Drop Rates Still Borked

You'd have a point if I had ever said this.... which I didn't.

No. I do not call disagreement "dogpiling." "Dogpiling" is what has went on for the past few pages as various forum... er... would-be luminaries *discreet cough* have piled on with the ad hominems in an attempt to force me to change my mind. This has been tried MANY times in the past and it has always failed miserably, just like its failing now. Ad hominems will never stand in for actual rational debate in my book. In fact they have the exact opposite of the intended effect.

As for "most informed players," unless you and these would-be Champions of the Borked Argument are actually developers yourselves - which I doubt - you are no more "informed" than any other player in the game. We are all out here speculating. Attempting to claim otherwise only earns you my scorn.

But do carry on

"Credence", since you like spelling flames.

Conspiracy theorist line #2: "Everyone disagrees with me! What can be wrong with them?"

There is a slightly simpler explanation for why this happens.

Misuse of "literally".

I notice you have quietly stopped defending the idea that a change that would be noticed almost immediately was made without documentation in the hope that no-one would notice it. That is probably best.

Well, allow me to help you out there. The bug was tracked down because a player noticed he was sometimes getting drops at their good old-fashioned rate while in TF mode.

What kind of deliberate nerf would leave drops at their old rate in some (but not all) TFs and Ouro missions?

Liar, you haven't backed away yet or this post wouldn't exist.


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You've accused the development team of changing the drop rate and then trying to cover it up since the players noticed.

This by definition would be a conspiracy as it would be a group of people agreeing to work together to obscure the truth.

It's heartening that they took the substantial pile of player-collected data into account and kept looking instead of just writing it off as a perception issue.

This is true.
You never bend to reality, however pervasive its influence.
When the incoming fire starts hitting too close to the mark, you just vanish for a few weeks or months. When you return, you act like the offending argument never occured, relying on short attention spans and the crummy search function on the old forums to preserve your dignity.

It'll be interesting to see how this tactic plays out on the new forums, with their modern, functional search option.


I am far from a fan of embracing orthodoxy or bowing to conventional wisdom just because it has a large following. There are times when swimming against the tide is laudable and necessary.

This isn't one of them.

Yay, B_I's back! I can't wait to see some new thread replies that hold up to the above statement.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

It's too bad that many don't bother remembering that this is generally the normal M.O. for our dev team.

I was concerned that Synapse had turned a blind eye to the issue. I brought my concerns up and was quickly corrected. The next day he posts to the forum that the cause had been found and soon would be corrected.

I was, and am, thankful for that.

To this point, discussion was focused on convincing the devs of a problem when they had stated that they hadn't found one. Yours was the first definitive pondering of 'intentional' that I noticed.

(Now, as an aside, the accusations of crying conspiracy were well founded. Random House Dictionary tells me that a conspiracy is "...surreptitious or covert schemes to accomplish some end, most often an evil one. A conspiracy usually involves a group entering into a secret agreement..." So, by claiming that there was a stealth attempt (secret) by the devs (a group) to accomplish a goal (reduce drop rates)... That fits the bill of conspiracy. Amuses me that you dodge the claim later. Stand tall and back up your accusations!)

So someone takes your earlier post, runs with the 'doom' and equates it to lying. You dance around it and finally say it may possibly could be a white lie?

So now your fun is ruined. The devs have admitted the bug has been found and they thank everyone for not letting it go. But that ruins your fun.

And no, I don't believe they are 100% transparent, but I don't believe that they are malicious about it, nor do I believe they would directly lie (white, status quo, or otherwise) about what was going on.

After a direct red name quote of it being bug, you come back to reopen the possibility that they aren't being truthful. Are you paranoid?

Yep. You don't outright say it, but then you say anyone who believes the previous comment is now gullible because clearly everyone lies. This continues your stance of lying and conspiracy, in the face of evidence to the contrary. I can't figure out if you're doing this for the lolz or you are just that paranoid.

heh. see earlier.
no twisting on anyone's part, everything you said lines right up with the very definition of the word conspiracy, as noted earlier.

yes, they do. Poking the gibbering paranoids is not the same thing, tho.

Humor to hide the weak-sauce.

heh. see earlier. You really aren't very good at this, are you?

Now its a 'borked argument' further implication that the 'bug is a lie', buried in a generally good comment that this is indeed all speculation. Not all of it reasonable...

Anyway, my amusement for the day is through.

Oh, and its a shame you hide with your rep off (I'd + you for the cool avatar). While rep doesn't hurt particularly, I guess it may show folks that your opinions aren't generally respected. That'd ruin your fun, wouldn't it?

And I am thankful that you didn't let it go. However, it was hiding, I credit your efforts (among others, I know) for not letting it slide.

Not directly, no. But the issue was with an uninitialized data structure that was being filled with data -- such data usually is pulled from something else in memory. In my particular case, I could repeatedly get good recipe drops in TF mode because, very likely, the data structure was pulling stuff from the area of memory where my "in TF mode" data was. Other people were seeing similar results by changing other things (maps, SG mode, etc) because their rewards data structure was being filled with something related to that instead. Uninitialized data structures cause problems like that, where you find that changing something in memory changes something else that's completely unrelated.

I am. Not of this game, of course; but this issue is not specific to any particular kind of code. Anyone trying to paint this as a deliberate change needs to get some programming experience and see what happens when a program they made gets random data feed into an important flag. The results will be very consistent with this, no matter what the app actually does; a lot of the time it will work as usual, a lot of the time it won't work right, and doing something that changes which bit of random data is feed will cause it to switch between not working right, and working fine.

That the problem was so streaky is one of the strongest proofs that this whole thing was a bug: a deliberate rate change would have affected everybody in the same way, not made a huge mess that affected everybody in a slightly different way.

If anyone has an issue with believing this was a bug at this point I recommend sitting in on a basic high school programming class (seriously).

Yeah, I'm with you on this!! I'm put out by this. I'm angry. My anger will *not* be satisfied by knowing that this is an unintentional accident. The universe can not be so cruel as to inconvenience me without reason... that way lies MADNESS!!

The best explanation, nay, the only explanation that will satisfy the need for vengeance fueled by my NERDRAGE is that this indignity was inflicted upon me by people so MAD with EVILNESS that they sabotage their own game and brazenly LIE about it though nothing they can do can go without notice, thus driving off their customers and their livelihoods till they and their children go hungry in the streets all because they hate.... ME!!!

Damn the very idea of an actual barking spider fills me with absolute terror.

Even at regular, quite small, spider sizes we have in the UK compared to most countires the idea of seeing this tiny spider and it letting out this massive bark for no good reason would cause pants filling terror.

The terror would have doubled if it's a wolf spider (who are the big bad boys of the spider world in the UK and who barely fit under a pint glass used to trap them).

Still now I know what to produce should I ever need to fill the world with ungodly horrors through genetic tampering.

It's not as easy for a lowbie to make quick Inf from the BM as it is at WW, but that's always been the case unless you get a lucky recipe or salvage drop that you can offload for 100K or more, which I usually have had at least one of by the mid-20s I'm glad to say.

At level 15 my dominator has a mix of DOs and TOs but can still handle her missions (+0/x1/bosses) By all means go the AE route if you want, but let's not pretend that that you're somehow being forced to do so.

No, I'm not being forced to do anything. I can continue to plug away at normal missions, poorly slotted, or go the AE route, which I understand still is dropping tickets at a normal rate. The vast majority of my new toons have got that one lucky drop - but the chances of that happening now are nil - I'm lucky to get any drops.

And whatever you do, DO NOT STEP ON A WOLF SPIDER... especially early summer. They carry their young on their backs... step on them, and a bazillion baby spiders go skittering every which way.

talk about "buggy"
>.<
*shudder*

Don�t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. - R.W. Emerson

And this is why we have flamethrowers.