Archie Gremlin

Thanks Cat.

It doesn't matter how many files you send or how much stuff is in each file. Just send whatever's most convenient for you.

My current estimate is about 1 in 2000 minions or minion equivalents. i.e. 0.05%. (This is mostly based on TopDoc's data.)

Curiously, Pool A rares are almost as rare as purples. Their drop rate is bout 1:1000.

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.

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.

Unless the drop rate fix and AE tweaks cause supply to continue to rise and prices to fall to their I13 level of around 25M. It'll be interesting to see.

Good luck Smurphy!

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.

You're welcome too!

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.)

You're welcome. It's good to know that people are using it.

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.

The single biggest factor in determining how many drops you get in a play session is how many mobs you defeat. (Actually defeats divided by team size.) If you've been running story arcs in a team while your friend has been whupping Battle Maidens then he will get far more drops per hour than you. (Possibly 20 times as many.)

(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.

Thanks very much for letting us know that you've found the bug.

Thanks also to all those who have reported their runs. Especially those who did a lot of runs.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

<PIMP MODE ON>
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!

Just to clarify...

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.

Short answer: No. It will identify the rank of some low level mobs correctly and leave the others out of the drop rate calculation.

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.

I've released version 0.3.1 that fixes this. (I think! Please let me know if it hasn't.)

Thanks very much to NordBlast and TopDoc for reporting the bug.

Were any of you who saw this bug in AE or super group mode?

EarthWyrm was also asking what's in Pool A.

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.