[0.9.2] Magic find not working? Drop rate?

Lets face it bros, the only direction item drop rates are likely going in this game is down because of its online nature.

I'm willing to bet they'd rather have players have less fun/power gain to increase the game's longevity/slow the economy inflation.

We(Gunz, Starcraft, Myself) are compiling a spreadsheet for statistical analysis of the quality/quantity and ratios. We'll post it after we have a couple days worth of data.

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IonicSlayer wrote:

Also time played (in your case comparing the amount of time you and your friend both did the same zone) is not the best measure of item drop rates. You may have different kill rates, the spawn rates of enemies in the zones may not be the identical, the variance in drops. You would need a much larger sample size and a more controlled experiments (how many champions killed, normal monsters etc...) instead of time played to draw more conclusive results.

I am sure GGG can check their formulas to ensure that increased item percentage is working properly, but 71% increased item drop difference between you and your friend playing over a short time frame does not spell conclusive in my book.

I did point out that the sample size is not representative.
We are both playing the same char (ice witch) kill at the same speed (one shot all with nova) and move equally fast, though.

BUT - not to distract from the main point of the post by diving into discussion of statistical analysis...

The difference between the Lvl53 area drops and the Lvl19 are drops are SIGNIFICANT enough to warrant a discussion. 100 to 7 speaks a clear language, in any statistic book that I ever read. ^^

The difference most likely comes from the fact that you probably get a lot more kills per unit of time when fighting the level 19 monsters.

As far as I'm aware orbs aren't any more or less common at higher levels, besides that fact that certain orbs won't start dropping until a certain level (eg, you're not going to find an exalted orb in the normal twilight strand).

So, if it's only orbs you're after, then is makes sense to fight lower level monsters, where you will kill faster, thus get more drops.

There has been some discussion in the past about ways of discouraging this. My suggestion was to give orbs a level, similar to gear drops get an itemlevel currently. So an Orb of Alchemy found at level 25 would only give level 25 and under magic mods. If you wanted high-level mods on you're item, you'd need to find high level orbs. This would also encourage you to use orbs as you find them, rather than hoarding them all for as long as possible to use in later levels.

The downside of this approach is that it would mean that orbs would be less homogeneous for the purposes of currency - there would be multiple types of each orb. So it is not a very good solution.

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Chris wrote:

We're going to double check this works properly, thanks for the reports.

Note that historically, it's very easy for people to get confused by a few hours of bad luck. Having said that, we take all the reports seriously!

Hey Chris,

we know you take our reports seriously, thats why we test the beta ^^

We have started a collaboration with a handfull of players to investigate this further. Been grinding it up all day long on different levels of difficulty with different sizes of groups.

So far we got about 14 hours of data in, but we will continue to do this for a week or so and see what the outcome is.

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Malice wrote:

There has been some discussion in the past about ways of discouraging this. My suggestion was to give orbs a level, similar to gear drops get an itemlevel currently. So an Orb of Alchemy found at level 25 would only give level 25 and under magic mods. [..]
The downside of this approach is that it would mean that orbs would be less homogeneous for the purposes of currency - there would be multiple types of each orb. So it is not a very good solution.

Yeah, I think that would not be practical. Orbs would become unstackable if they had different properties.

I think people will be surprised with the results, I won't post any data yet, but I found it interesting so far.

And for some clarification on our data, we are recording Zone, Difficulty, Duration, Total Yellows, Total Orbs (With orb breakdown), Total Scrolls, Quality/Quantity % of Character(solo play), # in Group.

This will allow us to crunch data for Solo vs Group vs Difficulty vs Zone. We will be able to chart the % per Currency item (so best places to farm). We also will be graphing three players against each other and their quality/quantity(%) values to show what those % do over a large period of data.

You can get into too much detail when you look at things like number of Champions/Unique Mobs, as statistics will allow us over a large chunk to accommodate for those variables.

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The difference most likely comes from the fact that you probably get a lot more kills per unit of time when fighting the level 19 monsters.

This is where statistics does wonders, we are recording per zone, so we will remove time to compare evenly per player, this result will show per zone run average vs quality and quantity, time is irrelevant.

Currently we are all using witches, so I think its safe to say this would be the best case scenario for "time per run".

14h:27m:47s of data recorded so far.