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Posts
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Thanks Cat.
Quote:Would you prefer a large log of several missions, or logs split out by individual missions ? -
Hi Folks,
Now that the drop rate bug seems to have been fixed, I'm keen to work out the drop rates for purples, pool C/D boss drops etc.
I need lots of log data to do this with any degree of accuracy so I'm asking for help. I'd be most grateful if you could enable chat logging and then send me the log files.
You don't need to log anything special but solo play is much for useful than team play. Any level, AT etc is fine.
You can find full details on the DropStats website here.
I'll post my findings as soon as I have anything useful to report.
(Please feel free to send log files by other any method you like if you don't fancy email.)
many thanks,
Archie -
Now that the drop rate bug seems to have been fixed, I'm keen to work out the drop rates for purples, pool C/D boss drops etc.
I need lots of log data to do this with any degree of accuracy so I'm asking for help. I'd be most grateful if you could send me log files. (Post patch ones anyway!) You don't need to do anything special except avoid team play. (It's impossible to work out drop rates without logfiles from all members of the team.)
You can find full details on the DropStats website here.
Feel free to send log files by any method you like if you don't fancy email.
thanks,
Archie -
Quote:My current estimate is about 1 in 2000 minions or minion equivalents. i.e. 0.05%. (This is mostly based on TopDoc's data.)So all looks great except the drop rates for purps would need to average 0.1% or lower for this to be right. Anyone know if they're this low?
Curiously, Pool A rares are almost as rare as purples. Their drop rate is bout 1:1000. -
Quote:I don't think that it's just computer games. Judging by some of the stories I've seen in the press, I'd say that the car industry suffers from the same attitude. There are occasional stories of dangerous design faults that aren't acknowledged for many months.So, the question isÂ… what is it about computer games that cause most people to doubt customer complaint?
I develop business software for a living, and I encounter this attitude there as well. I think UberGuy's post goes part way to explaining it. If the developers can identify the bug easily then they tend to fix it. (Assuming support or QA actually sent them the bug report!) If it's hard to reproduce, seems unlikely or they don't understand the report then they tend to ignore it.
Personally, I take all bug reports very seriously even when they're written in 3 inch high letters with crayon.Over the years, I've found that there's almost always a bug or a design problem to be fixed. My attitude is that reporting bugs takes effort and people rarely expend that sort of effort without a good reason.
It's true that users are often wrong about what exactly happened. They are almost always wrong about the cause of the problem. But, and it's a very important but, they're nearly always right that there is a problem.
Sometimes the problem boils down to "the program didn't do what I expected" or "I don't understand what's happening". It's easy to dismiss these sorts of bugs as "the user is stupid" but I've generally found that the problem is caused by poor user interface design. Better design usually fixes the problem but may require the devs to think in a different way. (This is hard!)
One thing that's worth remembering is that things that are obvious to users may not be obvious to devs and vice versa. In general, developers see a programme in a very different way to users. For one thing, they often don't know what chunks of the user interface do or mean. For another, they have a deep understanding of the bits that they are familiar with and so aren't confused by minor UI problems. Finally, they don't use the program often enough to be sensitive to subtle changes.
CoX developers seem to be better than most in this regard as at least some of them play the game from time to time. Even so, I doubt many of them spend as much time in a week actually playing the game as a typical, active user does. After all, it's their job, not their hobby!
Incidentally, the Total War developers (Creative Assembly) have an excellent track record for taking bug reports seriously. I guess it's just a question of attitude in the end. -
Wow. Thanks. I'm really touched.
I doubt a badge will be coming my way but I'll take the pie!
I feel I've played something of a Defender role here, providing back up for the people who actually fought the darned ebil bug.
It's a bit unfair on everyone else who's done lots of testing, but I'd like to single out EarthWyrm for his particularly dogged determination.
Thanks to everyone who's run tests, posted results or theories and pestered the devs.
Finally, thanks to the devs for actually fixing the bug. -
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I've just done 1000 defeats against Council in a paper mission. The drop rate was 3.08% and was within the expected range. FWIW this is the highest drop rate I've seen since I16 open beta began. Details below:
Code:---------------------------------------------------------- Archie Gremlin's Drop Stats v0.4.0 http://www.glasspaw.com/dropstats/ ---------------------------------------------------------- Defeats Minion Lieut. Boss Under. Pet Grey Unknown ---------------------------------------------------------- 1,012 951 61 0 0 0 0 0 ---------------------------------------------------------- Drops Total Common Uncommon Rare Very Rare ---------------------------------------------------- Pool A 33 29 3 1 0 Pool E 1 Salvage 84 64 13 7 Inspirations 294 203 91 0 ---------------------------------------------------- Other Drops ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Inf. Rewards 1,012 (1,128,751 inf, 0 xp, 44,000 debt) Prestige 15,047 Enhancements 4 single origin enhancements ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Pool DropRate Drops Expected Mobs ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Pool A 3.08% 33 20-40 1,073 minion equivalents Pool E 0.11% 1 ? 951 minions Salvage 8.14% 84 67-101 1,032 minion equivalents ----------------------------------------------------------------------- (1 in 20 runs will be outside the expected range.)
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If any of you are interested in testing this then you might find DropStats useful. It analyses your chat log file to find out how many defeats and drops you had and whether they're consistent with the expected drop rates. (The ones Cat gave above.)
P.S. "Slightly" was about 30% too low for most people who published values. It looks like a few particularly unlucky toons got considerably less than that. -
Quote:You're welcome too!Long after this current issue is resolved this little application will make the life of a tester verifying drop rates in closed and open testing so much easier.
One of the reasons that I've been working on DropStats is that I'd like to know what the actual drop rates are for purples, random rare boss drops etc. We should be able to figure it out if we can get enough data together. (At at least put reasonable bounds on them.) -
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I've just released a new version of DropStats.
The main changes in this release (0.4) are:- added -nobosses command line switch to force bosses to be counted as lieutenants
- heuristic check now works when in Super Group mode
- recipes are now split into the correct pools and Pool A recipes are sub-divided by rarity
- changed the output to make it more compact
- recipe lists etc are now hidden by default. Run with "-output verbose" to see them
- added a load more mob types to mobTypes.txt
- should now work under Linux, MacOSX and cygwin
Enjoy! -
Quote:I don't think so. As far as I can tell from Pohsyb's post, the game rolls to see if you get a recipe drop and then checks to see if the mob was grey. If it was, then the game discards the drop. The bug causes the game to think that a mob was grey when it wasn't. This causes it to throw away recipes that you should have received.Could this bug have the opposite effect? Meaning instead of a bad drop rate like most of yall have seen, could it increase somebody's drop rate?
Quote:My roommate has been getting drops out of this world. Now he has been soloing 8 man Battle Maidens, so that could easily explain it(or maybe it's both).
(Apologies if this is a double post. I've replied already but the post just evaporated.) -
I ran tests on the Wall and it's definitely affected. As far as I can tell, you'll see reduced drop rates whatever you do until the bug is fixed.
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FWIW I run CoX under Vista and chat logging works OK. My CoX installation is in c:\Games nor c:\Program Files.
Did you actually get a log file TRT? It should have appeared in the "City of Heroes\logs\game" directory. If you don't even have the directory then the answer's probably no. -
Quote:Thanks very much for letting us know that you've found the bug.I just wanted to let you know you can probably stop recording data, a fix for this should be making its way to the training room fairly soon. Your drop analysis there, when this patch hits the training room, would be very useful. Thanks for everyone's diligence, and believe it or not the bug had nothing to do with team size, what map you were on, whether you were in taskforce mode or not or anything else mentioned in this thread.
Regards,
Synapse
Thanks also to all those who have reported their runs. Especially those who did a lot of runs. -
Quote:The current version of DropStats doesn't recognise that the bosses have been turned into LTs. This means that the drop rates will be a little bit low.Sorry if this has been answered before, but before I started running DropStats I wanted one clarification...
So let's say I take my psuedo-farmer out for a spin--do I need to change her difficulty to include bosses to get an accurate reading? Or will DropStats count the lts as lts, not bosses?
It won't be out by very far unless you kill a very high proportion of bosses. For example, if you average 1 boss, 2 Lts and 5 minions in each spawn then the given drop rate will be about 10% too low.
Personally, I'd fight what I like and then complain to the author of DropStats that it doesn't work properly. -
Quote:No. The drop rate is accurate* but it's not based on all your defeats and all your drops. It didn't include any defeats where DropStats couldn't work out the mob's rank. In your case that means Fiction Purple 4-4-3, Gunslingers etc. The drop rate is accurate because it excludes any drops you got from those mobs as well.this part:
(Table excludes mobs of unknown rank and their drops.)
means that the table is not quite accurate?
The next version of DropStats should identify more of the unknowns. ('cos it identifies Gunslingers etc when you're in SuperGroup mode.) If you run it again you'll probably see a slightly different drop rate. This doesn't mean that old rate was inaccurate. It's just the effect of the RNG. There's not much chance that the extra mobs dropped exactly the right number of recipes to keep the drop rate identical.
(*at least as accurate as I can make it!) -
Quote:<PIMP MODE ON>I would gladly do the instance 20-30 more times for a consistency check, but I need a program to track these things instead of clearing inventory after every pass. I want to know the exact kill/drop ratio, and what rank of mob dropped what IO recipe. Is there a parser program for combat logs, or will I need to make one?
Yes there is. Try Drop Stats. It counts your drops, separates defeats by rank and calculates your drop rates.
It also washes dishes and leads to world peace.
</PIMP MODE OFF>
You need to turn on chat logging to use it and you can run it against any chat log you happen to have. There's no need to leave it running in the background while you play.
The only real down side is that it doesn't work very well until you hit level 50 (see above) and you can't use it to calculate drop mates when you're on teams.
Enjoy! -
Quote:Just to clarify...Hmmm...so I changed from being in SG mode and noticed my rates are a lot lower...though i think this is an issue with DropStats (I know you're working on it, Archie)...not a bug in CoX.
I'm 99% sure that SG mode doesn't affect the accuracy of the drop rate calculation. It does affect the number of mobs whose ranks can be identified with the heuristic rank check though.
The next release of DropStats will take account of SG mode and so will identify more mobs. -
Quote:Short answer: No. It will identify the rank of some low level mobs correctly and leave the others out of the drop rate calculation.So I was looking at this drop stats script that's been put together, and I noticed that the page says that it won't work very well for characters that aren't level 50 - it will fail the heuristic rank check. Does this mean that it won't be able to identify the rank of enemy mobs at all?
Long answer:
The vast majority of mobs can only have one rank. For example, Centurions are always lieutenants and Legionarii are always minions. As long as these mobs are listed in mobTypes.txt then DropStats will identify their rank. Lots of low level mobs haven't been added yet and will show up as "unknowns". (You can add more mobs yourself, if you wish.)
Some mobs, such as Possessed Scientists, can have different ranks. The "heuristic rank check" tries to guess the rank based on the amount of inf you were awarded. It only knows about level 50 inf awards so it will always fail at lower levels. (or if the mob was damaged etc.) Incidentally, DropStats doesn't know what level you're fighting at so it will do a heuristic rank check even if the two ranks only ever occur at different levels.
The latest version of will DropStats excludes mobs and their drops from the drop rate calculation unless it can identify their rank. So the drop rates will be accurate but might not include all the mobs you defeated.
In case anyone's wondering, the tallies for salvage and recipes etc are always correct, irrespective of level.
At some point, I'll add the low level mob types to mobTypes.txt. If anyone wants to do this for me and send me their file then I'll be delighted to include their changes in the next release. -
Thanks for posting, Synapse.
Can you confirm that the Wiki description of the drop rate is correct. i.e. that the rates are intended to be:-
Minions 2.666667%
Lieutenants/Snipers/Bosses downgraded to Lts 5.333333%
Bosses/EBs 7.999999%
AVs either 100% or 0%, depending on the AV
Can you also confirm that Pool A includes purples and temporary powers but not costume pieces.
This would be really helpful to those of us who are trying to reproduce the bug.
Thanks very much. -
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Quote:EarthWyrm was also asking what's in Pool A.BTW, are Purple recipes include in Pool A? Because I think I dropped more purples than rare recipes... And seeing how purple prices are decreasing at the market, it seems that purples have no problems in dropping (whereas some uncommon are getting higher and higher...).
Based on reading the Wiki, I believe that Pool A includes purples and temporary power recipes. It doesn't include costume pieces which are in Pool E.
From some of the testing I've seen it looks like Pool A rares are only about twice as common as purples. This means that it wouldn't be unusual to get a few purples in a big run and fewer rares.
Just to finish the set... Recipes that drop when you complete a mission are Pool B. Pools C and D contain lots of juicy recipes. They used to be awarded for completing trials and task forces. These days they've been combined and you now get them from random rolls or defeating bosses. I suspect that getting one from a boss defeat is very rare.
This is the break down that DropStats uses except that it counts Pool C/D critter drops as Pool A.