone of that class has the item. It seems me the game will check, see that all 4 classes are in the operation, then can still botch it and continue to drop IA gloves over and over again.

 

I don't see why Bioware can't just realize that commendations for each boss killed would be so much better than random RNG.

[moman]

Just ran DV HM and 85 or so percent was Smuggler stuff.

[Mossesman]

Whenever i run EV/KP on normal and Hardmode on my Trooper, i only ever see Smuggler drops. When i do them on my Scoundral, i only see Trooper drops

[krinaman]

Can anyone else post their raid comps that have different skewed drop rates?

 

We are mostly consulars in our group. Consular gear is by far the least amount of gear dropped with Knight gear dropping 4 times as often. We've had Knights get 5 pieces in a single night while some of our consulars get 0.

[dynastynyy]

So, just to make a note of it, in case they actually read this thread...

 

I have a BH who hasnt geared up in roughly 6 weeks. It's absolutely unacceptable that I cannot get a single piece of rakata gear from 24 raids. Is anything being done to fix this?

[Freyjadour]

We have a fairly static raid group doing 8-man Hard (and a few Nightmare) modes for the past ~2 months. The lack of control in the current system is one of the most frustrating parts about raiding.

 

Generally, our raid contains:

 

2 Jedi Knights

2 Jedi Consulars

1 Smuggler

3 Troopers

 

And the vast, vast, vast majority of our drops are Smuggler gear. Last night's run through EVHM/KPHM was typical of most of our runs.

 

I estimate about 50% Smuggler drops, 20% Consular, 20% Knight, and 10% Trooper. Obviously, some nights are different, but let's just say our raid's Cunning Companions are pretty much fully decked out. It has made gearing newer players challenging and bringing along substitutions doesn't necessarily mean they have a chance at gear.

 

When we got 1 trooper to switch to his smuggler in mid February he was instantly competitive on the first raid night and 90% geared on the second night, whereas our Trooper DPS classes have been struggling to gear (especially Weapons) for weeks.

 

I look forward to Patch 1.2 to take into account the raid composition but in truth I would prefer a generic token not limited by class. That way, everyone in the raid has an equal shot at progression and would allow us to focus the drops to the classes that need them most.