Low Drop Rates Suck

IN MY SIGHT OF SEEING IT.

 

I prefer it when there is a way to increase the drop-chance, like in monster hunter where breaking body parts increases the chance of getting a specific drop, or like in dark souls where you not only get a ring that boosts item discovery, but also get a boost when you possess one or more humanity.
having something only drop at a 0.1% rate and/or from a rare, hard to find (dangerous area, hard to access etc), difficult to kill mob is terrible, unless said drop is the REALLY worth the tedium (which is almost never, 0.1 rate on the whoopie cushion in terraria for example).
in short, im okay with reasonably low drop-rates (no lower than 1% please) with the ability to boost drop-rates and/or spawn-rates of certain monsters.

 

I kinda like low drop rates.

 

Farms should be for crops, not for guns.

 

To be fair, we could still grow chlorophyte, and make it into bullets.

 

I played through all generations of Pokemon games up to Platinum. Never saw a shiny that wasn't guaranteed (like the red Gyarados). If I actually cared about shiny pokemon, I would have either abandoned the series early or used cheats.

So, IMHO, the shiny pokemon (chance of about 0.012%) is rare enough that it makes the game worse, rather than better. It's too rare to be caught by legitimate effort, and so drives players towards cheating/hacking.

Things based too much on luck are not actually hard. They are just random, and - for me at least - annoying.

Besides, when something is random with a low drop chance, it tends to drop from boringly easy enemies. Then you have a combination of boring repetition, lack of challenge, and annoying randomness in how long it will take.

Disclaimer: I dislike games of chance with a passion. I never, in my whole life, spent a single cent in bets, wagers, or anything else involving random results. I find slot machines, roulettes, and games that depend too much on luck to be more annoying than fun.

Well, at least modding is more or less guaranteed, so if hunting for any specific drop proves too annoying due to the amount of RNG, I can just mod the game to remove the annoyance.

If loot is not personalized, then I will never fight any mob that might drop an item I want with anyone that I don't completely trust. Simple as that.

 

Every game where a certain item has a drop rate below 10-20% give or take I'll just use something to edit the item into my inventory. I'm not wasting my life grinding the same creatures over and over in a boring fashion.

 

Or better yet, mod it complex crafting plans so that the items can be made with an appropriate collection of resources.

 

If they use this thing properly, it will provide buffs or debuffs that might influence the drop rate on monsters and general loot.

 

I prefer some things having super low droprates, and I'm fairly certain anybody else who has ever played Phantasy Star Online would agree with me. Some things NEED to be rare and for good reason.

You think 1/1000 is bad? Try 1/37000 on a mob that spawns maybe once every ten minutes. Fun times.

 

AT LEAST 1% I think that is fair because really... there is a chance that the 1% even goes wellll beyond 100 critters and farming 100 critters or chests or w.e it is in is tedious enough. If anything has a lower drop rate it should be cosmetic or something to that effect(non essential) or super duper highest of tier and that still being like 0.01%. I hate the whole 1/50000 odds just whats the point... the only way I'd agree is with some sort of magic find. A really good question also is whether or not to put it mega rare on low tier critters/mobs and just a little bit rare bosses and what not.
edit: i played 200 hours of diablo 3 when it came out with out the newer updates and what not... got a total of about 7-8 legendary items all of which sucked and half of them dropped out of bones or weak mobs.

 

Okay. . . I'm in a mathy mood and decided to do some mafs about probability. Namely, what're the chances of not having a 1% drop rate item drop for you after 100 kills? The answer: 36.6%.
So if you're going to have to get 3 items each with a 1% drop rate, you can expect that you're going to have to kill at least 100 for one of them.

If you have a 1% drop rate item, then there's a 99% chance of it not dropping. If you were to repeat this, then you have to reduce the 99% chance by 1% (or multiply it by 0.99). Repeat this again and again. Since I don't want to do that by hand, 0.99^x is the same thing. Plug in 100 for x and you have 0.366

So my next question was: If I were as unlucky as the person who got the item on his first kill, how many things would I have to kill?
The answer: 458.2 kills.
This means that for every guy who is bragging about his awesome hat of awesomeness, there's a guy who had to grind through 458.2 of the fuckers to get the same thing.

I took the equation from before (0.99^x) and set it equal to 0.01 (1% of 1), plugged into WolframAlpha and got an answer.)

Question number 3: For the average person, how many mobs will he/she have to kill?
68.3 kills.
Whew, that's not so many, now is it? I can live with 68.3 kills.

The same as above, except I didn't set 0.99^x to 0.01, I set it to 0.5, so 0.5=0.99^x.

But the problem is that there's a massive amount of variation between the players. Some people will get exceedingly unlucky and have to kill the mobs hundreds of times, others won't.
This is accentuated by low drop rates, but it's hardly nonexistant with relatively high drop rates. With pure chance drops, someone's going be be missing out and frustrated. It's much less fun to be on the receiving end of the drop rates than it is fun to be the one favored.

I would like for drop rates to be almost completely removed for things that people really want. Either make it craftable, set it so that at X kills the item drops no matter what, or make it a quest item. If drop rates are needed, make the rates increase as it doesn't drop, to shorten the shaft of probability.

 

Okay iam honest, i didnt read through all of it so i will state my oppinion which is mostly unaffected from other posts in here.

For me low drops arent a thing either. Actually drops should not be lower than 5%, 20% sounds good too me so you actually GET something for your time and achieve it.
Having a "list" of drops that are entirely random are good as long as they are somewhat equal.

Like 30% chance to drop a weapon. That weapon has a 5% chance to be superior, 10% chance to be rare, 30% chance to be a magical item and 55% chance to get a common item. For items with a rarity order of Superior > rare > magical > common.

For crafting recipes i would suggest that when you want to make a "wooden stick" a 'hard to craft' item. Instead of relying on rare drops, make the craft count high with the reason that you need to "refine" those materials in order to make that item. Like crafting an exceptional bow over an common bow needs more wood because you can take only the best of it. So that instead of having low drop chances, you trade it for high material requirements.

Such a system sure could be boring when it requires 1000 materials from a rare boss. So its always subject of tweaking. But when you got a really broad variation of items to craft, say 20 armors and 40 weapons per tier (i know i know, starbound got more due to procedual generation). You can affort low crafting requirements. Collectors have to work a lot in order to get all the items, but they "see their goal and how they get closer instead of playing lottery" AND, even more important, everyone can make the items he/she wants without having to farm npcs like crazy.


In general i like really rare things. But i prefer having rare npcs that have a "guaranteed drop" over farming the same npc over and over again just hopeing to get it sooner or later.
That way you can move through the terrain and ignore common npcs but go after new unusual ones.

 

Also, with any luck the game won't spawn mobs in caves where they can't reach you, so you can actually stay in one spot not not have to worry about the spawns stopping. In Terraria I'd always have to modify the terrain so that enemies could reach me no matter where they spawned before I could farm them.

So that combined with procedurally generated weapons having less individual value (you aren't as likely to hunt for them specifically), if the unique items are mainly crafted or taken from chests, then really the only mob drops you'd expect to farm are materials like feathers and scales and such. I don't see any need for those to be below 1%, ever.

On top of that, most of the mobs will be procedurally generated, so maybe their drop rates will be randomized, too. This means that you might want to hunt for specific mobs that have higher drop rates than others instead of trying to farm the mobs that have low rates. All of these things could reduce the problem, especially combined.

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Let us not forget that some player won't look information up online. For those who refuse to check the forums or the wikis, they might never find out about the rarest of the rare drops, completely missing out. To these people, the mysterious chests in the dungeon would remain a frustration forever.

 

I honestly think that Guild Wars 2 has taught us that there is more than one way to accomplish something, and most of those ways are rather entertaining.

What I mean is, non-main story quests in Guild Wars 2 are completed by filling a specific NPC's bar. That bar/metre may be filled by completing different types of tasks. For instance, Rancher John Bobblehead needs a hand around the place: You may aid him by herding sheep, killing wolves, setting wolf-traps, and/or motivating lazy workers to do their job. As long as your contribution fulfills those requirements, John Bobblehead's bar will slowly fill up. Once it's completely full, the quest is completed and you may speak with him in order to acquire one or more rewards.

Okay, now back to Starbound: I'm perfectly cool with rare drops (as long as the drop rate isn't incredibly microscopic), but I believe there should be a way to acquire main/important items that does not rely on doing a repetitive task for a long period of time. If there was some sort of reputation/achievement system where you may obtain powerful items through different ways (for example, killing npcs, charting terrain, deploying scanners, etc.), then I believe people could have more fun with the game, as there would always be more than one option to accomplish these types of tasks.

I'm not against bosses, by the way --> I think they should be there with rare drops besides the suggestion in the above paragraph.

 

What if there aren't drops, (except for stuff that makes sense, like meat), but everything is found in a place that makes sense, like in chests in dungeons or at merchants stalls, or in villagers houses (not that I'm planning on stealing stuff or anything). Essentially, items and money found only in places where they "belong" like chests and stalls.

 

Ya I am wondering if the items dropped from monsters are just things that you gather in order to receive a bounty.

 

I had no idea this was a thing, thanks for the enlightenment.

 

Low drop rates are a way for the devs to regulate content acquisition. I feel drops shouldn't be the way to get new content, just some content. To change the difficulty of getting content, things should be accomplished. Drops are are an easy way of doing things but there are better ways.

 

I really hope the drop rates don't end up like Terraria Keys..