A better way for drop chance and player amount of time invested

This will be part opinion and part wishlist. What am I wishing for? The current drop chance (do not confuse this with drop rate, these are 2 entirely different things) doesn't feel very rewarding with a players time invested. This also can cause player perception that quests are not working.

What I am going to do here, is post this from a player perspective. I will also use actual in game examples.

There are various things throughout the game you can either always get or only have a chance to get. A example of something you can always get would be silver from mining silver nodes. An example of items you only have a chance to find are Wyvern Heads or Pristine Arctic Wolf Heads.

In playing our game, here is an actual example of a player spending 2 hours of their time:


In the above example, a player was playing the game attempting to find a Pristine Arctic Wolf Head. But in over 2 hours, this player found nothing. This then starts the perception that the games loot system isn't very rewarding, when attempting to actually find something in relation to the amount of time spent.

Because of the current drop chance, this also can cause players to also think that quests are not working. I'll post an actual example of what happened one day in chat.

A player in chat posted "The Imps aren't dropping the daily letter for the quest". I then spoke to this person to make sure they did actually have the quest and were doing everything correctly. I also then went into the scene to actually check and make sure the daily letter quest was actually working and it was.

What actually happened was the player just didn't actually kill enough Imps, due to getting a bad RNG roll based on the drop chance for the daily letter. This in turn can cause the perception that the quests aren't working, but they actually are.

What possibly happened was the player got a bad RNG roll and didn't kill 27 Imps:


Currently, you need to kill between 1 and 27 Admiring Imps before this item will drop. Due to the current drop chance of this item and the RNG. Of note, there aren't even 27 Admiring Imps in this scene to account for this large variance of Admiring Imp's that may need to be killed. You will have to run around the scene where the Admiring Imp's spawn and wait for them to respawn many many many times.

I did however explain to the player that was having an issue with the Imps, to return back to the scene, and keep killing Admiring Imp's until the letter drops. Of which it did finally for them.

My hope is that this post is both informative to players as well as the developers. My wish is that the developers can look at these actual in game examples and hopefully find a better and more rewarding system for these.

Thank you for your time.

 

brb

 

Hi,

How do you know that there is only 1 in 27 chance for the quest item drop?

 

I suspect he used API data for the number of drops vs. number of kills over a certain time period.

 

Every single day I do this quest I record the number of Admiring Imps I had to kill before the Letter from a Forlorn Wife dropped. I have currently observed it will drop between 1 and 27 imps killed. That’s also the same for the rune bag from barbarians in the South Boundless Forest. I use a LUA mod that has a creatures killed counter, to eliminate human error of me counting.