These loot boxes are unacceptable

Community General Discussion
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So far on my Druid, almost all of the loot box rewards from Delves, weekly quests, or world quest chests have been trinkets. There is no possible way this is a functional system. My Rogue is also stuck and only getting rings, which is even more enraging given the copy pasted “new” island this last patch. This happened last expansion on my Hunter, except it was boots. Just the same slot being rewarded over and over again.

Either the system is broken and not random, or if it’s working and this happens to be consistently bad luck for multiple characters and expansions in a row, there could easily be an internal weighting system that helps prevent you from rolling the same slot over and over again.

However, it’s not mathematically possible for this to be random and get the same slot that drops over and over. The odds of this happening are like winning the lottery, except in multiple expansions on multiple character if it was a truly random roll. I’ve reported it as a bug, I’ve talked to a GM. No help or fixes. Why is there not more frustration towards such a bad system?

I logged off today after 4 delves and 4 trinkets. I just can’t handle it anymore. It’s such a slap in the face as to how much I’m wasting my life on such a pointless effort.

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Gotta keep you subbed for next week though.

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I’ve just stopped playing Delves altogether. It’s just Torghast all over again; an unrewarding busy-work chore masquerading as content. It doesn’t HAVE to be that way, but given Blizz’s track record at actually fixing half-baked ideas I won’t be holding my breath.

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RNG is RNG. When initially gearing up, my Priest had a mixed bag of useful and useless. My Boomkin got nothing by useless crit/vers jewelry for the first couple weeks. My warlock had perfect drops. Every TW weekly quest, every vault, every delver bounty was unique with perfect stats. She was almost full hero before she got her first duplicate. It then took a month to get a hero cape to catalyze for the transmog while the druid got a hero spymasters from a TW weekly. Everything evened out in the end and everyone got what they needed eventually.

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I didn’t like delves so I didn’t do them. /shrug

do the content you enjoy.

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Looking at it… I think those loot boxes have bigger “loot tables” than bosses.

Just picking out one such item…
https://www.wowhead.com/item=229129/cache-of-delvers-spoils#contains

Contain 119 different items. Maybe some can be filtered out by multiple armor types and groupings of trinkets/whatever based on secondary stats… but yeah, that’s a BIG loot table.

Comparatively, how many drops does each boss have?

Let’s just pick the most recent raid:
https://www.wowhead.com/zone=14980/nerub-ar-palace

Total number of drops is 115, for the entire raid. That includes recipes, mounts, tier set tokens (all the different types and slots), crafting reagents, and so on. Another thing that’s important to note is that these items are divided amount the different bosses, meaning you have a far better chance of getting a specific item as it’s actually coming from a smaller loot table.

And of course, this is ignoring stuff like randomized item level and quality increases for both… well, not entirely sure if that’s still a thing, but we’re ignoring it in any case.

Anyhow.

Bigger Loot Table = Worse Chance of getting specific items and upgrades = worse luck overall.

Those caches are ENGINEERED to be bad luck.

And it all comes down to that massive and randomized loot table they all have. So unless everything you can get from the cache is an upgrade, they quickly become useless as you start fishing for specific slots or even items with better allocated stats or effects than what you currently have.

… and in retrospect, all the complaints about the vault? MASSIVE loot table, possibly the biggest in the whole game. When only half a dozen potential items in the whole loot table of hundreds that could possibly go in there are useful, no wonder you keep getting worthless items. Because for every useful item you could get, there’s 100+ items which are useless.

Engineered bad luck, right under everyone’s noses.

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This is some serious tin-foil hat material! :rofl:

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lol

Ten chars

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Sure, true, though I don’t think that’s “engineering bad luck.”

Engineering bad luck would be then also making undesirable items have a higher drop chance from the table than desirable items.

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Were you playing during WoD, when a dungeon boss who dropped bracers had 4 different bracers for each armor type on the loot table?

How would you know whether or not this is happening?

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oh yes it is.

you don’t have anywhere near enough data to make that claim.

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This is called variance. But yes, there’s a lot of trinkets that exist in the loot pool from delves, weekly quests, and world quests.

So in other words… you haven’t been getting just trinkets.

And another example of this not being trinkets or rings.

Variance exists and you are purposefully looking for a pattern where none exists. It is a very human thing to do, but it is important to note that these things just happen because of variance. When ignoring statistics and just opting for a “vibes”-based approach on what should or shouldn’t happen, that’s when you go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.

Nothing of what you have said is weird, unusual, strange, or as you put it mathematically impossible. Sorry but this is the nature of RNG - make use of the vault to get access to more specific and targeted pieces of gear (even if all you are targeting is other slots). You might have to do more content to do that, but that’s how it works. Or alternatively get a crafter to fill out the slots of gear that you are missing.

You have a plethora of options, and you are meant to play more of the game to get more pieces of gear. That’s all there is to it. So do that and you’ll be fine.

Not even remotely the case. You compared these caches with the loot tables of more limited areas of highly concentrated gear drops. Open world stuff isn’t as highly concentrated in the number of gear drops (at least not of the type most people talk about in conversations such as in this thread), but they do contain a lot more in their tables by necessity - since they have to be able to fill out, in multiple different ways, each slot.

They aren’t engineered to be bad luck, they are engineered to be there for people get random bits of gear that they may or may not need. To insinuate that there’s a “bad luck” component to it misrepresents it by several magnitudes.

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I wouldn’t, but that works both ways.

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Funny how there’s a list of drop rates on the cache, and it does appear that some items are indeed rarer than others. I’m not really looking at what’s desirable and what isn’t… but I can easily spot a range in the drop rates based on what WoWhead is saying.

But really, any intentional manipulation in the drop rates would qualify as “engineered”, be it for good or bad. Padding the loot table with a bunch of junk players generally aren’t going to want, even if it’s not at a higher rate than the desirable items, is going to steer the results towards more unneeded drops by sheer volume. Therefore, engineered bad luck.

If they make the undesirable items have a higher chance than the desirable ones on top of that? Oof. Yeah, that’d be beyond unfair… but it may be pushing the player too far in the realm of believability.

But really, I’m pretty sure Blizz tweaks these values so that they can push the the bad luck as far as it can go without the player quitting in frustration. The lowest chance they can get away with and have the player keep coming back and spending more time playing the game for another chance at the item.

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So there’s as good a chance of it being skewed toward giving an item you already have?

Is it possible that the system can inspect your character, look at your class, or have a history of what items you have already gotten to base your drop on? Yep. They could code that. Many things are possible. The idea that it should be considered perfectly acceptable for someone to get 8 trinkets in a row is odd.

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Wowhead’s an aggregate of user input.

Also, judging by it, the singular best item out of the cache (ritual blade) has one of the highest rates.

That’s not how that works.

It isn’t a 50/50 chance that the world is gone just because you don’t see it or know any relevant information to predict.

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There are patents out there for this sort of manipulation.

However, that’s how you put it. The idea that RNG is a simple thing that creates itself based on impartiality is false. It is a complex calculation that can be dynamic.

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No it’s not?

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Wowhead states an aggregated average result from people who report said drop rates. Those aren’t the actual drop rates but they can get close for very specific items that we have A LOT of data going back several years from.

Random gear from whatever is the current expansion is not really possible to create such a data set that is in any way shape or form reliable. Basically, those drop rates are just a very small average of a very small number of people who report said data. Which means it isn’t large enough to make any definitive or really even speculative claims about either.

And this is why you need to prove that, and what you have said so far is at best a gross mischaracterization and misrepresentation of what data is there and what it means. This is why you insinuating “engineered bad luck” is at best misrepresentation by several magnitudes; you aren’t just wrong, but you are mega-wrong in short.

Unless of course you have some evidence to back up this otherwise quite insane claim.
And before you try to further work this angle that…

… I need to let you know that conspiracy theories doesn’t count as evidence. It is at best speculation of various degrees of unreasonableness.

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Considering the highest drop rate of ANY item is 3% (assuming it’s the top item) and appears to be a trinket usable by all classes & specs… uh, yeah.

At some point, you just have to say a 3% drop chance is a lousy drop chance even if it’s the most common item.

I recall hearing about those, MANY years ago no less.
They were being talked about during MoP/WoD/Legion… I think.

Maybe sooner, can’t say my memory’s perfect about that, but there were definitely patents being filed with stuff about manipulating drop rates and preferentially showing off store-bought items to players who hadn’t bought them.

No matter how you slice it, there’s one undeniable fact:
There’s more possible drops from those caches than an entire raid tier.

Even if I were to assume even chances, it’s a bigger loot table and almost certainly a higher chance of obtaining a less-than-useful item than running the whole raid for a specific item.

Hmm… I have to wonder the decision to remove away from personal loot for all drops in LFR is to create more bad chances by adding in the “rolling for loot” competitive roll on top of seeing the right item drop.

But really, RNG loot systems are built to be unfair.
Purely because you’ll never get a truly guaranteed outcome.
It’s always going to be chance – a gamble, you could say.

Currency-based systems for gear acquisition will always be better and fairer. Because, by hook or by crook, you’re eventually going to get enough currency to buy the item from the vendor.

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