Drop rates on PVP vs PVE

[Stealthy]

Actually that's not strictly speaking true. Computers cannot simply "pick a number" but instead use a variety of complicated forumlas and other operations to "fake" random number generation. Would this result in a statistically meaningful pattern - potentially, but highly unlikely.

That said, I have noticed rather improbable runs of collection quest drops. For example, Hercular's Rod - 3 guys in a row got it. The drop rate being 1% makes that a rather unlikely event (about 1 in a million). I couldn't get it for the 4th or 5th guy and so abandoned the quest for all of them.

The point to this is, it's not impossible for the way WoW generates random numbers to create a pattern, dependent on supposedly unrelated events.

Drop rates for quest items will show up on the various web sites as being a much lower percentage than they really are - the reason being that quest items will only drop from a mob when a player has that particular quest (well duh!), but the rest of the time when the same mob is being killed, the quest item will of course not drop. The drop data gets fed back to the database in question, but the data gathering tool doesn't take into account whether a player was on the quest when they killed the mob. So all players not on the quest, but are killing the same mobs that drop the quest item and then feeting the drop data back mean that the drop percentage of the quest item gets artificially pushed down, becuase the quest item never drops for these players.

Cheers,
Stealthy

[Anozireth]

Random number generator is random. :whistling:

Actually that's not strictly speaking true. Computers cannot simply "pick a number" but instead use a variety of complicated forumlas and other operations to "fake" random number generation. Would this result in a statistically meaningful pattern - potentially, but highly unlikely.

That said, I have noticed rather improbable runs of collection quest drops. For example, Hercular's Rod - 3 guys in a row got it. The drop rate being 1% makes that a rather unlikely event (about 1 in a million). I couldn't get it for the 4th or 5th guy and so abandoned the quest for all of them.

The point to this is, it's not impossible for the way WoW generates random numbers to create a pattern, dependent on supposedly unrelated events.

Of course no computer ever produces a truly random number. However, you can be sure that the WoW server calls it's random function so frequently for so many different things and different clients that there is no chance of you seeing a pattern in it. My point was simply that the vast majority of things people claim to influence drop rates are completely absurd. From raid loot being determined by the first person to zone in or who the raid leader is, to rolling PVE vs. PVP, etc.

[Kicksome]

I agree that it's totally random - which means you get random results. You'd have to do 10's of thousands of tests on both servers to really have any sort of real data to go on.

[OzPhoenix]

I'll admit, I'm being a little nit-picky about it - but yeah, for all practical purposes it appears to be random even if behind the scenes its not.

As to the drop rate for quest/non-quest kills, I am aware of that as well. The specific example I gave of Herculars Rod is supposed to be a 1% drop rate for quest-kills but obviously wowheads/thotbots etc figures will be out due to non-quest kills.

I've seen all kind of weird and wonderful theories on raid drops too (such as zone in order etc etc).

[Tdog]

Random number generator is random. :whistling:

Actually that's not strictly speaking true. Computers cannot simply "pick a number" but instead use a variety of complicated forumlas and other operations to "fake" random number generation. Would this result in a statistically meaningful pattern - potentially, but highly unlikely.

That said, I have noticed rather improbable runs of collection quest drops. For example, Hercular's Rod - 3 guys in a row got it. The drop rate being 1% makes that a rather unlikely event (about 1 in a million). I couldn't get it for the 4th or 5th guy and so abandoned the quest for all of them.

The point to this is, it's not impossible for the way WoW generates random numbers to create a pattern, dependent on supposedly unrelated events.

Of course no computer ever produces a truly random number. However, you can be sure that the WoW server calls it's random function so frequently for so many different things and different clients that there is no chance of you seeing a pattern in it. My point was simply that the vast majority of things people claim to influence drop rates are completely absurd. From raid loot being determined by the first person to zone in or who the raid leader is, to rolling PVE vs. PVP, etc.

Superstitiuos person is Super!

[Gadzooks]

It's bizarre character to character - my rogue, since release, has gotten a handful of blue drops, and 3 epic drops, 2 of which were patterns. That's her drops over YEARS. She has horrible luck for set piece drops, it took over a year to get her D1.5 set, and only got 2 pieces of the Assassination set before she retired from 5 mans and raiding. Doing drop quests is like pulling teeth, but she gets more mana pots than I can sell, and small mountains of cloth. She also gets hot streaks for netherwing eggs, my record for one night was 7, and she has VERY good luck for blue gems from all nodes, even Netherwing ore nodes.

My other characters are completely different - my main mage gets blue drops constantly, and the ones that sell well, and she gets rare stuff too - she got a First Mate Hat (pirate hat), which is one of the rarest hats to drop in the game. She always gets good shards from DEs, while my lock gets nothing but powder, even on stuff thats supposed to be guaranteed shards. I really want to get her to Outlands to see what she'll find. She's been like that from day one, she's been getting awesome drops the entire way to 54...JUST...NOT...CASTER...GEAR. It's all pally/warrior stuff, some of which is stashed for my eventual warrior. She got the Mountainside Buckler tonight, that's been stashed for someone later on, it's too cool looking to DE or sell.

My Druid is average - some blues (Tanglewood Staff, woo! Something I can actually use!), some greens that get sent to her mage buddy, and questing has been pretty easy for her.

My shaman don't get a lot of green drops, but they get drops for quests almost immediately, and they seem to be a magnet for unique NPCs, they've killed a long, long list of silver dragon NPCs...and gotten crap for drops. They seem to repel cloth, and have to rely on their older guildmates for silk and wool. It's really odd, cloth is so easy to get, but they never have any.

My priest is still young, but she's showing signs of having a good green and blue drop karma.