Raid Chests 0 loots

I feel so bad for you. Is EQ an abusive relationship to you?

Pointing out that players have regretted asking for a change when it ends up being something that they don't like means it is an abusive relationship? A quick example is the nerf to the slow belt procs after people complained about other proc belts and how they compared to the slow proc belt.

Just because the players see a problem with something doesn't mean that the devs see it the same way or that the fix would be what the players want.

Its been a couple weeks, but we are still holding steady at around .9 on the whole (its technically up slightly at .94 but its not uncommon for the number to drift slightly up or down but remain close to .9), this week's raiding saw another 8 events with 6 single valiant drops and two chests with no valiant pieces, no doubles, and no triples.

we don't raid wraps or split raid, however we do complete every event each week. i feel for those of you getting hammered on empty chests. It does feel pretty terrible when it happens - and even worse because it seems at times where you go event after event with nothing and with one less raid, those blanks feel like they hurt worse. i ran the data from last year, and we are getting a touch less loot this year on a monthly basis (i.e. jan 23 vs jan 24, feb 23 vs feb 24, etc) but that's to be expected, I believe, because of the missing 9th raid.

im not a dev nor do i have any official say so, and my recollection could be off base, but my belief is that due to nature of the way each roll happens independently - i.e. armor piece drops or not, weapon drops or not, then nonvisible piece drops or not, independent of each other, that is why, historically, there is no guaranteed drop.

i was one of the loudest critics there was amongst players - both publicly on the forums and privately to anyone with ears, with concerns about everything from the complexity to the potential (laughably now) to be over run with "less necessary" slots like bows and shields - lol - all of our rangers have had to buy bows with currency, you name it. it wasnt my preference, and i'm still a fan of the universal "ore" piece model, but this one has worked well for us, and in our experience (though one year and a few months isnt really enough data to have a fair long-term experience imo), the system allowed our guild to be completed months ahead of schedule compared to years prior so its only fair for me to objectively quantify that success.

That sucked for casual players.

If the cost for T1 combines was 2kp each, and T2 was 5kp each, we would have to discuss it. As it is, it is something like 22,500pp to upgrade 15-18AC from group T1 to group T2 for each visible. Casual players don't have the coin to upgrade even if they get the drop. It is disincentive to play the game.

Cohort was better. Kill mob, loot, click on it, switch over augs, and you're set to go.

From Generic Raid Ores allowing you to upgrade any slot you needed/wanted -> Slot specific Ores, lowering your chance of getting an upgrade you want -> A 60% chance at getting 1-2 Slot Specific Ore further lowering the chance you might get what you want/need.

That kinda drop rate is fine if a raid was 20 some people, but with 54? That's getting pretty bleak

The problem is that there is evidence that shows that guilds can gear up faster in the new system. This change also reduced the cost for a lot of the items on the raid vendor which helps with the speed in gearing up.

How does this system compare to ToV? The items cost less and used universal ore, and they introduced the multiplier mechanic.

What do you define as your measured target?

I'd have a hard time believing you geared up faster NoS & LS than ToV.

Let see. My gut feel was that it(NoS/LS) was faster then ToL specifically, but let me review some historical data.
My benchmark would be when our raiding core (which stays mostly the same year to year, maybe one or two more or less people, but not much more).

Because i'm a huge dork, i keep lots of spreadsheets to track drop progress etc, that supplements our separate dkp system.

In ToV, we used a round-robin system, and it took us until midJuly to complete 4 rounds. round 5,about 1/3 of the guild opted out at this point and at the end of July/start of August that escalated significantly, and by the end of august it was basically only folks who had attendance issues, joined recently etc.

According to our rop system, we had the following drops: (Diamondized Velium Ore Nugget)
By June: 198
By July: 270
By August: 363 (most of core was done)
By September: 439 (stragglers and some attendance issues)
By October: 493 (major attendance issue people/recent joiners, and a few alts before stopping for beta)
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In CoV, it took us almost 11 rounds to see the first drop off with a handful of folks passing at the start of August, but by the end of August there was a bit more dropoff, and then I stopped tracking loot drops at the end of August using that spreadsheet as most of the core was done. My recollection was that we were getting dropped gear much faster then currency purchases (which is backed up by the fact we went 11 rounds). This was gear candyland.

According to our rop system, we had the following drops: (Diamondized Restless Ore)
By June: 439
By July: 579
By August: 747 (most of core was done including extra weapons, whatever they wanted, maxing out luck, what have you since gear was so plentiful)
By September: 859 (attendance problems were done)
By October: 891 (stopped for beta, and these were going all to alts).
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Then we hit ToL and things changed again.
In ToL, it was September before we got 7 rounds done. We were still having active mains loot into October, when we had our first drop off of folks that were done, and I didn't stop tracking that loot until mid october. we never got to finish the attendance problem people, and certainly didnt get pieces for alts.

According to our rop system, we had the following drops: (Calcified Bloodied Ore)
By June: 155
By July: 295
By August: 377
By September: 450
By October: 518
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Then came NoS, and everything changed again. We used a hybrid system of putting the drops where they did the most good/round robin of other less critical pieces, trying to give everyone a fair shake at seeing something. That makes the anecdotal dropoff analysis more difficult and getting the data out of our rop system is much more complicated (due to all the different item names)., however, I stopped tracking specific drops super closely for the spreadsheet on July 2nd which would indicate we were past done with the active core. This matches my recollection that were were done months prior to ToL, with no worry that we might not even finish before beta.

By the time I stopped tracking, we had gotten about 500 drops, and had a further 200 reported currency buys (currency buys are not super accurate as they are just the ones people told me about or i noted).

i dont normally release such specific data, however, it seemed harmless / warranted.
all years would assume the same schedule of clearing, no split raiding, etc, we are extremely consistent. the only slight variation would be that in CoV we actually dropped a couple raids a few months before beta because we had so much gear and the two raids in question were MISERABLE and we couldnt wait to be done with them.

the data supplied above is a "best reasonable effort" for all years, including my memories, and anecdotal observations.

Just posting this in general, it's not meant to debate any other postings in this thread. It's likely already been posted before too.
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It should also be noted somewhere, that different expansions have seen different number of items needed for upgrades. In general, 21 slots with some people wanting an extra for a different weapon type. How many people end up getting the evolving items and how long they keep using them will also distort the results a bit. If you assume a generic 50 of 60 mains get and evolve the items, LS could, in theory, be shorter then NoS by 4-6 weeks, and ToL by 8+ weeks.

Entering ToV, raiders may have needed / wanted 5 fewer slots because of the 4x TBL evolving items may not have been replaced and the Rallos Earring was new.

CoV may have been a toss up if raiders replaced any of the TBL items. If I remembered correctly, most still used the 4x TBL items for the aug focus slots if they had their TBL items fully evolved (along with the earring)

ToL didn't get a new evolve item and the TBLs were mostly gone. Again, I know a few people preferred to keep 1 or 2 for the aug slots. People still wore the rallos earring too.

NoS had the back slot item (along with Rallos for 2 total slots not needed). The TBLs were all gone by this expansion I believe.

LS has the neck slot and people are still using the back slot. The earring may be hit or miss on some now depending on preference.

If you recall, ToV ores were the cheapest ever at 226 currency. Gearing was easy.

In CoV they were like "F that you geared up too quickly" so they doubled the cost of ores to 552, but then also doubled the ore drops from chests so it countered their efforts, and gearing was even easier in CoV than it was in ToV.

In ToL they made their changes, single ores and 552 purchase price. Things were at their worst, and many guilds only wanted to do 7 of the 9 raids because 2 were either long or had dumbdumb "everyone wipes" mechanics if someone went LD.

NoS changed that all up by getting rid of universal ores and keeping only the Chest price 552and everything else scaling back, with a variable amount of ores dropping from the chest (0-3) . While extremely frustrating in the beginning (no opportunity to gear melee weapons first, for example) by summer most folks were totally done with gearing because they could easily buy whatever they wanted at a much lower cost. This gave the opportunity for DZ swaps to alts sooner, and so on.

Now we're in the exact same system as NoS, except that they fudged with the ore drop rates and FAR TOO MANY chests are coming up with 0 ores. Zero T2 loot, wtf?
And even worse, we've lost 11% of our raids due to poor developer resources, so obtaining currency and chest drops is lower than it was last expansion. We're back to ToL-level hardmode gearing.

incredibly we had 2, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 0, 0 this week (extraordinarily good), which pushed us up over 1 drop per event average so far for the year.

Mother bleeper ... taking our valiants away.

Xegony open raids are well below one. This week was 0, 0, 0, 2, 0. Which, if my math is correct, is a whopping .4 per chest.

I need to update my numbers sheet for the last month, but I think we're still under .8 per chest ... which is noticeable. The night of all zeros plus one chest that has 1 or 2 is just not rewarding. Especially when we're getting more valiants from Bidis and Kanghammer than all other raids combined.

your post has me curious - i might do a quick spreadsheet to analyze where our drops are coming from. like i've said previously we were running around .9 pretty consistently but now sitting at 1.01.

I can hardly wait for June when the drops double from 0 to 0.

This made me laugh...

It's funny because the missions still only drop one ore per chest.

If you didn't get in when the expansion launched and ores were dropping off trash mobs you kind of got screwed over.

Seems worse now? We've gone about 8 of 9 chests with 1 T2 drop...

We got screwed again last night too. It's really disgusting.

I remember some issue years ago where the Devs claimed everything was working "as intended" but finally after years of complaints they found their math was wrong and the complainers were correct. I think they have a similar problem here, some aspect of the calculation has shifted a decimal point and they're too stubborn to even look at the problem.

How many have you gotten across the entire expansion? Just looking at small sample of raids doesn't give a fully accurate picture. Knowing how many you average per event since the unlock gives a better picture.

I'm pretty sure every guild is going to say the drop rate comes out to approximately 1 tradeskill item per raid as the average. However, consider that because we get specific item loot now, the real drop rate is significantly lower.

Back slot items: alt loot
Neck slot items: alt loot
Weapons: Just about to become alt loot.

So 4 of 21 possible slots are practically useless to raid mains. That is almost 20% of drops that will end up in the hands of alts or rot. So I would say the real number is more like 0.8 drops per raid - and then you have to factor in the fact we only got 8 raids this year instead of 9.

This means that every raid clear we are getting approximately 6.4 drops this expansion.
If we had one guaranteed drop, it would be 8 drops.
If we had one guaranteed drop + 9 raids, it would be 9 drops.

So bottom line is that we are getting about 0.7 of what we ought to be getting according to historical expectations. If this is intended, so be it, but negative feedback should be expected as something was taken away from us. If it wasn't intended, it's pretty disappointing that we are about half way done with the expansion cycle and there hasn't even been an acknowledgement of the issue.