Notes on new team difficulty settings

I'd like to repeat the request that the tests be re-run on live.

Edit - I'm having flashbacks to the scrapper testing from a few years back.

It's very nice to have a Red Name commenting on this thread, though the treatment does leave one with a lack of resolve in light of the data that has accumulated over the course of this thread, especially when it comes to recipe drops. I'm going to make some more runs tonight and see if anything hasn't changed.

So, someone brought up the lag on live vs internal server test.....

Curious, how many of you guys with sucky drop rates play on east coast servers, where nasty lag has been reported of late? I know Liberty is one of them, I dont know all the east coast ones though.

Just a thought, maybe excessive lag/ping/whatever is losing packets? Kind of a stretch as other drops seem ok, but just a thought.

other thoughts.... maybe the drop rate is tied to zoning, or a certain zone? maybe a zone with/without an AE building in it would affect it, or coming from a pvp or co-op zone like rikti war zone? There is always a lag spike around wentworths for me, dont know why, but maybe that has something to do with it. There have been bugs involving zoning in the past. MIght not really be the drop rate, but the "team size"- what if on zoning, with your virtual team set to 8, it is adding another virtual 8- or the original virtual 8 is "converted" by the server to be seen as a normal 8 man team. Sort of how like a few issues ago(maybe still dont know) you could get hasten to stack by zoning and logging out or whatever.

Not sure. to me, it would be more likely to be something like that then a problem right in the drop code. It has happened enough times in the past where the server gets faked out one way or another when you zone or log out I could easily see it affecting the new virtual team size code somehow, inderectly.

Not sure how to test that....maybe select a mission in one zone, then zone to mission vs selecting the mission in the same zone. or select a mission, log out and back in, etc. It;s the type of test that would be tedious, as you would still have to run the mission every time, so it would be a whole lot of logging out or zoning. My PC is not up to that kind of exercise anymore.

I'm glad we have people who are good at math in here, because that post made me dizzy. =P

I've tried numerous on both red & blue side, different settings & team make ups.
All players on my teams have diminished to no recipies per run.
This includes maps farmed, completed mission arcs, street sweeping, orbouros missions, radio & paper missions, regular & co-op zones.
I am issuing an open invite for any dev to come and join in, or just even doorsit if they wish to team, for the purpose of gathering data of thier own on a player who has seen next to nothing for recipies since 16 launched live.
contact me in game @Katatrosphia if you'd like to gather data on a truly from the players point of view, our maps & settings.

Thanks for posting, Synapse.

Can you confirm that the Wiki description of the drop rate is correct. i.e. that the rates are intended to be:-
Minions 2.666667%
Lieutenants/Snipers/Bosses downgraded to Lts 5.333333%
Bosses/EBs 7.999999%
AVs either 100% or 0%, depending on the AV

Can you also confirm that Pool A includes purples and temporary powers but not costume pieces.

This would be really helpful to those of us who are trying to reproduce the bug.

Thanks very much.

Another run with my Electric/Shield/Mu brute. +0 level x 8 players, no bosses. Awful, awful drop rate for everything but salvage, which was within range of what Synapse got. Again, this is the same mission used by Synapse (Abyss, 1st mission)

Results:

Recipes
2 common IO recipes

Enhancements
4 SOs

Salvage
2 rare
10 uncommon
28 common

6:38 Pacific on Virtue, if that makes any difference. A friend of mine claims absolutely better drop rates off hours.

If it is only my perception that is the problem then that is really too bad. Because my perception affects my will to play the game. If i feel that i am getting recipe drops way too rarely then i am getting bored very fast.

My perception tells me that i was getting recipes when soloing at basic difficulty before I16 and that now i am rarely ever getting any. I could not care less about setting my maps for 8 players to raise my chances to get recipes. Simply put, i do not want to farm and kill tousands of mobs before getting the simpliest basic common recipes.

Would devs consider doubling or even tripling the drop chance for mobs? Or drastically lower the Merit cost for recipes? 5 Merits should be worth a random roll IMHO. That would be nice. Anyway, got bored and am taking break from game. Not willing to cope with a terrible drop rate like we have right now.

Hopefully Going Rogue will make me forget about Recipes and loot when it will come out...

Its nice to see the community going into troubleshoot mode instead of meltdown.

I can definitely see how this "bug" would generate disinterest in playing.

For now Loot and whatnots have been put on hold, getting my tank levels takes priority <thank heaven>

maybe something like that or base editing can keep attention until this gets fixed.

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?

Wow and I thought I was going crazy. Didn't think to keep track of data, but I do know that I was working through paper mission in PI set at x8/+0 and x8/-1 on two different characters. On my first character (x8/+0) I went through 3 paper missions. Wasn't really checking my recipes/salvage during this time but before I went to my 4th mission I decided "Better see what I got, don't want to fill up during the mission!". I had... one (1) lvl 50 recharge IO. After three missions set at +8. So I went to my second character and started things up, this time keeping track as I went. Did two missions with him, and got one recipe from mission complete. Then I logged off, and remembered today to check the forums and see if I was imagining things

All missions run on Pinnacle at difficulty +0/x8/yes/yes
All mission run in Peregrine Island using scanner and all missions 100% cleared.

Average number of recipes per mission: 4
Average pieces of salvage per mission: 14.5

Data per mission below. Now changing diff to +4/x8/yes/yes. Decided 10 missions per diff was enough.

Mission 1: CoT
7 basic recipes
10 common - 2 uncommon salvage

Mission 2: CoT
3 basic - 2 uncommon recipes
7 common - 3 uncommon

Mission 3: Council
3 basic - 1 uncommon recipes
15 common - 3 uncommon - 1 rare salvage

Mission 4: CoT
3 basic - 1 uncommon - 1 rare recipes
10 common - 1 uncommon - 2 rare salvage

Mission 5: Council
4 basic - 1 uncommon recipes
8 common - 1 uncommon salvage

Mission 6: Carnies
2 basic - 1 uncommon - 1 purple recipes
16 common - 5 uncommon salvage

Mission 7: Carnies
0 recipes
7 common - 1 uncommon salvage

Mission 8: Arachnos
1 basic - 1 uncommon recipe
12 common - 4 uncommon - 2 rare

Mission 9: Council
3 basic - 2 uncommon recipes
14 common - 2uncommon - 1 rare salvage

Mission 10: Council
2 basic - 1 uncommon recipes
13 common - 5 uncommon salvage

Up till tonight, I was also feeling that drop rates were quite low. Then I hit a hot streak tonight. About 2 hours of play on a level 48 scrapper. Playing at +2 difficulty, 2 standard heroes, doing story arc door missions. On triumph.

I got 8 basic IO recipes, 3 meh level 48 yellow set recipes and 1 absolute amazement purple. *makes the absolute amazement face*

Anyways, that was tonight's streak breaker for me and my third ever non-purchased purple recipe FWIW.

Edit: I wasn't tracking salvage. Got all common and uncommon salvage until the end of my last mission against some Malta where two minions landed me two different rare tech salvages. All these missions were story arc missions against carnies and malta.