Progressive loot?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

If you go to any quest item on wowhead, you’ll see the following tooltip popup when you mouseover “Progressive Loot” in the “Quick Facts” panel:

This item has a dynamic drop rate that increases with quest progression.

But upon googling this, I couldn’t find any references to this behaviour elsewhere. Is this how quest drops actually work in WoW Classic? In that, if an item doesn’t drop in a while, it’s drop rate increases?

I haven’t noticed this behaviour, and it generally feels to me like the drop rate stays the same, that is the number of drops before doesn’t seem to affect the chance of dropping.

Is there any evidence truth to what wowhead is saying (citation needed), or is what wowhead is saying just rubbish?

Please don’t reply with what you’ve experienced, because random numbers are well, random, and humans often see patterns where there are none. Which is why I’m not trusting my own judgement on this, even though the “pattern” I see is a constant, not progressive drop rate.

2

How would you be able to tell? It would look the same. It would only come into play if you hit an unlucky streak. So if something had a 30% drop rate but increased to 50% if you have 3 in a row not drop and 75% if you have 4 in a row not drop then it is unlikely you wouldn’t get any after 6 kills. Then your very next kill would have a 30% chance and you might get one, so you think it averaged out to ~1 in 3.

3

How would you be able to tell?

How was wowhead able to tell? Presumably the only two ways are if it’s documented somewhere by Blizzard or alternatively extensive testing that shows that the distribution differs from what would be the case if drop rates were constant with high statistical certainty.

I’m presuming wowhead didn’t make it up so there must be some evidence somewhere, unless they’re just telling porky pies.

4

You forgot data mining. You can go into the files of WoW and check settings and variables.