Aren’t you concerned that high levels will kill low-level monsters to farm rares?

[zathros]

Aren’t you concerned that high levels will kill low-level monsters to farm rares?

Answer: We’re taking this to account. srand likes to use the lottery analogy to describe the rare system: If you buy one ticket, you have a very tiny chance of winning. If you buy a thousand, you still have a very tiny chance. Doubling one’s kill totals will not significantly increase the chances of the player finding a rare item.

You have a 1000 times greater chance! That's significant!

If rares drop 1 in 65536, Killing 30 monsters an hour in VoD/Caul means you'll find one every 2000 hours or so. Killing 150 Mutilators an hour means you'll find one every 400 hours or so. Killing 600 Olthoi ninnies an hour means you'll find one every 100 hours or so.

Hopefully the rare droprate isn't set in stone yet.

[Deiwos_WE]

That was my question. I was disappointed in the answer, and wanted to debate ( :p ) but being in a room full of people who had their own questions to ask, its just not possible.

Had I the opportunity, I would have argued with srand. The lottery example breaks down, because to a UCMer (for example) there's little or no cost to hunting 24/7 for rares. To a level 240, there's very little cost (in lost xp, since they already are close to max) in hunting lower critters that they can kill faster.

The lottery works in part because people can't artificially increase their odds without huge cost to themselves. I really think this is a HUGE potential problem. They didn't see it my way though. :(

[Pyria]

before you get your panties in a buddle over this why don't you wait until more details come out?

just a idea...

[Yan_HG]

Brings up and interesting question though- if a character reaches the maximum level and becomes incapable of gaining any additional exp, are they even capable of UCMing?

Taken from the CoC (description of innapropriate behavior):
Allowing your character to gain experience points by engaging in combat without being at the keyboard, ready to respond to an Administrator on demand (this activity is commonly called a "Combat Macro"). Logging off as soon as an admin appears (visible or invisible) or when an admin tries to speak with you will be taken into consideration in determining unattended combat macros. First time-combat macro offenses may result in a permanent ban from the game.

If you're the maximum level, you cannot gain exp no matter what you kill, so your macro is free to farm as much loot as it pleases so long as it can't gain exp from the creatures being killed.

[Unarmed Foe]

You never stop being able to recieve xp tho do you? Or will 275 be a hard cap? Because the augumentation gems I would think you can gain xp forever...

[Deiwos_WE]

Did someone HONESTLY just use "your panties in a buddle"?!? Flaming really is becoming a lost art...

[Yan_HG]

You can only have somewhere around 4.2 billion in spendable exp at any given time. Earning any exp in any way while you have reached the cap on spendable exp does absolutely nothing. People who are really, truly capped have around 4.2 billion exp spent into every skill and attribute along with 4.2 billion in excess spendable exp.

Even I could stop myself from gaining exp if I were to refrain from spending any of it until I reach the spendable cap. Then I could UCM for treasure as much as I please and still be technically abiding by the CoC.

[Abdul]

Originally posted by Yan_HG

If you're the maximum level, you cannot gain exp no matter what you kill, so your macro is free to farm as much loot as it pleases so long as it can't gain exp from the creatures being killed.

You get xp, just not a whole lot of it.

You have made 3,178 exp in 16 mins. for an avg of 10,800 XP per hour and killed 99 creatures.

[Koth]

I think we need to wait until we get more details about what rares are.

I'm hoping that, at least at the more "common" levels of rares, they're somehting that will be ultimately useful, but not something that is overpowering or make you rich, and preferrably consumable. For example, the 5-use +500 healing kit they mentioned. That's useful, extremely useful when you're close to dieing. But it's not somehting that would likely sell for a lot since it's only 5 uses. If this is the kind of rare that is available 1/10000, i doubt that too many people would be willing to even macro for them. Assuming they're not stackable, you'd have to carry a bunch of them to make them truly worthwhile! I dont see buyers paying a fortune for them, or sellers trying to collect thousands of them. *shrug* maybe it's a lack of foresight on my part, but if this is the type of rare that drops 1/10000 or whatever, then i dont think we have too much to worry about.

Hopefully, the truly awesome, non-consumable rares will be the ones that are extremely rare, like 1 per month ones, which make it basically pointless to macro for them.

edit : just a note, i have no idea what the actual rates are set at now...1/10000 was just a shot in the dark to make a point :-P

[zathros]

What details should I be waiting for?

They gave a list of possible rares and said the drop rate would be uniform across monsters.

I hunt VoD most of the time, and kill about 30 monsters/buff. If I average 2 hours a day, it will take me 3 years on the average to find one rare. If I switch to the 40+ matron hive, I'd find a rare every 2 months on the average.

Of course if rares were my goal and I didn't care about the CoC, I'd macro Mosswarts in some out of the way place with a level 40 on a new account that I didn't care about bans on. You could even macro sparring golems! Killing 100/hour would yield a rare a month.

Bringing this up now rather than later makes it more likely that my thoughts will be taken into account.

[Palum]

Same people who SWEAR if they buy lottery tickets for 40 years they'll eventually win the jackpot.

The odds are so bad that its really not worth it. In fact, over time you have a better return rate for scratch tickets than the lotto.

The rate will probably be more like 1/1,000,000,000 for the loot drops (figure 9 servers, 1 month hunting, many drops per mob...).

The difference between 1,000/1,000,000,000 and 10,000/1,000,000,000 is negligable since you either get one or you don't. There is no benefit to having killed 1000x more mobs by the end of the year unless you actually find one.

Consider also, that mobs of many different levels only take 'one hit' so I wouldn't expect drudge skulkers to be the only victim from fools who think 0*1000 = 1000.

[Yan_HG]

>"The difference between 1,000/1,000,000,000 and 10,000/1,000,000,000 is negligable since you either get one or you don't. There is no benefit to having killed 1000x more mobs by the end of the year unless you actually find one."

Increasing your odds 10 times is hardly what I'd call negligable.

With persistence, a person who spends all their efforts into finding rares WILL find more than those who go about hunting normally. Macroers generally set up places with lower level creatures so their macro is safer, but gets more kills. Players have a tendancy to get bored with easy hack and slashing, so they challenge themselves with higher level creatures and harder battles.

If you ask me, they should do something to limit the value of killing too many low level creatures. Make it so loot level 1 contains the rare tier 1, loot level 2 has rare tiers 1 and 2, loot level 3 has rare tiers 1, 2, and 3, etc.

[vellus]

plus you would need to know the name of the rare to automatically pick it up.

and the rare would have to appear in decal. Envoys do not, maybe rares will not either.

the API interface for 3rd party that was mentioned, might not pass on that kind of stuff.

etc...

[Palum]

10*0 is still 0.

[zathros]

Pugum: Can I have 4 cents?

Edit: That may have come across as rude rather than funny. The point is 4 cents is negligable, but not zero. 1/65536 is negligable, as is 1/1,000,000. But if you claim 1 in a 1,000,000 is the same as 10 in 1,000,000 what about 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? You have to draw the line somewhere. At what point does 10*0 not equal 0?

[Was]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but nowhere in the info released so far did they say it would be an equal chance for a drudge slave to drop a rare as it would be for a peerless drudge, did they?

Its nice to know that anyone could be the proud owner of such an item, but really, one would think (and hope even) that the odds would be weighted towards the upper end.

Its an assumption, I know, but there almost has to be appropriate user reqs on the thing. If you got a tier 5 rare off of a drudge slave, its more than likely that you won't be able to use it any time soon. I personally would hope that Turbine has skewed the percentages for each tier to drop according to its useability.

[Deiwos_WE]

In the presentation they said all critters had an equal chance of dropping a rare. Of course, the expansion is still 7-8 months off, so even if that's true today, there's no telling what might happen.

[Pyria]

details would be like whats going to happen between now and next year. Why worry about something that is not going to affect the game until 2005? Im sure there are other changes coming so just relax and enjoy today's game.

[Zero_Washu]

Considering Turbine's Random Number Generator Technology it probably will be beneficial to farm low level mobs. After all everyone is more than familar with the 33% imbues and 100% chance to suceed stories :D

[ferastu]

From this page:

http://ac.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=211

Come these numbers:
In the time between the January and February events, here are how many creatures each world killed:

Darktide: 13.5 million
Harvestgain: 10.4 million
Frostfell: 10.1 million
Wintersebb: 9.2 million
Leafcull: 8.9 million
Solclaim: 8.8 million
Thistledown: 8.8 million
Morningthaw: 8.4 million

78.1 million critters!

From the ACPL:
Rare Drops
Tier System
# : Found per world
1 : 1000 per month
2 : 200 per month
3 : 40 per month
4 : 10 per month
5 : 1 per month

1251 estimated rare drops per month

For the sake of simplicity lets say that by the time the XP pack ships, the number of new/returning players it attracts will cause an equal number of critters to be killed in a month. Also lets assume that anyone doing serious hunting will have the XP pack and be eligible for rares to drop on their kills.

We are then looking at 1251 drops per 78.1 millions kills OR 1 per roughly 62,000 kills.

So yes you could increase your chances of getting some type of rare by killing easier critters. However, I don't think a significant dent can be made in your chances of getting that Tier 5.

Powerball Odds
Matching 5 numbers
1 in 3 million ($100,000 prize)
Matching 5 numbers + powerball
1 in 120.5 million (jackpot $10 -$200 million)

How many people do you know that have won the $100 grand prize in Powerball, let alone the Grand Prize?

[Sun Wu]

"We are then looking at 1251 drops per 78.1 millions kills OR 1 per roughly 62,000 kills." -- ferastu

So if a few dozen players triple the number of monsters they kill, nothing noticeable will happen to the number of rares on a server.

If a few hundred people join a server or resume active play, then you will see more rares. Or if hundreds increase their kill numbers by a modest margin.

But in the absence of a server-wide trend toward more killing, no individual will be able to significantly effect the number. There is a limit to how many easy monsters you can kill and loot in an hour, period.

You will want to kill moderate-to-high numbers of monsters that give good (non-rare) loot and good experience. No rare is gonna make up for the loot and points you could have made taking the middle path?

[Engl]

Oh my god, that lottery analogy is really scary. If that is how the devs are thinking, no wonder AC has flaws (and with such developers, probably will continue to have for some time).

Okay so why is the lottery analogy horribly stupid? Well it is actually true....if you only buy thousand tickets. Chance of winning with 1000 tickets, where each ticket has a extremely low chance, may still result in a very low chance of winning (obviously still 1000x as large as with only one ticket).

If we have two people and one of em buys one ticket at a time while the other buys a thousand at a time, the guy buying one thousand tickets at a time will have won on average one thousand times before the other guy gets his first win (presuming they both do their purchases at the same rate). This is the case that resembles how AC will work, since people are constantly killing stuff. Killing 30 VoD critters an hour for a day wont conciderably improve your chances compared to killing 200 lowbie critters an hour for a day. The thing is that you dont just play for one day, look at a year instead and the guy killing lowbie critters will have found on average ~6x the amount of rares compared to the guy in VoD (with the drop rates given, a year of play will yield some rares).

The above is a real problem in AC, since as we all know, AC isnt free from UCMs or ACMs with admin alert on secondary computers. There is just so much reason to macro lowbie monsters with those rare drops, since there isnt really anything to loose. If you get caught, no big deal, make a new char, he can be level 50 in no-time, and right back at killing lowbie monsters. Not only would such a macro maintain a LOT higher monster/hour rate, he would also be killing mobs for a LOT more hours/day. By the end of the year, if the macroer keeps his char on a lot and remakes when needed, he may very well have 30x the amount of rares of a legitimate VoD-hunting player, perhaps even tons more (100x the rares is not unreasonable when comparing with people who dont hunt every day).

I really hope the devs give this new system some serious thought before implementing it, they obviously havnt thus far.

[Synnah]

ferastu is that "per world" or "per all worlds combined" ?

I ask because everything I've heard/read has been "across all worlds" and not actually "per world"

just trying to clear that up, but I can look at the vault/cod :)

edit: ps, Engl, LOVE your post.. very well put :)

[Yusuki]

Let's take SC's numbers as a mathematical exercise. Emphasis (and additions in red) in the quote mine.

From this page:

http://ac.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=211

In the time between the January and February events, here are how many creatures each world killed:

Solclaim: 8.8 million

From the ACPL:
Rare Drops
Tier System
# : Found per world
1 : 1000 per month
2 : 200 per month
3 : 40 per month
4 : 10 per month
5 : 1 per month

1251 estimated rare drops per month per worldSo now we're looking at 1,251/8,800,000, or a 0.014216% chance per kill of getting a rare per kill, or roughly one in 70 thousand. For comparison, the odds of finding Ulgrim's scroll are widely reported as 0.100%, or one in a thousand. So. 1/70,000 for a rare per kill. Kill two thousand creatures in a month--not difficult at all. Now your personal odds are 1/35.

And try this: If a *CM is set up to kill and loot a creature every 6.5 seconds (and there are many, many places in Dereth where it is easy to set up a character to do this), it can kill 280,000 in a month if it's running 24/7. At 1/70,000 odds, on average, you're looking at four rares a month. Average. Statistical samples, other factors, blah blah blah--for purposes of discussion only--but four rares a month running 24/7. Running 12 a day? Two rares a month. More, if the RNG is being kind.

And that's just one character. Set up a hundred just like this one, running 12 hours a day, and you're talking 16% of the server's rares will go to those hundred characters. And given multiple accounts, maybe 25-50 total live real people.

On average.

[Lord-of-Light]

Well, I don't think that "equal across all monsters" means that your chances of getting a rare improve if you select lower lvl crits and/or whatever crit has the most specimens out there.

If they use a random generator that will place one of the highest lvl rares on a single critter once a month, it's pure pot luck on which type of crit it will be on, much less when that crit will spawn, much less where. Certainly, you can statistically improve your odds by picking a crit that has many clones across the server that spawn at a higher frequency, but you still have to be at the right place at the right time on the right server, and be the one that kills that crit, and opens that body, etc.. If someone is going to macro, UCM or ACM, they are presumably going to pick a particular type of crit to farm (or a particular area. How many "areas" are there in Dereth...one thousand? ten thousand? You tell me.

No doubt some will try such farming, and no doubt some of them will have some success in their yield...vis-a-vis the bottom level or two perhaps...but far more of them will have failed altogether to be at that right spot at the right time. And how many days or weeks, or months, are many of them going to waste in that kind of endeavor before they go back to hunting XP and lvls instead?

[zathros]

78.1 million critters!

1251 estimated rare drops per month.

We are then looking at 1251 drops per 78.1 millions kills OR 1 per roughly 62,000 kills.

So yes you could increase your chances of getting some type of rare by killing easier critters. However, I don't think a significant dent can be made in your chances of getting that Tier 5.

Powerball Odds
Matching 5 numbers 1 in 3 million ($100,000 prize)
Matching 5 numbers + powerball
1 in 120.5 million (jackpot $10 -$200 million)

How many people do you know that have won the $100 grand prize in Powerball, let alone the Grand Prize?

One. ( http://www.royaldiceonlinecasino.com/gambling-news/2000/12/1/a-16381.php) A security guard who works in my building pooled $10 with 13 others and hit the big one. By buying 140 tickets, he greatly increased his chances of winning over those who only bought one.

Check and mate!

[God Slayer]

uh.. guys

it's 1000 not per server

but per intire servers

so that 1 per server isn't per server it's 1 in the intire game


reread things

[Palum]

One. ( http://www.royaldiceonlinecasino.com/gambling-news/2000/12/1/a-16381.php) A security guard who works in my building pooled $10 with 13 others and hit the big one. By buying 140 tickets, he greatly increased his chances of winning over those who only bought one.

Check and mate!


Checkmate? Hardly.

Significant and statistically significant are completely different things.

1000x with such small odds to begin with is NOT statistically significant.

Using 1251 per world as a number is stupid because 1240 of those are common rares meant to be trinkets mildly useful to certain people. The top 11 will actually be highly prized.

[Danilo Thann]

8.8 Million * 7 = about 60 million so it is really 1241 / 60,000,000 of which maybe ( as someone said ) 11 will be truely useful so the odds are 11/60,000,000

[Silifi Of Death]

It doesn't matter that a couple pharmers will be able to get the lowest tier rares off slinkers. The rares that you will be able to get satistically significant changes are the most useless ones. A healing kit? Oooo... Those damn UCMs are getting Healing kits! Camping low level spawns won't be worth anything if your looking for the good rares, like that bow.

So, really, does it matter that UCMs might have a slightly better chance of finding a semi-good item? It's about time vs. reward. I doubt the UCMs will waste their time macroing drudge slinkers when they'll have a near equally good chance of getting them off creatures that are good xp too, like White Wasps.

[zathros]

So lets say the odds of finding a good rare (tier 4 or 5) are 1 in 7 million.

If I hunt VoD 2000 hours a year for 5 years, killing 35 monsters an hour, I'll kill 350,000 monsters so I'll find on the average .05 rares. If instead I hunt the 40+ matron hive killing 700 monsters an hour, I'll kill 7 million monsters for an average of one good rare. Is that statistically significant?

"That's ludicrous. You won't hunt rares for 5 years!"

So what if we scale it down to one year? .01 vs .2. Is that statistically significant? At what point does it break down?

[GKusnick]

If someone wants to spend a year of their life farming low-level mobs fulltime for a one in five chance of getting a rare, they can have it as far as I'm concerned.

But even if the devs decide that this is a problem, there's a fairly simple solution: make the chance of dropping a rare scale with the lifetime of the monster. Creatures that have been alive less than, say, 30 seconds should have zero chance of dropping a rare. From there it scales up to the cap of 1/7,000,000 (or whatever) at, say, three minutes. So farming rares becomes self-defeating: the faster you clear the spawn, the less likely you are to find a rare. Rares will be obtainable primarily from chance-met landscape spawns that have been around a while.

To my mind, that's more in tune with the concept and flavor of rares anyway.

[Deiwos_WE]

I think some of the people here are missing the point I was trying to make originally. I'm not concerned that some other guy might get a rare that I don't, without "deserving it". I've long since stopped beating that horse.

My concern is pretty simple. In the lottery, there's a practical barrier to people trying to "game" the system too much...and that's the cost. How many dollars are you willing to put into lottery tickets each month? Not all that many. There's a secondary issue too. If they put in more dollars, it IS decreasing your chance of winning (whether "statistically significantly" or not) but its NOT affecting the rest of your life.

The AC example breaks down on both these issues. The UCMer actually has a lower "cost" (if cost is the number of person-hours spent looking for rares) than the "real" player does. There's simply very little cost barrier. Secondly, if they DO seek to increase their odds, it doesn't just lower everyone else odds...it affects the rest of their game play too. Level 126+ characters in lower level dungeons (for higher kill numbers) DOES have a negative impact outside just the "Rares Lottery".

So for those two reasons, I think this is an implementation plan destined to cause LOTS of problems.

[BillBraskey]

I'm against the rare drop being like they proposed simply because I think the game should reward killing harder monsters. They should have the drops be base on (monster level divided by your level)* whatever percentage the drop is. That way, at level 100 killing a level 200 mob will give you twice the chance of finding a rare. Killing a level 50 mob will give you 1/2 the chance to find a rare. For fellows, it should count as the average level of the fellow members.

[Palum]

So lets say the odds of finding a good rare (tier 4 or 5) are 1 in 7 million.

If I hunt VoD 2000 hours a year for 5 years, killing 35 monsters an hour, I'll kill 350,000 monsters so I'll find on the average .05 rares. If instead I hunt the 40+ matron hive killing 700 monsters an hour, I'll kill 7 million monsters for an average of one good rare. Is that statistically significant?

"That's ludicrous. You won't hunt rares for 5 years!"

So what if we scale it down to one year? .01 vs .2. Is that statistically significant? At what point does it break down?


Excepting the fact that low olthoi drop 2-5 items and VOD creatures can drop a dozen+.

Plus you are forgetting to factor in looting. No matter how 'fast' you are there is a static time involved in looting a mob.

Despite all this, while the 40+ matron hives have an slight long term advantage (not statistically significant on a small scale by any means), you are assuming that the farmers have no goals in AC other than looting rares. That is patently false and obviously ludicrous.

Assuming there will be new content, those who gained xp on VOD will have access to killing higher mobs dropping tons of loot at a pretty rapid pace while you are stuck with a .00001% advantage gaining no xp over 5 years...

It is safe to say that a person who hunts for loot at the exclusion of all else has the advantage of finding, generally, better loot. This has always been the case. People who hunt just for exp get more... Why the hoopla now about a system that has always existed in AC?

[Synnah]

no matter whether it's right or wrong... or WHO is right and WHO is wrong.

the fact is that some people will see the statistics as "ooo I'll have to start hunting ohn from now on!" and do just that.... causing a problem in the leveling grounds of lower level characters.

imo I see this argument not for who's going to get or not get the rares... but who will be forced out of decent hunting grounds because of those that see them as rare-spawning grounds and not n00b areas.

[God Slayer]

they could put a level cap on certain dungeons

[zathros]

Excepting the fact that low olthoi drop 2-5 items and VOD creatures can drop a dozen+.


The rare sounds like a trophy item. It's an addition, not a replacement for other items.

Plus you are forgetting to factor in looting. No matter how 'fast' you are there is a static time involved in looting a mob.


Opening a corpse to see if the first item is a rare (obvious by the icon) takes about a second depending upon connection speed. It does matter, but 600+ creatures an hour is not unreasonable.


It is safe to say that a person who hunts for loot at the exclusion of all else has the advantage of finding, generally, better loot. This has always been the case. People who hunt just for exp get more... Why the hoopla now about a system that has always existed in AC?

I would like the same chance of finding rares as everyone else, but I'm not willing to camp low level monsters to do so. I'd like to see the chance of finding a rare proportional to the time it takes to kill a creature.

I want to keep hunting interesting monsters, but don't want the feeling that I should be doing something else. I'm bringing this up now because changes now cause less headaches than changes in the future will. Srand's lottery analogy is flawed, but of course it was taken out of context so it's hard to say how she really feels about it. Maybe I can convince her that the analogy has problems, maybe not, but if I don't try, I won't feel right complaining later.

[zathros]

Thinking about this more, I considered how much time I spend looking for Ulgrim's scroll. I spend about 2 hours a month, sometimes none, sometimes a lot more. If all level 100+ characters spent two hours a month looking for rares in low level dungeons, there would be a good chance you'd run into one in any given low level dungeon your took a level appropriate character to.

Not everyone looks for Ulgrim's scroll, but some hunted until they found it. With rares not being a one time only thing, I can see the fanatics more than making up for the people who don't look at all.

[Lord-of-Light]

I continue to regard this as a non-issue.

If the chances of any given rare being on any given critter are "equal" (as distinguished from being "less likely" to appear on a dungeon-based rather than a surface-based crit <or vice versa>, or "more likely" to appear to appear on a lvl 35 crit than on a lvl 70 crit (in/to any degree other than that there may be more lvl 35 crits than lvl 70 crits spawning in Dereth over time)...as in being the product of a true random loot assignment generator, statistically that given rare may appear on a given type of crit more often because it is the type of crit most often killed...and therefore the type of crit that is respawned/"recycled" most often...but part of that function in turn would also be on how prolific that creature was, particularly in frequently hunted areas, and how much it was a "target of choice"...i.e., people were hunting it for reasons other than the likelihood of getting a rare off it.

Let's say that, on average, 20,000,000 critters are killed in Dereth every month on any given server, and let's say that, on average, 1,000,000 of them are white phyntos wasps, and that a given rare will be randomly assigned to one of those 20,000,000 critters. Statistically (I suppose) there's a 5% chance that that rare will appear on a white phyntos...that is, on one of those white phyntoses. But there's a 95% chance it won't. Stated otherwise, statistically that rare will appear on a white phyntos only once every 20 months.

In addition, if you are 1 of 100 people that's hunting white phyntoses exclusively on that server, and that collectively that 100 is killing half of all the white phyntoses (or 500,000). If my math is right, your chance is only 1 out of 200 that you will be the person that gets that given rare after twenty months of hunting...and the odds would be 50-50 that NONE of those folks who hunted white phyntoses exclusively for twenty months would get that rare.

Now, if those odds still sound good to you, go for it, amigo...

[Al-Egre Arn]

details would be like whats going to happen between now and next year. Why worry about something that is not going to affect the game until 2005? Im sure there are other changes coming so just relax and enjoy today's game.

If thats the case, why even have this board then?

[Mestivious]

I think the only logical solution here is to only have rares drop if the character name doing the looting is one that is in my sig.

I'll be fare about dispersing them from there :-)

[belsamber]

I skimmed most of this thread and no one here seems to know how a lottery actually works. Each lottery is its own statistical universe and for each entry the odds are always the same, you can influence your odds of winning by entering more than once in a lotto, but in this case you can enter the lotto only once per kill because its a closed system, no matter how many critters you kill you have a 1 chance in a thousand to get a rare, the odds never get any better. If you kill one critter your odds of getting a rare are 1 in 1000. If you kill 999 critters without getting a rare, guess what your chances of getting a rare are if you kill one more critter? Yep you guessed it, 1 chance in 1000 just like your first kill. You could kill ten critters in a row and get 10 rares, or you could kill 10,000 and get no rares because each time you kill a critter you are starting from scratch and each one you kill has absolutly no effect on the next one you kill.
Now if there were only 1000 critters of a given type and their numbers decrease as you kill each one then you will be certain that if you kill 999 and there is only one left he will have the rare on him, but thats the only way you can be sure.

[Hidalgo]

I'm thinking that there will be of course different levels of rares right? If that is the case then the lower level rares (I think they said there were 5 tiers?) would be on the low level creatures, and the really special ones, which my guess is noone will ever find, will be on the high level critters. I'm guessing the low level ones will be a nice find but nothing to hunt 24/7 for. Of course I could be way off on this, haven't paid much attention to the rare items idea.....

[zathros]

Lord-of-Light: Your numbers aren't quite right based on the information Turbine has given us, but your general concept is. Your odds of finding a rare are small regardless of what you hunt, but they're a lot better fighting wasps than they are fighting Tremendous Monouga. Given that, I probably wouldn't hunt the lowest level thing I can find, but I'll be much more likely to farm wing/keys/peas from lower level creatures.

belsamber: I understand the concept you presented, but that doesn't change the fact that killing 100 monsters makes you almost 100 times as likely to find a major. It certainly doesn't guarantee it, but it does make it more likey.

Hidalgo: The current plan is to have all monster have the same chance of dropping any tier of rare.

[ferastu]

Sorry about the numbers in my original message. The amount of rare drops were per all worlds not per world. That is the assumption my numbers went on, I just typed that part incorrectly.

To some other comments made on this thread
If we end up with an influx of new players doing 3x the hunting we will end up with 3x the number of rares
Although this wasn't explicitly stated, it seemed to be the teams desire that the number of rares found remain within those ranges. If a larger number of monsters are killed per month they may decrease the chances of getting them.

farming low level monsters won't help as the high tier rares will be on high tier mobs
I don't believe this is true. I remember someone stating that Elysa's Wondrous Bow has as much of a chance as falling on a Drudge Skulker as a Seraphim.

lottery analogy isn't correct as each kill is an independent drawing as opposed to a lottery being a single drawing with multiple chances.
It was actually Srand who brought up this analogy at the ACPL, I just continued with it. If anything it reinforces her point that increasing the number of monsters you kill won't significantly increase your chances of getting a rare.

My friend won the lottery!
Great! Any chance I could get a loan?
Hopefully I'll be lucky enough to know someone who finds a Tier V rare!

The point is that is doesn't matter how many critters Mr.UCM kills. Everytime I kill a critter I will have the same 1 in 78.5 million shot at getting a rare. Whether I just got one, or 10 have already dropped for that month, or one hasn't dropped for 2 months.

Nothing that any other player does will affect MY chances of getting a rare.

While I would love to see all the UCM'ers gone, I don't want the devs developing content/game mechanics around worrying about them!

[DefzorTD]

As much as you may want to say with 1/65k odds you can find a rare in 100 hours, I highly doubt it. Think of 1/3 imbues. Many people have failed 8/9. Just because odds are 1/65k doesn't mean you'll find one in 65k kills. It also doesn't mean you'll find a decent one. I'm willing to bet most people won't be too excited about tier 1 rares (the lowest tier) which will be the most 'common' of the rares.

[ferastu]

I agree with that assessment of the Tier 1 rares.

Other than bragging rights what use is the uber healing kit with only 5 uses? Sure it means a failure proof healing back to full health, but...

To be truly useful I'd only want to use it when I was in danger of dying - say after I just failed a heal and just got slammed with another war spell.

So now I have to remember to use a different hot key, and the entire time this thing is on me it is taking up a pack space AND a hotkey.

I'm sure that many of the lower tier items will have tradeoffs like this.