Drop Rates

Peacekeeper06

Hi everyone,

i just wanna know, why drop-rates in eso are a well kept secret. In e.g. wow
drop-rates are well known. When its about crown-crates its very clear because of profit, while this is still questionable because of gambling. But why are drop-rates especially of motifs or similar things not made public, so that everyone can see, of its fair or not. Is it just to sell books (servers dont pay themselves)? Another answer i cant think of. My solution would be: Just tell the people what drop-rate is for a specific item, so everyone can decide for themselves whether it makes sense to farm it or just buy it. E.g. the new drop-rate for outlaw motifs is a Bad joke in comparison to assassins league motifs. And that already when you get two loots while there is this event. Dont tell us, the drop rate was made smaller with the last patch to keep these motifs "special". Thats a big joke. It is to sell more of them for real money. There is no other sense, when you see how bad the drop chances are now e.g. for outlaw. When the real drop chances are not made public, you can hide behind :"Its just random, you didnt have luck". But wen the are made public, it would just be more honest

VaranisArano

Because if they revealed the drop rates, they'd have to turn off the machines that know what you are looking for and make sure you get useless stuff instead.

davey1107

One reason might be simpler than we might accept - they might not reveal drop rates because they might not know what they are. Or rather, the system is too complex for them to calculate drop rates on individual items so that they can’t micro-manage informing us.

Let’s use like the hlaalu furnishing recipes from containers in vvardenfell as an example. It seems clear that to some degree Zos determines how rare these should be. A programmer has to program the item, after all. And it seems clear that from time to time they go and adjust these rates...they say so in patch notes.

But the fluctuation in drop rates doesn’t seem entirely driven by the dev team. There are other (undisclosed) factors at play. Frequent farmers can tell you this because we see rates fluctuate wildly from day to day or over time...in ways that make it implausible that someone is sitting at a control panel yelling “pull back the hlaalu chair recipes! Pull them back!!”

What likely happens is that the system has a traffic control mechanism that tries to distribute enough items, but not too many. If ten people in an hour run the tomb for recipes, the system is ok handing out one rare recipe. But if 1,000 people run it, the system doesn’t want to hand out 100 recipes and flood the market. This means that the drop rates would fluctuate depending on factors outside of Zos’s control.

Such a system might enact traffic control changes to drop rate based on:

- number of those items currently held in inventories in the game
- Number of players completing or picking up relevant quests
- Number of players in relevant zones
- Number of relevant containers raided
- A combo of all of these, plus potential others.

So if someone is farming for a sharpened asylum bow (trait is less relevant now, obviously), they might not be able to say the odds are 1:15. The odds might depend on how many bows are out there, how many it’s handed out today, how many people are in the trial, etc. And in all likelihood, there’s no master control panel that employees can pull up that would calculate the odds on a specific item, so they couldn’t tell us if they wanted.

ZarkingFrued

No

ghastley

davey1107 wrote: »

One reason might be simpler than we might accept - they might not reveal drop rates because they might not know what they are. Or rather, the system is too complex for them to calculate drop rates on individual items so that they can’t micro-manage informing us.

< snip >

I think this is the real reason. It's not a simple percentage rate, and the formulae aren't the same for all types of drops, making it also too complex to publish those. If they're regulating the availability of items to stabilise the economy, that would also rouse complaints from interested parties, both sellers and buyers.

However, information like "item X is only available in zone Y" is the sort of thing we should be told, and generally we are.

The grey area is when items are more frequent in one region than another.

redspecter23

If they don't reveal drop rates, then you don't know when they change them. This is especially worrying for crown crates, but also annoying for in game items. As players we can pool data and essentially work out drop rates, but if ZOS tweaks a few percentage points behind the scenes, we'd need an astronomical sample size to reliably notice the change. Basically, it lets them do shady number shifting without us knowing.

msetten

VaranisArano wrote: »

Because if they revealed the drop rates, they'd have to turn off the machines that know what you are looking for and make sure you get useless stuff instead.

Note sure this is actually in place, but I find it very weird that I get lots of master writs for Militant Ordinator, which is the ONLY motif I don’t have at the moment.

And I also noticed that when I get a master writ for a very high number of writ vouchers it tends to be for the craft that I have the least gold tempers for (in my case Blacksmithing).

Starts to make me wonder.

ghastley

msetten wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Because if they revealed the drop rates, they'd have to turn off the machines that know what you are looking for and make sure you get useless stuff instead.

Note sure this is actually in place, but I find it very weird that I get lots of master writs for Militant Ordinator, which is the ONLY motif I don’t have at the moment.

You can look at this (if it's real) as the RNG being mean to you, or as the game encouraging you to experience the part you've been missing. Half full, or half empty?

msetten

ghastley wrote: »

msetten wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Because if they revealed the drop rates, they'd have to turn off the machines that know what you are looking for and make sure you get useless stuff instead.

Note sure this is actually in place, but I find it very weird that I get lots of master writs for Militant Ordinator, which is the ONLY motif I don’t have at the moment.

You can look at this (if it's real) as the RNG being mean to you, or as the game encouraging you to experience the part you've been missing. Half full, or half empty?

I honestly don’t care either way. It’s just an observation I made. I just store those master craft writs for later when I do have that motif.

Jaraal

msetten wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Because if they revealed the drop rates, they'd have to turn off the machines that know what you are looking for and make sure you get useless stuff instead.

Note sure this is actually in place, but I find it very weird that I get lots of master writs for Militant Ordinator, which is the ONLY motif I don’t have at the moment.

And I also noticed that when I get a master writ for a very high number of writ vouchers it tends to be for the craft that I have the least gold tempers for (in my case Blacksmithing).

Starts to make me wonder.

I know they do this for crown crates, because most people get duplicates of the same thing over and over again, rather than getting an even distribution of the prizes. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if they weighted master writs towards the motifs your character doesn't know.

Wuselmann

Na that is just a vague suspicion. Ofc opening 10 undaunted chests with a 50% chance to drop either Balorgh or Vyskosia shoulders will give me 10 times Vyskosa in a row. While I need Balorgh shoulders and have not even a Vyskosia helmet. All working as intended. The mathmatical chance to loose 10 times in a row at 50% chance is 0.048828125% but hey It might just be bad luck which we have no protection against...

tmbrinks

Wuselmann wrote: »

Na that is just a vague suspicion. Ofc opening 10 undaunted chests with a 50% chance to drop either Balorgh or Vyskosia shoulders will give me 10 times Vyskosa in a row. While I need Balorgh shoulders and have not even a Vyskosia helmet. All working as intended. The mathmatical chance to loose 10 times in a row at 50% chance is 0.048828125% but hey It might just be bad luck which we have no protection against...

You necro-ed a thread from 2 years ago for this?

Glad to see innumeracy was still around then too.

[Deleted User]

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