Fragment of Val'anyr drop rate - stealth buff?

[Bigslick]

Bored w/ nothing else to do, so a group of us went back in to Ulduar to play around, and picked up 2 fragments off of 5 bosses. Historically our luck was to average maybe 1 fragment every other week out of a full clear (excluding the guaranteed one off of Yogg).

Anyone else seeing more of these dropping, or was this just unusual luck of the draw? I'm still 15 short to craft Val'anyr, but if they're dropping that much more I'll probably grind for it more.

[Nekovivie]

So you got 1 more fragment than usual, over the small sample size of 5 bosses.

QUICK, OBVIOUSLY ITS BEEN BUFFED

/sigh

[Bigslick]

So you got 1 more fragment than usual, over the small sample size of 5 bosses.

QUICK, OBVIOUSLY ITS BEEN BUFFED

/sigh

Nekovivie, were you just giddy with excitement when you posted that? Feels great to chime in and then GO CAPS for a bit, eh? Next time you might consider reading a post before replying strictly based on the title...

"Anyone else seeing more of these dropping, or was this just unusual luck of the draw?" - I can't believe these were my words... I really need to refrain from making such concrete statements about things like this as if they were known fact. And using a '?' in the title, I may as well have said "CNN Confirms that..." :

What sample size do you want? Hey, here's a thought (I suggest you try having them sometime): instead of longitudinally gathering information in a study, a question can be answered much more quickly by gathering information laterally from several groups. And guess what? Ulduar clears are pretty much a controlled experiment for this type of question. The only variable that's changed is the release of Patch 3.3. So from that perspective, this is a pretty damn good place to post exactly the sort of question (not statement) my original post posed.

In 25+ clears before we stopped running it we had never seen more than 2 fragments drop in a run before Yogg. We'd only ever seen a grand total of 38 fragments drop, which after you drop the 25 from YS leaves 13 over 25 full runs and several partial runs when we were first learning the instance. Whatever you want to call our luck in drop rate, it was very consistent over a prolonged period of time.

With this being such an unprecedented spike in our historical drop rate, and it just happening to occur the first time we dropped into Ulduar after a major patch release, I'ded post to see if anyone else had had similar experience. Statistically speaking, this stands out as quite an anomaly if there's been no change behind-the-scenes.

[Trisst]

RNG is RNG gimp....

So if you did those five bosses and saw no fragments, would you have come on the forums to see if there was a stealth nerf?

Your logic is flawed, random is random.

[Somedudeknownaschris]

Despite your massive long post to try to explain yourself, this thread still fails.

"Quick guys, I flipped a coin, got heads 3 times in a row! Tails got nerfed wtf!"

[Mystearica]

1 week we got 7 fragments. Every other week we only got the 1 off Yogg. Apparently they buffed fragment drop rate for 1 week then nerfed it again.

[Gevlad]

Maybe you were just particularly lucky.
Maybe the droprate was changed.

I recommend creating a thread on a WoW related forum asking for input based on other player's experiences, and see what people generally think.
Oh, wait......

Of course you're going to get a bunch of retards who haven't been in ulduar recently expressing their views as to why they still know everything and you are wrong to contemplate such things, but maybe you'll get a few other people who actually have been in there recently commenting eventually.

[Bigslick]

RNG is RNG gimp....

So if you did those five bosses and saw no fragments, would you have come on the forums to see if there was a stealth nerf?

Your logic is flawed, random is random.

Your definition of random is wrong, as it applies here.

Random is only as random as blizzard makes it - a predefined % chance for it to drop. When the curve is bent severely than one suspects a change has been made. I figured posting here would be a quick way to find out if anyone else had seen a notable bump, rather than wasting time plodding through old content for weeks.

Oh, and if we went 5 weeks with no drops I might - this would be a similar level of statistical significance.

[Dawon]

OMG a theory that doesn't have enough statistic foundation around it and he got the nerve to inform/check with the rest of us!?!! QUICK, FLAME HIM!

[Deleted]

Your definition of random is wrong, as it applies here.

Random is only as random as blizzard makes it - a predefined % chance for it to drop. When the curve is bent severely than one suspects a change has been made. I figured posting here would be a quick way to find out if anyone else had seen a notable bump, rather than wasting time plodding through old content for weeks.

Oh, and if we went 5 weeks with no drops I might - this would be a similar level of statistical significance.

Do you even know what random means?

[Kaneiac]

Your definition of random is wrong, as it applies here.

Random is only as random as blizzard makes it - a predefined % chance for it to drop. When the curve is bent severely than one suspects a change has been made. I figured posting here would be a quick way to find out if anyone else had seen a notable bump, rather than wasting time plodding through old content for weeks.

Oh, and if we went 5 weeks with no drops I might - this would be a similar level of statistical significance.

RNG is RNG.

It could have a 99% chance to drop and you could only ever see 1 fragment in the course of WoTLK. Very unlikely, but just because there's a set percentage doesn't make it any less random.

[Haaizor]

Your definition of random is wrong, as it applies here.

Random is only as random as blizzard makes it - a predefined % chance for it to drop. When the curve is bent severely than one suspects a change has been made. I figured posting here would be a quick way to find out if anyone else had seen a notable bump, rather than wasting time plodding through old content for weeks.

Oh, and if we went 5 weeks with no drops I might - this would be a similar level of statistical significance.

i lol'd

Despite your massive long post to try to explain yourself, this thread still fails.



"Quick guys, I flipped a coin, got heads 3 times in a row! Tails got nerfed wtf!"

^ So true

[Zeuq]

Oh, and if we went 5 weeks with no drops I might - this would be a similar level of statistical significance.

I disagree. From what I can tell from a quick Google search, the normal droprate is around 3-5% and the heroic droprate is around 10-15%. If you went 5 weeks of full clears without seeing one, excluding Yogg (who is 100% and thus invalidates it) and Algalon (otherwise you'd be doing lots of hardmodes and be seeing much higher droprates), that gives you 12 chances per week, or a total of 60 chances. Even if you assume the higher expected droprate, there's still ~5% chance that you could go 5 weeks and see zero fragments. If the droprate is actually closer to 3%, there's 16% chance to go 5 weeks and see zero fragments. IOW, you could expect that somewhere between 5% and 16% of guilds to go 5 weeks and see no additional drops; that wouldn't be particularly odd. Yes, the expected number of drops over 5 weeks would be 2-3, but random doesn't mean you're going to see the expected value; in fact, if everyone did, then it would be decidedly NOT random.

Same for what you mentioned in the OP, it doesn't mean anything statistically. When you're talking about relatively low droprates, you need more samples to make a statistically significant judgment about the accuracy of the suspected droprate. In the same way that you could go 5 weeks and see zero drops, it's also possible that you could see more than the expected number of drops. Seeing 2 drops in 5 bosses, assuming none are hardmode will happen about 0.1-0.25% of the time. Yes, that's a low chance of happening, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. I'm sure if you look on thottbot at drops that have roughly the same chance of happening, you'll see plenty of people saying "I'm not sure about that droprate, I got it on my 5th kill."

The fact that you often went seeing few and suddenly saw a couple quickly is exactly how I'd expect random to work. For instance, a one in five chance doesn't mean every fifth time you'll see something, it means if you do a sufficiently large number of trials you'd expect that roughly a fifth of the trials will have come out that way. Sometimes you'll go a while seeing nothing, sometimes you'll see several in a row, that's just how random is. Yes, they released 3.3 last week, but what you're doing here is a statistical fallacy where you see something that seems out of place, you see something that happened at the same time and assume one caused the other. Correlation does not equal causation.

TLDR: Random is Random. Wait a few weeks, let people run Ulduar a few times and see what happens. Then we'll have some data and can figure out if the droprate was changed.

[Lilcheeks]

I figured posting here would be a quick way to find out if anyone else had seen a notable bump, rather than wasting time plodding through old content for weeks.

No change.

[Mystearica]

OMG a theory that doesn't have enough statistic foundation around it and he got the nerve to inform/check with the rest of us!?!! QUICK, FLAME HIM!

THROW SALT AT HIM.

[Firecrest]

Hey, here's a thought (I suggest you try having them sometime): instead of longitudinally gathering information in a study, a question can be answered much more quickly by gathering information laterally from several groups. And guess what? Ulduar clears are pretty much a controlled experiment for this type of question. The only variable that's changed is the release of Patch 3.3. So from that perspective, this is a pretty damn good place to post exactly the sort of question (not statement) my original post posed.

Hey, here's a thought. Look it up on armory for concrete evidence as opposed to posting stupid questions to a forum on which no one actually in charge of such things ever reads.

Here, never mind, I got your back. Just click. Hell, I'll even save you the click. No change. After weeks of snake eyes, you rolled boxcars. Congrats. It happens.

[Munk]

2 frags our of our weeks full clear of all hard modes which includes the mandatory drop of yogg+1.

No there has been no buff.

[thundercles]

Oh for crying out loud.

This guy was ASKING A QUESTION not making some totally off-the-wall unfounded assertion.

Upon reading his QUESTION one should:
a) Provide your opinion on the specific topic (Yes, no, maybe, and why) OR
b) Decide that you've nothing to contribute or that this thread isn't worth your time and move along quietly.

If you did not do one of those two very specific things, then you are a troll. Please kindly go fornicate yourself with an iron stick.


OT: No I don't believe they upped the drop rate.
BTW, your response to the first troll's obvious trolling was epic. +1 to you, sir.

[Bigslick]

Your definition of random is wrong, as it applies here.

Random is only as random as blizzard makes it - a predefined % chance for it to drop. When the curve is bent severely than one suspects a change has been made. I figured posting here would be a quick way to find out if anyone else had seen a notable bump, rather than wasting time plodding through old content for weeks.

Oh, and if we went 5 weeks with no drops I might - this would be a similar level of statistical significance.

/points-at-self Poorly stated.

My point was that while RNG can easily explain why one week might offer more drops (even notably more) than others, it is not the only possible explanation. % rate is something Blizzard defines, and can (though not necessarily has been) be changed either intentionally or unintentionally with a major patch release.

2 frags our of our weeks full clear of all hard modes which includes the mandatory drop of yogg+1.

No there has been no buff.

Thanks for contributing the only actual input that helps the original question

Hey, here's a thought. Look it up on armory for concrete evidence as opposed to posting stupid questions to a forum on which no one actually in charge of such things ever reads.

Hey, I'd be glad to! So tell me, oh enlightened one, where does one find drop rate on the armory? I guess if you felt it was a stupid question, you felt it deserved a... well you can figure out the rest :P [Edit: Ok, you edited in a link to where blizzard shows their posted drop rate, I'm eating crow on that one. But that doesn't provide any add'l info if there's been a stealth change]

[Firecrest]

Oh for crying out loud.

This guy was ASKING A QUESTION not making some totally off-the-wall unfounded assertion.

Upon reading his QUESTION one should:
a) Provide your opinion on the specific topic (Yes, no, maybe, and why) OR
b) Decide that you've nothing to contribute or that this thread isn't worth your time and move along quietly.

If you did not do one of those two very specific things, then you are a troll. Please kindly go fornicate yourself with an iron stick.


OT: No I don't believe they upped the drop rate.
BTW, your response to the first troll's obvious trolling was epic. +1 to you, sir.

OP is a moron for asking a question which absolutely no one here is qualified to answer. It's made even more retarded by the fact that the people who are qualified to answer his question HAVE A GOD DAMN PAGE SPECIFICALLY DEVOTED TO IT that he was too stupid/lazy to go look at.

He deserves all the trolling he gets.