Seriously, whats up w/ the drop assignments? anyone figure it out?

All the drops are random for people within spirit range (1.5 aggro circles) of the dropped loot.

antifarm code was always real, some people still don't belive it

I have noticed it too a friend of mine always gets at least 1 ecto on every UW trip. If there is only going to be 1 ecto drop you can bet your money it will be for him.

_,.-+=’* ♥ Aurelio Furor [AUR] ♥ *’=+-.,_
Ariana Of Damia (Mo/Rt) ♥ Electra Of Damia (W/Mo) ♥ Lexa Of Damia (E/Mo)
Lily Of Damia (R/Mo) ♥ Mia Of Damia (Me/Mo) ♥ Zarina Of Damia (N/Mo)

For those of you who still do not believe in anti farming code, click on attachments.
2ndly on "lucky" accounts:
If there is a green I want I do one of two things:
A take my monk there, or ask that this one VERY specific guildie with her damned Ele to come with me. Any of my other characters will take forever, if they ever get it. My guildie will get it after 1 or 2, MAYBE 3 runs. Possibly one each run. My monk will get golds in the meantime hence why I take him.
My tank has possibly the worst luck of all my characters (hes my material maker), followed by my necro (wands and staves ftw!). My monk has really good luck with golds and my ele is great for ectos and shards. None the less, theres few items I actually wish to have, and my guildie will give it to me (free!) if I ask her to come with me to get one I actually want.
I do not 55 with my monk unless I am bored or want to try a new build, or want to duo UW for kicks. So that might have to do with his drop rate. Also, he travels all over cantha helping people. Karma.
As is the case with this guildie, its not her account, its specifically her one character. Its her lucky character. If we do Fissure runs, out of 8 shards that drop, she gets 5. If we do SF, she will get more than half of the greens. If its a specific boss, she WILL get the drop.
I believe in anti farming code and I believe some characters are luckier than others.
Also, I have never deleted a character. I bought a 2nd account instead. So I do not know if remaking a character will change the "luck" attribute.

I dont farm, but I have been playing a lot recently.
If I go on a mission (lets say tanaki temple) I will get 5 putrid cysts and nothing else....others in the group will get gold, purple, or even items...what I get is a big putrid cyst collection (have almost 100 of them now).
Did the venzuah square mission yesterday with another character----I got...putrid cysts and a few white items....almost everyone else in the group got at least 1 gold...me nada.

Now if my husband plays, he gets good stuff (one day he got both black dye and a sapphire).....so I have no idea why some people get good stuff and I get putrid cysts.

WTS putrid cysts!!

there's probably some kind of seed value that is set when you create your character. it could be as simple as the creation timestamp.

eudas

Let's hope not. Some random number generators are very bad and affected by seed value, meaning some characters might be forever cursed...

you're right on. thx for pointing that out for the others. I think for many, that is the point they have been trying to make..

No, there's no possibility of that. If my character is getting crappy drops in an area, I can guarantee that it's the way I'm playing him that's causing that, not some arbitrary magical "luck" factor that's been permanently attached to that character.

If you know a certain player who gets consistently great drops, or consistently crappy drops, just try copying their playstyle and see what happens with your drop rate. There's a lot I don't know about the drop rates, but one thing I do know beyond any doubt from my own personal experience is that gameplay style can definitely affect drop rates.

I'm pretty sure thats a perma drop...at least the 5 times I've gone its dropped.

Several guildies and I are now of the belief that each character seems to have a set luck for each area, with a "magic" spot for them too. Example, guildie A has taken 4 of his characters out to farm a certain spot. 3 of them consistantly get junk loot from these monsters. I have been trying this spot too and getting junk totalling 1.5k if Im lucky. The 4th charcter of his is constantly getting gold drops (up to 4 a run), coming out with an average 6k per run, and has gotten 5 black dyes from this spot over the last 3 days. I need to find my magic spot...

alright, this thread is 5 pages long, and i didn't have time to read it all, so forgive me if this has already been stated. I have taken numerous computer programming classes and the fact is:

There is no code to make something actually and literally random.

Heck this game's not even pseudo random if anyone wants to argue that.

I'm a regular farmer, and there are peculiarities I see when farming.

There are certain enemies that have semi-reflection of the item that will be dropped (predetermination anyone?) - as in if you see an ice golem holding a frost artifact, it is guaranteed to drop it unless you're running with henches.

This is not true with avicaras as in if you see one holding a fiery dragon sword, chances are it won't drop such an item- but this is as I said, only certain enemies, mind you.

Why back about 8 months ago when I said farming was good in Talus Chute and that I got decent amounts of gold and purples, it was because I noticed that some Tundra Giants can actually be seen holding giant slayer hammers when I get up close to it - and every time, said giant dropped the hammer which was guaranteed to be purple or gold.

But it seems that's no longer the case (it's been "patch"), now they mostly drop purple or gold armors and white or blue hammers, but they still do drop hammers when they are observed to be holding one.

If anyone wants further proof of this, go farm birds in the Nahpui Quarter mission - if you see them holding a celestial bow, sword, or shield, they will drop it (assuming you go without henches) and these celestial items will be gold - I guarantee it (no luck involved), because apparently celestial items can never be white, blue, or purple.

The way I see it, it's that whenever you zone and your world is "instanced" every enemy is assigned a specific drop - some of which can be seen via reflection, some of which can't.

I guess you could then argue that it is random, but once the world is "instanced", the items that drop are fixed.

Now, on another note - there was a time (about a year ago) when I went Fissure (FoW) farming with a player group, and this one guy intentionally went afk for maybe an hour or so, and as he went out of range of the party, he no longer got any drops; however, when he can back and came within range, 90% of all drops became his.

He even admitted knowing that the system was making it up for him.
Now I don't know about you guys, but I dont believe people should be paid overtime if they've been missing for a good chunk of time when they should've been present.

This is a major game exploit that may not have been fixed by now and to all you who can't believe how lucky someone else can get - check to see if people are going afk or out of range often.

I think you're onto something there. When the Icebreaker dropped for me in Talus Chute, the Grawl who dropped it was wielding it.
I'll try farming there a bit more to test it further.

I have noticed hugely disproportionate drops in FoW on a few occasions.
I sometimes Farm as warrior, and normally kill all the first 20 or so spiders all at once. I was farming on a chest run, when half way through killing all 20 spiders a warrior had run round and got through the cave. I carried on killing the spiders and when they died, every drop apart from gold was assigned to this other player. At least 15 items in total!!!
Another time I was monk on a 3 man FoW farm, this was quite successful yielding 22 shards between us yet 15 dropped or the warrior, as many as 5 in a row at some points.

The thing I noticed about this was (and the guy said this on the spider farm incident) was that they were both wearing full FoW armour. Has anyone else noticed this slight favouritism in the game?

I can answer your questions. Some people think its about what your character has done, or achieved. I could solo a boss for 20 runs and not get anything, then completed a mission in master time, go back to the boss and get nothing but straight greens every run. I have noticed that everytime i complete a mission, unlock an elite skill or some sort of achievement, when i open a chest its nearly always gold.
Whereas if i hadnt achieved anything for a long time, all my chests/drops suck. Try it out, you never know.

Also dont chest or farm with henchies, it mucks up the drops. I know this by experience

well thats true but computer generated numbers are random enough for games, you'll only see a pattern after tens of thousands of trials.

I said in Guild Chat 'woohoo got an Icebreaker' before it even dropped for me, lol, I knew that the one wielding it would drop it after I killed him.

Once again it's SoF to the rescue:

http://www.sof-guild.com/index.php?Page=safecasting

The stuff about drops is a ways down on the page, but if you really care about droprates, read the entire thing.

Well, I guess complaining on forums works. In the past two days, I've had 2/4 black dye drops I've ever had farming Elona's Reach. Maybe the Guild Wars gods favor those who read and post on the Guru before asking noobish questions.

I just have to say, I do not totally agree with the "IMPACT ON XP/LOOT" of the SOF website.

Who should the smites, aataxe, coldfires hate more? The person killing them, or the person using 3 spells. (ps, hb, bonettis) Yet time after time, I get the drops (all that nice white stuff) and the necro might get one or two things. This happens even after holding aggro the necro comes and stands next to me.

Secondly, since the aggro item nerf tanks have to manage aggro the right way. Most times those tanks are set to "survival mode" and most of the skills I would think the AI thinks are less important than a healing monk, an ele, a necro etc.

Thirdly, that article says nothing about characters getting an averge of better drops (not loot distribution) than others. So, the myth is still unsolved.

Last, playing safe "monks get no loot" is false in my case. He's probably the luckiest. Gets gold drops regulary (when I id them, well...).

The thing I do agree with is damage caused may affect loot distribution. An easy example of it is using NPCs by shrines. If you hurt a monster all the way down to 10% health and the NPC kill him off the rest, youll get the drop, on the other hand, if you bring the monster to the NPCs while still at a relativley high level of health and the NPC kill it, youll get nothing.

-done thinking for now-

Greetings,

I just had to pop in here and comment. When I saw all the comments about drop rates being random, I just cringed in my chair. With computers, there is no such thing as random. A computer is incapable of making a random decision/choice. This is coming from my years as a computer programmer. Snowman and others have it right - the computer must use "seed" numbers in a calculation for it's "random" number. The thing is - a computer can make computations so fast that when a monster dies, more than a million computations can be made between the death and the item drop. But, it is not a "random" drop.

By the way - the most common "seeds" for a computer's "random" decision is the date as well as the time (down to the fraction of a second) that the computation takes place.

When the drop rate is looked at in this way, along with the mounting testimonies from the various forum posts (along with my own experiences), it seems that there is a portion of the "seed" that is taken from either the account key or a character "tag". For example - the numerical equivalents of the letters in your account key are added together as part of the total "seed" number used in the "random" computation. Or, the letters of your character's name are used instead of the account key.

Truth be told, though, this is getting way too much "behind-the-scenes" about the game's programming, so we more than likely won't be hearing any kind of offical confirmation from ANet about how the loot system assigning works.

As for my own drops - I've been playing since August of 2005, and I've only gotten: one non-max green from outside Shing Jea Monastery, 3 golds worth doing anything more than merchant selling, no superior monk, warrior, or vigor runes. I've resigned myself to being a broke bum and mooching off of my room-mate's success .

Hope this helps those who are still scratching their heads over this whole issue.

Merry meet, merry met, merry meet again,
Wyldchild777

Do you have a link for that update, it'd would be handy for citation in future antifarm code arguments.

I've seen the bug actually. Went out with henchies, remembered to take a cap signet, so went back to town and exited right away. Drops where incredible crap (when there was drops at all). I was wondering if antifarm hadn't gotten too sensitive ...

Any hint there ? I do seem to get far better drop in Cantha than in Tyria, and better drops with my necro than with previous chars. Then again, no ground for comparison, since I'm mostly playing my Canthan necro through faction atm.


That would fit with the seeding theory : loot determined by character + local identifier. That would mean lucky UW farmers, but what if your lucky spot is old ascalon ...

yep, but there is code for decent pseudo-random ; that would be good enough.

Correcting for character activity is fine, but that will lead to major exploits (ie : leecher stays away from party for most of quest/mission, and moves in at boss to collect the goodies). It could also disrupt team dynamics : if doing damage improves your drops, wth ! I'm a prot monk, i don't deal damage, I deal _with_ damage ... I'm also relatively far from the action most of the time. If monking means dealing with disgruntled tanking eles (<avoid assassin trolling>) and getting crappy drops, this char will soon convert to 55/605 gentleman farmer ...

I have seen screnshots of the anti-farm bug, it IS real.

However i am not sure how to get rid of it...........whehter to farm another area until you get it there, or just not to farm there for a long period of time. Overall, it seems a bit pointless to use it when no-one knows about it or how to get rid of it.

That is assuming it was an update. If it was in the game from the get-go then it would not be documented anywhere, as it wouldn't be an update. It may be kind of like looking for the update that says Prince Rurik has Hundred Blades.

The loot system, totally random or not, is fair and just. People just simply don't know how to appreciate lucky moments and whine about every unlucky thing upon them.

People gets jealous when others get good things and selfishly believes a gain by others is a lose of himself; on the other hand, when he gets lucky, he continues to seek the next profit like a greedy dog and never gets enough. When both the jealous anger toward others' lucks and greed without bound boil his mind, he crys for the God's "unfairness". Since he puts himself in the center of all, he of course cannot understand why God's blessing isn't shining right at the "center".

No, it isn't. If it was fair and just, everyone would get an equal share of decent loot. As opposed to something like, 4 purples dropping during a mission and going to exactly 2 people.

Did you actually read the entire thing? It is unknown how much hate healing skills generate, but healing skills DO generate hate, and lots of it, if used a lot. By "playing safe" he means the closer you are to a "sit there and do nothing" build, the less hate you generate, so the less stuff you get. This theory is supported by some statistics Savio and I took on Orozar's runs in Sorrow's Furnace. For the last 30-40 runs, he ran a build which enabled him to take a gear and just stand there and not do any damage or healing. He got exactly zero drops, but, according to the average drop rate from the total of 130+ runs, he should have gotten from 8-10. Could it possibly be a coincidence? Yeah, except for that towards the start, his drops were much better than mine when he was doing lots of spike damage and using skills, etc. Now, is this data very precise? Not really, but now that more people start to pay attention to this, I'm hoping for someone to get some really good data, or maybe even for a release from Anet. *crosses fingers*

I remember going into tomb when it first released and saw one person getting both Victos Axe and Blade at the same time. I really don't know how drop is assigned but i do believe there is codes or programs that limit the amount of drops after you overfarm certain areas.

My theory:

If you farm.. say.. Wing, Three Blade(Can someone "donate" his axe to me ? IGN Joobelix Moo)

You farm with 7 friends

You go 80 times, and nothing drops fo you
In theory, there should be 10 drops for you, and 10 drops for each other player.
But all of the other players get their drops the first 70 times. In that case, presuming A Net use a Ratio pattern for their drops, you will get 10 drops in a row. You WILL get your fair ratio of drops, just maybe not at the start, and you may need to do 80 more runs, with the first 140 being unsucsessfull.

So to recap
-You WILL get your fair ratio- Albeit not spread out

like you go 8 times and you get nothing, but you go another 8 times and you get 4 drops, so the next 16 times you go you wont get aything.

Nothing can truly ever be completely random. Random is just a concept. But computers can get pretty close to random - close enough that it should not matter.

You bring up an interesting point, and know much more than I do about computers generating random numbers. However, from what I understand, there is very little one could do to get better drops. In that case, it would be best to just play the game instead of complaining on a forum about bad drops.



Getting ANY gold items is lucky. Even if your gold comes with just 10% vs. plants, the fact that you got a gold in the first place makes you lucky. To get a gold, AND get good mods on it is extremely lucky and rare.
[/QUOTE]

I think I'm right in the middle...neither lucky nor unlucky. I went out with a full group, and on our first run I was the only one to get the green Ice Breaker. I get a decent amount of gold drops, but they're almost never worth selling. With chests, I got maybe 6 purples in a row when I went with henchies. For the most part, however, I only open chests when I am with a real PuG and someone else opens it first, that way i don't waste money on purple chests.

Something to note, however: Without a doubt, I get more drops on my warrior than my elementalist or monk

I really think it is random and a game of chance... I do not believe in luck

Well I don't farm and I don't get any good drops at all!
But I know of people who farms a lot and get very nice drops and they are rich too!

I was referring to the screen cap. posted by Wildi (http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...4&postcount=82)



someone needs a hug but there's truth in that.

Hate to disagree with the big man, but equal share is fair split, not random. If you toss two coins, odds of getting heads+tails are only 50% ; half the time you'll be yelling "wtf ! 2 heads ! no fair for tails !" (or the other way round).

On a small scale, random occurences will often seem to cluster ; since us humans live by patterns, we will manage to see some. Add to that, as Farmer stated, that time flies when you're happy whereas we can appreciate every second of misery, in a truly random system you'll just think you're mostly getting ripped off, ie : focusing on drops you didn't get.

Ran a few missions yesterday with my necro, multiple dye drops, 5/6 were for me (+1 crappy gold), which started the party griping. Well, I've had a dry spell before, so things kind of even out in the long run ..

This looks good on paper, but I still think the balancing may be a bit off. I've been playing (non-smiting) monks for a while now (monkey got his birthday present ), and a necro (currently MM) for 3 weeks. Both are going through factions, and (no objective statistics) I seem to get far better loot with necro girl than with my monk.
This could support the character creation skew theory, or just be due to a fairly more aggressive style (I guess minion damage count toward master hate) or yo-yo health bar, which would definitely be unfair for monks (it's not as though I was sitting there doing _nothing_, whereas MM is mostly spawn spawn nova spawn), or ritualists for that matter.

Anybody seen the same pattern ?

Random drops don't mean everyone has the same chance to find something. Like someone already stated: It depends on the seed (mostly time based with eventually account or chr. based parameters added). So some may be more lucky than others.

I myself found only 1 green from the moment they started dropping. But the many runs I did to get to the bosses dropping greens provided me with more than enough gold to buy the desired unique that did not drop for me. So the result is the same. But I admit, I would prefer the thrill of a green dropping above the gold to buy it.

Would the computer 101 students please stop with the semantics?
It's true that it's not actually literally random, and it's equally true that from the POV of the user, provided the routine isn't buggy, there is no discernible difference to if it was.
Hence, that the drops are not in the actual literal sense "random" is completely irrelevant.

Secondly, please everyone understand how 'random' works. Tossing a coin and seeing which side comes up is random, yet there is absolutely nothing prohibiting you from getting tails ten times in a row. Or 20 times in a row. In fact, toss the coin enough times and you *will* get tails 20 times in a row. It is only when the heads vs tails is _averaged over a large number of tosses_ that the probability of getting, say, tails become 0.5.

Now, it is possible the random number generator used by ANet is buggy or biased or sticky, but going out of a town and getting no drop at all from killing a bunch of mobs proves NOTHING. Going out of a town twice and getting no drop at all from killing a bunch of mobs STILL proves nothing. Getting two superior vigor in a row when everyone else in the team get nothing ALSO proves nothing.

You want to prove something, you start jotting down every kill, every drop, every mob, for every player in the team, and once you have several hundred entries, you do a statistical analysis.

Everything else is just idle speculation.

Regarding the anti-farm code: yes of course it exists. If you kill the same thing & zone repeatedly, you get less drops, and need to go somewhere else and kill something else to reset it. That's no secret. You even get a help-message telling you about it (if you haven't turned off hints in options).

QFT.

Go to http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Drop_rate and add in your statistics. *That's* how you help us figure out what drops what and when and how much and to whom.

All this anecdotal evidence ("once, when i was in zone X, i got item Y Z times in a row, lol!") is useless.

eudas

my drop rate sucks just like the rest!! Is totally BIASED.

Ex. Napuhi Quarter Mission.

5 guildies no golds for me, everyone else got a gold(Celetial shield Req9 tactics -4 +41 health enchant) best drop by far.

I have always gotten crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FIXE IT PLZ>> i want my wheaties!!!!

has anybody else noticed that the drop rate on rubys is way up after the last update?

maybe a bug but i got 3 today off low level enemies in one short session.

going back for more