Originally Posted by
Coconut
First of all, we don't know if it's 1 in 2.000 or 1 in 1.000 or 1 in 666. These are just some numbers that players kept saying to each other since MoP and in time they became popular wisdom, sort of like people in the distant past used to believe that the Earth is flat.
If you want to estimate the drop rate correctly, you need a relatively large sample size - not of collectors, but of actual mount drops: you take 300 Oondasta mounts, you find out how many kills it took for each one to drop, and you calculate the average. Obviously, it is impossible for us to compile this information, because even if we can find 300 ppl with the mount, we don't know how many kills they had on that account, or if they had any extra mounts drop or not.
The only way to find out is if Blizzard tells us, but the problem is they seem reluctant to acknowledge the fact that people purposely farm these mounts. They weren't put in to be farmed, they were put in to be random and legendarily rare, something the devs thought was "cool" (but in a reward-driven mmo-rpg that is, obviously, retarded). The bosses were not designed around being farmed by max level characters 2 expansions later, hence the issues with Galleon and Oondasta in WoD and now with Sha.
That being said, the numbers you mention are not out of the ordinary statistically. Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that the drop rate is 0,1%, or one in 1.000. In that case, there is a (1 – 0,999^2.800)x100 = 94% chance that the mount would drop in 2.800 attempts. So naturally, the vast majority of people who have the mount have less than 2.800 kills. Even if the drop rate was lower, 0,05%, or 1 in 2.000, the probability of getting a drop in 2.800 attempts would be 75%, still a vast majority of participants.
The probability of getting a mount (well, of any probabilistic event being triggered) before you reach the average number of kills is always higher than the probability of getting it after. This is because there is no upper limit on bad luck, and in the end the numbers have to balance out. If it was usual for the drop to take 5.000 attempts, the drop rate would simply not be 1 in 1.000/2.000, but much lower. Just look at how probability progresses for a 0,1% mount:
- there is a 10% chance you get it in 100 kills.
- there is a 26% chance you get it in 300 kills.
- there is a 40% chance you get it in 500 kills.
- there is a 64% chance you get it in 1000 kills (chance is higher than 50% to get it before the average).
- there is a 90% chance you get it in 2.300 kills.
- there is a 99% chance you get it in 4.500 kills.
- you will never reach 100% even in a million kills.
Do you see how the number of kills required ramp up more and more for a smaller and smaller probability increase? This means it is very, very unlikely for the mount not to drop after so many kills, but it is certainly possible, and at this point the exact number doesn't even matter, you are just super unlucky with this one mount.
So you are looking at it the wrong way, it's not that there is a bug because you can't find people who got it in more than 2.800 attempts, it's that the situation you want to find it implies a combination of two very very very rare occurrences: a) someone having that many attempts in the relatively limited time since the boss was added in game, and b) someone being that incredibly unlucky with it*, with c) said person actually reading your post and wanting to respond being the icing on the cake.
This is exactly why I hate mounts with such abysmally low drop rates, because the effects of being unlucky are truly retarded. It's one thing when you are unlucky with Invincible or Elegon and it takes you 450 or 600 kills, that's still only around 2 years with a reasonable number of 5 characters each week. Being unlucky with Sha or Oondasta, or any other, and farming with your regular chars, not 50 farming muppets, means you can farm for a decade or two without any results. And that's basically cruel mockery towards unlucky collectors.