This is something that I’ve been chewing on for a bit. Is a pure random loot table really all that great? I’m beginning to think not. Let’s establish some things first. Let us assume you have a good random number generator (RNG) to start. Without a good RNG all of this is moot anyways as your players will figure it out and abuse it. Second is that you either have a large list of items you want to distribute to your players, you have items that you rarely want to distribute, or both. If you just have a small list you’re probably fine with pure random. Third is that you have a large player base, 100k+ at least. More is better because ‘randomness’ isn’t really visible in small sample sizes. Now let’s take a look at some numbers.
Assume 10 items in the list, with the ‘ultra rare’ only occurring with a 1/10 chance. Keep in mind this does not mean you will get the item in 10 drops. Each time you get the drop (kill, chest, vase, reward, doesn’t matter) there is a 9/10, or a 0.9 chance of not getting it. So if I want to find the odds of this happening 10 times in a row, I’d do 9/10 * 9/10 * 9/10 and so on ten times, or 0.9^10 which equals 0.349 or 34.9%. That’s pretty good odds that you won’t get your item in 10 drops. In 20 drops though this drops to 12.1%, and at 30 drops you’ve plummeted down to 4.2% odds of not getting the special item. This is why I say a small list can get away with pure random. Depending on the pacing of course, getting 30 chances at a drop shouldn’t take all that long.
But what happens when that is increased? Say, we have a really powerful item that we only want to have a 1/100 or 1% chance of dropping? It is very easy for the mind to think “hmm, that means it will take the player 100 tries to get this item, which will be a bit of effort, but then this is the uber item”. This is bad thinking. First let’s extend the example above. If there’s a 1% chance of getting it, that means there’s a 99% chance of not getting it. So that 100 tries that takes a while would result in (99/100)^100 = 36.6% chance of not getting it. That means over one-third of your player base has not received the item you intended them to receive with that level of effort. That can cause problems because there’s a strong chance that the unlucky 1/3 of your players are going to feel some strong resentment that they are so unlucky. They will blame you, the developer of the game, not the RNG. Oh, and there’s the fact that about 40% of your player base got the item with 1/2 the expected effort. (99/100)^50 = 60.5% not getting it, so 39.5% getting it.
Honestly, this does cause problems. They may have changed things, I haven’t played in a long time, but in Age of Conan the crafting skills suffered from this. At launch there was a flat percentage chance of a rare resource dropping when gathering. The result of this was some players had an abundance of rare mats, and some players took a very, very long time to get their rare mats. Which you needed to advance your skills. Which you had to gather yourself, you couldn’t buy it and turn it in for the quest. Much frustration over this, as I tended to be in the unlucky group.
OK, so pure random can bad, so what’s the answer? That shall be in the next post.
0 Comments.