Hello, once again! So, this is Part 2 in a 3-part series discussing things centered around the acquisition of items within the game. In this post, I will be referencing terminology from my first post (Discussion: Skill-Based Difficulty, Time-Based Difficulty, and Value Preservation), so if you would like more of a lead up into this topic, feel free to take a look at that. Also, for the developers potentially reading this, I will have two images linked in the document – if able, would you be able to place those where the link is located? They are just graphs.
Also, I will include the outline this time to help with navigating the post:
- Bad Luck – Conceptually, the Unlimited Foe
- Bad Luck Protection – We Have No Armor
- Bad Luck Protection – Sizing Our Armor
- Reasons for Bad Luck Protection – Why Do We Need the Armor
- Preserved Value – Establishing Trust in the Armor
- Bad Luck Protection Systems – Forging the Armor
a. Forging With Quests
b. Forging With Determination
c. Forging With Luck- Lessons Learned – The Cost of No Armor
- Closing
- Bad Luck – Conceptually, The Unlimited Foe
So, there has always been RNG in WoW. This has varied from the original mounts from Stratholme to progression in Molten Core. If you were 1 of 7 Warriors on your 40-man team, then you had to 1) pray that the 4 items from a loot pool of 30+ items showed something your class could use and 2) pray harder that your luck was better than the other 6 Warriors. The point here is that RNG has always been a part of not only the WoW universe, but most other MMO-like games as well. And the players have been left to manage it – whether they choose pure RNG, DKP system, GDKP runs, or Loot Council.
Also, there are several types of RNG as well. If you go to a casino, then you will likely see many forms of RNG-like gameplay. For the more skill-driven player, the poker table presents a challenge of skill, wit, and luck. On the opposite side of the room, there are rows and rows of penny-slot machines where players mindlessly snack and/or scroll their phone while continuously pulling the lever. So, there are different styles of RNG to be applied to different types of people. The same is true within WoW. While the raiding scene has discussions of RNG and bonus RNG systems, there are other pursuits in the game where all you need to do is show up, hit some things, and see if you are lucky that day.
So, why am saying something that you likely already know? Because it is important to understand that RNG is not the enemy – people like this element of the game. Whether they are aware of it or not might be a different subject, but players like RNG. They enjoy the challenge of beating the odds, as they would if they kept pulling the lever on a slot machine. And others enjoy the challenge of giving themselves the best odds by applying their own skill and effort. Either way, RNG is the challenger for a lot of content. So, if RNG is not the bad guy, then who is? Unlimited (or severe) bad luck.
- Bad Luck Protection – We Have No Armor
So, where is the issue? The issue is the unfair balance of good luck and bad luck. If an item has a 1% or 0.02% chance of dropping, then the luckiest you can be is having the item drop on your first attempt. Either way, your luck starts by participating first. However, whether an item has a 1%, 0.25%, or 0.02% chance of dropping, you may need participate 10,000 times – for each rate. So, you have a cap as to how lucky you can be, but you are uncapped as far as how unlucky you may be.
Again, the heart of the issue is that if you are severely unlucky, then you will need to pay the Sha of Anger price for Invincible. You will need to pay the Nalak price for the Glacial Tiderstorm. Why? Because that was the luck you were randomly assigned for that item. You don’t know that, and you will only find that out when the price is paid. So, if you stop, you will never know if you paid 50% of the price or 99% of the price for an item your don’t have.
Just as an example, for me personally, I farmed all the BoP and BoE recipes out of Sunwell. Many of these BoP recipes roughly have odds of 1 in 2,000 attempts (this is a rough estimations based the style of the farm, the composition of mobs, and their individual drop rates). The Pattern: Sun-Drenched Scale Gloves has a 0.02% drop rate, and it took me 42,000 kills to finally get this item to drop. If you apply this chance to any of the MoP World Boss mounts, that is a lifetime of kills at its current availability. I will go into the details later, but the key takeaway is that there is no protection for being unlucky.
- Bad Luck Protection – Sizing Our Armor?
So, this section will be somewhat technical as far as the math is concerned, so if you are not into this type of thing, I will make this as skippable as possible for you. However, it will give us a core understanding of terminology we are using to clear up misunderstandings and misconceptions. Essentially, we are trying to figure out the community’s proportions regarding good and bad luck.
(a) Standard Bell Curve. A bell curve in this case is just a graph that shows a breakdown of how many people looted the item after a certain number of attempts. We will assume that the nature of all drops will follow the standard bell curve, where the left side is the luckiest and hard capped at 1, and the right side is the unluckiest with an unlimited cap.
As an example, let’s use Invincible that has a 1% drop rate. If you wanted to ask yourself, “How many times would it take on average for half (50%) the community to get this mount?”, then after the use of a formula, you find this number to be 69 (have fun with this). This means, with this bell curve, half of the playerbase would be on one side of 69 attempts and the other half would be on the other side with a few outliers who are severely unlucky. However, this is misleading because it is incorrect to assume this is a standard bell curve.
(b) Asymmetric Distribution. You might be asking, “Why did you just waste my time by telling me about something we are not using?”. Because this notion that both sides of 50% likelihood are roughly equal is a very, very common misperception how RNG works. We all know the truth that half of people will be lucky (meaning it took them less than 69 attempts) and other will be unlucky. What is rarely discussed the extent of those who are unlucky.
In other words, many players have the idea that for every 1 person who gets the mount on their first attempt, there is another player who needs 500 attempts. This is obviously not good, but it’s much worse than that. For every person who gets a mount in less than 10 attempts, there is another person who will likely run over 230 times for an item with a drop rate of 1%.
The two images below illustrate the likelihood in the number of attempts for a 1% and 0.02% drop of an item. Keep in mind with charts are derived from formulas that do not predict the future, but rather gives an understand of what is likely to happen.
Graph: https://imgur.com/a/26sLX9h
(c) Odds, Drop Rates, and Likelihoods. So, for the sake of conversation, we need more words. In our example, what is the 1% and what is the 50%? In this scenario, the drop rate of Invincible is 1%. This means the odds of you getting this mount is 1 in 100 chances for each individual attempt. The next time you attempt, the mount’s drop rate and your odds are exactly the same as they were the first time. These are set in stone and do not change. However, we need another term to describe our chances if we attempt to loot an item several times.
This is where likelihood (sometimes called ‘drop chance’ – not to be confused with drop rate) comes in and is found using a mathematical formula. Think of likelihood as a best-guess tool – if 100 people run ICC 69 times, then more than likely half of them will have the mount. The actual number may end up being 47 or 51, so this tool cannot predict the future. It just gives us an idea of what where we would be number-wise. You may be wondering, “Why is this important?”. We need this 50% likelihood number in order to get a frame of reference in the comparison to the range of good luck and bad luck. The range is the keyword as this is our metric for severity.
So, why go through the trouble of writing out (and reading) an explanation of what all these terms mean and presenting bad luck protection like armor for the player base? Because it is important visualize the actual shape of the armor and realize that it does not fit the community, and, therefore, it does not offer protection for an unlucky part of the community. Like, absolutely none at all. It is OK to be lucky – nobody is complaining that some lucky people are getting Invincible after 10 attempts when average is 69. People are upset that the average is 69, and they are needing to put in 230+ attempts. Some people, over 1,000+ attempts.
- Reason for Bad Luck Protection – Why Do We Need the Armor
Keep in mind that this scenario is only taking the average of what is expected for 1,000 players. If 1,000,000 players are broken up into 1,000 groups of 1,000 players, then there are going to be outliers within groups as a whole. Now, you never want to build a system or make a general decisions based on outlier data. However, this doesn’t mean that outliers should be ignored, because in this case, your outliers (again, those who are not only unlucky, but also severely unlucky) are people.
Depending what you read, I think people remembering / experiencing something bad over something good is a ratio of 4:1 or 10:1. Depending on what we are talking about, I think number can fluctuate quite a bit. Either way, it holds true that we tend to be more impacted by negative experiences than positive experiences.
So, what’s my point? In our example of 1,000 people attempting for Invincible, for all the good that those 100 people feel for getting Invincible in less than 10 attempts, there is four to ten times the negative emotion of a separate 100 people who put in 230+ attempts. Then there are the poor souls who have put in 1,000+ attempts. So, when we lay things out this way, it starts to become evident why there is so much discontent when it comes to this topic. Furthermore, this example assumes everyone runs until they get the mount. However, in reality many people will stop at random points, never even seeing the fruit of their time and effort.
- Preserved Value – Establishing Trust in the Armor
So, for those who read my post and replies about preserving communal value in an item, thank you, but some of you may still be asking, “How are you preserving value, if you are talking about making RNG content easier.” This is not about making content easier, which is why I listed Bad Luck Protection as 1 of the 3 things not able to be addressed by preserving communal value.
Allow me to explain in a little greater detail and talk about RNG from a gaming standpoint. So, whatever you call RNG – A skinner box, a hamster on a wheel, a fool’s game, or anything else – it is fun. It is fun to be lucky. And it can even be fun while being unlucky depending on the content. However, there is a very hard line somewhere between being unlucky and severely unlucky, where the mechanic that was once fun becomes torturous. I cannot tell you this value, because just like fun, what an individual person identifies a severely unlucky and unfair will change from person to person. The only thing we can do as a community (including developers and players) is determine that this point exists. And at this point we say, “OK, they obviously want the item, let’s allow them to have it after a certain amount of effort – despite what the RNG gods have said.”
Going back to preserved value, how does what I just say apply? RNG can have a range of difficulty as well as a range of difficulty intent. So far in this post, I have talked about the range of difficulty – where people can get a 1% drop in the 1st run or the 1,000th run. However, Invincible was never designed with a difficulty intent of 1,000 runs. The difficulty intent is center around the likelihood number. The difficult question is which one? 50%? 75%? 90%? In other words, we need to be able to maintain trust in the communal value of an item, while simultaneously allowing people access via luck and/or raw effort, where we say, “Hey, you might not be lucky, but you are definitely determined, so here is your reward!”.
- Bad Luck Protection Systems – Forging the Armor
So, to briefly summarize where we are at the moment. We have established that bad luck is an enemy with infinite numbers. If you are severely unlucky, then you can put in 90% more time/effort than others participating in the same content and have nothing to show for it. We have shown that the widely accepted model of RNG is not a bell curve, but rather model of gameplay that randomly chooses which player will need to put in 10x or more effort than 50% of the community. Furthermore, because of this discrepancy, this system is so broken that we cannot even apply a communal value for those who are severely unlucky, because they are so far outside of the original difficulty intent. And finally, we have established that something needs to be done for this portion of the community.
So, what do we do to correct this problem? Honestly, this is the million-dollar question that has the potential to develop very interesting or fun answers. Ultimately, we need to provide a way for players to deterministically acquire what they are chasing, regardless of how unlucky they may be.
However, let’s address what we are not doing first. We are not advocating for an increase in drop chance. Our goal is not to make things easier, but rather make things fairer. Please refer to the Preserving Value post for an explanation of why (Discussion: Skill-Based Difficulty, Time-Based Difficulty, and Value Preservation). The intent is to simultaneously keep rare things rare while giving a person the opportunity to overcome unfair bad luck. So, for the sake of examples, I am going to randomly use the 90% Likelihood Marker as my trigger point for bad luck protection. Within the community, whether we use 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, or 95% is up for discussion later.
By the way, I am just going to use Invincible (the mount that drops from the Lich King on Heroic 25-Man Icecrown Citadel) as our go-to example, because it is easier to relate to rather than using a bunch of arbitrary terms.
(a) Forging with Quests. One of the more popular suggestions in the past has been having some sort of meta, account-wide quest, where if you go through and complete a dungeon a certain number of times, the mount drops. Everything is automatic. So, going back to Invincible, the drop chance for this mount is 1%. Therefore, the 90% likelihood threshold is 230 attempts. Again, if you take 1,000 groups of 1,000 people and run ICC 230 times, then on average 900 people in each group will have the mount – thus the 90% likelihood threshold.
So, let’s say you have a separate quest tab that lists all rares and bosses that drop mounts. If you click on the Lich King in this hypothetical quest log, you will notice that across your account you have killed him 229 times. So, today is the day! You run ICC, kill the Lich King, and the mount drops. That simple. To put this in perspective and combine it with our example of 1,000,000 players, this would save 100,000 players from an unfair level of bad luck of running this content more than 230 times.
(b) Forging with Determination. The next concept has the tactic of increasing your luck each run. So, let’s say you complete ICC once. Well that first attempt your chances are 1%. However, the next time you kill the Lich King, your drop chance will increase a certain amount, like 1.1% or 2%. Here, we need to be careful, because if the increase of percentage is too steep, then it would bypass the intended difficulty. So, for example, if we increased our determination percentage each kill by 1%, then after only 10 runs the drop chance would be too high, making the overall intended difficulty easier. Conversely, if we make it the percentage chance too low, then there will still be those who are unlucky enough where they would still have to run 230+ attempts despite the new system. This would just be trading a system for a more complicated system with similar results.
So, this system is obviously more complicated than the first suggestion and would require a little more careful calculations. But I am just throwing it out there as a suggestion.
(c) Forging with Luck. For this one, there is no example, so I will just copy and paste my hypothetical from Halite’s post: (The X-45 Heartbreaker: a rant about randomness)
In the case of the Lich King, maybe exchanging the pets and weapons he drops from all difficulties for a currency to then purchase the mount could be a potential solution. What makes this difficult is individually establishing a value for each item, determining a price for the mount, and centering all these around what you would expect to get after 230 runs. It could be fun for some, but frustrating for others, because that would include the extra step of managing those items - and in this scenario, a little complicated.
Another variant of this could be Invincible dust. Maybe, you have a chance to get 1 – 3 Essence of Invincible after each kill. Then, once you have 100, 150, or 200, you can exchange that for the mount.
Again, just thoughts and ideas here – this one just centered around the idea that duplicate drops were actually useful.
This system may be worth trying out with new content first and work out the bugs as you go – before drastically changing something shotting from the hip with the details of values and costs.
- Lessons Learned – The Cost of No Armor
For me, personally, I am a collector that started collecting in early Battle for Azeroth. So, my focus on these posts have centered heavily on mounts, pets, transmogs, achievements, and etc. However, RNG is something that all of us contend with within WoW, from raiding and M+ to collecting. And, again, RNG is not bad in and of itself, but in specific situations it most certainly can be bad, especially for those who are severely unlucky.
So, let’s move to current content of the past where Warforging and Titanforging existed in the game. In its purest form, Warforging and Titanforging was supposed to be something that gave you just a little bit more excitement when an item dropped. It was a “Not only did you get your sword, but the crazy thing procced with 6 more ilvls!!” type of thing. With the assumption that the difficulty of dungeons and raids were designed around non-forged pieces, these extra procs where just random little bits of good luck that allowed you to be able to progress your character. This Warforging and Titanforging system also vastly extended the life of lower tier (from a skill perspective) content. Players were more willing to do outdoor quests on that random chance something might proc, as opposed to now where it is not even worth opening the map and taking a look those the rewards. Players were more willing to run a dungeon they outgeared. It was easier to find people more willing to do more content. So, there was definitely some good that came from the Warforging and Titanforging concept.
So, why did a lot of players hate it? Because there was no bad luck protection. You had Heroic raiders who would spend months in raids trying to get a Heroic weapon to drop or drop with Warforging, only to see a player get an LFR weapon to Titanforge to a Mythic level. However, this example only tells have the story. For the most part, people didn’t really care that someone got something outside of their skill bracket. For the most part – there are always some.
However, people do care if there is no way for them to overpower their bad luck. Content can still be fun if you are unlucky. However, it is never fun to be severely unlucky. That feeling is made even worse when these players see others who are lucky. And it feels devoid, powerless, and unfun when you realize no amount of effort or time can compete with just being someone else who is randomly lucky. Compound this with the timing, seasonal feeling for raids, M+, and PvP content, and you have a frustrated community.
Due to this, we never even had to chance to talk about the details of proc rates and proc intensities.
Conversely, there could have been some sort of ‘boss dust’ that dropped off every M+ and raid boss, where you can take that to a blacksmith, leatherworking, tailor, engineer, or jewelcrafter. They would then take that dust and enchant your gear to Warforge it, Titanforge it, add a tertiary stat, or all the above. In other words, players could have, over time and effort, upgraded their gear and armor to a point where it could compete with luck.
- Closing
In closing, RNG is a mechanic that can be a lot of fun depending on the details of the gameplay (and also how players choose to participate), but the community is vulnerable to unmitigated and unrestricted levels of bad luck. We cannot say a system is fair to the playerbase if one person is randomly chosen to receive an item after 10 attempts, and another is randomly required 1,000 attempts with no available path for determinism. We need to discover the designed difficulty range and set our bad luck protection around that.