How people on my Server are making 1 Million a day from farming Cabinets, Drawers etc.

Mystrius_Archaion · June 2018

Cryptical wrote: »

There's a cooldown timer on the telvanni/hlaalu/redoran motif chapters you pickpocket from people in vvardenfell.

45 minutes, if I recall correctly.

So the farmers start on character 1, and when they pickpocket a chapter they note the time and change to character 2. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It is very believable that there is a cooldown timer on farming furnishings.

No, I can guarantee that is less than 45 minutes if there even is a cooldown. That is still not likely as a purple drop is already rare enough chance that the RNG takes care of any possibility of a lucky fast streak.

For example, there are three possibilities for people going for the motifs from pickpocketing/killing NPCs:
1) You are the only one doing it. The drop chance is extremely low like 1-200 pickpocket/kill attempts. You see one motif every fairly long term, seems like a cooldown. (You being the only one in a game with hundreds of thousands of players on at the exact same time with similar goals is like winning the lottery already. It isn't going to happen.)
2) There are many people doing this and the code for the drop chance is server side. 1/200 chance so somebody in that group, of say 10 people, will see a drop relatively often, like 1/20, on the whole but the same rate overall for everyone due to it being random who gets the purple.
3) There are many people doing this and the code for the drop chance is client side(at your PC , which it isn't because that would be stupidly easy to cheat hack). That would still mean the same case as 1 and 2 above where everyone would randomly see a purple 1 out of every 200 tries, on average.

Now, the reason some people think there is a cooldown comes when they stop for a while, to let the cooldown pass, but scenario 2 above still happens. There are other people working the odds on the server. That means you can come into that equation and "get lucky" and be the one to get the motif without having to do all that work.

People believe there is a cooldown because of server side drop calculations and luck when a cooldown really doesn't exist.

Server side RNG calculations are tricky and often just ugly.
I did a whole calculation many years ago on World of Warcraft about how going for the mounts from loot in raids was insane which is just how this is. Mounts there had a 1/100 drop chance from the end boss of a specific raid, like Kael'thas Sunstrider and the mount item Ashes of Alar(maybe spelled incorrectly). That raid required 25 players where everyone rolled for the loot. So 1/100 chance was divided into 1/2500 chance per run. That means you would have to run the same raid with the same people 2500 times to be guaranteed(as much as ever could be) every member get the mount. But, people swap out and your group is not the only group going for it. You're more likely to never even see the drop let alone win the roll for it. Content dies due to "the new hotness" coming out also and therefore you will probably never see the drop, especially with their weekly/monthly raid loot reset.(loot reset timers are masochistically dumb)

You don't need a cooldown to keep things insanely obscenely rare and screw players over. RNG does it all easily.
The reason you think you see a cooldown is simply because somebody else "wins the roll" on the server side calculation while you lose it repeatedly, or you randomly "win the roll" being lucky when the server side calculation hits after all the other people have been trying while you sat and didn't try.

It's a fantasy of coincidence created by the human mind trying to find patterns in everything, like shapes in clouds that seem to be one cloud but if looked at from another angle aren't even the same cloud.

You're just trying to put on lucky socks for watching your favorite baseball game to "help your team win". It's all a lie you tell yourself.

ResTandRespeC · June 2018

LadyLethalla wrote: »

Increased Summerset droprate? Where?

I've done the main quest and the Psijic quest and the dailies for over 2 weeks, done all the delves, done one of the public dungeons, looted every single urn and other container I've found, and have found a total of 3 recipes. Two blues and one green. Nothing purple. But I did see someone in chat the other day apparently unsuccessfully trying to flog the Fireplace purple recipe for 50k.

On the other hand I have gotten a few blues and a purple of other furnishing recipes, such as a Breton Knotwork Mirror or something like that, in Summerset.

I meant in comparison to morrowinds diagrams. If you do want some of the diagrams I'd definitely go [ark a couple characters in traitors vault and do a couple of the wardrobe loops. I've gotten 5 or 6 diagrams with pretty minimal work. Have a bunch of friends who have been doing it non-stop. Make sure to have room in your inventory for the stacks of lock picks your sure to get though XD

bellatrixed · June 2018

"1 million a day"
"Why do people do this"

I think the answer is self evident there!

Personally I keep trying to farm but it's so absolutely mind numbing. I'd rather farm the gold and pay someone else for their container opening efforts. It kills my soul lol

LadyLethalla · June 2018

It's also funny that OP posted this, given his reputation on PS4 EU... just saying...

Linaleah · June 2018

LadyLethalla wrote: »

Increased Summerset droprate? Where?

I've done the main quest and the Psijic quest and the dailies for over 2 weeks, done all the delves, done one of the public dungeons, looted every single urn and other container I've found, and have found a total of 3 recipes. Two blues and one green. Nothing purple. But I did see someone in chat the other day apparently unsuccessfully trying to flog the Fireplace purple recipe for 50k.

On the other hand I have gotten a few blues and a purple of other furnishing recipes, such as a Breton Knotwork Mirror or something like that, in Summerset.

wait. WHAT? oh... ps4... 50k for that recipe is a STEAL. even on PC.

LadyLethalla · June 2018

Linaleah wrote: »

LadyLethalla wrote: »

Increased Summerset droprate? Where?

I've done the main quest and the Psijic quest and the dailies for over 2 weeks, done all the delves, done one of the public dungeons, looted every single urn and other container I've found, and have found a total of 3 recipes. Two blues and one green. Nothing purple. But I did see someone in chat the other day apparently unsuccessfully trying to flog the Fireplace purple recipe for 50k.

On the other hand I have gotten a few blues and a purple of other furnishing recipes, such as a Breton Knotwork Mirror or something like that, in Summerset.

wait. WHAT? oh... ps4... 50k for that recipe is a STEAL. even on PC.

I know, right? Though since s/he was clearly having difficulty selling it at that price (I saw it in zone chat twice, after wayshrining to Mournhold and back to Alinor) I was thinking maybe it was a scammer...

Linaleah · June 2018

LadyLethalla wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

LadyLethalla wrote: »

Increased Summerset droprate? Where?

I've done the main quest and the Psijic quest and the dailies for over 2 weeks, done all the delves, done one of the public dungeons, looted every single urn and other container I've found, and have found a total of 3 recipes. Two blues and one green. Nothing purple. But I did see someone in chat the other day apparently unsuccessfully trying to flog the Fireplace purple recipe for 50k.

On the other hand I have gotten a few blues and a purple of other furnishing recipes, such as a Breton Knotwork Mirror or something like that, in Summerset.

wait. WHAT? oh... ps4... 50k for that recipe is a STEAL. even on PC.

I know, right? Though since s/he was clearly having difficulty selling it at that price (I saw it in zone chat twice, after wayshrining to Mournhold and back to Alinor) I was thinking maybe it was a scammer...

must have been. because while the prices seem to be dropping on pc, still https://us.tamrieltradecentre.com/pc/Trade/SearchResult?ItemID=17936&ItemNamePattern=Praxis:+Alinor+Fountain,+Four-Way+Timeworn&SortBy=Price&Order=asc

Lykanus · June 2018

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

Coding = Logic
Logical = simple is better

Adding cooldown = not simple
not simple = not logical
not logical = not coding smart
not coding smart = not having a coding job, least of all at a big successful game company

You should go an farm yourself for a while then you'd know you're wrong and telling myths here.

There is a cooldown. You can clearly check it by looting a blue and then seeing (and waiting) when you loot the next blue, do the same at least 25 times, then do the same again while always logging onto an alt after you looted a blue... you will CLEARLY see the difference even with a sample as low as 25. I did.

How it is implemented code-wise however is totally ignoreable (it might just much lowers your drop chances) but that makes overall no difference - if its an lowered rng after looting or just a clear block - you have cooldown for your chance. Sure it would make a minor difference in the first or later case as you would still have a low chance but you still would have a cooldown for your normal (good) drop chance. For me that makes no difference, logging to an alt improves your chances as you have a cooldown of whatever kind.

Juju_beans · June 2018

redspecter23 wrote: »

You will pull a green furnishing recipe about 99% of the time from the wardrobe run on every toon.

You have better luck than me. I've run that room in Traitor's Vault when I get the daily delve there.
No greens, blues or purples but lots and lots of lock picks for me.

LadyLethalla · June 2018

I ran it twice while on my lunch break, did a Daily quest in between. First run, one blue and one green furnishing recipe in I think Nord and Khajiit, both of which I already had. Purple Anc Elf book, which I didn't need, one purple and one or two green food recipes that I didn't need.
2nd run: one white furnishing recipe. Nothing else. -_____________-

ErMurazor · June 2018

Its a CD on recpies. A friend of mine did extensive tests.

Ferrofluid · June 2018

There’s no cool down on furnishing plans. I looted 2 blues from containers next to each other in that tomb in vvardenfell.

SantieClaws · June 2018

Khajiit herself may have a small team of five or six apprentices who clean the wardrobes once each day. This one considers it a public service to be cleaning up all those unwanted lockpicks yes.

Recipes do drop but in a normal day this one will be lucky if the apprentices find one Alinor recipe. If this one doesn't know it then she learns it. After that they go in the bank yes for trading and giving to friends.

This one she sells any other blue or purple recipes found at very, very reasonable prices.

Enough perhaps can be made to buy some other Alinor recipes for herself at the weekend.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge yes you understand as this one will never have enough of the lacquer to actually craft very much.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Seri · June 2018

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

For example, there are three possibilities for people going for the motifs from pickpocketing/killing NPCs:
1) You are the only one doing it. The drop chance is extremely low like 1-200 pickpocket/kill attempts. You see one motif every fairly long term, seems like a cooldown. (You being the only one in a game with hundreds of thousands of players on at the exact same time with similar goals is like winning the lottery already. It isn't going to happen.)
2) There are many people doing this and the code for the drop chance is server side. 1/200 chance so somebody in that group, of say 10 people, will see a drop relatively often, like 1/20, on the whole but the same rate overall for everyone due to it being random who gets the purple.
3) There are many people doing this and the code for the drop chance is client side(at your PC , which it isn't because that would be stupidly easy to cheat hack). That would still mean the same case as 1 and 2 above where everyone would randomly see a purple 1 out of every 200 tries, on average.

Now, the reason some people think there is a cooldown comes when they stop for a while, to let the cooldown pass, but scenario 2 above still happens. There are other people working the odds on the server. That means you can come into that equation and "get lucky" and be the one to get the motif without having to do all that work.

Well, there is a 4th option there - a server side RNG stream which is instanced per toon. Realistically we don't have a good way to determine which is in play since any sufficiently good RNG stream would indistinguishable if one person is using it vs hundreds. From general experience, PTS RNG feels just as bad as live, but obviously this doesn't answer one way or the other. The truth could very well be a combination of the two where there are multiple RNG sources depending which server/instance you're connected to (as making a whole-megaserver thread-safe RNG source would involve a lot of mutex locking). Even with a uniform RNG generating integers 0-199, it could be hundreds of attempts before a '0' occurs so both case 1 and 2 can't be readily determined.

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

Server side RNG calculations are tricky and often just ugly.
I did a whole calculation many years ago on World of Warcraft about how going for the mounts from loot in raids was insane which is just how this is. Mounts there had a 1/100 drop chance from the end boss of a specific raid, like Kael'thas Sunstrider and the mount item Ashes of Alar(maybe spelled incorrectly). That raid required 25 players where everyone rolled for the loot. So 1/100 chance was divided into 1/2500 chance per run. That means you would have to run the same raid with the same people 2500 times to be guaranteed(as much as ever could be) every member get the mount. But, people swap out and your group is not the only group going for it. You're more likely to never even see the drop let alone win the roll for it. Content dies due to "the new hotness" coming out also and therefore you will probably never see the drop, especially with their weekly/monthly raid loot reset.(loot reset timers are masochistically dumb)

That part, also feels weird. Unless you mean there was a 1/100 chance that it would drop to _someone_ in the raid. In which case, yes, I agree, your personal drop rate would be close to 1/2500 (1/100 chance that someone will get, then 1/25 chance on who gets it after that). This is a different type of RNG than just a 1/200 (for example) chance that an urn or NPC would contain a given motif as the second chance depends on the first.

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

If there is a cooldown then you can "prove it"(more than perceived time continuously farming) by stopping farming as soon as you get a purple recipe and waiting an hour, doing nothing else but still logged in, then loot again and instantly see a blue recipe again on the first container.

A cooldown can easily be proven by waiting for it to expire and seeing a guaranteed result.
RNG would make you still need to wait longer after the cooldown supposedly expired.

I don't think there was ever the claim of a cooldown (and nothing but cooldown), but rather RNG+Cooldown where you're excluded from RNG until cooldown over, then get the regular x% for every subsequent urn. Unfortunately that combination could never be proven - it can only be disproven by obtaining two rare items more or less back-to-back.

Feanor · June 2018

I‘m actually really happy I’m not that much into housing. Farming or buying all these recipes sounds awful.

rustic_potato · June 2018

If you aren't interested in furnishing and outfits gold is kinda useless in ESO.

SickDuck · June 2018

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

redspecter23 wrote: »

Tannus15 wrote: »

Why would you need alt accounts? if you logout and back in again all the containers refresh...

There is a timer for most of the drops. I think green recipes are 5 minutes. blue are 1 hour and I'm not sure on purples. This is just what I've noticed. If you pull a purple or blue, you'll want to swap toons and avoid the cooldown. It also prevents the situation you may see which has all the cabinets empty if you simply log out and back in on the same toon.

1) Instances have a reset timer. You relog and you often enter the same copy unless there are more copies due to being full. This is how "megaservers" work.

2) You can reset the containers of an instance guaranteed by leaving the loading screen door of the instance and going back in. Guaranteed works 100% of the time so long as you see the other zone on the other side of the loading screen, aka don't disconnect and relog into the same instance.

3) There is no cooldown on the drops, just RNG lower chances that make it seem like a cooldown. If there was a cooldown then they would tie it to your @ name and multiple characters wouldn't work at all either. If they wanted to do a cooldown for the reason of slowing farming then they would do that, especially since it reduces the server side calculations to 1 per @ name rather than 1 per character name.

I don’t farm these days but there was a cooldown on recipes and motifs in early days. I remember farming dwemer motif pages when it was released. The drop rate was decent, you could always get one in a few minutes. And then 2 hours of silence... unless you switched toons and repeat.

If you are still in doubt just think about the 5 mins delve boss loot cooldowns. They do exist and easy to verify.

Mind you it is not based on instance but global. Instance based would be insane.

Asardes · June 2018

1) Why would anyone want to make 1M a day? (this isn't realistic, as blue quality blueprints are 20K or less)
2) Why would one run endless loops in the same delve hundreds of times a day instead of actually playing the game? (even if they went for 20K and sold right away you'll still need about 50 of them to make a million)

Gold has rapidly diminishing marginal value in this game. Even with motifs and blueprints released every few months with every update you could easily make enough gold just playing the game to keep up with them. For example I just do writs on several characters and sell surplus items on guild stores and still get 7-800K per week in profit. DLCs get released every 3 months on average, and in that time I would have earned 8-9M with minimal effort. No DLC has loot that costs that much, unless you're greedy enough to just buy everything in the first 3 days. I usually farm some of them myself, but in a more relaxed, laid back manner (ex. run the dailies for a few weeks), then buy everything that I'm missing right before the next DLC drops, when the prices would have already dropped quite low. It takes 2-3M at most if you go trough the guilds several times over a few days and scoop the bargains. Also there's no rush to get the furnishing plans. I've never tried to buy the Morrowind purple ones when they went for 5-600K. I bid my time and I bought them in envelopes with vouchers when they were added at Faustina's, and sold the duplicates for quite a good price 100-200K in the first few days after they were added, before people actually realized they were so easy to get - way too many rely on MM price alone. So I actually earned more gold by waiting. To conclude, I really see no point in mashing my brains farming items, or run like crazy farming gold fast so I can buy them straight away, when they cost an arm and a leg. It's like a dog chasing its own tail

Mystrius_Archaion · June 2018

Lykanus wrote: »

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

Coding = Logic
Logical = simple is better

Adding cooldown = not simple
not simple = not logical
not logical = not coding smart
not coding smart = not having a coding job, least of all at a big successful game company

You should go an farm yourself for a while then you'd know you're wrong and telling myths here.

There is a cooldown. You can clearly check it by looting a blue and then seeing (and waiting) when you loot the next blue, do the same at least 25 times, then do the same again while always logging onto an alt after you looted a blue... you will CLEARLY see the difference even with a sample as low as 25. I did.

I've done it, and my results are the same every time. It is always explained by RNG.
The only difference is the relog time to the other character while other players are still farming that area and causing several of the set number of chances to be used up in the time it takes me to relog.

You're seeing an artificial effect created by your perception, just like shapes in clouds or thinking wearing dirty unwashed socks helps your favorite baseball/soccer team win.

There is no cooldown because of 2 reasons:

1) They would make it username based, not character based, if they wanted to limit how fast players can get certain loot. They've done this sort of username check for everything in collections already so it is super easy to do username instead of character name if they want to go through that complication.

2) The cooldown being character based, as you all say it is based on absolutely no fact and just rumors, would mean that it would likely be client side code, on your pc, which means it would be easily hacked for people to get guaranteed recipes if they wanted to. This is because all those containers reset on each character the second you go through the loading screen to another zone, like out the front door of the instance. You go right back in to full containers filled personally just for your character which can't be opened and emptied by other players unlike crafting nodes and treasure chests and lockboxes.

There is no cooldown because it would be a waste of developer resources to make such a thing and likely cause cheating hacks to be much easier and more common because of how they would have had to implement it for it to match how players believe it is.

Just because some people believe in "the flying spaghetti monster deity" doesn't mean everybody does or that it is even real. There are so many things just like that in this world with no actual proof that people can claim "but this is proof" when it is more easily proven another way.

This is another example of Occam's Razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is most likely. Also, it's another example of 2 things about human behavior, that people will take the easiest option and that people can be convinced of anything with the slightest shred of believability(like people believing the earth is flat against all evidence just because past people believed it was flat and because the earth curves too subtly for us to obviously see from the ground).
So, the developers would not have complicated their lives by making a cooldown that RNG would work better for and could give people the false impression of a cooldown anyway and yet people obviously believed whatever "messiah cult leader" started "the cult of cooldowns" suckering them in on without any proof just the words "it must be true because it feels true".

Mystrius_Archaion · June 2018

SickDuck wrote: »

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

redspecter23 wrote: »

Tannus15 wrote: »

Why would you need alt accounts? if you logout and back in again all the containers refresh...

There is a timer for most of the drops. I think green recipes are 5 minutes. blue are 1 hour and I'm not sure on purples. This is just what I've noticed. If you pull a purple or blue, you'll want to swap toons and avoid the cooldown. It also prevents the situation you may see which has all the cabinets empty if you simply log out and back in on the same toon.

1) Instances have a reset timer. You relog and you often enter the same copy unless there are more copies due to being full. This is how "megaservers" work.

2) You can reset the containers of an instance guaranteed by leaving the loading screen door of the instance and going back in. Guaranteed works 100% of the time so long as you see the other zone on the other side of the loading screen, aka don't disconnect and relog into the same instance.

3) There is no cooldown on the drops, just RNG lower chances that make it seem like a cooldown. If there was a cooldown then they would tie it to your @ name and multiple characters wouldn't work at all either. If they wanted to do a cooldown for the reason of slowing farming then they would do that, especially since it reduces the server side calculations to 1 per @ name rather than 1 per character name.

I don’t farm these days but there was a cooldown on recipes and motifs in early days. I remember farming dwemer motif pages when it was released. The drop rate was decent, you could always get one in a few minutes. And then 2 hours of silence... unless you switched toons and repeat.

If you are still in doubt just think about the 5 mins delve boss loot cooldowns. They do exist and easy to verify.

Mind you it is not based on instance but global. Instance based would be insane.

My big question for all of you is what would be the purpose of the supposed cooldown that would make its existence worth the time and effort and risk of bugs to add to the game code over everything else already there?
Is a cooldown meant to slow down acquisition of specific items? If so then what purpose would RNG have when it is meant to slow down acquisition of items? Why have 2 systems doing the exact same job?

The delve boss cooldowns are completely different. They're not per item or rarity level of the item or multiple bosses tied together. They're that boss and only that boss to encourage people to go around to multiple bosses and prevent exploiting easy bosses.
I also feel that those cooldowns are absolutely pointless considering the delve bosses take the exact same amount of effort to defeat each and every time anyway.

Also, if you were to compare the supposed container loot cooldowns to delve boss loot cooldowns then 2 things would need to be true:
1) The cooldown is the refilling of the container, caused by zoning out and back in or relogging to the same or another character(which you all believe is true). The refilling would be the only cooldown then.
2) The container should not refill every time you zone then and should track a full 5 minute wait like delve bosses.

But then if those were true even, why do bosses drop a purple motif, sometimes the same motif, twice in a row when you kill the boss and then do so again 5 minutes later on the next respawn? The rate is too high for a purple cooldown that supposedly wants us to wait 45 minutes to over an hour according to most people.
Also, delve bosses respawn instantly for anyone needing the achievement for their defeat and even often the quest progression point needed for that boss. Recipes and motifs don't even bother checking if you already have learned them and you get repeats.

If a cooldown really exists then it should and would check for whether or not you already know that recipe/motif on that character to make it more likely that the next one you get is one you don't already know. It doesn't though so what is the point of the cooldown that you say supposedly exists? Is it to add to a duration to slow players down even more than RNG already does when RNG can already be tweaked to make any length of delay happen anyway? Why use 2 systems compounded on each other to make a specific result happen when one simpler easier to code system can and does do the same thing much simpler and easier with fewer possible bugs??

Coatmagic · June 2018

Threads like this are why/how things get nerfed xD

Mystrius_Archaion · June 2018

Seri wrote: »

That part, also feels weird. Unless you mean there was a 1/100 chance that it would drop to _someone_ in the raid. In which case, yes, I agree, your personal drop rate would be close to 1/2500 (1/100 chance that someone will get, then 1/25 chance on who gets it after that). This is a different type of RNG than just a 1/200 (for example) chance that an urn or NPC would contain a given motif as the second chance depends on the first.

The only difference between World of Warcraft and this game is that all loot drops are not "per boss" but "per loot attempt".
So that 1/100 chance for the mount to drop was per "Kael'thas kill", one chance out of 100 times that raid was finished. That was still server side so there could be 100 groups going at the same time.
So yes, anyone's personal chance to receive the mount was 1/2500 multiplied by the amount of groups finishing the raid that weekly cooldown multiplied by the number of weeks people ran it. The odds quickly went into 1/infinity so that some people would never ever see the drop.

This game uses the same thing without the loot rolls so members of your own group do not decrease your odds of getting loot as obviously. They are still a separate loot instance and potentially increase your odds considering the server code could say 1/100 chance which means with a 25 person raid group it would be a 1/4 chance that somebody in the group would get the mount rather than a 1/100 chance while your personal chance would still be 1/100.

Essentially though, server side calculations of drop chances cause this feeling of cooldowns because you farm and farm and don't see anything 99 times out of 100 but then you don't farm and only visit on time 1 and time 101 and get a drop both times because somebody else did the other 99 times.
It's not a cooldown, just the very predictable law of averages and the fact that you are not the only person gettign that loot and it is not your own personal loot chance.

For example, I've gotten 1 Aetherial Dust on my entire account ever since that was added to the game. Have you gotten any? Have you gotten more? How much have you farmed in the base game areas before any DLC to get that?
I certainly haven't farmed base game areas. I either farmed craglorn because of nirncrux or didn't care and just stayed in DLC areas where I was doing quests and dailies. I just stumbled upon the Aetherial Dust from a random nirnroot node in The Hollow City in Coldharbour when I happened to be there and felt like grabbing some of them.
It wasn't a cooldown. It was just luck that I happened to be grabbing the right node while others had been farming forever for it. I probably caused, because of server calculations, a long term farmer to have to farm another month or more without seeing another one of those Aetherial Dust just because I happened to get the lucky "server roll".

Cooldowns are unnecessary and pointless when you already have RNG based on the server. And that RNG also causes the illusion of cooldowns due to it being on the server "for all characters". So a 1/2000 drop chance can look like a 1/2 drop chance for the player who patiently waits and doesn't farm all because the farmers are continually pinging the machine.

It's like going to a casino and putting a dollar in a slot machine and winning the jackpot. You didn't hit it at the cooldown time. You just benefited from the many people that went before you throwing their money into the machine, which in that case also increased the jackpot amount. It's all random chance.

Mystrius_Archaion · June 2018

ErMurazor wrote: »

Its a CD on recpies. A friend of mine did extensive tests.

Anecdotes all of them.
You could only accurately test this if you were the only person farming any container that they can possibly drop from across the entire server, which is impossible.

I've been trying to tell every person here the hidden truth of drop chances. They are not "per player" drop chances. They are "per server".
You see a 1/100 chance(just for an arbitrary number) of a purple recipe dropping and it actually means 1/100 chance on the server for anybody looting any container that can possibly contain that item. Meaning if there are 100 people farming then 1 of them is guaranteed the drop which appears like a 100% chance to them.
You have enough people farming and the odds are really 1/100 for everybody because of enough sample size but then it is still server based so I could literally stop farming when I see my first purple recipe and then sit and wait however long I choose and start farming again and quickly see another purple recipe all because my 100 chances were mostly used on the server by other players.

The illusion of a cooldown happens because you are not the only person farming something 100 times for a 1/100 chance. You could just try once and sometime later come in on the 100th time any player has looted the container type in question and suddenly you get what you wanted, making it appear that waiting was the smart move, but in reality you just benefited from another player's effort.

Loot attempt 1: me, purple recipe
Loot attempt 2: you, nothing
Loot attempt 3: you, nothing
Loot attempt 4: you, nothing
Loot attempt 5: you, nothing
Loot attempt 6: you, nothing
Loot attempt 7: you, nothing
Loot attempt 8: you, nothing
Loot attempt 9: you, nothing
Loot attempt 10: you, nothing
...
Loot attempt 99: you, nothing
Loot attempt 100: you, nothing
Loot attempt 101: me, purple recipe

me: "There must be a cooldown because when I farmed 100 times in a row earlier I only saw one purple recipe but now I didn't farm and instead waited after my first purple recipe and got a second purple recipe. Cooldown must be real."

This would be a delusion because even though I didn't farm the code is server based so it was as if I had farmed because of other players. My odds looked really good because I was missing data on the sample size.

Edit: Also, it always feels like longer when you are doing something boring so even if it were quicker than you believed a cooldown would be then you would still likely overestimate the wait time to fit your belief in a cooldown, or just amend your believed cooldown number down to match the results. It's just like "a watched pot never boils" when it really takes the same amount of time to boil if all variables that affect it are the same whether you watch it or not.

SantieClaws · June 2018

Cooldown or not there is not point in fretting.

We will never know for sure. The gods will not tell us their secrets.

So loot while you feel like looting. When you don't then go and stab some elves, go fishing or drink all of the wine at a friends house.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Merlin13KAGL · June 2018

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

There is no cooldown because it would be a waste of developer resources to make such a thing and likely cause cheating hacks to be much easier and more common because of how they would have had to implement it for it to match how players believe it is.

You make a lot of presumptions regarding how you think they coded things in game, as well. You realize that, right?

Giving example of how you would approach it is likely different than how they chose to.
Giving example based on logic, however sound it may be and assuming that was the intent is just as likely to be incorrect.

The fact that you make statements about how it would be a waste of developer resources to tack on a timer object to a character leads me to believe you probably don't code or even do basic development (often requiring very little to no code with modern engines).

You're presumption that there is no cooldown has just as much lack of proof as the presumption that there is one, and is as equally unproven and valid/invalid as a result.

Your argument that it is low drop rate (which is likely true) without the presence of cooldown is still just an assumption. Nothing says they must be mutually exclusive.

I vaguely recall a Dev post some time back regarding either drop rate and/or cooldown regarding tier of certain items, specifically recipes and motifs. This was of particular interest back when people were still trying to obtain Imperial motifs, questioning why the drops appeared to be guaranteed to be of lower quality after harvesting a higher tier drop.

I'm not going to take the time to dig back that far in the patch notes, etc, but if someone feels frisky, enough of the detail is provided in said post.

Given the 10's of thousands of players in this game at any given moment, it seems if it simply were drop %'s, the sheer number of samples would produce more high tier items than what generally are available at any given time.

The only absolute I'm aware of is this: Whatever assumptions are to be made regarding how we think something is supposed to work, vs how the Devs "intended" for it to work, vs how it actually does end up working in game will usually result in three completely different answers.

You don't get to argue "Your answer is wrong because this is how I think it actually works," because without proof, you're just as likely to be wrong as anyone else {not} offering the same.

Unless it's a Dev comment, it's all speculation.

EDIT: If someone really wants to dig for it, I think the post in question was either prior to, or just shortly after containers were changed to have ownership (requiring you to steal.)

SickDuck · June 2018

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

SickDuck wrote: »

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

redspecter23 wrote: »

Tannus15 wrote: »

Why would you need alt accounts? if you logout and back in again all the containers refresh...

There is a timer for most of the drops. I think green recipes are 5 minutes. blue are 1 hour and I'm not sure on purples. This is just what I've noticed. If you pull a purple or blue, you'll want to swap toons and avoid the cooldown. It also prevents the situation you may see which has all the cabinets empty if you simply log out and back in on the same toon.

1) Instances have a reset timer. You relog and you often enter the same copy unless there are more copies due to being full. This is how "megaservers" work.

2) You can reset the containers of an instance guaranteed by leaving the loading screen door of the instance and going back in. Guaranteed works 100% of the time so long as you see the other zone on the other side of the loading screen, aka don't disconnect and relog into the same instance.

3) There is no cooldown on the drops, just RNG lower chances that make it seem like a cooldown. If there was a cooldown then they would tie it to your @ name and multiple characters wouldn't work at all either. If they wanted to do a cooldown for the reason of slowing farming then they would do that, especially since it reduces the server side calculations to 1 per @ name rather than 1 per character name.

I don’t farm these days but there was a cooldown on recipes and motifs in early days. I remember farming dwemer motif pages when it was released. The drop rate was decent, you could always get one in a few minutes. And then 2 hours of silence... unless you switched toons and repeat.

If you are still in doubt just think about the 5 mins delve boss loot cooldowns. They do exist and easy to verify.

Mind you it is not based on instance but global. Instance based would be insane.

My big question for all of you is what would be the purpose of the supposed cooldown that would make its existence worth the time and effort and risk of bugs to add to the game code over everything else already there?
Is a cooldown meant to slow down acquisition of specific items? If so then what purpose would RNG have when it is meant to slow down acquisition of items? Why have 2 systems doing the exact same job?

The delve boss cooldowns are completely different. They're not per item or rarity level of the item or multiple bosses tied together. They're that boss and only that boss to encourage people to go around to multiple bosses and prevent exploiting easy bosses.
I also feel that those cooldowns are absolutely pointless considering the delve bosses take the exact same amount of effort to defeat each and every time anyway.

Also, if you were to compare the supposed container loot cooldowns to delve boss loot cooldowns then 2 things would need to be true:
1) The cooldown is the refilling of the container, caused by zoning out and back in or relogging to the same or another character(which you all believe is true). The refilling would be the only cooldown then.
2) The container should not refill every time you zone then and should track a full 5 minute wait like delve bosses.

But then if those were true even, why do bosses drop a purple motif, sometimes the same motif, twice in a row when you kill the boss and then do so again 5 minutes later on the next respawn? The rate is too high for a purple cooldown that supposedly wants us to wait 45 minutes to over an hour according to most people.
Also, delve bosses respawn instantly for anyone needing the achievement for their defeat and even often the quest progression point needed for that boss. Recipes and motifs don't even bother checking if you already have learned them and you get repeats.

If a cooldown really exists then it should and would check for whether or not you already know that recipe/motif on that character to make it more likely that the next one you get is one you don't already know. It doesn't though so what is the point of the cooldown that you say supposedly exists? Is it to add to a duration to slow players down even more than RNG already does when RNG can already be tweaked to make any length of delay happen anyway? Why use 2 systems compounded on each other to make a specific result happen when one simpler easier to code system can and does do the same thing much simpler and easier with fewer possible bugs??

There are lot of misconceptions here.

1. Cooldowns - especially global ones - are very easy to implement. It does not add any complexity whatsoever.

2. The purpose of cooldowns would be to give better loot control. It would allow players to find nice things relatively easily but prevents them to find too much. The only flow here is that it’s character based but my guess is that’s on a principle as most things are character based in the game.

3. As I mentioned CDs were implemented before so the feature is there to use. Whether it is used now and how the CD timer relates to drop rates - idk.

4. You can actually prove CDs if you want to. All you need is something with an estimated longer CD (30-60mins+) and farm it for a couple of days. You record the loot times on a single charater vs multiple ones rotating. If the loot time is significantly different between the two you can establish the chances of CD exists very precisely. This was clearly showing with the dwemer motifs in old days.

5. Regardless of CD or not, switching toons holds no disadvantage after you find a precious loot. In fact in should be faster and safer way to reset the delve than going in and out with the same one.

NoTimeToWait · June 2018

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

Anecdotes all of them.
You could only accurately test this if you were the only person farming any container that they can possibly drop from across the entire server, which is impossible.
This would be a delusion because even though I didn't farm the code is server based so it was as if I had farmed because of other players. My odds looked really good because I was missing data on the sample size..

I was the single guy who tested this kind of cooldowns during the last closed PTS round on PC EU. I am pretty sure I was the only person trying to figure out Ayleid diagram drop patterns on the PTS server in the middle of the night. And I can say, that there is some cooldown algorithm in place. It doesn't prevent you from getting more drops per hour. Actually it is used to make you get recipe drops guaranteed with certain frequency. It means, that if you farm for 10 hours, you have 95% probablility that you will find 10 purple recipes during this session. Also It seems that there is some cliff after which your chances of getting the recipe get much lower.

Also, I tested this theory in the same conditions on the live server and found out that drop rates are not the same. It means, that there is also some server-wide counter that prevents the whole server from getting too many recipes per hour/per day and maybe per week.

Sorry, I just couldn't stay away from debunking your walls of text, but you can keep your illusions, I don't mind

burglar · June 2018

A long time ago, someone documented that you could get a purple recipe or motif every hour by doing some random sampling from specific dungeons. This was back when there were dwemer containers outside of some dungeons. So, you could go into a dungeon, get all the containers, run out get those containers, etc.. It may have been a guide, but it suggested doing each character every hour. Pretty reliable, but so obnoxious and not fun.

Mystrius_Archaion · June 2018

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Mystrius_Archaion wrote: »

There is no cooldown because it would be a waste of developer resources to make such a thing and likely cause cheating hacks to be much easier and more common because of how they would have had to implement it for it to match how players believe it is.

You make a lot of presumptions regarding how you think they coded things in game, as well. You realize that, right?

My "presumptions" are educated guess, which is all we can do, based on human nature.

Do you get tasked with a goal like "make dinner" which could be as simple as "baked potatoes and steak" and choose to do make it by harvesting the potatoes yourself and butchering the cow yourself or do you go with the quicker easier store-bought items that are available?
Would you do that if you had the time even? What about the cost to raise a cow to be able to butcher it to get a steak which is offset by multiple customers in a store so that each of them gets a relatively cheap steak?

The developers are tasked with the goal of "limit acquisition rate of drops" and code that one way through RNG and you say they supposedly then code another way on top of that through a cooldown when the first way will suffice and save them time and cost? Wouldn't that add complexity? Wouldn't that add more ways it could be bugged and just NOT work?

I don't know about you but I am always looking for the easiest and fastest way to get anything done, without needing to be re-done(which takes more time and effort), so that I can get to doing things I actually want to spend more time doing.

This is human nature. This is how we do our work and how we speak even with all the slang and new words that we make up to shorten longer unwieldy wording.

And FYI, you're assuming they actually do have a cooldown because none of you can provide any evidence of this specific type of cooldown except anecdotes that can be explained through the fact that it is server based RNG(only smart way to do RNG because the server is the master to prevent cheating) where other players are making up other attempts at looting in between and at the same time as your own attempts. This means a 1/100 drop chance is not your own 100 attempts but the conglomerate 100 attempts by all players.

Don't accuse me of assuming when you are doing the same thing and assume that will shut me up. I know I am making educated logical probability assessments while you are just trying to "logical fallacy" your way out of this.

Mystrius_Archaion · June 2018

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

You don't get to argue "Your answer is wrong because this is how I think it actually works," because without proof, you're just as likely to be wrong as anyone else {not} offering the same.

Unless it's a Dev comment, it's all speculation.

I'm not arguing "I think this" but actual human nature versus human nature.

People want to believe in patterns. This is why they look at clouds and see faces and shapes and meaning to those as if it was made just for them and why religions exist and all say similar things and yet are different and all view other religions as wrong. Nobody has any proof yet expect unquestioning faith.

Human nature truly is to take the easiest quickest path. We get tired and worn out. It's a survival mechanism.

So, you people believe in cooldowns because you are seeing patterns that aren't truly there for any reason other than random chance.

The developers are very unlikely to have ever used such cooldowns you believe, or at least avoid them now with the wisdom of experience, because they are more time-consuming and difficult to implement than other options that are already necessary and more easily and readily available, which is standard RNG used in every game in the last 40+ years.

Occam's Razor tells us that the most likely explanation is more than likely the correct one. Random chance works just this way also.
The most likely explanation is the devs took the easy way out and just made it complete RNG without a cooldown and that player "feelings" make them believe there is a cooldown because they anecdotally see more purples when they don't farm than when they do because they are seeing patterns that are illusory.