TopDoc

Hopefully it'll be on test today, and pushed live this coming Tuesday along with fixes to the 4 broken TFs.

I assume the fix isn't on the test server yet.

I was seeing 1/8 the expected drop rate.

My guess is PvP recipes. I know the Devs claimed that PvP changes would never affect PvE (how many times have we heard that?), but I bet some of their recent tinkering with PvP recipe drops didn't play nicely with the new difficulty system.

Pretty much, though I forget the exact details. I got it in Pocket D.

I've seen a few posts recently in which people complain that they can't get the nicest stuff in the game (purples). I wanted to explain a few things, so that in the future I can just point to this thread every time someone complains.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, the Devs set the drop rate. There is absolutely nothing that we as players can do about that. The Devs want purples to be ultra-rare, so they are. Complaining here about the drop rate is not productive. Go to the Developer's Corner forum, or the Suggestions and Ideas forum.

SECOND MOST IMPORTANT, purples are not needed. People played the game before purples. Characters loaded with just SOs can usually take on 3 even con minions, unless they made some bad choices when picking powers and slotting. No content is limited to chars with purple IO sets. I've never seen anyone require purples for a team, or even set IOs. Granted purples make the game easier. Purples make it possible to do some silly hard things, like solo AVs, or Rikti Pylons, or massive spawns of high level mobs. But the Devs DO NOT want everyone doing that, so purples will NEVER be easy to obtain.

Purples are an end-game activity. You only earn them by fighting high level mobs, a WHOLE LOT of high level mobs. They are designed to be a time-sink, something to do with your char after you hit level 50. If you want purples, you better be prepared to play your level 50 chars a WHOLE LOT. It used to take hundreds of hours to hit level 50, and the Devs probably started out with that same general time scale (or longer) to fully IO out a character with purples.

If you are not prepared to jump through the hoops the Devs created in order to earn purples, then you do not deserve them. If you feel you deserve them simply because they exist, and you pay your $15/month, I recommend you keep it quiet. You have a sense of entitlement that people in this forum will laugh at. It's about as silly as demanding a Hummer just because you have a Driver's License. Things do not work that way in the real world, and they don't work that way in the game. The high end loot in this game is already far easier to get than in most other MMOs. The Devs will NEVER make purples common enough that casual players can get lots of them.

How long does it take to get purples? My average from farming is one purple every 1500 minions. I could get on average one per hour with my very fast farming char. Your average character is significantly slower, and it could take upwards of 10 hours of play per purple. Teaming may take longer, just due to the lower defeat speed on teams. I'm giving you these numbers to help set your expectations. Run Hero Stats and find your kill rate, divide it by your team size, figure out how long it'll take to defeat 1500 mobs, and that'll give you an indication of how long on average it'll take to find one random purple.

You only deserve the purples that you get as drops. If you want MORE than that, you have to convince other players to give them to you. Other players can be very unreasonable. You may have to give them a WHOLE LOT of Inf to get what you want. This is normally done on the Market. If you want to complete a purple set, you have the same problem. It is unlikely you'll get a whole set from drops, given their random nature. The Devs added the Market specifically so people could sell the recipes they don't need and buy the ones they do need. You may be able to complete a set by asking friends, SGmates, or global chat channels. But for ultra-rare things, the Market is often your only choice.

A LOT of people come to the Market looking for purples. Casual players don't play enough to get many purple drops, so they want to buy them at the Market. People who like playing lowbies don't get purple drops, so they come to the Market. Players with purples who want to finish a set come to the Market. Powergamers who want to solo AVs come to the Market. On the other hand, not a whole lot of people are selling their purples at the Market. If I find one that I think I may be able to use some day, I'll store it in my base, or keep it in my Enhancement Tray. Lots of people would never consider selling a purple. Low Supply and High Demand have massively increased the price of purples.

Supply has taken a lot of hits recently. You can't earn purples in AE (except in Dev Choice arcs), and a WHOLE LOT of people were just doing AE for months. Issue 16 has gotten a lot of people out of the AE building, but there's at least one bug that has significantly reduced recipe drops. I'm getting 1/8 of the usual Recipe drops on one of my farm maps. Some farmers have simply stopped farming till the bug gets fixed. Nothing has reduced Demand. In fact Demand has increased significantly in the past few months, due to the amount of PLing that went on in AE. And all that PLing has produced a lot of Inf that can go to purchasing purples.

The absolute richest players in the game set the price for purples. If a single Armageddon: Acc/Dam enters the market each day on average, then it will be purchased by the one person who bids highest. Now there are a LOT of rich people in the game. There are Ebil Marketeers, farmers, PLers, and hardcore players who have a LOT of Inf. There are probably people who have used exploits (snake egg farm or some Duping hack) to rack up huge amounts of Inf. And there may be people who buy from the RMTers. So there are plenty of people with a billion or more Inf. That single Armageddon: Acc/Dam each day will go to the single ultra-rich person who bids the highest.

The Market is a PvP zone. You are competing with other players to buy purples. You need a WHOLE LOT of Inf to win there. You need to be the single ultra-rich person who bids the highest. Patience helps too, as you may be able to win with a lower bid if no ultra-rich person happens to be bidding that day. Now there are a lot of different ways to earn enough Inf to become the winning bidder. You can become an Ebil Marketeer, or a farmer, or just a hardcore player. But there's no way you'll ever earn enough Inf to buy multiple nice purple IO sets if you remain a casual player.

It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to become good at Market PvP, and most marketeers believe the rewards are better than anything else in the game. There are a lot of threads in this forum about earning Inf fast and easy using the Market. Complaining about the price of purples won't really accomplish anything. But earning massive Inf using the Market will.

tl;dr THE PUPLE ANSWER: Play your 50s a WHOLE LOT, or play the Market.

Updated composite stats. As before, the Expedient Reinforcement isn't recognized properly because it doesn't have (Recipe) at the end of the name. But both it and the Mako's Bite are Pool C drops from a boss, and so shouldn't be counted. That gives me a total of 9 Pool A Recipes for 2295 minion equivalents, or 0.39%. That's about 1/7 of the expected rate.

For all of you people commenting on the test server, all of this testing was done there. It's far better than the drops I was getting on live under slightly different circumstances (1 recipe in 6000 mobs). So hopefully Synapse can reproduce it.

"Defeat all Clockwork at factory" from Unai Kemen, gotten from him directly (no Flashback), solo, difficulty +1/8/yes/no, level 50 Stone/Stone Tanker, mobs are level 51, most spawns have 2 bosses, but some are all Minions and Lts.

Current cumulative stats below from 4 runs between 9/20 and now. Note that the Expedient Reinforcement is unknown because it doesn't end with (Recipe), so I actually got 8 Recipe drops. But both that and the Mako's Bite are Pool C/Gold drops that I got from bosses, so they shouldn't count. My Pool A results are therefore 6 recipes in 1708 minion equivalents, or 0.35%. That's about 1/8 the expected rate of 2.66%.

Test server, "Defeat all Clockwork at Factory" (Board Train), the regular mission from Unai Kemen, no Flashback, no teammates, Difficulty set at +1/8/yes/no, done by Clocker, a level 50 Stone/Stone Tanker.

I tried dropstats, but got the following:

$ perl /cygdrive/c/drop/dropstats.pl game/chatlog\ 09-20-2009.txt

----------------------------------
Archie Gremlin's Drop Stats v0.3.0
http://www.glasspaw.com/dropstats/
----------------------------------
Illegal division by zero at /cygdrive/c/drop/dropstats.pl line 178.

UberGuy, there are lots of things that can mess up the datamining. If there's something wrong with the final choice of who to give a drop to, then data-mining may indicate things are being dropped when they really aren't. For example, if the "spawn for 8" difficulty fills the team up with 8 chars who aren't really there, they may be the ones getting the drops. In my case (6000 mobs at level 53), the game may log that it's giving me a Crushing Impact, but then give me nothing because it doesn't hand out level 53 set IOs. It may also be a problem that only affects certain people, like those who fight at particularly high level or against very large spawns. That's a small percentage of the population, so the reduced drops there may be lost in the noise of everyone else. The Devs would need to do some different data-mining to figure out these sorts of things. Like mine just solo people, or mine just missions run at level+3, or things like that. But even that won't help if the data being mined is wrong, as in the first example.

Nord, could you try some different settings? Like try mobs at +1, +2, or +3 if you can manage. Your results for even level mobs look fine, so it'll be obvious what's wrong if you change something and the recipes stop.

badchad, in Cimerora the mobs spawn with fixed sizes and levels. I don't think your difficulty affects that at all. But certainly try farming the wall at significantly different difficulties and see what happens. If you're getting fewer recipes than normal and you have your difficulty to be spawn for a team of 2, they may be linked. Change to spawn for a team of 8, and see if the recipes stop.

Archie, the info in my original post should be sufficient for the Devs to track down the problem. Under virtually identical circumstances, the drops were significantly different. The main difference was getting big spawns using the difficulty slider versus using offline padders in a Flashback. In both cases I was solo, but the game internally has to recognize the difference. Somehow that appears to make a difference in handing out recipes.

I started a new thread HERE describing my results, as the devs seem to be reading that forum. I've PLd a char from 1 to 31 so far, using the same map and same settings (level +3, spawned for 8). I've defeated over 6000 mobs based on the Prestige I've earned. In all that time, I've earned 4 recipes, and 3 of those were costume drops. For all I know, someone gifted that last recipe to me while my lowbie was outside the mission, because I stopped checking after a while. Drops are broken. I've asked for more input in that thread.

I've been PLing a char. The level 50 farmer is set for +3 level mobs and missions spawned for 8. I get big spawns of level 53 mobs. I have PLd another char from level 1 to level 31 since Update 16 went live in one of Unai's missions. That's over 6,000 minions, based on the amount of Prestige I've earned. While defeating those 6,000 minions, I have earned a total of four recipes. Three of those are costume recipes (which aren't in the regular drop pool), and one was a common IO. I don't know the circumstances of how I got that common IO, as I had given up checking for recipes after a while. For all I know, some generous level 50 char slipped it to him while he was standing around outside the mission. I've gotten reasonable amounts of XP, Inf, Salvage, Inspirations, and Enhancements.

In order to test this with a control, I tried the same Unai mission under 2 similar circumstances. I have a level 50 Tanker in a Flashback that was started with 8 chars, so he gets full spawns. I set his difficulty to +1 mobs so I would get level 51s. I was the only person in the flashback logged in. Defeating ONLY minions, he got 2 Uncommon Recipes after defeating a total of 184 minions. That's a very small sample, but that's around the expected rate. I didn't see a need to get a larger sample.

I then copied my char to the test server (running the same version as live). I wasn't in the flashback, but I just so happened to have the exact same Unai mission as given by him normally. I set my difficulty to +1 mobs, spawned for 8. So I was on the same map, fighting the same mobs, at the same spawn size (spawned for 8), at the same level (51), with me being the only char in the team. I defeated 774 minions only, and I only got a costume recipe. Again, costume recipes come from a different drop pool than regular recipes. In the good old days, I would have gotten on average 15+ Common, Uncommon, and Rare recipes.

So it looks like increasing the team size completely shuts off regular recipe drops under some circumstances.

I have heard many other people make similar claims, some with numbers to back them up, but I haven't heard anything from the devs one way or the other as to whether or not drops are broken. Does anyone have any further information on this?

As I was deleting spam emails yesterday, I saw something that caught my attention. One of the sites is now selling Inf in 10B blocks. So yes, prices have seriously gotten WAY out of hand.

Necroposter!
FPARN!

This thread may come in handy when I16 goes live, if people want to compare drop rates.

I'm curious, what level set IOs do you get when you're fighting 48s? I've always farmed 50+ mobs, and I've always gotten level 50 recipes. Given the sometimes significant price drop on some recipes going from 50 to 49, plus the significant loss of Inf from defeats, I don't know that the drop in income is worth the trivial difference in difficulty. Sure you'll do 20% more damage versus 48 mobs, but does that means you'll defeat mobs say 20% faster?