Low Drop Rates Suck

Is it just me or is 0.0001 the same as 1x10^-4 ? It may be something wrong in my math but 0.0001% = .000001 = 1/1000000. 1x10^-4 = .0001% = .000001 = 1/1000000. If I'm wrong please explain.

 

I think it really depends on what's dropping what item frequently. As mentioned before, if the rarer drops are only dropped by difficult enemies/bosses, then the sense of achievement will come more from killing the enemies than just from getting the drop itself. All I know is that if I have to bust my ass to kill something, I should be rewarded in some way for it. And it doesn't even have to be a super amazing reward, either. I'd be content with incremental upgrades as I go along. Maybe rare items would have something just adds some special flavor, like finding a rocket that shoots squirrels. It doesn't have to do godly damage compared to what you're already using, but man...SHOOTING SQUIRRELS! I really do think the key to keeping players engaged is making sure reward = effort. From what I've gleaned from all the posts here, no one is suggesting that drops should be easy to get and/or plentiful. People just want to know that they won't be left disappointed if they put time into killing things.

Also keep in mind that rare items don't have to be super powerful. If they just give you a slight edge over the content (without making your current tier super easy), then that would be enough. People tend to think that rare items = op items, and it doesn't have to be that way. I know I personally would get bored if, mid-tier, I looted a rare item that allowed me to just mow over enemies with no real effort or skill involved.

 

When everyone has rare items... no one has rare items.

 

Best case scenario imo: Scaling percentage. An item with a, say, 1% drop rate. The first time you kill it, it has its base drop rate x1. The second time, x2. The third,. What you get is eventually the player is guaranteed to have the item, and the more they kill a specific enemy, the higher the drop chance for that item becomes. Eventually, no matter what manner of bad luck they have, they WILL hit 100% drop rate and get the item. Base drop rates will have to be lower since once you hit about 30% the chances of getting the item start increasing dramatically, but its a good way of both maintaining rarity and yet at the same time providing a guarantee that the item will be obtained. To reduce program stress, this would only be necessary for very low drop rate items, as those with naturally high or moderate drop rates would find this system redundant since there is no problem acquiring the item anyway. After a certain amount of time with no monsters with that drop being slain (Depending on spawn rate, of course), when the player moves completely out of the area the creature(s) appear(s) in and stays gone for a certain amount of time, or when the item is dropped, the multiplier drops to 1 again and the cycle repeats.

 

I agree.

Things that bother me the most about forums is when forum population is a sample of the much larger crowd of people who actually play the game in question(Sometimes the majority pop of a forum is actually a small niche of who will be playing). If developers of a game change features in the game by asking the small niche what changes to make, then nightmares may ensue because "the forums have decided."

 

You are correct. I just felt like using scientific notation to make it more obvious how stupendously low these rates are.

What about classics like Super Metroid, Tetris, Sim City, Harvest Moon, HALO, Slender, Starcraft, etc...?

None of those games have low drop rates, but according to you they have no feeling of achievement and lack any replay value.

If you really think that low drop rates are the only way to get players to enjoy a game, then you're just wrong.

In fact, to the contrary, I've play SO3 for hundreds of hours and collected the best of everything in the game, which took hundreds of hours. I still feel far more achievement and had way more fun playing all of the games I just listed above. I don't ever want to replay SO3 again, but I definitely go back to play Super Metroid at least once a year.

 

This is precisely why discussion should focus on discussing the root of the problem as opposed to trying to identify solutions. The devs are capable of that themselves if they fully understand the problem. If they understand why low drop rates are bad they're sure to come to their own approach to solving it. As it is they are already aware of the problem so there isn't really even much need for further discussion.

 

There was never a *need* for a discussion, it's just interesting

 

I think everything that needs to be said has already been said multiple times over.

We even have graphs and math from two different contributors, developers tweets about the thread, lots of potential solutions to help the developers brainstorm, a poll that shows how the community feels about the topic, and justifications for the positions on both sides of the issue. My job here is done, I think.

 

...Different... Genres...You're misrepresenting what the person said.

This topic is on games that have drops accomplish completely different goals, and some of those games don't even have drops... Sim City??

You have even agreed with me when I said that it feels better if a monster is more difficult with high drop rate instead of an easy monster with high drop rates. It seems like you're just looking to argue.

 

Like you noticed youself, such a feature favors grinding on the same spot for the same npc. So killing the same kind of npc over and over again, over a long range, will make the drop happen. The issue is that in order to balance that, the initial drop-chance has to be lower. The effect would be that when exploring through new regions you always have low drop chances which is exactly the opposite of what many wanted in here.
In addition it would require to store the temporary increase of dropchances either per NPC alone or per NPC per player. So it would require much more storage (memory usage) and in a game like starbound with procedually generated npcs, that shouldnt be underestimated.

Indeed, because counting zeros is no fun. Its the same like using odd words like quintillion etc for me. Since we use the long-scale instead of the short-scale, thats much more of an annoyance too ...
And plain numbers are more comparable too. 10*10^5 vs 3*10^8 is much easier than 4 septillion vs 12 yodayaddajedillion.

Ay, thats why i cant add anything new. Things simply got said already =D

 

I think you may have meant 1.0*10^100 - or a Googol - or maybe you meant 10^(1.0*[10^100]) - or a Googolplex.

Bonus fact: If a person can write two digits per second, it would take about 1.51 × 1092 years, which is 1.1 × 1082 times the age of the universe, to write a Googolplex.

I think a Googolplex should be the drop rate of the rarest item in the game.

What should the item be?

Maybe the item should give a choice between Omniscience or Omnipotence... How fitting.

 

Just my opinion, but thats not necessarily a bad thing. Grinding for hours and hours to get an item just to hear your friend got it on his first try is disheartening and frustrating. It would level the playing field a bit, you would spend less time grinding, and they wouldn't just win the lottery on the first try.

A balance has to be struck between "grind for days to get an item" and "get everything with no effort applied". The things that will have the ludicrously low drop rates are going to be incredibly valuable anyway and chances are you're going to have to kill the same thing multiple times anyway to get the thing you want. Yes, you MIGHT get the ultra-super-deathray on the first try even though it has a .5% chance to drop, but odds are, you're going to be there a while. In this scenario, which is the scenario every low drop rate item will be in, you can either raise the drop rate to a point that it either takes little time to get it or STILL takes forever based entirely on RNG, or you can implement a system that equalizes the drop rate across the board and sort of controls the amount of time it takes to get it.

Simply raising the drop rate on the ultra-super-deathray to, say, 3% means you are STILL going to be farming for a while, though statistically speaking, it will be less time. And yet, since it is still RNG, your chances of getting the drop are STILL extremely low and you STILL might farm for hours and hours and get no drop. Keeping it at .5% and increasing the drop rate each time, however, guarantees that there will, in fact, be farming involved but at the same time it gates how long this can happen for so even though you do have to grind, it wont be forever, as eventually that .5% will turn into a much higher number. At 3%, you have to kill approximately 33 creatures to get the object, but it may be much less, or significantly more, and I think the "significantly more" is what people find so frustrating. With a scaling chance at .5% you have to kill approximately the same amount of creatures (In fact, slightly fewer) to get the drop, but it becomes so likely it is guaranteed to happen. After killing 33 creatures your chance has increased to 16.5%, and if you happened to spill salt on a black cat which you chased under a ladder which caused you to break a mirror that day and it STILL hasn't dropped, it will continue to scale to 100%.

So yes, the odds of you accidentally getting it on the first shot goes down. But your odds of getting it after a couple tries goes UP. And for extremely rare items I think this is the best solution.

 

So? Starbound isn't an MMORPG either.

While there are games that do have rare drops and also are fun, it doesn't prove that rare drops made those game more fun.

Correlation does not imply causation.

I want a game to be challenging, but it should test my skills, not test my patience.

Another bonus fact: it is theorized that there are fewer particles in the entire universe than the value of Graham's Number.

Craft rare equipment out of relatively common drops.

Like, instead of a 1% drop of a Black Dragon Sword, instead you need 10 Black Dragon Scales to craft a sword, and each scale drops with a 10% rate. The average amount of time spent obtaining the items is the same, but the variance between the luckiest and unluckiest players is much smaller.

 

Even If the Droprates are 0.001% or something Mind-murdering, We have Modders. They'll fix any bugs/issues.

 

I am reminded of pretty much ever true 3D Bethesda game ever now.

 

A win, for me, is eliminating or really reducing RNG influences on if a player will get a drop (though RNG in when he will get the drop, as long as it always falls between acceptable intervals even for the most unlucky player possible, is fine).

I don't care* if we have to kill 10K enemies, or an insanely powerful boss, for the item; but I prefer to have an assurance that, no matter how unlucky I am, I will still get what I want in a reasonable number of attempts that, ideally, is not much larger than the average.

For example, if the item is moved to a really powerful boss, with the drop rate being either pushed to 100% or else a deck system for determining the boss' drops, then that is a win for me. If getting the item or not is down to luck in the end, then that is a loss for me.

* To clarify, I don't care as long as either the number of mob/boss kills to get the item is kept to sane levels, or else the rare drop is purely cosmetic or for bragging rights with little to no gameplay influence. Having something that feels essential in the game locked behind an insane grind is something I see as bad, no matter if the grind length is RNG-based or not.

BTW, abusing random elements is often called fake difficulty, because it can make the player fail (in this case, fail to get the drop they want) though no fault of the player. It's often a shoddy way for developers to make something that isn't well crafted enough to be legitimately challenging still feel challenging for less knowledgeable and/or skilled players.

 

Lol, yeah. I love Bethesda games, specially the Elder Scrolls and the Fallout ones, but I sincerely can't stand those games in their original, unmodded state. Too many little irritating bugs, plus they often have a mechanic or two that I really can't stand. When properly modded to fix the little bugs and change the mechanics I despise, though, they offer an unique experience.

It's why I will never purchase a Bethesda game for a console, at least until consoles add ways to mod the games without having to crack the console first. It's also why, for me at least, making a game mod friendly roughly doubles the chance I will purchase it; available modding tools and documentation makes it high likely that I will either find ready made mods to fix whatever I didn't like about the game, or else will be able to make those mods myself.

It's also why I'm not overly concerned about drop rates and the RNG influence in loot for StarBound. Being mod friendly means that I will likely be able to "fix" it to a point I enjoy no matter what the devs to. The side effect of that, though, is that I'm likely to only play in online servers that implement those same "fixes".

 

Wat... Seriously? You're arguing just to argue right now. Skippy3 did NOT say that drops are a UNIVERSALLY REQUIRED TRAIT for all games to be FUN.

How much do I need to spell it out for you?
*Oh, why is he raging now?* Because I thought better of you to not twist people's words.
Please, point to me where Skippy3 said something REMOTELY CLOSE to that.

That's exactly what I was saying in my post on that, and you liked that post...
I agree exactly with you, and again you are looking to argue with people who agree with you(at least on a few things).
Would you like Starbound to have high drop rates across the board where epics drop like crazy?... No?...
Well I don't want that, neither does Skippy, and if you agree then why are you making something out of it instead of just agreeing too?

I implied all of what you said in my post... I'd prefer the boss drop rate to be something like 20-30%, but have the boss be difficult(key word here), and have the boss drop multiple great items; in that case then you will likely get a great item after once or twice then if you try a few more times, surprise! There were more items that you may like, and all the while it's a good chance for the drops and by then you'd likely be enjoying it having mastered said boss.