Leg/Ext Items: A Replacement System

[Pyrizzle]

But you are not gerantied to get these items that's the whole point.

so? That is the whole point. These items to not effect wither a player can finish the game or not. I like the system the way it is now.

-1 sorry guys.

[fiernaq]

Actually, PK17, the lower the drop rate, the more likely you are to encounter someone who has significantly passed the number. Drop rates are deceiving. Think of them as possibilities.

(A) Possibility A: Item drops.
(B) Possibility B: Item does not drop.

If you kill one monster with a drop rate of 1:10,000 then you have one possible outcome where (A) occurs and 9,999 possible outcomes where (B) occurs.

If you kill a second monster with the same drop rate... guess what. You still have precisely one possible outcome where (A) occurs and 9,999 possible outcomes where (B) occurs. What happened with the first monster in no way affects what happens with the second monster or the third or the 10,000th or the 50,000th. Your chances do not go up the closer you get to that 10,000th kill. In other words, you could kill your 9,999th monster and roll one of the 9,999 possible (B)s and then you could kill your 10,000th monster and roll one of the 9,999 possible (B)s and then you could kill your 30,000th monster and roll one of the 9,999 possible (B)s etc... etc... etc...

People like to think of random as a system where if you flip a coin 100 times it will land heads up approximately 50% of the time give or take a few. However, in actuality, that coin has just as much of a chance to land heads up 100% of the time as it does of landing heads up 0% of the time or 39% of the time or any other %. Taking this concept to a 1:10,000 drop rate doesn't change it in any way as once again you have just as much of a chance of not getting the drop in 1 kill as you do of not getting the drop in 846,397 kills.

It's weird, it's funky, it goes against everything most people's brains tell them but that's the way the real world works and that's why statistics is not a guaranteed science. To go back to my opening paragraph, the reason it's true is because of statistics. Sample size would be the key element here. Take a large enough sample of a low drop rate item and you would still see those extraneous exceptions where someone kills 1000 monsters and gets nothing. Increase the drop rate and the required sample size to see those extraneous exceptions decreases. When you have a drop rate of 1:10,000 and only 500 people are playing the game you're going to see very different numbers. There won't be a massive cluster of almost everyone being within a few kills of each other for getting the drop.

To put it in visual terms, picture a small box about the size of a CD case that has a single hole just barely bigger than a marble somewhere on it. Now blindfold yourself, hold your hand over the box and drop a marble with ink on it. The ink will mark the spot where the marble landed and you'll probably have to drop a few marbles before you finally get lucky and one of the marbles goes through the hole. That's just one person. Multiply that by about 100,000 people each doing the exact same thing and you'll start to notice a pattern. Most people get the marble in the hole within a certain number of drops, probably 10-50 drops, but a few people will get it in only a handful of drops while others will keep on trying for a long time and may not get it in till 100 drops or even 200 drops. That's an example of a high drop rate. For a low drop rate, make the box MUCH bigger, say, the size of a room. Somewhere in that room is a hole big enough for a marble to go through. Take one person and try dropping a marble and it will take a while. Use 100,000 people each dropping marbles and guess what, some people will still succeed (most actually, if given enough time) but you will begin to see a much wider difference in number of drops it takes to get the marble through the hole. One person will do it in 5 drops, another in 60, another in 1,489, another in 21,537, another in 68,403, and another in 138,520 drops.

The reason I brought this idea up is to hopefully get rid of that huge difference. We don't have 100,000 people playing AT which makes the difference even worse. You want the hard work and effort players put into earning a legendary item to be rewarded appropriately. You do NOT want to give one player a legendary item for only spending a measly half hour grinding... especially not when you don't give another player that same legendary item even though they've spent the past 3 months doing nothing but grind away. Of course, you can't just lower the drop rate and hand everyone legendary items on silver platters... you still need to make people work for it. That's why you change the item being dropped to something that you have to collect many of and raise its drop rate considerably so you get a lot of them in order to exchange enough of them to obtain the actual legendary item you're after.

[PK17]

Really? Wow.... thanks for the third grade math lesson.

[Sarumar]

NO! A huge -1 here.... Make the leg. Items 1:25000 not 1:10000, the whole point of them is to give the player some 'ultimate' goal to strive for. They are not needed to progress the game in anyway, and provide no new areas, quests, or npc's. They are once in a lifetime items your adventurer has a very small chance of recovering on his expeditions.

I see no problems with the way it is, all good things come in time with hard work and perseverance.

+1 i agree, but instead of chansing drop rate of current legendary items i love to see a new category of items "unique" at drop chance 1/50000..

[PK17]

NO! A huge -1 here.... Make the leg. Items 1:25000 not 1:10000, the whole point of them is to give the player some 'ultimate' goal to strive for. They are not needed to progress the game in anyway, and provide no new areas, quests, or npc's. They are once in a lifetime items your adventurer has a very small chance of recovering on his expeditions.

I see no problems with the way it is, all good things come in time with hard work and perseverance.

+1 i agree, but instead of chansing drop rate of current legendary items i love to see a new category of items "unique" at drop chance 1/50000..

I like that, but unique sounds lesser than legendary, how about otherworldly items?

[Sarumar]

NO! A huge -1 here.... Make the leg. Items 1:25000 not 1:10000, the whole point of them is to give the player some 'ultimate' goal to strive for. They are not needed to progress the game in anyway, and provide no new areas, quests, or npc's. They are once in a lifetime items your adventurer has a very small chance of recovering on his expeditions.

I see no problems with the way it is, all good things come in time with hard work and perseverance.

+1 i agree, but instead of chansing drop rate of current legendary items i love to see a new category of items "unique" at drop chance 1/50000..

I like that, but unique sounds lesser than legendary, how about otherworldly items?

true... if the god of AT (Oskar) is with us... then perhaps we may have something better than just those legendary items..

[nyktos]

i have one waiting in Nor City, for those tainted enough to grasp for such a relic...

who have YOU been working for?

[fiernaq]

...you want even lower drop rates available for some items? I don't even... I accidentally the whole ocean! Time to finally break out the hex editor? I've been grinding off and on for the RoLS since before .6.11 was released in June 2012.