Notes on new team difficulty settings

I forgot to mention I got a costume recipe.. dunno if that's significant since we believe it is a separate pool.

If there are certain maps that do this, it might be the ghost of a bug.

Remember the cargo ship map, which used a not-so-random number generator? It might be a good idea to count which mobs are dropping recipes. The demon ship map had only minions, which made it easy to count. When the spawn was minions and Lt's, the count got all messed up, but overall patterns remained, they were just harder to detect because defeat order mattered, and it's possible the order in which things were spawned mattered as well.

I think what's bothering me is that these maps seem to have a set number of drops given, within a small margin, and regardless of how many the maps are actually spawned for. Might be worth checking out the demon ship map and doing the counts again.

I reran liberate entirely 8 spawn -1 no bosses;

17 recipes: 14 common 3 uncommon
52 salvage
5 enhancements
879,280 infamy

What we need for figuring out if there's a change is that data plus how many of each rank of mob was defeated.

We can't tell from the aggregate view if there were non-proportional changes among the different mob ranks, but we can tell if the aggregate is different from expected values. Alternatively, with data from live we can tell if the "expected values" we're using are actually valid for live.

Hmm I don't think I'm likely to find 6 fillers redside.

Yep. That's why I've been asking the devs to just tell us if this is expected or not, and/or if live drop rates have changed since I9. That way we can avoid the pain of gathering data we don't have to that I know would be really painful to collect. At least I know it would be painful for me.

Some of you were asking for hard data on current drop rates. I believe the rate is about 1 recipe per 40 defeats. 80% of these recipes are whites (commons).

The rest of this post just gives the facts behind this figure.

TopDoc's data gives about 29 defeats per recipe. (18,116 defeats and 623 recipes.) He did his runs in the "Liberate TV" mission redside in March this year. TD estimated that 30% of his defeats were lieutenants.

I've recently (August) been working the wall in Cim. (Also redside) I've received 124 recipes in 4,471 for a rate of 36 defeats per recipe. About 10% of my defeats were LTs.

According to the Wiki, LTs drop twice as often as minions. Adjusting the kill rates to account for this gives 38 and 40 minions equivalents respectively. This is a good match to the Wiki rate of 2.33% which gives 1 recipe per 43 minions.

Hope this helps.

It does.

Sadly, it really does suggest that something on test is lowering drop rates compared to live, because it's working out to lower drops than the Wiki probabilities predict, by a pretty wide margin.

This sounds like a job for Arcanaville.

FWIW, I just played with some numbers to try to work out how many defeats are needed in order to establish whether the drop rate has changed or not.

If we assume that the old drop rate is 1 in 40 (2.33%) and the new rate is EarthWyrm's rate of 1 in 100 (1.00%) then we need more than 1500 defeats to tell them apart with 95% confidence. If the drop rate has changed less dramatically then we need more defeats to tell the difference.

In other words, EarthWyrm's runs of around 2000 defeats are significant. (In the statistical sense.)

The Maths
This is based on treating drops as a normal distribution and looking 2 standard deviations above and below the expected number of drops. If my maths and my assumptions are right (I wouldn't bet on that!) then 95% of the time, we can expect 1500 minion defeats to give 23 to 47 drops at the 2.33% rate and 7 to 23 at 1%.

I'm no statistician, so take this with a big pinch of salt. (Or if you are good at statistics then tell us whether this seems reasonable or not.)

In other words we need to summon Arcanaville.

Arcanaville, Arcanaville, Arcanaville...

One of the reasons I'm running the demon ship over and over is that it spawns only minions (Spawning for x1 and x2 team size- beyond that, it makes LTs that make things harder). So far, run after run, I'm seeing that inspiration and salvage drops seem to spawn according to the virtual team size: double the mobs, double the inspiration and salvage drops.

I can't say that I'm seeing the same for recipes, but I need a LOT more defeats to be able to tell for sure.

QR to EarthWyrm.

It looks like you're using the same analysis that I am.

The difference between your 25 drops and the expected value of 79 is over 6 standard deviations. In other words, there isn't any realistic chance that this is an unlucky roll of the dice.

Synapse just posted to the CB forums (about 20 minutes ago) to say that there have been no adjustments to recipe or salvage drop rates. He also said he's going to run around on the test server and test them out in-play.

So while my data may be six-sigmas out, they're obviously not impossible.

Somebody should try a proper analysis on a rikti map and count vanguard merits too. I ran the RWZ arc mish where you have to kill the leader (Sal'tar ?) on the burning forest map set for 8 with no bosses. I don't run herostats, but killed a number of rikti significantly in excess of 100 and got 1 vanguard merit.