I’d been farming Saltmarshes off and on for months now.  Whenever I had off, down time (not enough to run quests), I’d grab my highest level character and do two or three passes because the drop rates were just insane.  On average 8-10 rares would spawn per run and it only took about 10 minutes to do the complete circle.  Way better drop rates than any of the RL quests or even WPM back in the day (before they stealth nerfed the drops).

In these loot runs I pulled:

Every single one of the named/bound to account augs
A truck load of rare filigrees
Easily a dozen 1000xp gems
Two state tomes (+5 upgrade and a +6 tome I believe)
And a minimum of 3-4 named items each run.

Since I still have sent weapons to feed, it’s been well worth my time.

A while ago I noticed that the named augs stopped dropping.  Wasn’t worried about it since most were worthless and not auctionable, but it did seem odd to me.

Since the last update the drops have just been f-ing horrible.  Filigrees still drop but nothing like before.  I’m not seeing the XP gems nearly as often and named items I’m lucky if I pull one every three runs.  I’m varying which toons I use, so it’s not ransack.

It’s occurred to me that there might be some built in loot drop rate over time (high drop rates to start and slowly diminish the more you open chests).  That absolutely fits in Shit the Bed game’s business model; high rewards to start so you convince other people to buy the pack then slowly drop the rates so you’re more inclined to purchase the next expansion – but I’m not sure if they have the actual skill to program that in.

More likely they just did a stealth nerf on older pack drop rates packaged in with one of the more recent updates.

Anyone else notice anything like this?

boxes wrote on Oct 17^th, 2022 at 5:53pm:


IKR?  What's weird is it racked up nearly 300 views in just a few hours.  That's an unusual amount of lurking/guests 

Head-Meat wrote on Oct 17^th, 2022 at 6:27pm:


Banana fag?

Head-Meat wrote on Oct 17^th, 2022 at 7:20pm:


That sounds sad and yet a little boring 

Head-Meat wrote on Oct 17^th, 2022 at 6:27pm:

Arturo's a busy guy.

Arkat wrote on Oct 17^th, 2022 at 8:47pm:


It would be funny if Arturo actually was Grand after all that(and not terrible surprising; but if true why didn't Arturo sell duped tokens?)



As to the initial point of this thread - I've been tracking loot drop rates for some time and made some interesting observations. Basically, DDO's RNG suffers from severe "clumping" issues - meaning that instead of the numbers being distributed evenly, you get "clumps" of high and low numbers. Peeks and valleys instead of even distribution.

If we were to distill this down to DnD terms: image if you had a D20 that rolled nothing but 1-9 for 17 roles, then rolled 3x 20s in a row; and it did this consistently every single time you played with it. That's how DDO's RNG works.

So while you were seeing "insane" drop rates, you were in a "peek"; now you're back in a valley. Nothing you can do but keep pushing forward until you hit another "peek".

The exact cause of this bullshittery is probably DDO's spagattie code. Unfortunately, no matter how easy it is to observe these RNG snarls, you can't convince anyone on the dev team to give it notice. All the cock-sucking yes-men insist "That's just how statistics work!" even though no, no it is not.

noamineo wrote on Oct 17^th, 2022 at 9:23pm:


At the gaming table, in the final encounter my high level fighter rolled and confirmed 4 crits in 1 round against the big bad of the campaign. It was the only time ever I did that in the whole campaign.  (attack, attack-5, attack-10, hasted attack).  At the table, witnessed by other players, the only time it ever happened.  That's what random is.

higgildypiggildy wrote on Oct 18^th, 2022 at 4:29am:


Exactly. It's like when 5 hearts are dealt in poker. Everyone says the deck isn't shuffled lol. Sometimes a shuffled deck will produce 5 of one suit, 5 cards in sequence, pairs, etc. If it never produced that, then it wouldn't be properly shuffled.

I'm not missing anything. 

You have a "feeling" that drop rates have been nerfed.  Feelings are worth nothing.  You need data, long term data over many many incidents.  10-20-30 those show vast fluctuations.  You may get 5 20's in a row.  you might not.  You need 100's to really start get get valid results.  Feelings are coloured by your short term memory of significant events.  My multiple crits in 1 round was a significant event, I remember it.

Don't all RNGs have bias problems?

SpaceGoat wrote on Oct 18^th, 2022 at 8:56am:


Exhaustive spread sheets and an honest to god statistician who looks at my data every now and then and goes "what the fuck? This is not random."

Ive noticed that named item drops do seem to clump together. Running a 13 quest saga at cap generally nets me a good deal of named items, or almost none, rarely do i get a result in between.

ManyCookies wrote on Oct 18^th, 2022 at 5:21pm:


If you track which item you'll also notice you get a whole lot more of one item and practically none of another, despite them being weighted equally.