EarthWyrm

It's worse than that, actually. Costume recipes aren't in the same drop pool as anything else, so those runs you quoted only yielded three Pool A recipes. Without knowing the total mob count, I can't calculate a drop rate, but I think I have that map saved and can see about thrashing it with my fire/fire tanker later tonight. I almost burned myself out on the game testing drop rates during beta, though, so no promises.

It was Synapse on the closed beta boards. He said that there hadn't been any adjustment to the drop rates of recipes or salvage and that they tested normally internally, but he was going to the training room to test it out in practice. That was the last I remember hearing from him on the topic.

Indeed. I'm disappointed that the 26-30k observations Archie compiled from our testing weren't enough, but the behavior on Live is pretty much exactly what it was on Test as near as I can tell.

On the bright side, the lack of motivation to play my 50s for lewts means I'll have more time to level my new claws brute. What's the over/under on how long it takes Spin to get ner^d^d^d adjusted?

The current behavior on live is exactly the same behavior we documented on Test without much comment from the dev team. There will be inexplicable accounts/runs who get good drops and good luck when it comes to recipes, but most of us were seeing 50-70% of the old drop rates. Mine weren't even that good, most of the time.

I ran a pair of PACKED maps yesterday (one the same Council map I used for most of my testing, one a packed map of Longbow) and over the course of ~600-700 kills, saw 4 recipe drops.

The psychology of the drop rate is an important thing to understand. What we're on, from a behaviorist perspective, is a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. We know that if we repeat the same activity often enough (defeating mobs) we get a desired result (recipe drop), but we don't know exactly how many times we have to perform that activity to get the reward. This continues to be motivating as long as the individual performing the behavior has a reasonable expectation that, "The next one could be the big one!" It's the same principle that keeps people pulling slot machine levers all day, or rats pressing bars to try to get a food pellet.

The problem is that if the ratio of performance/reward becomes too low, the motivation to continue working for the reward is diminished. Rats stop pushing bars. People walk away from the slots. Players stop logging in.

At least one person in this thread has already said as much in the one day this has been live, if not in those exact words: the current drop rate makes drops infrequent enough to lose their motivating power. Whatever the issue is that has led to the decrease in recipe drops, I very much hope the devs will be able to datamine what it is that differentiates the characters that get drops consistent with old drop rates from those that don't (other than random chance; I'm hoping there's a legit bug here somewhere!) and get it fixed so that we can go back to getting our shinies.

Just finished Lib TV. For today's session, 19 drops realized, 31.52 drops expected. My partial run on it last night gave me 14 drops with 16 expected for the amount I'd gotten done.

It looks like I may have been overly optimistic in my willingness to say that this was fixed. Oh well. Can anyone else run on the TV Don map and see if they come up with a good drop rate? That was the only map where I've been above expected since beta started, but I've only run it once.

I'm not getting the same number for expected recipes you are. I get 36, rather than 32, which makes your results even worse (though only barely outside the 95% confidence interval).

What expected are you using for minions? Paragonwiki says the drop rate for recipes for minions is .0266667, but I've seen a few folks in various threads using .0233333. The .0233333 gives close to 32 for the expected, so I'm guessing that's what you used.

With 1134 observations, you've got a margin of error of +/- about 1%. Your weighted expected drop rate looks like 3.17%, so anything down to 2.17% would be within chance. Unfortunately, you're at closer to 2.03%.

I could have just had a mutant session. There could be an element of what time you log in or what time you register your first kill that feeds into the RNG seed, and I just got really lucky. I'll try to do a little more data gathering before my wife and I leave town today, to see whether my experience yesterday was far afield. I'll also go back to the map I've done most of my data-gathering on after I finish the Lib TV map I've got sitting in my flashback.

My limited observations lead me to agree. Set to +0/8, ran the "TV Don" mission and a little less than half of the "Liberate TV" mission. 513 minions, 327 lieutenants. Expected Pool A drops: 31.12. Actual Pool A drops: 36.

Pending further confirmation, I'll offer a preliminary "gg, devs," and continue to wonder what the bug was and how they isolated it. That it's probably fixed is enough for me to be happy, though.

I honestly had no idea that giving him a wordier version of what he'd already been told would do anything other than incite more rage, given what he'd posted to that point. I really don't feel like I told him anything new.

There was someone in another thread bemoaning 20 or so runs on that map without a purple. About 3 posts in, he came back and said he just got 2 in one run. Any single run I can write off as everybody's favorite, "Random drops are random". I'm just shifting maps because of the possibility that the Council map I'd been using was part of the problem, but another 1400 kills later, I still can't get anywhere near the advertised drop rate.

Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if character names actually contributed part of the seed value for the RNG, and all those people who claim that they never get drops on their mains don't get them because of how they named their characters?

There wasn't a patch today that I could tell, and the character I've been testing with was still getting junk for drops yesterday (in terms of percentage vs. expected, not necessarily in terms of quality). Without being able to isolate why, though, I can't imagine that there's much Synapse or anyone else can do about it.

edited to add: ran the first mission of the arc that includes "Liberate TV" (the one with the freaks and DE on the graveyard map). 365 minions, 394 lieutenants. 15 Pool A recipes realized. 31 Pool A recipes expected based on previously known drop rates. Better than what I get on the council map, but still low. Given how much Castle and BABs were on the forums today, expect I16 to be live by the time I'm awake again.

I would if it were still giving it. Overnight, without a reboot, it decided to become able to run.

Stats for the 3 paper missions from yesterday: 259 minions, 71 lts, 17 bosses who also downgraded to lts, 5 Pool A recipes.

Will run more tonight. I'm tempted to swap to a different version of the l50 brute to see if the bug is in the character, but will try to get to 1k kills in papers/rikti missions/cimerora missions before I do so.

edited to add: 210 minions, 210 lieutenants (counting downgraded bosses), 4 shadow cyst crystals: 4 Pool A drops (none from a cyst). Will do more tonight if the storm that I keep hearing in the distance decides to skip us.

I've not been able to get it to work, which kept me from posting more results last night. I suspect I just need to reboot; when I type the command syntax, it gives me an error that makes me think that Perl didn't end up in the path as it was supposed to, but may be there once I reboot the machine.

Sure thing. Same mission on a different map didn't change for me, but I can grab something else thru FB to use for testing. Or a mayhem... that'd be fun...

Edited to add: I had the same concern during CB after my initial round of runs (I think it was then) so went to the RWZ and ran some Borea missions. After 3-4 of those, I was still getting really low recipe drop rates, so went back to the Council map because it had predictable spawn numbers.

Will post data from today's data collection later, not sure how many missions I'll get to run because the wife has some plans for us. First council paper mission, 3 Pool A, one costume recipe

Archie's breakdown above is, to me, a sufficient summary of the testing we've all been doing to present a compelling picture of what's wrong. Given that his analyses can be replicated by the Dev team by datamining everything that's happened across the various stages of I16 beta, I am comfortable concluding that some unintended change has occurred in drop rates that seems to be related to the virtual teammate slider.

Put more succinctly, over 20k observations is way more than enough for me to be confident that the patterns are incredibly unlikely to be the result of random chance.

I'm hopeful that whatever the issue is can be identified and dealt with prior to I16 going live. Given the somewhat questionable decision on the part of the competition to engage in large-scale nerfing on their launch day, I don't think the CoX team should feel any compulsion to push I16 live until it's as close to perfect as possible. Another couple of weeks, hopefully, should get this last major bug squashed.


Edit: I just mentally kicked myself. The one character I used who got higher drops than my brute was my dom, who I ran at -1/8. I should drop more characters down to 0 or -1, instead of the +1 I've used consistently on the brute.

Sorry about that. My most recent tests have all been +1/8, since I get the most data fastest that way. The 2484 was a combination of +1/8 and +1/1, and I believe (I'd have to go back through the thread and check) that the 617 was the +1/1 part of that.

Bosses, no AVs:

5 recipes (one Pool C drop from a boss - stoopid Glimpse of the Abyss proc...)
45 salvage

268 minions, 68 lt's, 8 bosses

Bosses and AVs both enabled:

1 recipe
32 salvage


268 minions, 68 lt's, 8 bosses

AVs, no bosses:

2 recipes
31 salvage

268 minions, 76 lt's

Tentative conclusion: Doesn't look like it matters, but n=344 per map, so I could be wrong

I have as well. I need to figure out where those files are of mine - I was just cutting/pasting my reward chat logs (I put my rewards in a tab by themselves) into a word document, doing a find-replace of every instance of minion-level inf with the word "minion" and every instance of lt-level inf with the word "lieutenant," and then using that to count total minions and lieutenants. What that means is, if I can locate the document, I can see whether there was any consistent pattern in who dropped what.

The problem is that my laptop, which is my computer most able to run City, is in the shop; it had a MB replaced and I got it back last week, only to have it start pixelating and crashing whenever I logged into City Saturday night (video card failing). And that's where my document with the tracking data was. I may have a copy of it on the wife's laptop as well, since I used that while the MB replacement was ongoing, so I'll go through this afternoon and see.

I know that at some point I was going through the logs and noticing that the drops seemed to be sorting by rank, at least somewhat, I just don't remember how that played out or whether it was more than what my brain perceived as an idle pattern.

It's late and I'm flying without a net (doing formulas from memory), so if I make a mistake, forgive me.

It looks like an overall drop rate of around 2.9%. If these are all minions (you're on the cargo ship, yes?) with 2080 observations your margin of error is around .7%. So the x1 drop rate (3.17%?) and the x2 drop rate (2.64%?) both look like they're within margin of error for what we would expect of minions, and when compared to each other.

The most striking thing, to me, is that this really does come out to almost exactly what we would expect. Archie's speculation about lieutenants being a big piece of the problem may be correct. Does the drop rate on this map skew downward when the team size is raised and there are lieutenants in the spawns?

I agree with your inner developer. Introducing a feature like this is likely to touch a lot of unforeseen bits of code. Hopefully the data being gathered can help them isolate the issue.

If that were the case, I would show a much higher drop rate on the same map spawned for 1, since the ticket cap is based on the number of spawn points. The drop rate has not been significantly higher spawned for 1, though. Things are borked all over.

Yes, now that you mention it there was something that went in with the ticket cap that caused maps with fewer spawn points to cap their rewards significantly lower than 1500.

The maps I've used for testing have been very large, though, and wouldn't be affected by something that reduced tickets based on spawn points. I don't think the cargo ship map would, either. I've also not seen anything that would indicate a "hard" cap. Most of my runs on the warehouse Council map have been 1-3 recipes, but I've had runs where I got as many as 7, and running the same mish on a different character on a slightly different map with the same number of total enemies have gotten as many as 12.

It's a good thought, and given the complexity of the code base it's not out of the realm of possibility that they're related, but I don't think a hard cap is what we're dealing with.