Guild Wars 2

This is a long shot…..and I’m not sure anyone knows this…..but does anybody know when the loot roll is set for champs bags?

Does the loot roll for the champ bag stop once the mob is killed? (meaning loot for the champ bag is set before you loot it?)

When the bag enters your inventory (meaning loot dice are rolled when you pick up your loot)

Or, does the loot roll begin when you double click on the actual bag itself? (meaning loot is not set till you actually begin to open it)

I know MF has no effect on this, I’m just curious as to when the roll takes place for most of the loot containers in the game, just because.

Just because you’re studying the RNG? :P

You are talking about the bags that stack, right?

If so the loot is rolled when you open the bag/chest. This is evident because if you get a loot bag on a non-level 80 and transfer it to a level 80 character, your drops are better when you open it on the level 80 character.

If you’re talking about drops in general, like getting a precursor or an exotic drop, I’d guess the contents of a loot pile you pick up from an enemy is rolled when you pick it up. If it was rolled the instant the enemy died it would cause a sudden processing spike for their servers if the game rolled loot all at once for every single player who participated in killing a world boss. It’d be a lot easier on their servers to simply calculate IF a player gets a drop then roll for the contents of the drop later when the player picks the loot up.

OR it could be combination of events that calculate loot. Perhaps precursor drops are decided when a monster dies, while the general contents of loot is decided upon pickup. You do see that different types of loot lays on the ground. sometimes it’s a bag and other times it’s a chest. The drop calculation could happen partially at every point in the looting process you mentioned.

Schrodinger’s Cat—- it is a precursor up to the point that you look at it.

Champ bags the dice rolls when you open it. As pointed out above the loot changes depending on the level of the character opening it.

Theftwind.8976:

Schrodinger’s Cat—- it is a precursor up to the point that you look at it.

I like that very much

Let’s call loot drops Schrödinger’s Bag in the future

Honestly, without a developer stating when it happens, it’s impossible to really know. My guess that the loot table lookup would happen upon opening it, because that’s where I’d put it. It doesn’t make much sense to calculate the loot table of an item that may not even be opened, and when it does you’d need to save the information of the looted items anyway – which you shouldn’t really do before their true creation because they don’t exist yet and would be a waste of storage space to do so (sure, it’s only going to be a couple of records, but it all adds up).

I do like the idea of mobs/bags being assigned loot as they spawn though. Just because I like the idea of a Skritt running around with a Dusk saying ‘Shiny Shiny Shiny!’.

When they updated the champ bags, people hoarded bags to take advantage of the new drops which worked. I’d conclude from that the roll is on opening.

It would have to be on opening as someone said since the loot scales with character level.

Why? because unless the drop tables are identical in size for all levels as this just calculates a set of random numbers and looks into a database index for your item ID to give to you.

So if the databases weren’t the same size, it could lead to some pretty massive problems without code made explicitly to handle each level, which would also require major updating to the code which handles this, which adds a ton of extra complexity and inefficiency to the game in general and require a ton of additional maintenance, while adding even more unnecessary bookkeeping and strain on the back-end hardware since every bag would need to have a permanently-assigned ID within it for its corresponding item. This would also mean that depending on player retention and acquisition rates, storage capacity of this data would possibly need to approach infinity.

Pretty much everything in computer science points towards the bags merely referencing a function/server event which calculates which item to ship out upon item destruction.

Not to mention that bags farmed before the implementation/release of new items can drop said new items, which pretty much proves that the bags do not hold the loot they contain upon acquisition.

Yeah, it has to be on opening. Back when the Queensdale champ train ran, I’d take my lowbie alts in there to level up a bit. I’d save my champ bags to open on my 80s, though. And I’d get the typical gear I would any other time I’d open on my 80s. So, yup, on open.

As people have already mentioned, there are two proofs that the roll happens the moment the bag is opened. First is the loot level – it is calculated based on the person that opens the box, not the person who got it. Second, every time the loot tables were changed, that change applied to all champ boxes that were dropped before the patch but were opened after it.