Canis_Lupus

Now, Kitteh.... be reasonable... he can post after he gets home...

Seriously, Synapse, thanks much for your continued efforts on this, it's truly appreciated, even if we don't say so often enough.

Given the massive scope of the product, the relative lack of major problems is quite the accomplishment, keep up the good work.

A (very small) bit of new data, running the same Unai Kemen/Nemesis mission that I did the first two runs on. Two more runs, one with 2 recipes dropped, another with 3. This is for a map with @90 minions per. (Being a warshade, I tend to get some variation in terms of how many Voids get spawned randomly)

So far, of the 4 runs I've done of this mission, there was one outlier, and the other 3 all appear quite normal, recipe wise. I have noticed, however, that out of the 4 runs (approx 360 minions total), I've had ONE enhancement drop. Does anyone know what the droprate on these are supposed to be? Do they drop from minions at all, or only LTs and above?

On another toon running teamed missions for a couple hours last night, I had to empty my enhancement tray a couple times, plus having slotted/deleted a large handful along the way, so that character seemed to be getting a "normal" rate of ENH drops. Just a related thought.

Once again, salvage drops seem quite normal, in fact on the Nemesis map, in 4 runs I've picked up 3 Chronal Skips, a Photonic Weapon and some other rare salvage.

I've been busy with regular teaming/playing/etc so I don't have a huge batch of data yet, by the end of the weekend, I should have a meaningful sample size to post the full data numbers from.

On a more general note regarding everyone's reaction to things. Am I upset that there definitely appears to be a bug in the system that's messing with recipe drops? No. Disappointed yes, upset no. This is a massively complex application with an incredible number of dependencies between different components, so bugs are inevitable. Heck, I'm not entirely certain I'm affected by this. Aside from some gut feelings with a pair of new characters rolled up since last Tuesday that "feel" like low recipe drop-rates, the only actual hard data that I have is showing basically expected recipe drops.

Am I upset that Synapse is requesting specific steps to replicate the issue? Again, no. I've been doing computer support for 18 years now. Having a set of steps to follow to replicate a reported problem is always one of the first things that I look for when I'm doing troubleshooting myself.

Do I think that Synapse lied when he said there was no change to the drop-rates to deal with farming? Heck no. I've yet to run across a situation with this development team has told us one thing while knowing that it isn't true. Have they been wrong about the existence of bugs/etc in the past, yes, have they flat out lied about an intentional change, no. Until they do, I'm always going to believe them when they say that no intended change has been put in place. (And no, I really don't expect to stop believing them, since I don't think they ever will lie about this sort of thing).

What I AM incredibly upset about is the apparently casual dismissal of the absolute mountains of data that several people have posted along the way on this issue with a "we're not seeing it, it's a perception problem."

What I can flat out say is that looking at the numbers being reported in this thread (several batches by people that I've known and played with for years now), there is definitely something very odd going on with the drop rates and/or the distribution of recipes (and likely enhancements as well), and that my "Perception" is that the development team doesn't feel like actually helping us to dig in and see what's going on. The raw number of trials that several people have posted here, along with meticulously tracked recipe drop rates should be more than enough to demonstrate to anyone looking at this that something is wrong. From everything that's been tracked/reported so far, it's obviously a very complex issue with some hidden cause that the players are not able to determine from the information that we can possibly have access to.

Synapse, please, we WANT to help you figure this out. Other than a set of steps to reproduce the issue (which given the apparently character and/or account related nature of things, players just cannot do) is there anything we can do in terms of info to be gathered or whatever to help you track this down? There have been at least two offers from people offering to have you join them to watch what happens during a mission. PLEASE take them up on this offer, don't wait until the players either are able to replicate circumstances beyond "every time I log in, this happens" which is obviously not what you're looking for. If it's left like that, eventually people are going to give up on it. And in this case, giving up would likely mean giving up on the game, not just trying to track the problem. If I find a character/mission/etc that I'm having issues with consistently, I'll be extending the same offer.

Thanks for the info EarthWyrm, I hadn't heard that, so this could explain it.

I'm definitely interested in an answer to this, or finding out that someone's messing with us. Since the LotG +7.5 is in the former Pool C, I don't understand how it's possible to have this as a random drop for a kill, mission complete, or anything, with one possible exception, what pool (if any) do AVs drop from? I seem to recall seeing that they're set individually, but I don't know for sure. If this is the case, is it possible that the 7.5% is on a table for either Requiem or Romulus?

Definitely planning on running more with this toon (like another 25-30 runs at this same map) just to get into the 2500-3000 minion equivalent range to get some numbers that are actually in a meaningful sample size. I hate the map and after I'm done with this one will be moving on til I find someplace other than Boomtown maps to work with, but at only 100 critters per missions it isn't TOO painful to run through.

And I'm already pulling out the runs individually, but will be compiling them at the end to run one big report through dropstats.

Not much in the way of hard data from me just yet, but I'm getting there. Only ran a couple missions last night to start tracking this, and of course, I forgot to enable logging on that character when I ran the first mission

This is an Unai Kemen mission, the "Investigate 2nd Dimension" with Nemesis and hostages. I cleared the map except for one hostage group, leaving 2 minions untouched to prevent the mission from completing. (I really need to find a better map for testing, Boomtown is such a pain to make sure everything's clear)

On the second run, DropStats showed 89 Minion equivalents, and 2 Pool A recipes, for a drop rate of 2.25% which is right about where it should be. The interesting part is that on my first run of the same map (I believe the same number of mobs, but I don't have the hard data for this) I got FIVE recipe drops, or 5.62% which seems absurdly high. The two runs together are in the 3.93% range.

I know that under 200 minions is way too small of a sample size to draw any conclusions from, but I was quite surprised by how rapidly the recipes were dropping the first run through.

I'll bite the bullet and run this mission several more times to get a better sample to work from, but I may be on the flip side of this issue... I think we're definitely finding (and DOCUMENTING) that there is an issue with the distribution. So, when Synapse and company look at the server stats, they're seeing 1 Million minions defeated, and total Pool A drops of 26667, everything looks fine. What they're not seeing in the data is that the distribution of these drops may be very much out of whack.

Testing done on a level 50 WarShade, running at diff +0/x1/no/no, Freedom between 11 PM and Midnight on the 23

The one thing that I do wonder about with the Test vs Live vs Internal testing is whether there could be any sort of server load factor causing a problem. If a large amount of processing on the server side is having an effect on this, the question arises, would we still see the same results on test as were observed during Beta?

Outside of that, I agree, I can't see how his running on test would be a problem, given that the testing/data collection that you've done started there.

One thing that I've been thinking about is whether it's possible that the recipes are getting lost in transit somehow. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know programming to any serious degree, but I do know problem solving and troubleshooting.

As a group, we're definitely seeing some very odd behavior coming through the system. Is it possible that there's something going on where the portion of the code that decides there's going to be a drop clicks properly, but that the portion that distributes that is sending it to the wrong place?

Also, are there any statisticians out there that can point out any issues with the way the math has been done along the way? Are we thinking we have a statistically significant sample, and we really don't? (From my understanding, I think that 5000+ trials of something with a 2-4% chance of occurring probably counts, but am I right about this, and what is the confidence in that sort of number?) I'm definitely willing to have it demonstrated that we're looking at this wrong, but there's been so much evidence compiled by multiple people, I'm finding that harder and harder to believe.

EDIT: Oh, and as far as I've gathered, it's been noticed that the salvage drop rates may be a BIT low, but it's very close to the expected number. Similarly with Inspirations, those still drop like candy. Enhancements seem to be off quite a bit too, but I don't have hard numbers on that. What, if anything, is different in the coding for dropping of different items?

I get that bad things happen with patches, possibly even causing an emergency outage during peak hours. While this is disappointing, it's a natural consequence of any system this complex.

THIS: