Loot ID Completely Random & Independent?

[Nebs]

Before anything, I'd like to point out that this is not a post complaining about gear drops, just one of curiosity. I've seen the idea get thrown around the forums, that whoever makes the raid group 'sets' the loot ID for that raid, and thus influences the type of gear that drops off of the bosses. Now, on its face, this seems completely ludicrous, as we all assume that the loot a boss drops is decided by RNG and completely independent of other factors. But, hear me out.

Ever since SoO began, and even back in ToT, our group has been showered with plate drops. As it happens to be, our only plate users are tanks, thus a lot of it either goes to off-spec or disenchanted. Now, I realize that this is a result of human psyche, 'useless' loot drops are particularly more memorable, because there is a sense of frustration that hard earned heroic gear is essentially going to waste. However, I think something can be said of the fact that both of our tanks have DPS off-specs of comparable and higher item levels, upgrades aside, than most, if not all, of our DPS. I think this speaks to the fact that plate does indeed drop more often for our raids, and not just a generalized statement that 'all we get is plate,' when in reality, plate drops as much as cloth, leather, mail etc. The past two weeks that I haven't been able to raid with them and thus not creating the group, I don't think there has been a single plate drop.

I remember raiding MC, when the concept was still very new and unfamiliar to players. It's amusing to remember how we would switch group leaders each night, because people were superstitious that a plate tank putting the group together would result in the majority of drops being cloth. I know, or at least, 99% sure that whatever gear drops is determined by a random number generator, independent of anything else. However, I've been unable to find anything either confirming or denying this on Blizzard's part. Most people would just dismiss the idea outright, and that's fine, but I would love to see some concrete evidence, a link, a forum post or an article addressing whether or not it is, in fact, just 'rng is rng'.

[Khorm]

Daze: Is Loot determined when the monster dies or when we actually loot it?
Thanks


Drysc: Loot is generated upon creation.

As soon as you step into an instance, or a mob is created in the world, the loot that's going to drop has already been determined.



Q u o t e: What are the variables in the random generator's kernel, is it based on some attribute of the players in the raid, or the raid leader?

Drysc: Heh, no.

I believe it uses a time stamp to seed the generator. So, there's nothing you can influence within the game that would alter or coerce the generator.



Q u o t e: So what you are saying is that we've killed Curator at the exact same second each week for the last 7 weeks, to account for the Champion gear? Or 14 out of the last 15 weeks? All we have to do is kill him a minute later? Huh...

Drysc: No, the time it uses to seed would have no real implication into the final outcome of what loot its given. On a long enough generation table, you may see some type of pattern based purely on a random generators inability to truly be random. But we're talking about astronomical numbers, something ridiculous like hundreds of billions of generations. Nothing you would or could see a pattern in during your time playing the game.

What you're seeing is pure and basic laws of probability. Have a few thousand people roll a pair of dice and you're bound to see hundreds of people able to roll snake-eyes 10 times in a row. (not that dice are truly random either)


Q u o t e: I believe loot is determined at the time the mob dies. How else would quest mobs drop quest items for people only on the quest? Does it register client side or is the quest item in the spawn only for people who are on the quest?

Drysc: Quest items are always there, they're just hidden if you don't have the quest.


Q u o t e: After stepping out of an instance or logging into an empty zone, I've often seen all the mobs throw up their buffs at the same time. Is this just my client, or does the server only create the mobs when someone's around to reduce load?

Drysc: The mobs aren't actually created until someone enters the area. Sometimes you'll see mobs sort of "fall" a bit to the ground, or groups of mobs all fan out from a single point. This is usually the creation happening. Ideally you don't notice it at all though.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...9988587?page=2

[SlippyCheeze]

I am reminded of a "trick" that one stats professor used: she would get everyone to write, and turn in, a string of twenty coin flips -- with about five people actually flipping coins, and everyone else inventing them. The folks doing that were also randomly selected, and she wouldn't know who was doing the real random bit.

Then she would get all those results turned in, and would pick out the actual random five, pretty consistently from year to year, shocking the folks in the class who couldn't imagine how she could figure that out.

The trick: look for the sheets with the longest sequence of heads or tails on a row. People inventing the lists wouldn't write long sequences because they didn't "seem" random enough, but the real coin flips would give five, six, seven or more of the same side in a row pretty often. Worked well enough to impress people.

The moral of this story is: randomness is hard at the best of times, but super-hard for people, because we have all these intuitive notions that don't even remotely match reality.

[Annarion]

I was tasked with creating our Hyjal and BT instances, because when I joined my guild, the tanks were still using Karazhan shields. However the first time I rolled Hyjal, we got a shield to drop. Right after they elected me to go into BT first, and we got our first Warglaive drop. I would say roughly 2/3 Hyjals that I rolled included the shield, and while my luck hasn't run that well on Warglaives, it was still me that rolled the BT that got us our second drop to complete the set for our rogue GM.

[kamuimac]

if u want to start thinking abotu rng and probability then start that if u want any kind of any significant approximity u need as absolute minium 1000 samples -_- better would be 10k or 100k samples - and u wont get that much aka 1000 gear drops probably in whole tier even if u raid 25 man -_- therefore there no poitn to think about it - rng is rng nothing else -_-