Farming in general does more people farming an area cause less drops?

totally agree. I have many occasions proving to me this is true but I'll point out the one you mentioned about the tusks. 1.5 hours at Mount Qinkai-3 tusks. After traveler left for about 5 minutes or so, 10 drops in 10 minutes...luck my ass -_-;

I've suspected A before, but seeing as some of my best drops have been when whatever I was doing was a Zquest I don't think it is actually true. The brain is a tricky thing, often draws patterns from randomness.

I noticed a very poor drop rate for the tusks. But I don't think it is the number of people affecting my drops, because my inventory was filling up full of other stuff.

One thing I have found the closer you are to where you zoned in the lesser the quality drops if any at all. I've been zoning out at the Hatchery and going north also getting a chance at a nice green necro staff on the way to the rots just outside of Eredon Terrace. I get 2 to 3 a run this way where I used to get none per run when I exited out of Eredon Terrace. So I'm pretty sure there's a line in the sand before stuff starts dropping either distance or number of kills. I've noticed this when doing newbie areas in hard mode and initially when zoning out I don't get much if anything, once I've moved a lot and killed a lot then things start dropping and in all colors and quality.

Because if we knew exactly what the loot code and drop calculations were there would be a million whinners screaming it's not fair because <enter 1 million reasons> one that would come to my mind would be time playing. So, it's best to just leave it to speculation and wonder this way nobody can really whine because they don't know.

I just know I get my fair share of good drops and number of drops and I play with 3 heroes all the time. Soloist scream about the number of drops they get because they think if they can solo they should get 8 drops and not just 1 lol. But, I don't think anyone should be able to solo in the first place so I think it's more than fair the amount of drops and quality they get regardless.

I firmly believe there is a drop quota system running, that clears every day.

I remember when I started farming corsairs for scimitars when HM was introduced, I was among the first to farm there, and the drops were very good, but after one week of mass farming, drops were bad.

I did lots of runs, and clearly saw the quality of drops decreasing, I don't know what's behind this phenomenon, but I will never believe there is nothing until I see the code by myself.


On the other hand, Vaettirs have always been a great spot, with many gold and event item drops, but that's the only place where I haven't seen loot decreasing significantly.

B. It's all luck.

I get the same drops on average whether hundreds of people are farming, or there's no-one but me in the starting outpost. I've farmed some places to death, for weeks or even months, and seen no decline in the averages.

I consider all "reduced drops" theories to be superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

Its time, wait 2 mins and the mob just outside the door drops as normal. ie, you start a zone with full rate of kill drop throttling.

Miniature Polar Bears do not exist. There is no such item.

OP: It's A, or at least it was at some time in the past. 55 Prot Bond farming proved that to me, as the ecto drop rate increased markedly if America got favor late at night (1-3 AM). I had a hard time believing that all the 4, 5 and 6 ecto runs from smite farming would distribute during off-peak American hours by pure chance. Never crunched the math on it, but that had to be at least a 1 in 50,000+ proposition by pure chance.

I have said this in the nic thread before and I stick by the diff drop rate.
If you farmed the points last weekend you would ususaly get lots of Tusks
Colecting them for nic this week the drop is way down.
Noticed this with most things nic wants but then it's still luck chucked in there as well.

There is a difference between not being aware of an item that has been in the game for all of 3 hours...
and explicitly going out of your way to refute stuff about a basic game mechanic on several different threads over the course of a year.

Definitely B. As somebody who has studied math, I know people have a tendency to see patterns in true randomness. The next person who says "but computers can't make things random" gets a giant mathematical pimp slap where I post the refutation of that since they clearly don't understand what that means. That is one of the most overquoted and misunderstood statements on the internet.

that is a question i often ask myself. if it is true, than the reason why I only get 89 gold from killing almost half of everything in the Sparkfly Swamp yesterday is not a mystery anymore. Left after that, but i am sure if i kill everything and return to the outpost, i would have 3 white item and 89 gold split 8 ways. true story, i swear!

randomness is very limited in GW

I remember two persons farming the same area with similar builds, entering at the same time, and getting similar drops (same gold items with same req and same mods, same amount of gold...)


btw, for someone who "has studied maths", you're rushing into conclusions without any kind of data to justify them

I'm with HawkofStorms. Bug John needs a slap

**** SLAP ****

She also said there wasn't a Mini Polar Bear. Sorry, HER credibility is SHOT!

1) Over the years actual recorded drop rates support the theory. Current drop rate trends still support this theory. This type of code is one of the best types of code to prevent areas from being over farmed and keep this month's flavor of 100K+ items from becoming ultra common. Until the "its just a theory" crowd start putting up drop results that do not conform to the theory, I'm perfectly content to keep the current belief.

2) Over the years Gaile's forum activity has consisted of teasers that are ultimately useless and giving false information because she "misunderstood" the developers.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you want something it seems like it doesn't drop as much? It's like the game knows what you're thinking and specifically changes the drop rate on that item to spite you.

This is what I believe and my drops support this theory.

I thought it was pretty weird when Nicolas wanted scale fins and I was hardly getting a droprate of 3 per area in places I'm used to seeing plenty per 2-4 kills. So I'm pretty certain farming rates do get affected.

The point stands: she was only as good as the information she was provided. Just because the coders told her something does NOT mean it was true. There is no difference between these two cases.

Whoever implemented the drop code has every incentive to lie if the statement is not easily falsifiable. Conduct a controlled experiment with sufficient data to demonstrate that the hypothesis isn't true, and I'll believe you. Until then, I'll stick with the implications of the data I have, thanks.

As an educated person that does math for a living, I'm aware of the perceptual bias. I'm also qualified to sort out what's random and what's not. The observation I mentioned was highly unlikely. Sure, stuff like that happens. I saw a guy drop two royal flushes on me in two hours the other night in Texas hold'em. And before you ask, he wasn't dealing either time.

But poker is a well-specified mathematical process. Deductive logic enables us to write off the incident as "stuff happens." Drop rates are not well-specified, and so we have to induct from available data. Given evidence that tends to confirm the hypothesis, should I believe the evidence or the word of someone who has previously been misinformed? Do you believe the propaganda of the Chinese government? (Or that of your own?)

Just because the PR person shouts it loudly doesn't mean it's true.

Your point? The degree to which the computer's outputs are "random" is entirely dictated by the mechanism the coder used to generate the outputs. You don't know what mechanism was used, but you want to simply infer that it produces outputs indistinguishable from truly random outputs?

Conclusion: you like making bad assumptions.