EarthWyrm

It looks like your rare recipes were from a slow set, a defense debuff set, and an immob set. Maybe one of the zingers is rare as well? Not much improvement to add a taunt set to that mix.

You're certainly unlucky. The quality of drops is always going to vary, but as someone already noted, the quantity looks about right. For every 6k defeats that you end up with this pile of dreck, you or someone else does 6k defeats and ends up with a purple or 2, a Numi: Heal, and a LotG: Defense. Don't sweat it - it all evens out in the end.

I'm pretty sure there are still people who have 50+ training enhancements stored away in bins, somewhere. I wouldn't use anything that's EVER existed in the game as a place to "store" excess inf in bid-form, on the off chance that someone might still have one.

I tend to recommend level 52-53 recipes. Those have never existed, and if something happened that caused them to suddenly start existing, we'd find out about it on the test server before it went live.

So you're worrying about people roleplaying heroes who doesn't believe in the possibility of redemption and rehabilitation? Point out to them that the heroic act would be to help make sure that the reformed villain in question is truly repentant and walking the proper path - or, if distrustful, to keep a close eye on a potential spy.

Refusing to work with the person at all keeps the hero from either being able to bring someone fully to the side of good, or puts innocents at risk through a refusal to take action. Unless they're playing "Ostrich Man," in which case I guess the head-in-the-sand technique is completely in-character.

Yes. The distribution across team members has always been strange, and it's been shown a few times that if you want drops, you're better off solo than teamed. It's even easier to see now, though, since you can observe what the drops would be solo on a map spawned for six or eight; adding another person, best case, probably cuts your drops in half.

If there's a bug in the distribution of drops across team members (and I don't doubt that such is possible, though I've not seen any hard data on it), that's independent of what we were seeing and what the devs fixed.

Theoretically, yes. People I play with regularly used to comment on my ability to get drops all the time; I thought it was random, and due to my playing a lot, but I may have been getting an above-average rate before I16, which would explain why the changes seemed SO massive to me.

Thank you so much, Synapse. I'm now kicking myself that in the data I sent you, I didn't mention that my cruddy runs were in a regular missions and my good runs were thru Ouroboros. I'm really glad you didn't give up on us, given all the wailing and gnashing of teeth. +Rep 4 u!

Not at all. I firmly believe that whatever's going on is somehow linked to account settings. It doesn't affect everyone, and we've not been able to come up with the variable that the folks who are experiencing low drop rates have in common. Nor have we been able to figure out what's different for the people who get drop rates significantly above average, like Synapse did. All data are relevant, and the fact that people aren't seeing anything different while others can't get decent drop rates to save their lives tells me that the bug exists in a form that masks it from detection by standard drop datamining.

That's because it's demonstrably worse for some people than for others. Beber, for instance, has consistently had a drop rate that's right around 70% of expected. He's got thousands of observations. Mine has ranged from 30-50%, with a comparable number. Synapse's was around 120% for the 15 missions he reported (5120 observations).

Please do. I'm guessing that you won't find anything out of the ordinary if I'm right about it being account-based, but if you could check out Archie Gremlin's "Dropstats" utility to track, that would be helpful since it allows a precise count of mobs defeated by class. Archie's utility is linked in his sig, and mentioned a few times in the thread on this topic in the Market forum. If you can't find it, PM me and I'll send you a link.

The thing that's making this bug so hard to pin down is that it isn't consistent across accounts, but it's very consistent within; so we can't provide a sequence of commands/behaviors that guarantee anyone else will be able to replicate our cruddy drop rates, other than, "Log in to my character and play him" or "Come play with me on the map I've been using and observe what happens." I don't know that either of those offers has been accepted by a member of the dev team, but I know that the latter has been publicly offered by at least two different players, and the former suggested at least once.

On the Test server, I've primarily run the Abyss map on its "normal" version (I saved the map for a long time because it was the last arc in the game that I hadn't finished on my brute, and didn't want to feel like I had done all the v-side content on one character...). The bulk of my low-percentage drops came from that. When I ran the same map thru Ouroboros, I didn't notice a difference, but as Leandro says that may still be a contributing factor.

To answer another of your questions that I accidentally deleted, the version of my brute that I've used on Test is not in any SG.

I have all the add-ons except, I think, the DVD edition. Badge title is "Goon Squad". Never had Chronologist awarding anything while I was testing, but also never completed the mission.

I think "buttload" is a pretty good descriptor. I just wasn't interested in re-posting all my data in more than one thread.

Synapse's test didn't show that there's no problem with drops; his observed drop rates were actually TOO HIGH for the map he was using. If there's an issue with drop distribution (note: Not "drop rates," as those are fixed numbers internal to the system that have not, based on what Synapse said, been modified - the problem seems to be somewhere in how drops are distributed, which is odd given that almost all the testing has been solo, so where the drops are being distributed to is quite beyond me), and if it's consistent within an account, then sometimes a player will experience and complain about too-few drops. There will also, however, be players who obtain too many drops - and Synapse DID. The expected number on that map is 11.2 recipes. His lowest number over 15 runs was 14 recipes. Over 5000 mob kills (about what he had), that is extremely unlikely (but not impossible) to happen by chance.

I'm glad for the people who either aren't affected or who are getting higher-than-intended drop rates. If there really is a bug in drop distribution (which I believe to be the case), then within a month people are going to figure out how to locate the maps/situations that will give themselves the best drops and use the bug to exploit the reward system. But hey, at least we know that if it happens, we can't get banned for doing that - since we're only "perceiving" that we get more drops under those circumstances.

I've been testing this since Beta. My results have been consistent enough, and documented on the forums in various places, that when Synapse declared this was all a "perception issue" I almost went and cancelled my accounts. I'm still here and still trying to figure this out because I love the game and want to see the problem fixed.

On my brute I've used for 95% of my testing, everything is stock. In fact, the costume he's in hasn't changed since I added an aura at level 30, and he hit 50 in summer 2006.

My Dom got cruddy drop rates over a few hundred kills today, and has customized powers.

You and Synapse have that in common. He should do a comparison of your account and his to all the accounts (like mine) that are seeing decreased drops to try and isolate what it is that differentiates people who are seeing "business as usual" from those of us who have produced mountains of data showing that for us, at least, something is not working right.

Most of my testing has been out, but when I switched in for a few missions a while back I got no meaningful difference.

I did a small bit of testing tonight with characters on 2 different servers. Got below-expected (read: < 50%) recipe drops on both. Both 50 vills, one a brute running the Abyss mission, the other a dom running the first mission in the arc that culminates in Lib TV.

I've not stopped playing and paying attention to what's going on, but right now I'm just trying to figure out if there is any pattern to be seen switching maps or characters. I'm coming up with a lot of nothing, in terms of new information, and sitting here at the end of every session running dropstats and doing hand calculations to demonstrate what I already know to be the case isn't going to change Synapse's mind.

Data aren't what he's looking for, unless those data include reproducible steps to get low drop rates, and continuing to do the same thing I was doing had a 0% probability of meeting that goal. So I'm playing and observing and hoping for some pattern to emerge that can lead to solution. I'll try and switch up characters more often, at least once in a while, to run the same maps and see if I can get different results.

About the only organized thing I can think of that a large-scale effort might make worthwhile is having multiple people do 5-10 runs each of the exact map Synapse used, with the same settings, to see if (a) people get consistent drop rates within characters, (b) whether the consistent drop rates obtained differ across characters, and (c) what the characteristics are of characters that get good, average, and poor drop rates. But that would take a lot of people to be able to meaningfully isolate the problem, and then there's no guarantee that what we identified would generalize to other maps.

I was using mentally skewed data, so you could be right. I've gotten two Pool C drops off bosses ever, and got a half-dozen purples dropping just during Beta for I16 (and one of the two Pool C's).

But I've also defeated a metric TON (tonne?) more minions and lieutenants than I have bosses, so my internal data aren't going to be reliable. In fact, I can't think of any of my purples that came off a Boss+ critter. It seems unlikely that none of them did, but given my play style prior to I16, it's entirely possible.

I also misspoke; it's not just bosses in missions, it's bosses anywhere. One of my two dropped while beating stuff up out in the wild in the RWZ.

Pool C recipes have a very small chance (probably smaller than purple drops) to drop off Boss-class (or higher, I believe) mobs in any mission. This was implemented a few months ago, but is so rare that few people have ever had it happen to them.

The costume recipes aren't Pool A, so we can drop those out of the analysis entirely.

Did the scrapper get any common recipes? If not, that looks like 2 common, 1 uncommon, and 1 ultra-rare for the entire map. 4 recipes for a map that size is definitely low. I'll have to see if I have a way to get that map on any of my melee heroes to do some testing; is it available thru Ouroboros, and if so, what arc?

My main map (the first mission of Abyss's "Light and Darkness" arc) is all Council. I've got somewhere between 7-10k observations on it, and the drop rate has never been good for me on the character I used for testing.

If there's an effect for enemy group, we've not been able to get it to replicate across different testers.

The other thing that makes this problem insidious is that Synapse himself demonstrated that drops can be above average, a number of us have demonstrated that in specific testing situations (specific characters on specific maps - or, in BillZ's case, pretty much everywhere) the drop rates are abysmally low - and sometimes, everything will work as advertised.

The thing is, I don't think the overall distribution of drops is normal right now. I suspect that it's rectangular, which would still keep the mean and median right where they're supposed to be.

It had crossed my mind that one of the elements of the RNG seeding might have to do with the server clock and the creation of the mission instance, but given how consistent my findings have been on specific maps, I tentatively rejected that idea. The different clocks, and anything else that might be different across servers when maps were generated, were things I thought about, but the fact that I can still get back on test and get the same drop rates I got all the way through beta, and still get on live, leads me to tend to reject that - though I'll admit that the motivation to run a lot on test is kind of low for me right now.

This is what he said when he posted his data in this thread. He only sent me data for the first five, which I assume were on the internal server, since he said something about then heading to Test to verify what he'd seen.

As far as I'm concerned, his having done some portion of his drop analysis on the Test server doesn't invalidate anything; even if he used [The I Win Button] to clear the last 10 maps, the fact that his results were so incredibly consistent (and above expected values) that it looks like Internal-Test is a reasonable translation. As to Test-Live, my piddly drop rates began on Test when I started in the Beta, and carried over pretty exactly to Live. If he'd only done his testing on the internal server I'd see that as a meaningful criticism of his testing, but he didn't.

That being said, it can't hurt to replicate on Live, and I really hope he takes someone up on the opportunity to run some maps with them. Even if he's there as a non-teamed police drone, it'll give him a chance to observe first-hand what the drops are like. We know the drops generated for the entire team were once put into their own channel in the chat tab, so that datastream still ought to exist.