Guild Wars 2

Like, “for real” sure? “Bet our lives on it” sure? Over the last month or so my salvage rate for ectos has been in the toilet. I know, I know, “rng is rng”. If this is simply a case of rng, then I’m on a long, long streak of really bad luck.

Mine is normal.

I don’t know, my drop rate on rares is too low to get a reliable sample.

Salvaged 2 rares today and got 5 ectos, must have been buffed.

darkace.8925:

“rng is rng”

The price history of ectos suggest nothing has changed.

Rng is Rng

Vol.7601:

The price history of ectos suggest nothing has changed.

Rng is Rng

Yeah, based on the price staying stable it seems as though nothing has changed….but I too have had too many streaks of 10-15 rares salvaged with only 3-5 ectos….several friends have seen the same recently too.

RNG is a harsh mistress.

Got 12 ectos out of 6 rares the last time I salvaged. If that is nerfing, ANet may feel free to nerf some more.

khani.4786:

Vol.7601:

The price history of ectos suggest nothing has changed.

Rng is Rng

Yeah, based on the price staying stable it seems as though nothing has changed….but I too have had too many streaks of 10-15 rares salvaged with only 3-5 ectos….several friends have seen the same recently too.

RNG is a harsh mistress.

That’s because you are more likely to hear about complaints about bad rng than elation from people with good rng. And people who have average rng are going to continue on because they got what they expected.

Got 3 ectos each from my last 6 rares.

Clearly ecto rates must have been buffed!

I got 3 ectos from my 40s rare.

Time to buy all the rares and become 200% richer with ease!

Vol.7601:

I got 3 ectos from my 40s rare.

Time to buy all the rares and become 200% richer with ease!

You heard Vol’s tip of the week, of course it comes with the usual money back guarantee. Right?

darkace.8925:

“rng is rng”

I feel this is said a lot, but it really doesn’t make much sense.
“rng” = “random number generator”
so that means that saying says “random number generator is random number generator”
a better saying would be “rng is r” = “random number generator is random”

I’ve had some pretty poor streaks with them, but if you look at the data on the wiki, they do say that the drop rate is 0-3, so (on average) you are going to get 0 ectos on 1 out of every 4 rares you salvage.

Edit: Just read the wiki again. I’m remembering incorrectly.

They are saying the chance with mystic/master kit is:
0 36.75%
1 47.00%
2 8.25%
3 8.00%

Mystic.5934:

darkace.8925:

“rng is rng”

I feel this is said a lot, but it really doesn’t make much sense.
“rng” = “random number generator”
so that means that saying says “random number generator is random number generator”
a better saying would be “rng is r” = “random number generator is random”

It’s hard to find a way to express the concept of randomness without someone getting nitpicky about it. I once said that it all depends on your luck. Another poster took umbrage at the word luck and described at great length how it wasn’t luck but blah blah blah (many technical words and who cares anyway).

As far as the average player can determine, it’s random. The term rng is rng gets the point across as well as anything else, in addition to being concise and reminding people that the randomness is part of a computer generated set of numbers.

For general posting usage to discuss the randomness of drop rates, rng is rng works good enough. If it is a technical discussion then dissecting the term is useful and necessary then. But not otherwise.

Mystic.5934:

darkace.8925:

“rng is rng”

I feel this is said a lot, but it really doesn’t make much sense.
“rng” = “random number generator”
so that means that saying says “random number generator is random number generator”
a better saying would be “rng is r” = “random number generator is random”

Que sera sera.

From my data of 1300 salvages with a master/mystic kit

0: 40%
1: 45%
2: 7.5%
3: 7.5%

In the last 7 days I got 24 out of 29. But some days I got 1 out of 3 and other days 8 out of 5 or 4 out of 4. And even those two great returns included 3 out of 9 that didn’t yield any.

I don’t know about this version of John Smith. Less Kosh, more Morgan Freeman.

I used to think Anet lied about ecto rate. But lately my rate has been a lot better. Most of time at least. One time i had a 3 week bad luck streak. Litterally every ecto i salvage was almost a fail, something like 20-30% rare to ecto rate. Now last months it’s just 0,9 average rate. Sometimes a streak of 0 ecto out of X (or low out of X). Sometimes 6 ecto out of few attempts (2-4).

There’s some Rng i don’t trust anet on (precursor, Blt chests), but ecto’s isn’t one of them. What i mean with don’t trust, is that the rng is to controlled. (prec rate for instance is probably ‘you drop 10 per unique percursor, per day, and we don’t care how you divide it, mystic forge is additional resource’. If that’s how it is ,(and experience with korean grind games with limit items to round numbers like ‘this event, new item will drop, but is (secretly) limited to 1000 drops, meaning the most ppl that farm, the lower the drop rate. The lower ppl online, the higher drop rate. If you farmed at 5 am, when almost nobody was online (EU time), you had way higher droprate in these items. I played that game a lot, and while Gw2 economy is probably bigger, and 10 items per 100 000 players is hard to track, the trading post, spidy, and player progress report on precursor just prove it. If there was a 0,00000xxxxx% rate on precursor, we would one day see 50 Dawns drop, and another day only 3. Spikes like the 50 never happen. Apart from mystic forge spikes (wich was nerfed to hard recently with 76 exotic outcomes), there is no way to accomodate the superior high demand atm. And before you say, but 50+3 average would still yield same results as now. Yes and no. Statistical, you are correct. But JS has often use the word ’psychology’. And a 50 supply on one day, would psychological, lower the price barrier, because of the spike effect, and because the price shortly went lower, the longer term the demand will stagnate cause more ppl will hope for the lower price. There will be more ‘wait for right moment people’ rather then now everyone, poor or rich, rushing for legendary as fast as possible.

Well because players expect 0.8 to 0.9 per salvage and if 40% of the time you get nothing, you remember those misses. You rarely remember the times you got 2 or 3 and they don’t seem to make up for all those misses you remember.

One reason I started documenting my salvages.

I remember bad and good streaks XD if i get 2x 3 from 2 rares I DEFINITEly remember it. Today i had 1+0+1+1+0 (looks bad here, me ’omg 3/5 ecto, i hate you), +3. Net result: 6/6 ecto. Pretty satisfying.

I slipped a small mistake that Behellagh had to exploit. Fixed now, to bad, quotes don’t fix themself.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

I remember bad and good streaks XD if i get 2x 3 from 2 rares I DEFINITEly remember it. Today i had 0+0+1+1+0 (looks bad here, me ’omg 2/5 ecto, i hate you), +3. Net result: 6/6 ecto. Pretty satisfying.

And you can’t add, that’s 5 out of 6 unless you had a 2 in there you forgot about.

Still above/close to average in my book.

John Smith.4610:

The ecto rate has not been modified.

History tells us that until you go and test this, you can be wrong on this statement. Did you run actual salvage tests to confirm this statement?

Firebaall.5127:

John Smith.4610:

The ecto rate has not been modified.

History tells us that until you go and test this, you can be wrong on this statement. Did you run actual salvage tests to confirm this statement?

I would think looking at the code is enough.

Ryan.9387:

Firebaall.5127:

John Smith.4610:

The ecto rate has not been modified.

History tells us that until you go and test this, you can be wrong on this statement. Did you run actual salvage tests to confirm this statement?

I would think looking at the code is enough.

Absolutely not enough. The last ecto rate kitten was a bug, that they couldn’t see just by examining the code, and didn’t believe existed……….until they ran salvage tests.

Ryan.9387:

Firebaall.5127:

John Smith.4610:

The ecto rate has not been modified.

History tells us that until you go and test this, you can be wrong on this statement. Did you run actual salvage tests to confirm this statement?

I would think looking at the code is enough.

JS would be the wrong person to ask/answer then. Kinda like asking a professional wrestler if there’s something wrong with the space shuttle launch program.

But you might be able to call up the include file that contains the various chances or the actual source code file that handles salvaging.

Essence Snow.3194:

Ryan.9387:

Firebaall.5127:

John Smith.4610:

The ecto rate has not been modified.

History tells us that until you go and test this, you can be wrong on this statement. Did you run actual salvage tests to confirm this statement?

I would think looking at the code is enough.

JS would be the wrong person to ask/answer then. Kinda like asking a professional wrestler if there’s something wrong with the space shuttle launch program.

O.o more like asking the operations director how many bolts were used. From what I can tell, JS deals with policy, while source code would be implementation.

looking at source code can be… deceptive. it’s too easy to have a typo you don’t see and completely throw everything off. Sometimes the typo isn’t even at the spot where the result is! Like you might have a magic_find variable, at one spot it’s called to display it on your hero screen, but accidently is set to negative what it should be, then the next spot down the page uses the negative value and you get very few exotics, even though the drop rate is working perfectly if only the magic_find variable were set right.

This thread is made once every few months by one person who’s had a bad run of salvaging luck.

I’ll just let how silly that is sink in.

Last time there was an actual bug with the salvage rates the markets started reacting hours before any posts were made on the forums about it – and by the time there was a dev response, the market price had surged to a point that it was undeniable that something was wrong. Ecto is a big, fast market. If there’s a systematic disruption in the supply, it’s not subtle.

If you think there’s a problem with the salvage rate, check ecto prices. If they haven’t moved, you’ve just hit a string of bad luck.

It’s as common as “new patch dropped my FPS” or “new patch is increased my lag”.

New patch increased my FPS… or maybe it was my new drivers. ;-)

Anyway, I’ve salvaged a fair few rares and exos recently and I’ve seen pottery much expected behaviour: random return, did better on the rates than the exos but got a good return on dark matter on those so I’m happy. And that ultimately is it, people don’t tend to question (or even particularly remember) the good runs, just the bad ones.

I think a lot of confusion comes from players who take the reported average as a % chance of getting one.

Now from what I’ve data mined with my salvages, I’m seeing a 40/45/7.5/7.5 percentage for 0,1,2,3 ectos on rares with a mystic/master kit. That’s an average of 0.825 per.

If you take my 0.825 as a percentage chance of getting an ecto, if you salvage 3 rares you would expect to get 3, 56.15% of the time or better than halve and only 0 or 1, 8.12% of the time. If you use 0.9 per as the chance of getting 1 then the numbers are more extreme. 72.9% to get 3, 2.71% to get 0 or 1.

However in reality, with the percentage breakdown I listed, it’s the opposite. You actually have (a) 55.9% chance of getting less than 3 and a 28% chance of the time getting either 0 or 1.

So it’s a perception problem. Your brain first reduces the problem of getting 0 to 3 into a 0 or 1 using the average as odds. Then you figure with odds that high, something is very wrong because I got none or just one out of three attempts which you think should be very rare.

So your brain jumps to the conclusion “OMG they nerfed ectos again!”. In reality it’s the fact we oversimplify the problem and have a very bad sense of the statistics of probability.

Behellagh.1468:

Now from what I’ve data mined with my salvages, I’m seeing a 40/45/7.5/7.5 percentage for 0,1,2,3 ectos on rares with a mystic/master kit. That’s an average of 0.825 per.

How big is your sample? I ask because while I stopped keeping track after a few thousand rares, from those I got an average of 0.878 ectos per rare, with a standard error of 0.018. Your average of 0.825 is 3 standard errors below the average I’ve gotten – so I’m wondering if you have a huge sample and I’ve gotten crazy lucky, or yours is a smaller sample, or there’s something in between?

Rares are overpriced for salvaging at the moment (at least I don’t like the margins) but this is making me think I need to crack a couple thousand more…

Somewhere above 1300 now. I’m a bit of a piker.

Only doing drops now rather than putting in bids, profit simply isn’t there anymore. I would need to buy rare armors with runes at less than 31s each for a 10% profit and there are only 8 items currently at or below that price, all with very little supply and a quick look at their charts show that these low high bids are a temporary condition since all have been well over 31s most of the time over the last 7 days. I would need to buy 50 a night to equal the 5 on average dropped on me in 2 hours of play. However if I can get significantly more than the average salvage, I sell the rare. Why get only 40s worth of mats and runs if I can sell it intact for 55s or more?

Long story short, I’m only doing around 150 salvage a month now. I did that in one afternoon once when I was making a 30% profit (hmm, nobody has noticed dire armor replaced traveler and I can get more from cracking ectos to dust than ectos intact). Ah, those were the days.

Haven’t added that last 7 weeks of data into the spread sheet yet. And my actual numbers a bit higher but if I was programming the drop rate I wouldn’t use percentages that weren’t expressed as fractions with large numerator and denominator but simpler percentages. 40% miss, 60% something. 75% when getting something of getting 1, split the remainder between the other 2 possibilities. The last time I tabulated the total it was 39.37% 0; 45.32% 1; 7.30% 2; 8.03% 3; giving me a per drop of 0.8397 with 1260 salvages.

If anything, I seem to have gotten better drops over the last few weeks….

I get 3 Ecto Drops all the time now (and no Ecto salvages are quite rare). Using Mystic or BL kits….. Granted, nothing scientific so it may just be a perception issue on my end.

Can someone sticky JSs comment so these quit popping up every week?