I’ve been doing a lot of farming these past few days trying to unlock the ability to find the components to make the jeweled dragon whelplings and I also set my alts up on other servers to try to find stuff on the timeless isle.
Got me thinking a lot about asymptotic functions like drop chances, and how I could literally farm something like Garnia an infinite number of times (I’m up to 147 this time out of the ~246 to consider the drop rate of 3% scuffed) and not get the drop, and that would technically be “working fine” because of randomness.
But on that note, its been 18 years and the player still doesn’t have a tool besides just opening a ticket to request a quick check on if drops are working correctly.
Like these treasure maps that supposedly drop out of dragonflight treasures. They have a player recorded drop rate of 0.0018 or .18%, which is nice but due to all that being lumped in with just opening stuff its difficult to decipher. Which brings me to the magic number. 250 is close enough to a magic number in this aspect, if something is taking more than 250 times to drop its either meant to be very rare (these things I’m farming aren’t) or something (like an imp or a cosmic ray or something) is messing with it. Which takes me back to the fact that its been 18 years and we still don’t have a contactless way to check on stuff like this.
Its fortunate that they chilled out on the really low drop rates since classic, but some of those have a 1/10000 drop chance. How long has it been since somebody checked if those are dropping correctly or anything like that? Or done a simple review on WHY some of these things are meant to be so rare, or if they are even meant to be that rare and its just been forgotten about because of people rushing to finish every upcoming patch?
Especially with some of the legacy stuff where it has a long respawn time. Where every time I sneeze on it, it dies and I’m technically denying the next guy an opportunity to kill it.
But yea, if you want a TL:DR,
1:) double the dragonflight treasure map drop rate, then double it again
2:) make sure old drops are working correctly, build a tool to do that for you, like jic they got encrypted or something
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1% is not that bad, 0.01% is bad.
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Maybe, but if its supposed to be a 0.01% drop chance and its actually 0.000000% chance you’d be saltier than Antarctica’s Don Juan Pond.
It’s quite aggravating to fly around, opening dozens of bags and chests and dirts, and not see even a single treasure map of any kind. All when I could have sworn I was seeing one every dozen bags at most in the first week on my first character.
Yep, treasure hunting for the actual treasure maps feels awful.
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As far as the player is concerned I think any automated system to check if drops are working properly will be questioned if that is working properly.
People just get it in their heads that 1% drop rate means you’re almost guaranteed to get the drop after 100 kills when in reality there’s still a ~36.6% chance you wont get the item after 100 kills.
People just figure that if the % chance isn’t doing what they feel like it should, that means the % chance isn’t working correctly and telling them that it is often doesn’t convince them that it is.
Well, thats a bit defeatist. I think there is a definite issue with things that have a long respawn time AND a low drop chance. There we also have things that have all of that AND spawn conditions. Yea, some of them are just a little bit much.
For the purposes of this post though: Do you honestly think you would stop believing there is an issue just because an automated system told you there wasn’t?
Keep in mind I’m not talking about if you think the drop rates should actually be that low. My post was more about your suggestion to have a tool to make sure drop rates are working correctly that the players can see.
In my experience most people who are inclined to think there is an issue wont be swayed by an automated tool or even the developer saying it’s working properly. Most of them will see a 1% drop rate, not get it in 150 drops and assume that can only be because there is something wrong with the drop rate when in reality there’s still a ~22% chance of not having gotten the item yet.
Not that for sure drop rates are always working, but Blizzard undoubtedly already has their internal testing tools to look for issues. I don’t think setting anything up that just says “yes, the drop rate is working properly” would change many minds about if they’re actually working properly or not.
Really the only low drop rate thing I have ever tried to farm is Ashes of Alar, and I’ve run that I don’t know how many times. But that has a 1% drop rate. Based on that experience alone (because I still haven’t gotten it), I have sub-zero motivation to farm anything with a low drop rate. What an enormous waste of time.
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