Notes on new team difficulty settings

I finally got a situation with some regular results, I'm going to pursue it a bit. My 50s were all coming up zip (solo brute, solo troller, 6-person LGTF with a def), but there had been that one mission on my brute that showed regular drop rates. It was from an old contact that had been open.

A friend on his PB did some epic tanking on the LGTF, so I pulled out my dusty L27 peacebringer and ran two Sunstorm missions solo. No changes to the diff settings, this guy hasn't done anything in I16. He killerates very slowly, so I don't have a huge amount of data, but for 70 minion equivalents he got 4 recipes and 2 salvage. Quite the ratio. (I should emphasize that this is not a large enough sample to go anywhere with yet, but it is enough to give me a glimmer of hope.)

My hunch/guess/suspicion is that it has something to do with the toon/mission interaction. I believe it shows up in streetsweeping as well, altho I haven't confirmed that myself, so maybe something kind of persistent for a particular toon? Be interesting to figure out if one bad toon can bork an entire team?

[EDIT: I should also add, another of my hunch/guess/suspicions is that it doesn't have to do with the values you've selected in the SRSLY settings, exactly. I suspect if you got a mission/toon setup with regular drop rates and you adjusted your settings you would continue to get the same rates you had been. Just a guess, and I've no way to test it yet.]

Those are just idle questions, and those situation are all more complicated. The best test case is the simplest one where you can repeat it. If my PB continues to show good drop rates I'll pack up the info and send it off. Here's hoping.

/w

Research into the idea that lag is invovled should take into account that bad numbers show up on Test reliably. See Top Doc and others.

/w

Have done a tonne of "playing the game" but nothing particularly scientific. So this is just my personal opinions based on how I perceive the problem

1) Drop rates seem to change based on type of enemy. The more exotic types of enemy seem to drop recipies more often. Freaks and Preatorians seems to drop less frequently. I personally think this may have been adjusted due to quantity of bm and freak farms. Clockwork, Hyrda and Council in particular seem to drop more often.

2) I also think there is a bug in the recipe drop logic which is also related to the "random" rare recipe rolls from merit/ticker vendors. It has happened to me too many times where I roll and get two or three of the same recipe in a row for me to think its just "random" - something is wrong here.

So I was looking at this drop stats script that's been put together, and I noticed that the page says that it won't work very well for characters that aren't level 50 - it will fail the heuristic rank check. Does this mean that it won't be able to identify the rank of enemy mobs at all? I was thinking of grabbing it since I've been running around perez park sweeping lots of stuff with my plant controller anyway, but if it won't be able to properly total stuff up, it seems like it'd kinda be a waste.

Hi. I've been reading this discussion as often as I can and would like to help you all gather data.

I have a level 50 D4 that I use for quasi-farming that is available for help, but I do have some questions.

What program is currently being used to track the drop rates/kills? What should my kill quantity be for best data? What missions/levels are recommended?

Thank you in advance.

Swampy.

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

That is great, Canis, I'm interested in finding cases where it is looking correct, to give some clues. I've been having a very hard time coming up with them on my toons. Keep it up if you can on that toon for a few more runs.

I'm suspecting there may be a "good mode" and a "bad mode", so if you suddenly drop into bad rates for one mission, note that. Keep your logs separate as individual missions, so you can later calculate stats on the "good ones" and "bad ones" separately.

As you suggest, lumped together you might not see the problem, just being a little low on the probability side, which wouldn't jump out.

/w

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.

Just ran a Battle Maiden mission and had odd results.

Hoping those of you with more experience at this can tell me if this is normal.

-1/ spawned for 8. I took a lvl 24 scrapper in as well with my lvl 50 Fire Tank.

I got 2 enhancements and 2 generic recipes. The lvl 24 scrapper got 10 enhancements, 1 Purple - Apocalypse - chance for negative, 3 costume piece recipes and a Mocking Beratement recipe. Salvage seemed close, but I think the scrapper got more.

I understand random chance, but still.

I just tested my Carnival map (it's the Kings Row map with the graveyard at the top) on level +0, 8 equivalent. No bosses.

304 minions
254 lieutenants

56 salvage (2 rare)
4 common IO recipes

I should have received in the range of 21 recipes.

Or maybe I'm just perceiving this wrong.

This said, I'm done testing. I KNOW something is not right. My numbers continually point to this. The Dev Team needs to take this seriously. They need to test this on LIVE servers and they should be datamining this heavily.

The scrapper got no common recipes.

Defeat Battle Maiden and her guards from Maria Jenkins. It's not part of an arc.