I fully understand these complaints, a friend of mine was missing 6 mounts affected by this buff, 4 in bfa and 2 in SL, one of that isn’t very farmable atm because it drops in mechagon, which is part of the mythic rotation, apart from that he got 4 out of the other 5 like immediately, within a day, 3 of them were at first try, or so it looked to me.
So the things are 2: either the drop rate is way higher than 5%, because you normally wouldn’t get this many mounts at 5% so quickly with so few characters, or the drop rate is 5% and he got incredibly lucky, and after our experience (the attempts you mentioned and my necrotic wake runs, where I feel like I’m farming with normal drop rate, have hundreds of unsuccessful runs there) I’m leaning towards the 2nd option.
This enormous luck difference is very annoying, at least before the buff it was rare for people to get stuff at first try, now you have some people who get everything at first try and others with such a luck that the buff might as well not be there.
Mathematically speaking, an increase “of 5%” is not synonymous with “to 5%”. There are two other ways this might be implemented.
An increase “of 5%” might be the original drop rate + 5%. So for a mount that has a drop rate of .1%, this would be (5 +.1)% or 5.1, a huge improvement.
The other way of interpreting this would be to increase the drop rate by 5% of the original drop rate. The new drop rate calculation would be the original drop rate x 1.05%. Which would not be a huge change.
So did they say the drop rate was increased “of 5%”, “by 5%” or “to 5%”?
From all the websites I looked into, my understanding is that it’s +5%. So, for example, Invincible is typically about .8% drop chance. It’s now increased to roughly a 5.8% chance.
Much larger mathematically speaking, but still very low when put into practice.
Ironically this is also a common misconception. There are 2 variables at play.
Is the chance a particular item will drop. This never changes (unless blizz changes it).
The second is the chances a particular item will drop within its chance to drop within X number of attempts. This chance does indeed increase the greater the X value becomes. It is for this reason that Rarity will show your chance to get a drop increases with each attempt. It’s because your chance to get the drop within an ever increasing amount of attempts, does indeed increase. The individual chance doesn’t. The collective chance does. There’s a difference.
You’re right. The more chances you have to trigger the event, the more chances the event will trigger successfully regardless of the actual percentage chance. I should have been more clear about that.
However, the danger with that is getting into the mindset that the percentages can be brute forced. The whole “Well it’s a 5% drop rate, so that’s 1/20, so if I run it with 20 alts, then it has to drop on at least one of them.” That’s where the gambler’s fallacy comes into play.
But you are correct. A person who triggers the event 20 time at 5% each time does have a higher chance of getting the item than a person who triggers the event on just one character.
However the issue with gamblers fallacy is that gamblers are usually dealing with chances and probabilities far worse than what we deal with. Like, the chances of winning the lotto or Powerball is far worse than the chance of getting even the lowest drop rate mount in wow.
So if a gambler could attempt the lotto a trillion times a day for example, chances are they would win relatively quickly. But because gamblers deal with horrendous probabilities, the math simply never works out in their favour in the real world. Thankfully wow isn’t anywhere as punishing.
I mean. Yes. That is true. I’m definitely not saying that all is lost or that no one is going to win. Heck plenty of people have gotten quite a few successes on this very thread.
I am only cautioning people to adjust expectations that it may still not drop or or it still may take a long time to drop. And also to help put into perspective what’s going on for people who are wondering if the event is bugged or broken or something like that.
A 1 out of 20 chance is not bad. Mathematically better than 1/100 for sure, and definitely better that the 1 out of a million+ chances you see with casinos and lotteries (I live within walking distance of a few casinos… I’ve seen how easy it is to lose there xD), but a 1/20 is still not a sure thing, and running it 20 times or even 100 times isn’t going to make it a sure thing either. Though it does increase your chances.
Yes I understand. A lot of people are getting irrationally upset if the mount they’re after doesn’t drop within a dozen or whatever attempts. What they’re forgeting is that the 5% increase means it will take possibly a lot more than that to meaningfully stack the deck so to speak.
Personally I think a major flaw in this event is that it only runs for a month. With weekly lockouts, that means we only get 4 attempts per toon and a lot of these mounts require max level characters with at least 600 ilvl to actually be able to farm. Especially the ones from BFA and SL. One month is simply not enough for those to properly leverage the new drop rate increase.
Yea, I agree. I think that an event like this - They should have gone bigger. Either increase the percentage (nothing crazy, but I might have gone to 10%) or remove the lockouts on legacy raids/dungeons so that people can farm the event more (but keep the lower 5% drop rate).
As it stands I think that there will be a few disappointed people at the end of the event. (And a few that get every drop they were hoping for, but we’ll make faces at them when they aren’t looking )
All I know is it’s been awesome seeing so many people flood old world zones and dungeon/raid entrances during the event. I think at a bare minimum, blizz should make this an annual event or something. I’ll be very disappointed if they only ever do this event once.
Each run you make doesn’t actually increase your odds though. The odds are the same with every roll of the dice. It’s possible to run it a million times and still get nothing.
With that said however, they might increase the drop rate at some point. There has been an alarming number of patches and events in the last few years where they go live in a state everyone hates and then blizz waits a few weeks then finally decides to buff it. Kind of feels planned but I wouldn’t know. All I’m saying is I bet they will buff it eventually.
That is another way I think that they could get around disappointment. Keep it like it is, but make it a reoccurring event.
But yea, I’ve had a lot of fun. It’ll be nice if my mount drops, but I’m still enjoying talking about it on here, or hanging out with one of the big crowds out in the game. Heck, I finally did my first ever timewalking raid last night. First time I’ve ever used the premade group thing on the dungeon finder. That was neat.
My ideal scenario is if they simply make it permenant. Or a monthly event. That might be being too greedy. But wow is such a massive game with so many cosmetics that we’re long past the point where nobody should be farming an individual mount for longer than like a month.
Either the lockouts need a daily reset or the drop chance increase needs to be much higher.
The other items buff should have been ‘drops extra items - bonus items are unique and only include items which are eligible for transmog’, not ‘double drops’ which can mean just more trinkets, rings, relics and other useless garbage.
Skips should have been enabled in all raids.
For bonus point effort they could have added a daily / weekly quest with a bonus chance, put portals / event NPCs in cities to port to instance, tied the event to other events like the goblins - have mini portals spawn in the old instances or give each boss a chance to drop chests or something.
Another alternative would be to make it recurring with TW weeks where the week that expansion is up, all drops are buffed (and more than 5% or have no lockouts).
Yea, I agree. Or make the event bonuses so significant that everyone is going to at least get one big thing to drop, and then make it yearly or something. Cosmetics are for fun. Especially from decades old content. There’s no prestige from those anymore. Not really.
Or like give tokens on failed drop attempts that can be turned into get the item when you collect a whole bunch.
(My example was like for invincible. It’s normally about a .8% drop rate, so make it you have to collect 100 tokens. With one token being dropped per failed run. Even if shared by all your alts, that’s still 100 runs for a sure thing. That’s plenty for that old of content at this point. That’d still take most players a few months or more to get through)
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