Setting the record straight.

It can certainly be made more fair than random drops.

I recall the first time I did the RWZ missions with a friend. He had a Controller sidekicked to my Brute. Despite the fact that I was doing the bulk of the heavy lifting and he was strictly in a support mode 90% of the time, he was getting at least 50-60% more merit drops than I was. Maybe even close to twice as many. I wouldn't say I resented his earning upper triple-digit merits to my middling double-digit rewards, but it was annoying to play both on teams and solo yet still end up with not enough merits to buy the things I wanted. I eventually did, but it took me quite a while.

I've had that same luck with random rolls throughout the life of this game. Maybe I'm a statistical anomaly, but it sucks. I'd like it to be similar to xp and Inf: show up, do your job and get the reward, same as everyone else on the team.

.....what dimension did you just zone in from, again? How is the existance of qualifiers that help determine what you get, RANDOM? This is the opposite of random, sorry.

Qualifiers are in there, and that means that your original rant is not valid.

*props chin on hand* 'K, please explain to us the difference between an "opportunity" and a "chance."

Opportunity implies a binary choice, chance implies probability.

If I meet the participation threshold, I have the opportunity to be awarded a Very Rare, but not much of a chance.

If my league performs well and I have the opportunity to be awarded something, then my chance of getting a Very Rare is increased.

In which case a computer algorithm working on a specific seed isn't random at all, it just appears random to a non-scientific, non-informed observer.

Furthermore, putting rewards on a random roll has got to be one of the worst, most repugnant practices in gaming history. I'd much sooner see rewards based on collecting a large number of points, than rewards you have to be lucky to get, even if the latter MAY end up being more common than the former. I prefer to me in control of the amount of effort I put into a game and I prefer to have a direct system of feedback as to what my effort is accomplishing. Six-times-hidden systems for measuring participation on top of a pure random roll is the exact opposite of that.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Like, say, collecting 30 tokens gets you a Very Rare, or collecting four Rares and 400 mil Inf gets you a Very Rare?

Oh, wait, sorry. That doesn't count because it's too much points.

If the "tokens" weren't themselves highly random, then I'd be much more forgiving of how much it took. I did the whole rat race of trying to gain Alpha Incarnate boosts with Shards dropping off regular level 50 enemies, and I gave up after about the third day in which I hadn't gotten a single drop in a multi-hour play session.

Also, if you're referring to the existing methods, those are intentionally made to be punishing because - and this is from official comments - they are not the main way to gain Incarnate status.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

If you actually took the time to read Baryonyx's and my own posts, you realize what the qualifiers are actually qualifying you for. But here, I'll explain again.

You are qualifying for a chance at the random roll. You are not qualifying for a guaranteed very rare, you are qualifying for a shot at the rewards table. After you have qualified, it all thrown to the random generator and your reward is determined by that.

From Baryonyx:

My reward is determined by something, perhaps several somethings.

That's not random in the least.

The various levels are weighted by how well the league does overall, so if you complete all the "objectives" (That give you Astral Merits) then everyone who qualifies for a reward has a higher chance of getting a "better" one.

Based on the Beta server feedback, they set the Uncommon weighting too high and as a result, when leagues did better than expected on i20 launch, it resulted in Uncommon coming up more often than Common.

It's now been fixed.

I wouldn't say that necessarily. I still get a lot more uncommons than commons. I am not opposed to it being fairly easy to bump my chances of getting better rewards through good league play though, and with the ability to downgrade, I am happy to agree that it is fixed.

I'd like to point out just on this very narrow subject of the probability of getting Uncommon drops, "fixed" seems to be ... conditional? Take a look at my recorded drop statistics, and check out my ratio of Uncommon to Common salvage. The 1st character was run through trials mostly before the change to Uncommons, the 2nd straddled the change, and the 3rd, 4th and 5th were after it.

Then perhaps you'd care to tell me what those are? You can't just say "It's not random!!!!1@2!" and expect me to believe you. Because I already gave you developer quotes which say the system is random.

Let me put it to you this way. You and your friends are on a gameshow. You and your friends have to go through an obstacle course, and afterwards you get to spin a wheel to decide your prize. But, you can only get the opportunity of spinning the prize wheel if your team does well on the obstacle course. If you stand around and don't help your team, or if your team fails remarkably, then you won't get to spin the wheel for a prize. Does it make sense now?

What I'm saying. The participation threshold (that qualifies you for any Incarnate Salvage as opposed to just 10 Threads) is entirely an individual thing.

League performance can boost qualifying members' chance of getting higher tier rewards, which is why a lot of people still seem to get more Uncommons than Commons after the "fix" was rolled out; because their leagues are doing well and that's skewing their results upwards. If it reaches the point that it becomes too prevalent (remember that us forumites are not a good sample pool as we tend to be more knowledgeable about game mechanics and the like than non-forumites resulting in - I would imagine - more successful iTrial runs on average) then the devs may have to adjust the modifiers again.

There are degrees of random. Which is to say, it may always be random, but the distribution of rewards based on the random roll may be affected by various things. We don't know what any of those things might be specifically, but we can get a hint of it by looking for correlations between things we can control and the probability of rewards given.

If you look at the thread from my post, linked above, and check out the data from myself, Lobster, Arcanaville, and one other post I linked to data for in another thread, there are some suspicious-looking trends, particularly for Masterminds. If participation only controls whether you see Threads or not, once you filter out all the times someone gets Threads only, there should be no reason for Masterminds to see Common salvage more often than other characters. However, tentatively, based on data available at this time, it looks like Masterminds might be seeing more Common salvage than other ATs. This is interesting because we think we know that there is something wrong with the system's measurement of Mastermind participation. If that is true, and Masterminds are more likely to get Commons than other ATs, then it suggests that participation score may have some influence on reward, because it looks like a low participation score may make Common salvage more likely.

What I would say seems likely at this point is that participation does not appear to have any significant impact on reward beyond some level. In other words, the theory that Masterminds are prone to get Common salvage due to low participation seems likely to be specific to low participation scores above what you need to avoid the Thread-only table. If participation can indeed influence your reward distribution, I believe it must reach some maximum contribution, at which point any further influence over reward distribution would come down to things at a league level. In other words, low participation may make Commons more likely, but there is probably a hard limit to the degree which high participation can make Rares more likely.

I don't believe this theory is incompatible with the things Baryonyx said (or didn't say).

The tokens are e-merits, which aren't random at all unless you want to consider it a 'random' team you could choose to be on that determines your success. They are distributed once per trial on a 20 hours timer.

30 e-merits for a very rare
8 e-merits for a rare

Run the trials successfully, you'll get your e-merits. It may not be as fast as you like, but you are making progress. Running 2 trials per day to get those e-merits. It'll take you roughly (less actually) 92 days to get all of the e-merits to craft the rare and very rare components to get every T4 above alpha. During those successful runs, you'll also get astral merits, each worth 4 threads. You'll get around 2500-3000 threads just from those. More if you get the badges. Then i'd say about 3-5 threads drop per run anyways by themselves. Assuming you only get threads, commons, and uncommons as drops from the reward table you should have MORE than enough components to craft your powers. Getting the badges on each one reward a random uncommon the firsttime. Getting the master-of badges give you a random rare. More astral merits for each additional time. Its also possible you MIGHT get a rare or very rare drop which will drastically shorten this time to do this in.

Everyone should with minimal, what I would say casual, playing (1-2 hours a day to run 2 trials) CAN get a T4 in about 3 months without rares and very rares dropping at the end of trials. Is it instant? No. Its not meant to be. Some people get lucky and get better drops. Yes. But not everyone. Kinda sucks, but its not impossible or extremely difficult to get without being lucky with the drops.

You don't like the trials, well there is a, granted, much slower way of getting up there, also depending on the RNG a good bit by up converting shards. But if you're not running trials, you really don't NEED to have T4s to be successful and have fun and be overpowered in this game.

The most compatible theory with our current best understanding of the system is that if one particular archetype, for example masterminds, tends to get a lower grade of component reward separate from any chance at getting threads, the most likely reason is that somehow something about the way some players play that archetype is somehow causing them to fail to acquire team or league bonuses that are otherwise accruing to the majority of the team or league. In other words, its not that their lower participation score is generating a lower reward, its that their lower activity level is somehow disqualifying them for at least some random roll bonuses.

Assuming that there's only one thing measuring activity, and that thing is the participation metric, my idea was that there might be a band of low participation scores (below which you get Threads) which effectively dictates a reward table that has a higher chance of commons and a lower chance of rares and very rares than the table(s) presented to people with higher participation. Above this band of participation, the odds of uncommons, rares etc. would be dictated not by participation, but by league activities.

So I think what I was thinking and what you're describing are compatible.

"From Baryonyx: If your league does well, and you are a factor in that success, this will only increase your opportunity to earn a Very Rare component.

Increasing opportunity to get this or that via something judging your performance and awarding drops accordingly.... Not random.

I'm sorry, that is the last thing BUT random!

"You have a chance to get a rare drop!"

"You have an opportunity to get a rare drop!"

In this instance there is not much, if any difference between the two statements. But that to the side, Baryonyx has told us in plain language that something [maybe several factors] are weighing into who gets what drops. Not random.

I'm not sure if they are compatible, but I don't think they are congruent. I think you're suggesting that its possible having a low individual participation score plus league bonuses can generate lower component rolls than someone with a higher individual participation score plus league bonuses.

I'm suggesting that participation score itself does not factor into the random rolls at all, but its possible the root cause of having low individual participation scores could also lower your chance of getting league bonuses which means even when you qualify your random rolls would tend to be lower regardless of participation score.

Suppose you got a participation bonus and also a league bonus to your random roll of 2% for each weapon crate or containment vessel you contributed damage towards (just making up an example: I have no data which suggests this is actually true). In that case, its *theoretically possible* for a player to only hit each crate once and do nothing else and yet qualify for a drop with an otherwise very low individual participation score: the league bonuses would be helping him qualify. But in general, someone that attacks much less often and gets low participation scores would also tend on average to hit less crates: the same thing that lowers his participation also lowers his random roll bonuses. But its not the fact that his score is low that causes his random drops to be lower, its the fact that the same thing that makes his participation low also makes him much more likely to miss out on totally separate bonuses.

I think some more complex variation on that theory is likely to be the cause of most archetypal skews, and not some form of "bleed through" of the individual participation score into the random roll. Unless what we've been told about the system is in error.

"Random" and "weighted" are not mutually exclusive. In fact one has nothing to do with the other. Normal invention recipe drops are both random and weighted: which one you get is generated randomly, but the odds of getting each one is weighted based on type and rarity.

To be precise, a random number generator generates a random number from one to the maximum number of rewards in a reward table. That number is then used to select a single reward from that reward table. That makes the selection random. Is there any way for the player by their own individual actions to either alter the result of the random roll or alter the entries in the table? According to the devs, the answer to that question is no. Other factors not under the individual player's complete control can influence the distribution of rewards according to the devs, but nothing alters the actual random roll. Therefore the choice of reward is still random, and more importantly nothing the player does can materially influence the random result.

I don't know why its true that lots of people seem to think that "random" implies "equal distribution" but neither the colloquial definition of random nor its technical definition include that property when the term "random" is used synonymous with "randomly generated." In fact, I encounter weighted random situations far more often than unweighted random ones.

I'm suggesting that a low enough participation score might effectively override your league bonuses, giving you a "low participation" table. The reason I'm thinking there might be such a direct relationship (at least over a small range of participation), rather than there being some other factor in between that's creating a non-causal correlation between participation and league score, is that having another factor seems to require yet another measurement of our personal activity besides just participation. Even in your example, there's an indirect measurement of some sort suggested - some criteria that the way support characters are played often causes them to not get full credit for what the league does as a whole. While that's certainly possible, I don't think we've been told anything to suggest that is the case.

I find it easy to be cynical about the detailed correctness of what we've been told, not specifically because I expect error or deceit, but because I suspect that significant effort was put into "laymanizing" the explanation. Going into all the curves and interactions is probably not just considered undesirable in order to hide the details from us, but also possibly because they're actually rather complicated.

We were told we can't control our ability to get a Rare or Very Rare, and that what we get is random. We were not told we cannot affect that chance. I'm just assuming that participation is the means by which that any such affect would be determined, because it's the explicit, individual measurement we know about. That and because we weren't told it had no affect at all, just that it didn't have so much affect we could produce deterministic rewards.