Showing Posts For Syzygy.5031:
1 2
Here’s the premise. RNG is evenly distributed on aggregate.
TL;DR I’m happy with a mostly random distribution, so long as it can be massaged to prevent the more egregious outliers.
For instance:
I’m on Deso since launch. Come Tequatl first arriving we were one of the earliest servers to be able to kill it regularly. It was a lot of fun whilst it was still challenging. It led directly to one of my most memorable in-game moments(1) I’ve killed it regularly ever since. I have never had a mini, Tequatl Hoard or any of the “top end” loot. I have seen, several times, someone get the hoard and announce to map or say it was their first Teq kill. A guildie got 2 minis in 2 weeks (which is how I ended up with mine).
After only getting scraps after 100+, 200+ I have no idea, attempts, I’m just going to give up on it. It appears to not like me. I’m the unlucky holder of an outlier account that is perfectly within acceptable random distribution. Even if you are using an external random number generator with guaranteed entropy on your servers, those outliers are still going to exist. It is, after all, random
I understand the maths. But it’s a game. It’s meant to be fun. For those outliers, it frequently isn’t. How far off the distribution curve you need to be to feel like you’re “doomed unlucky” will vary person to person.
So let’s have some streak-breaks. Nudge Tequatl, Fractals, Bosses or whatever such that if you’ve done 25 (some number that keeps things on the distribution curve of “random” with the ends cut off) kills and not had something nice, you do. Simple as that. 100% chance of one of the “nice things” to break your unlucky streak. Perhaps the mini when you wanted the Hoard etc, but at least you got a “good ’un”. Perhaps a variable length run so it doesn’t become simply guaranteed loot every 25 times.
Alternatively leave as-is, but add some tickets to the loot, and a vendor in LA who sells all the nice things for tickets. Those tickets give the same drop rate as the “random” loot. The lucky outliers get more lucky, but the unlucky outliers don’t get a kick in the face every single time.
NO, not with laurels as well. NO, not with 10g as well. Just the tickets. A sane amount of the tickets.
Spoons. Stop giving them to me. They appear to take up a “nice” loot slot. I don’t want to open a restaurant.
“What’s the point doing Tequatl, all you ever get is another spoon”
Another for instance:
One guildie (the same one of two teq minis in 2 weeks) has 8 legendaries. She was gifted one pre, the rest were drops/forge. I’ve never seen one, even in party. Perhaps we’re both outliers, but even if she has played 2x the hours of me shouldn’t I at least have seen one? Even a harpoon gun. That’s not the same as expecting a guaranteed Dusk at some point.
I have simply given up on the Mystic Toilet, as I now always regret not salvaging for ectos.
I’m never having a Legendary, I’ve accepted that. Grinding gold and buying off TP is NOT an acceptable means of acquisition for me. I want to have done it myself, or it doesn’t count.
Third for-instance:
Key farming. I tried this for a while, and got a reasonable amount of “stuff”. Later I found out that Black Lion tickets should drop roughly one time in xx (I forget the exact number), as well as scraps. I’d never seen a full ticket, so I logged every key farm I did since:
52 prior to Sept patch – 0 tickets.
30 since Sept patch – 0 tickets.
Attempt 31 got me a ticket. There were perhaps 100-150 key runs before I started logging loot. So I’m still way under that average on the wiki and claimed by others.
Buy zephyr pack, get 1 ticket, and markedly better loot, along with lots of scraps. OK, is drop rate significantly biased towards gem-bought keys? Or Chests opened together, rather than opened as you get the keys?
One day I’ll quit, quite possibly when my friend gets her ninth pre, simply as I feel I have a lower chance of having nice things, so it’s pointless to go on.
I really miss season 1 of the Living Story, as I got a lot of the meta rewards for reasonable challenge, fun and time. Now you give us a boring instance to re-run identically for a few AP and Dry Top random fossils to grind. Did I mention my in-game luck?
To be fair I’ve had a lot of fun in game, and still do, I’m just unlucky…
(1) In-Game Moment:
Ninja invading low-population servers as we couldn’t get enough of our own people on the Deso map to make a kill party (people were guesting to Deso in the hopes of seeing a successful kill. No doubt similar on SFR etc).
Easy, smooth kill of Tequatl resulted, and the locals were delighted and astonished. Comments along the lines of “What the hell just happened? We never got him below 90% before…” “Please come back tomorrow?” filled the map every time. 
Oh I equipped it for the skin and collection, then nuked
Most of the mesmers you’ll see, my own included, got a portal to Rhendak. To repay the debt of the mystery mesmer who did the dungeon back near the dawn of time, we’ll make portals to the waypoint.
My mesmer was parked there, but he’s one of my crafting alts, so doesn’t live there enough.
I have a number of chalices and blue Rhendak’s Signets now though.
@Relshdan
That’s not underwhelming enough. You’ll have people asking for mounted combat with that!
Introduce mounts, 3250 gems or whatever. Obviously it has to be just over a multiple of 800.
They move at -33% of run speed. Hopefully that comes out midway between walking and running. Seems appropriate for a rented horse.
Also they must need feeding, or they die; and cleaning up after…
1) The change was supposed to be unnoticeable:
I think that’s one of the points of the thread. It may be supposed to be unnoticeable, but for me (on my seemingly bugged-loot necro main), OP and others it’s very noticeable and consistent. Perhaps there’s a bug causing it to be applied too harshly than intended etc.
Could it be a really bad run of RNG luck? Possibly, but after a few weeks of consistently more leather on my necro that seems increasingly unlikely! It’s not quite the same as waiting for the RNG lottery win of a precursor – lots of blues and green drop all the time, and the balance of the resulting materials has changed. Rather noticeably.
If I’d been getting consistently more light, as a necro should, I doubt I’d be here complaining about this new approach. I’d be quietly delighted at the extra income, not drawing attention to it on here. Necro being the class I get most loot on, after all. :p
I don’t have recorded samples of loot to be statistically adequate, nor samples from before patch to serve as a control. My play style hasn’t changed, the stuff (after salvage) I end up with seems to have…
So I’ve just cleared my necro of all mats and will keep a track of what the next few days brings. I don’t know whether loot bags / champ bags are blessed with this loot favouring, so any I happen to get will be opened on my ele.
Sod’s Law states that now I’ll get an RNG run of mostly heavy or something…
(edited by Syzygy.5031)
My first class at launch was necro, and I threw it away by level 50 as it seemed so under powered. Came back to necro much later (after getting thoroughly bored on warrior), and overall it’s become my favourite class.
Necro is my favourite WvW class. Amazingly versatile, aside from being over-dependent on others for stability. Of the classes I’ve played it’s the best for loot bags! Very, very good survivability – you can run up front with melee (dagger/warhorn) if you want. Though I mostly play it ranged with staff, along with plenty of plague form+DS.
It’s also my class of choice for CS aoe farm events – tags everything
It might not be meta, but necro works pretty well in dungeons too – though you’ll do better with guild runs than in LFG
Choose your traits well!
(edited by Syzygy.5031)
Get the Ghostly Tonic from Ascalonian Catacombs. They drop often enough in the explorable paths and even then they are only 10 tokens each.
Ooh, didn’t think of those – thanks! I mostly NPC them, but I’m bound to have a few still in bags somewhere!
I guess they want to prevent horrible exploits in story dungeons, like so:
(We thought it was rather neat transforms worked in the cut scenes, so the whole party transformed for that step, when we were doing achievements)
Attachments:
(edited by Syzygy.5031)
Great idea, and I’ll add the one thing I found confusing about downed state, when it first happened. The skills are only visible whilst you’re downed and on a timer.
Put the class’s downed skills on the weapon skills tab so I can see what they do before I need them.
When a mob or six are bashing on your head is not the time to be reading tooltips and figuring out which is most likely to help, especially as they vary by profession.
Moving it out to level 5 doesn’t help in the slightest. A completely new player is still going to wonder what the heck just happened, but given no opportunity to adjust, or even explanation, so is probably just going to start spamming numbers. They are on a timer after all…
They get another surprise first time downed under water. Again on their first alt.
Anet have removed bundles and massively oversimplified transformations (like the wolf heart for Norns), presumably because players weren’t adapting to the sudden change in all their skills. (I think they’re drawing the wrong conclusion and solving the wrong problem, but that’s for another thread). At least in the context of those quests you can spend 20 seconds, or 5 minutes as necessary looking at tooltips without risk.
Level gating 3 and 4 gives them less to read, but they’re still on a surprise, on a timer.
New players rarely read wikis. They might look at their skills tab whilst out of combat.
Your idea would give them a moment to look. The help could point out that skill 1 is always damage, and 4 heal, and that the skills vary by profession and when drowning.
Having them on their skills panel would let people look at why they got dead. Most likely just afterwards.
Or why their warrior apparently rallied yet dropped dead without reason (they hit 3) moments later.