What's with the drop rates?

So I waited patiently for the Halloween event to end, hoping that it would take with it the bug to drop rates that showed up with the patch that made the apocalypse more frequent - no such luck.

We went from the old (bugged) rate to a couple of weeks with the drop rate fixed. It was wonderful - decent recipes dropping regularly, nice ones more frequently and even purple recipes dropping more than once in a blue moon. As supplies went up, market prices went down and looked as if they might go back to what they were prior to the madness brought on by AE farming.

Then came the Halloween event, or at least the update to it, and now the drop rate has trickled to nothing. Prices have skyrocketed and even someone willing to pay the prices would be hard pressed to find anything they need for sale.

I'm tired of running missions with 8 spawns and bosses and getting 5 or 6 common salvage, a couple regular recipes and (if i'm lucky) a worthless snipe or fear recipe, or the dreaded Doctored Wounds Recharge which has dropped multiple times in the same map on multiple occasions for me.

I know this isn't just me being unlucky as everyone I've spoken to is having the same problem. I've been running radio missions at level 50 with 8 spawns and bosses. Prior to the drop rate bug fix I needed to sell recipes and salvage every 3-4 missions. After the fix, every 2-3. Now I can usually go 5 or 6 and even when my inventory is full there's nothing worth anything more than what a regular store pays for it.

I really hope this is dealt with soon. I have a lot of 50's sitting around waiting to be i/o'd and I can't work on them when one or two recipes will run me what a full character's worth would have cost before. I don't want purple recipes dropping out of the sky but frankly the game just isn't fun when you're getting no reward for your efforts whatsoever.

i have found this very true, i had run about 20 mishes on the same map farming with 54s on a team of 8 and no sign of even a pool A recipe drop better off a Purple drop. this frustrated me and i look forward to a fix with this bug

Congratulations on the Heca. Red fortune and mocking beratement are fine for one map but when those basically worthless recipes are the highlights after running 20 or so 8 spawned mishes something is wrong.

One only need look at what has happened with the market in the last couple weeks to see that it's a global problem.

Just noticed another post about the lack of numina (not the proc) recipes on the market and realized i prolly should have posted this in the recipe/market section. New to forums - this is the first thing that's bothered me enough to post on.

How about running DropStats for a while? That's what it was created for: to quantify drop rates, so that people could prove that the drops were bugged (or not).

Sorry i didn't have the foresight to compile statistical evidence prior to seeing a problem. If you'd be willing to loan me a time machine I'll get right back to you with that. Actually i'll include it in the original post.

Also not sure one mish's stats which includes an av and multiple heavy duty bosses counts as a statistically significant counter to my admittedly anecdotal evidence.

Honestly I don't care at this point. I made the post because when I petitioned they said use the forums. There may or may not be an actual bug, all I know is I was getting stuff, they fixed a bug, I started getting more stuff, they patch the event, i'm not getting stuff. I assume if there is a bug more people will start to gripe now that ToT is over and people go back to regular content.

If the "knowledgable people" are right this will also cause all the supply problems to end and I won't need 10 or 15 billion to build my parked toons. Either way, problem solved, just not for a while.

Oh and I did run hero stats for a good long while and monitored the drop menu. Turned it off cause it was making me depressed to see it all compiled there.

Something for the "knowledgeable folks" to remember.... Back before Synapse found the problem, the "drop rate bug" was shrugged off as a "perception issue" because it didn't happen to everyone. So... it wouldn't surprise me that it might be back after patching the Halloween Event in/out.

I don't run hero stats or such, or use your sci fi gizmos to tell if drop rates suck. I've been farming everyday for awhile now and I'm telling you, somethings up. I'm not expecting a purp every run, or every 10 runs, but it's weird that I went from getting 2 or more a week to 0 total in 3 weeks. Of course I'm not just talking about purps, and I could care less about salvage, but I can tell that something is wrong. Like V said, all you have to do is look at the market.

(I should mention I'm talking about red side. I rarely play blue)

While I agree that statistics would be more helpful, I'm just saying I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss someone's "perception". It took a LOT of players to run a boatload of stats before it was taken seriously last time... Perhaps look at this as a call for assistance

It's worth noting that buying level 49 pool As has been particularly effective during the -1 TF bug's persistence. People tend to pile all their bids (and money) on level 50s, because supply has historically been strongest there. However, supply definitely shifted partially to level 49 for Pool A drops, but prices didn't particularly adjust. As a result I've obtained plenty of Pool A drops I wanted for builds by buying at level 49 for a fraction of the cost usually paid for the level 50 versions.

Well my original hope when I posted was that maybe, just maybe, the devs wouldn't mind taking a look at the drop rates since they had just fixed it before installing the halloween event, an event which brought with it a bunch of bugs, including a few that had already been fixed. My intention in posting was not to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the drop rate is bugged, but to suggest that perhaps it should be looked into.
To ask for hard evidence that something at point B is worse than at point A without having any data from point A is a bit unreasonable. If I were able to produce data on a subject from a time before an issue emerged which could use such data, I'm sure I could get a very lucrative job as a lobbyist on one side or the other of the tobacco or global warming debates.

Again, all I can say is that I was getting a ton of good drops over enough hours of play that I can't chalk it up to a lucky streak, and that the opposite has been true since the event was patched, and that most of the people I have spoken to in-game have noticed the same. Not evidence, true, much less reams of it. However, I wonder if the devs would actually require such reams of data to look into something if any mention of drop rates in the forums weren't dismissed out of hand and immediately tagged with "mythology". What exactly is the motivation for immediately rejecting any such post?

In any event, I've said way more than I ever wanted to say on the subject and really don't enjoy pissing in the wind so I'll be signing off.

Thank you for your society

Do you have any idea how much would get done if the Devs had to look into things every time such a mention was dropped at them? Just look at this board, for crying out loud. There must be 25 topics a day similar to that, ranging from animation issues, market issues, power issues. Someone is always complaining about something that just needs "looked into" with no concern for anything beyond themselves.

If you want results, you have to put in a little work yourself to get such a thing moved up the massive priority scale on a project this large. You apparently don't care about drop rates enough to do that.

Markets always get crazy during and for a period of time after special events. Not sure telling us to "look at what the market is doing" is gonna show us anything concrete.

Also, for future reference for anyone claiming something is "weird" or "messed up" or "bugged"... if you don't come with anything but what you're seeing, or a feeling, or "what I've been hearing from other players," we're gonna believe the person that actually has some hard evidence to back up what they're saying. If you don't wanna keep track or run some numbers, be prepared to be given the standard "you've hit a bad stretch of luck" answer, because the evidence that we've been given tells us that's exactly what it is. And if you want the devs to help, you'd most certainly better have some data. The faster and more descriptive you can give them information or clues as to what's going on, the faster any bugs, if they exist, will get fixed.

Going back to the start of my recent tracking (this spans a couple of incremental builds)

Defeats  Minion Lieut.   Boss Under.    Pet   Grey Unknown
----------------------------------------------------------
 10,328   7,839  1,483    285    404      3    140     174
----------------------------------------------------------

  Behemoth Overlord (3) failed heuristic rank check
  Chief Mentalist (1) failed heuristic rank check
  Guardian (13) failed heuristic rank check
(so the heuristic check brought 157/174 of the unknowns into play - a good portion are named bosses/EBs)


Drops         Total Common Uncommon   Rare Very Rare
----------------------------------------------------
Pool A          333    247       64     20         2
Pool B            4
Pool E            4
Pool C/D          2
Salvage         889    695      167     27
Inspirations  1,826  1,186      607     33
----------------------------------------------------

Other Drops
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Inf. Rewards     10,454 (36,027,443 inf, 0 xp, 2,600,750 debt)
Prestige        323,832
Reward Merits       102
Vanguard Merits     314
Enhancements        124 single origin enhancements
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Pool       Drop Rate         Range   Drops        Expected    Mobs
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pool A         2.74%   2.46%-3.06%     320         279-347  11,660 min. equiv.
  minion       2.81%   2.46%-3.20%     220         183-239   7,839 minions
  lieutenant   5.19%   4.12%-6.45%      77           64-98   1,483 LTs & snprs
  boss         8.07%  5.18%-11.86%      23           15-33     285 bosses & EBs
Pool E         0.05%   0.02%-0.13%       4               ?   7,839 minions
Pool C/D       0.70%   0.09%-2.51%       2               ?     285 bosses & EBs
Salvage        8.06%   7.56%-8.59%     863         803-913  10,702 min. equiv.
  minion       8.13%   7.54%-8.75%     637         582-676   7,839 minions
  lieutenant  10.79%  9.25%-12.48%     160         135-182   1,483 LTs & snprs
  boss        23.16% 18.39%-28.50%      66           58-87     285 bosses & EBs
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Table excludes mobs of unknown rank and their drops.)
(1 in 20 runs will be outside the expected range.)