Too early to say. We're barely working out the actual drop rate, let alone which variables are statistically significant.
Seems unlikely, though.
Quote:
He may or may not be full of it from his point of view.|
Originally Posted by shaggy5
Some guy on my team says that if you get more debt, you get more shards and he "tested" it. I want to say he is totally full of it, but maybe someone here can tell me that it's true?
|
It's called the perception phenomenon. Players in a game tend to notice when things that are unusual happen. E.G. players tend to remember attacks that miss, rather than attacks that land.
It is very possible that the guy on your team only noticed the shards dropping when he had debt because he was looking for any kind of relational behavior: He performs the X event, which causes random Y drop event to occur.
It is very possible that an identical or larger sum of shards were dropped while the player was NOT in debt, but those drops were either ignored or did not register because they didn't fit any particular relational pattern.
It is also very possible that due to the random number generator, the guy may have only gotten shards while in debt due to the timing and the rolling of the random number generator, and the debt was simply a coincidence.
The development staff at Cryptic and now Paragon Studios have been very clear in the past that item drops are all based off their own separate generation systems. There is no intentional You do X event and it causes random Y drop event occur behavior coded into the engine.
Most of the player held theories on X performance causing Y random drop event are often disproved by simply running HeroStats.
Case in point. Everytime there is a patch, some player comes running to the forums screaming that accuracy has been nerfed. Two or three herostats sessions later and the logfiles show that no, accuracy was not nerfed. The player just noticed a string of misses and it stuck out.
By the same token, everytime somebody comes running into the forums saying that X performance causes Y random drop event... chances are some stat tracking later will show that there is no relation.
There are two things I wonder about when it comes to shard drops, having read the above post and knowing full well that my mind is likely playing games on me I still get the feeling that there are two factors that are different when it comes to shards.
First, I cannot help but think that the fewer players on your team that are 50 and can get shards the greater your chance is of getting more shards. Playing on an ITF team with 4 50s and 4 less than 50 players I can walk away with 12 maybe even 15 shards, but playing with a team of 8 50 all looking for shards I might only get 5 or 6 shards. I know this is mind remembering the events that turned out very well for me, but Ive seen it happen again and again.
As we play though the game at any level and we kill a mob the game rolls to see if anything will drop, numbers come up and ding salvage drops, then the game rolls to see who it is that will get said salvage. Lets say player two gets the roll and game kicks the salvage over to player two and if that player has room the salvage lands and the player get a notice of salvage drop. However if the salvage is full the new items bounces off and drops into the void to never be seen again and no one is the wiser. This has been reported as true by the developers and we all except it.
For shards though I feel, and again this is just my perception, that when a mob dies and the game rolls a shard drop and determines a receiver it further checks to see if that player can even receive a shard, are they 50 and if so do they have their alpha unlocked, if they dont meet these criteria then the shard bounces to another player rather than down into the void.
Second, when I play on my AoE blasters with a good team that can keep agro off me and Im allowed to just go nuts with the damage I walk away with twice and sometimes three times more shards than anyone else on the team. So that brings up the question does risk equal reward with shard drops? Will someone that does twice or even three times the damage of others on the team walk away with more loot?
Ive never ever had a purple drop on my controller or my tank but I have on my scrapper and my blaster.
Dark Tower. SL50 Stone/Stone Tanker
Founder The Freedom Phalanx Reserve
An Infinity Top 25 Super Group
Founded January 4th 2006
Random is random.
"You don't lose levels. You don't have equipment to wear out, repair, or lose, or that anyone can steal from you. About the only thing lighter than debt they could do is have an NPC walk by, point and laugh before you can go to the hospital or base." -Memphis_Bill
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Quote:
Random is randomly random, since random randomly is selectively random.|
Originally Posted by DarkGob
Random is random.
|
Uugg, I think my head just exploded
Dark Tower. SL50 Stone/Stone Tanker
Founder The Freedom Phalanx Reserve
An Infinity Top 25 Super Group
Founded January 4th 2006
Quote:
Not saying this is true, but I've been wondering if it's true for a few weeks now.
|
Originally Posted by Dark_Tower
First, I cannot help but think that the fewer players on your team that are 50 and can get shards the greater your chance is of getting more shards. Playing on an ITF team with 4 50s and 4 less than 50 players I can walk away with 12 maybe even 15 shards, but playing with a team of 8 50 all looking for shards I might only get 5 or 6 shards. |
Quote:
Previous post on gaining multiple shards with single kill.
|
Originally Posted by Dark_Tower
First, I cannot help but think that the fewer players on your team that are 50 and can get shards the greater your chance is of getting more shards. Playing on an ITF team with 4 50’s and 4 less than 50 players I can walk away with 12 maybe even 15 shards, but playing with a team of 8 50 all looking for shards I might only get 5 or 6 shards. I know this is mind remembering the events that turned out very well for me, but I’ve seen it happen again and again.
|
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Quote:
*'SPLODE!*|
Originally Posted by Dark_Tower
Random is randomly random, since random randomly is selectively random.
Uugg, I think my head just exploded |
*thud*
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Quote:
Well, according to what i've read shard drops are rolled for every eligible member of the team when an enemy is defeated. There is no "gets the roll and game kicks the salvage over to" effect. The game doesn't create a shard and then go "gosh, now I've got to give this to somebody on the team." Everyone getting a roll for a shard drop is different from the standard drop mechanism and gives greater rewards for teaming than the other drop systems.|
Originally Posted by Dark_Tower
There are two things I wonder about when it comes to shard drops, having read the above post and knowing full well that my mind is likely playing games on me I still get the feeling that there are two factors that are different when it comes to shards.
First, I cannot help but think that the fewer players on your team that are 50 and can get shards the greater your chance is of getting more shards. Playing on an ITF team with 4 50’s and 4 less than 50 players I can walk away with 12 maybe even 15 shards, but playing with a team of 8 50 all looking for shards I might only get 5 or 6 shards. I know this is mind remembering the events that turned out very well for me, but I’ve seen it happen again and again. As we play though the game at any level and we kill a mob the game rolls to see if anything will drop, numbers come up and ding salvage drops, then the game rolls to see who it is that will get said salvage. Let’s say player two gets the roll and game kicks the salvage over to player two and if that player has room the salvage lands and the player get a notice of salvage drop. However if the salvage is full the new items bounces off and drops into the void to never be seen again and no one is the wiser. This has been reported as true by the developers and we all except it. For shards though I feel, and again this is just my perception, that when a mob dies and the game rolls a shard drop and determines a receiver it further checks to see if that player can even receive a shard, are they 50 and if so do they have their alpha unlocked, if they don’t meet these criteria then the shard bounces to another player rather than down into the void. Second, when I play on my AoE blasters with a good team that can keep agro off me and I’m allowed to just go nuts with the damage I walk away with twice and sometimes three times more shards than anyone else on the team. So that brings up the question does risk equal reward with shard drops? Will someone that does twice or even three times the damage of others on the team walk away with more loot? I’ve never ever had a purple drop on my controller or my tank but I have on my scrapper and my blaster. |
This discussion reminds of other game myths regarding certain actions causing certain effects. People used to insist that clicking glowies during a blueside respec trial caused extra enemies to spawn in the reactor, and there were also people at the original Hamidon raids that insisted that leaving the zone during the raid caused mito splits. The thing to keep in mind is that in order for the game to do things like that the programmers would have to explicitly code such mechanics into the game. At that point it's worthwhile to ask what is the storyline or balance justification for adding such a mechanic. Generally things like that aren't added because the programmer had whim.
Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
Quote:
This is all very true, except programmers do write things into the code that they dont tell you about or want you the player to know about right off the bat. So while unlikely maybe things along these lines were written in and then removed, but as any programmer knows removing lines of code is not as easy as highlight and delete.|
Originally Posted by Schismatrix
Well, according to what i've read shard drops are rolled for every eligible member of the team when an enemy is defeated. There is no "gets the roll and game kicks the salvage over to" effect. The game doesn't create a shard and then go "gosh, now I've got to give this to somebody on the team." Everyone getting a roll for a shard drop is different from the standard drop mechanism and gives greater rewards for teaming than the other drop systems.
This discussion reminds of other game myths regarding certain actions causing certain effects. People used to insist that clicking glowies during a blueside respec trial caused extra enemies to spawn in the reactor, and there were also people at the original Hamidon raids that insisted that leaving the zone during the raid caused mito splits. The thing to keep in mind is that in order for the game to do things like that the programmers would have to explicitly code such mechanics into the game. At that point it's worthwhile to ask what is the storyline or balance justification for adding such a mechanic. Generally things like that aren't added because the programmer had whim. |
Additionally City of Heroes is not fresh out of the box as it were, its been updated, changed and fixed for almost 7 years now, there are likely billions of lines of code, and millions of these lines have likely been written out of the game but are still there effecting things in ways that not even the programmers really know or understand. Basically it comes down to if it isnt broke dont fix it and when it is broke fix it only enough to get it working again. So your guess is as good as mine and even as good as the programmers.
Dark Tower. SL50 Stone/Stone Tanker
Founder The Freedom Phalanx Reserve
An Infinity Top 25 Super Group
Founded January 4th 2006
Quote:
Actually... not random.|
Originally Posted by DarkGob
Random is random.
|
The more one plays, the more one is likely to get debt.
The more one plays, the more one is likely to get shards.
The more one attacks higher ranked foes, the more one is likely to get debt.
The more one attacks higher ranked foes, the more one experiences a higher shard drop rate.
There can be a real correlation between A and B, but not because one causes the other, but because C causes both.
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Quote:
Well, "full of it" sounds almost insulting. Let's use the word "mistaken". |
Originally Posted by shaggy5
Some guy on my team says that if you get more debt, you get more shards and he "tested" it. I want to say he is totally full of it, but maybe someone here can tell me that it's true?
|
Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
Quote:
Yes, but dependencies like tying spawn sizes glowy clicking in a previous mission, or triggering critter spawns when a player exits a zone, or even increasing drop chances if a player has debt are all things require being explicitly coded in, and it's adding additional layers of complexity and possible bugs for no apparent balance or thematic reason, so it's very unlikely to have happened. Testing had shown that the first two were never true, and the debt=more drops is almost certainly not true either. Although at least the last one would be using recently created code.|
Originally Posted by Dark_Tower
This is all very true, except programmers do write things into the code that they don’t tell you about or want you the player to know about right off the bat. So while unlikely maybe things along these lines were written in and then removed, but as any programmer knows removing lines of code is not as easy as highlight and delete.
Additionally City of Heroes is not fresh out of the box as it were, it’s been updated, changed and fixed for almost 7 years now, there are likely billions of lines of code, and millions of these lines have likely been written out of the game but are still there effecting things in ways that not even the programmers really know or understand. Basically it comes down to if it isn’t broke don’t fix it and when it is broke fix it only enough to get it working again. So your guess is as good as mine and even as good as the programmers. |
Basically, only an idiot do would the extra code required to have drop rates affected by debt status without a good reason to do so and there is none.
Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
Since at the moment level 50s only get shards, and level 50s have no concern for debt and could just build it up at the start of their play session and whenever they got low on it to increase the drop rate, I highly doubt its anything more than perception.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
[*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*
|
Quote:
50s do care about debt. It cuts into influence gains.|
Originally Posted by Mega_Jamie
Since at the moment level 50s only get shards, and level 50s have no concern for debt and could just build it up at the start of their play session and whenever they got low on it to increase the drop rate, I highly doubt its anything more than perception.
|
Not that that stops me tackling hard spawns by rushing a couple of troublesome enemies, dropping, and RotPing for a nice big stun and a few dead troublemakers.
Quote:
When I'm teaming with my 50s I still occasionally die, but the associated debt that comes with that usually gets erased within what seems like a matter of milliseconds. It's probably been several years since the last time I had any "lasting" debt on them that made me even vaguely concerned about it.|
Originally Posted by shaggy5
Some guy on my team says that if you get more debt, you get more shards and he "tested" it. I want to say he is totally full of it, but maybe someone here can tell me that it's true?
|
Let's just say that if there's ever any correlation proven between having debt and getting more shards then I'm probably going to have to go out of my way to kill myself a whole bunch of times on purpose to have any benefit from this.
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I got two purple drops in one mission of a prior week's WST (LGTF) as an Ice/Ice blaster, so.....
Ice/Ice blaster must get double chances at purple drops when running the WST. Just sayin'. 
I find your lack of signature disturbing.
Quote:
I agree that is how it is supposed to work but it isn't necessarily how it does work. The thing to remember is that while the incarnate shards are different from the standard drop system they are not different from all other drop systems in the game. The mechanic of "everyone on the team has a chance for a drop" is used for quite a few other cases in the game, for example:|
Originally Posted by Schismatrix
Well, according to what i've read shard drops are rolled for every eligible member of the team when an enemy is defeated. There is no "gets the roll and game kicks the salvage over to" effect. The game doesn't create a shard and then go "gosh, now I've got to give this to somebody on the team." Everyone getting a roll for a shard drop is different from the standard drop mechanism and gives greater rewards for teaming than the other drop systems.
|
1. AVs: everyone gets an enhancement
2. Mothership Raid: everyone gets a Vanguard Merit
3. Monster: everyone gets a chance for an inspiration drop
Now there are two basic ways these could be implemented in the code (obviously this is more relevant to the third case than the other two since it's not a guaranteed drop):
1. Roll for each character separately
2. Roll X times and distribute as evenly as possible
Now the advantage of using the second method is that it would mean that the same piece of code is being used for all drops, it is simply told roll X drops with a chance of Y where X is either 1 or "number of team members" depending on the drop.
Now if we assume that the devs did originally implement using the second method above and that they used the same system for Incarnate shards (neither of which I would consider unreasonable assumptions) then it is entirely plausible that there is a bug in the code where for Incarnate shard drops X is being set to "number of characters on team" instead of "number of incarnates on team".
Sure more debt = more shards. It means you are skating just over the edge of what you can reasonably handle and more enemies = more chances to get shards... right?
j/k
Best educated guess would be that all 50+ mobs have the exact same drop rate for shards and that some bosses EBs and AVs have another table with a slightly higher drop rate in addition do the normal drop rate. So with each time they are defeated there is a minisucle chance of getting 2 shards.
Quote:
Actually, they apparently are. You can get MULTIPLE shards from a single enemy defeat and it is not like Vanguard Merits where you get a fixed number based on rank.
|
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
The thing to remember is that while the incarnate shards are different from the standard drop system they are not different from all other drop systems in the game.
|
Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
When new code comes in, new weirdness is possible. (For instance, there were missions that ALWAYS gave you a Pool B Door Prize- random wasn't quite random in that case.) So I'm going with "Unlikely but possible."
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@Boltcutter in game.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by je_saist
He may or may not be full of it from his point of view.
It's called the perception phenomenon. Players in a game tend to notice when things that are unusual happen. E.G. players tend to remember attacks that miss, rather than attacks that land. It is very possible that the guy on your team only noticed the shards dropping when he had debt because he was looking for any kind of relational behavior: He performs the X event, which causes random Y drop event to occur. It is very possible that an identical or larger sum of shards were dropped while the player was NOT in debt, but those drops were either ignored or did not register because they didn't fit any particular relational pattern. It is also very possible that due to the random number generator, the guy may have only gotten shards while in debt due to the timing and the rolling of the random number generator, and the debt was simply a coincidence. The development staff at Cryptic and now Paragon Studios have been very clear in the past that item drops are all based off their own separate generation systems. There is no intentional You do X event and it causes random Y drop event occur behavior coded into the engine. Most of the player held theories on X performance causing Y random drop event are often disproved by simply running HeroStats. Case in point. Everytime there is a patch, some player comes running to the forums screaming that accuracy has been nerfed. Two or three herostats sessions later and the logfiles show that no, accuracy was not nerfed. The player just noticed a string of misses and it stuck out. By the same token, everytime somebody comes running into the forums saying that X performance causes Y random drop event... chances are some stat tracking later will show that there is no relation. |
I quite agree however I also consider how new shards are to the game and keep room aside for the possibility of the code having an error. The question being how do we check?
What I am walking away with is that I now want to do ITF's (perhaps most end game TF's) with 7 lvl 48 characters and myself. And it is time to do another Hammi raid or two.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Actually... not random.
The more one plays, the more one is likely to get debt. The more one plays, the more one is likely to get shards. The more one attacks higher ranked foes, the more one is likely to get debt. The more one attacks higher ranked foes, the more one experiences a higher shard drop rate. There can be a real correlation between A and B, but not because one causes the other, but because C causes both. |
That says nothing that disproves randomness.
Some guy on my team says that if you get more debt, you get more shards and he "tested" it. I want to say he is totally full of it, but maybe someone here can tell me that it's true?
Global Name: Denver Nugget
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