Notes on new team difficulty settings

Have the changes been made to the live servers?

tomorrow.

So what was todays patch?

Did 2 runs of my Demon farm @ +0 x5 & +0 x8 and got 19 Recipes, 5 of which were uncommon set recipes

Infact, I dualboxed it and both my characters had 19 recipes with about 3-5 uncommon set recipes

http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/patch_notes/

(:

I consider this problem fixed. +0 x8 players, no, no on the Axis America map from Unai Kemen. Prior to the patch, I was getting 2 -6 recipes, 1 - 6 enhancements, about 20 salvage.

Today: 15 recipes (2 set, 13 common), 6 enhancements, 48 salvage. That's more than acceptable.

Thanks dev team. And I third (fourth, fifth) the nomination for Archie Gremlin to get Bug Hunter. I'd also recommend EarthWyrm for the badge as well in helping coordinate / consolidate efforts. I also realize it's not a nomination effort, so this is more sentiment than anything else.

Cheers!

It's sad that we must now leave this thread... Ima miss it =p

</3

Yeah its fixed. 3 trips to unload recipes/salvage from 5 (or maybe 6) newspaper missions set for 6.

Level 50 recipes are REALLY going to come crashing down in price.

Thanks to all here who put so much time and effort into testing this! Looking forward to playing tonight once I get out of the office.

I definitely saw the drops of regular recipes fixed.

Purple recipes I'm still uncertain of. Unfortunately with this the sample size would need to be huge and as far as I know, no specified drop rates have been posted. Anyway, my test post fix today was:

641 minions
326 lieuts
160 bosses

Expected drops: 47.3
Actual: 47 (plus 2 end of mission drops on 7 missions)
Purples dropped: 0

So all looks great except the drop rates for purps would need to average 0.1% or lower for this to be right. Anyone know if they're this low?

So, I’m glad the drop rates are back to normal. I still have a general question however. First I’ll preface it.

I’m English second language, older (40s), and very VERY drama-king type person. Very Old School non-USA customer service (i.e. I can teach the French about being rude, which is doubly funny because… well… I AM French).

So, the question is… what is it about computer games that cause most people to doubt customer complaint?

I come from EverQuest, and, barring a few bells and whistles, the thing there on boards was exactly as I see it here. People complain about drop rate, mob toughness, power toughness, and the overwhelming response is either…

“I don’t believe it.” Or…

“Prove it.”

And, to steal buzz words I know nothing about (friend is a lab tech), to prove it, you almost have to have a double blind placebo control trial with negated observer bias having an extremely high sample size (I have no clue what I just said, FYI) for it to be acceptable. Otherwise, it’s “Not true”.

Um… why?

Here’s a mirror example. When my wife and I go to a restaurant, she likes the steak to moo as she bites into it. Mine has to shatter on the floor if it’s dropped. She routinely orders her steak rare. When the waiter brings her the steak, she routinely sends it back, saying the rare streak “is too cooked.”

My friend works in the food industry. My wife IS getting a rare steak. What she wants (loosely translated from French) is “Blue Steak”. But, she thinks it’s overdone, so, the chef makes her a new steak, barely cooked. Facts don’t really matter. She’ll only eat it one way, her way. The waiters now know what my wife means by “rare” since we always go to the same place. They don’t correct her, since she is the customer, but just give her the steak her way. Perception > Facts.

Ditto my friend’s wife when she visits. She asks for milk. We give it to her. The milk is perfectly fine, but she often feels “It smells rotten.” So, I take the glass, put it back in the fridge for us, for later, and she gets juice. The milk WAS perfectly fine. But she will not drink it, the end. But we don’t go “prove to my satisfaction the milk is bad”… we go to the fridge, and get her something else. Now, after the second or third type of drink she’d reject, we DO go “Well, then bring your own drink.”

So, back to computer games, why do most communities “demand proof” when it comes to drops, mobs, powers, etc…? If enough people think something is a problem, in almost any industry, it either changes, or we get a “It won’t change sorry, and this is why” of some sort through management. Or, at the very least… silence. But we don’t seem to get the vitriol for “daring to complain” that online boards give out.

I understand a bit about game balance, but isn’t it still perception > facts? This isn’t a science class, but a business, no? I completely get that, say, if 1 purple auto-dropped as EACH mission complete, it would totally ruin the game. It would render many if not most sets obsolete. Yet, wouldn’t the Devs cave if 90% of the player base was quitting unless they dropped? Or, do you honestly think that (making up numbers) if subscriptions went from 300,000 to 30,000 because of “not enough purples” that Devs wouldn’t up the rate, hoping to get customers back? And, if they wouldn’t… care to explain why?

If it’s only a few people, trust me, I’ve done my share of “Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out.” French, remember? But, even without the “Wah, I’ll quit.” Part, wouldn’t well, common sense / courtesy / etc… mean = let the person talk / vent / whatever?

Case in point, I too thought the recipe drops had been much lower. However, unlike the super-dedicated people that did 100s of runs, talking statistics I have no hope of even grasping, just to “prove” their point to the community and the devs, I just told my friends, and they agreed.

The runs you did, that was 1,000s of person-hours of work, just to… not be yelled at, to avoid “can I have your stuff” posts, or to get dev attention. Stands to logic (I think) that means that if those hours weren’t invested, by the playerbase, by dedicated people, we’d be still at low drop rates, from now until the end of time (fine, I superlatize, shoot me, and yes, it’s not a word but it should be, heh) and no-one would have known it.

But, I didn’t “dare” mention it on the boards, for fear of retribution. Well, not drive-by retribution, but certainly a “I’m grumpy towards friends / family because the board yelled the crap out of me for daring to complain and now I’m in a bad mood.” type deal.

So, can people, using small words, and no “cool phrases” that a 40 year old will likely never grasp as to why computer games have so much of a “prove it” type mentality on boards, rather than most other places?

Any input to this daunted old man would be helpful.

Disclaimer = I press Power on my computer, and Double Click on City of Heroes, and hope to God it works, so keep that in mind if getting technical.

Side Note = People talk about BM hunting for Purple. What does that mean? Thanks.

P.S. It’s late, but tomorrow, I’ll post my Peanut Butter Toast story, that should show clearly my perception > fact issue.

Now that the drop rate bug seems to have been fixed, I'm keen to work out the drop rates for purples, pool C/D boss drops etc.

I need lots of log data to do this with any degree of accuracy so I'm asking for help. I'd be most grateful if you could send me log files. (Post patch ones anyway!) You don't need to do anything special except avoid team play. (It's impossible to work out drop rates without logfiles from all members of the team.)

You can find full details on the DropStats website here.

Feel free to send log files by any method you like if you don't fancy email.

thanks,
Archie

Thank you UberGuy and Archie Gremlin. This helps a lot. Getting a tiny handle on why, now.

Personally, the recipe thing bothered me a bit, but, I adapted. I did more of content A instead of content B. I altered my buying and selling at Wentworths. And, eventually, I just set my timeframes for drops based on the new drop rates i.e. I got comfy for a longer ride.

I’ve tried to adapt to content and drop changes. I liked AE when it came out. I obsessively badge hunted. Then, when the badges went away, my interest in AE went away. I didn’t scream or vent on the boards. I simply started to do something else in CoH. No interest, no playing. Simple as that. It’s not like there’s not tons else to do here.

Anyhow, I promised a peanut butter anecdote.

Almost a decade ago, when my father in law had health issues, we moved in his house to help him with daily life. We started to look at budget, and one thing was = change our eating habits from brand name foods to no-name. One of these was peanut butter. Translated roughly to “Too Good to be True” brand.

We got ready for our morning breakfast, toast was ready, and we opened the new jar of this new brand. We froze as we saw peanut butter settled on the bottom of the jar, and about 1/4 to 1/2 an inch of fluid that was collected on the top. We both thought EW but, hey, we were saving money. I carefully folded the peanut butter in with the fluid until it was smooth again. We spread it on our toast, and took a bite.

We looked at each other in mock horror. It…was… DISGUSTING. It had this horrible chemical taste. Maybe it was just the first bite. Again. Nope. Just as bad. So, we start joking about the horrible chemicals that must be in there. Polo-sorbo-something. Mono-glyco-watsit. I pick up the jar, and get ready to read my wife the ingredients.

Peanuts.
Water.

That’s it.

We looked at each other, stunned, then laughed and simultaneously said “Score one for chemicals, eh?”

We never ate that brand again.

Factually =

-It was healthier.
-It was cheaper.
-It had no chemicals.

We didn’t care. Perception > Facts. It felt / looked / tasted unnatural and unhealthy, and the fact that it wasn’t in no way altered our enjoyment of it, and, more importantly (from the company’s standpoint) our buying habits. We never purchased their product again.

In fact, instead of “Too Good to be True” we nicknamed it “Too Good to be Eaten”.

Something for you facts people to keep in mind when talking to us perception people. You’re totally right, but that in no way affects our behaviour.

Anyhow, thanks again to the above people for the explanation. Any other ones that come will be appreciated as well.

Later.

thanks for keeping on compiling data, Archie.

I haven't exactly noted what I did get last night on my fire/ice tank on the one run I made (+0/x6 demons) but I got 12 recipes (an armag triple and then commons, with 1 unco most likely) and 40 some salvage (2 rares) which is pretty much what I was getting when I was doing runs seriously (so pre AE)

I'll try to remeber to dl Dropstats for future runs.

Thanks to the Devs for fixing that problem.

Todays Series of newspapers

----------------------------------------------------------
Archie Gremlin's Drop Stats v0.4.0
http://www.glasspaw.com/dropstats/
----------------------------------------------------------

Defeats Minion Lieut. Boss Under. Pet Grey Unknown
----------------------------------------------------------
586 504 74 7 0 0 1 0
----------------------------------------------------------

Drops Total Common Uncommon Rare Very Rare
----------------------------------------------------
Pool A 15 10 3 2 0
Pool C/D 1
Salvage 53 42 11 0
Inspirations 161 107 53 1
----------------------------------------------------

Other Drops
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Inf. Rewards 589 (928,649 inf, 0 xp, 88,000 debt)
Prestige 12,698
Enhancements 3 single origin enhancements
Other 18
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Pool DropRate Drops Expected Mobs
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Pool A 2.23% 15 11-27 673 minion equivalents
Pool C/D 14.29% 1 ? 7 bosses and EBs
Salvage 8.49% 53 37-64 624 minion equivalents
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(1 in 20 runs will be outside the expected range.)

15 Pool A recipes (Mob Defeats)
2 rare recipes
Efficacy Adaptor : End Mod/End Reduction (Recipe)
Scirocco's Dervish: Dam/End (Recipe)
3 uncommon recipes
Calibrated Accuracy: Acc/Range (Recipe)
Rope-a-dope: Acc/Stun/Rech (Recipe)
Tempered Readiness: Acc/Slow (Recipe)
10 common recipes

I get home generally about 60-90 mins before my wife most nights. In the NAME OF SCIENCE as Von Grun would say, I'll be running a few papers set 0/6 people on my brute 3-4 times a week. These will go to Archie until he cries enough.

Im hoping one thing we get out in the long run of it is a better feel for the distribution in Pool A drops by type.