Ancient Cloak of Flames (raid item) off Death Beetle

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Kelefane, Aug 23, 2013.

  1. Rouan Augur

    Finally got mine the other day by killing... the cubby bats that nobody ever bothers with since they're a pain to pull.

    Pure luck, but I figured since they were so rarely bothered they were the most likely to have a cloak rotting on 'em for hours.
  2. The Drood Elder

    Drops seam to be turned off on these items
  3. Kravitz Augur


    If you can't find a camp then there is something wrong, the spawn time is about 8 minutes. So you could even solo with a merc and be fine. Find a spot anywhere in the zone, there are plenty of mobs because the spawn time is so short. Even with 100+ players in the zone, noone can keep up with the fast as hell spawn rate after stuff respawns near your camp again. So a group isn't clearing that far from their camp.

    Like I said before, you may have to $ to get it , but I think that was the whole intent by SOE, to get you to buy Krono from market place. And these are ONLY 2 drops, not a significant power increase at all. Its more of a fluff, lets get real 16% overhaste vs 17% isn't that significant power boost, nor is the hp/mana value, as that is mundane when you compare it to your whole armor set, sure if it was 21 pieces of armor (full armor set), then you'd see a significant boost from the hp/mana values, but 2 items isn't that much of an impact at all on anyone's power increase.
  4. Jonny Panic Augur

    Zonewide rare drops are always random. I've spent a week camping Pouch of Curses while mass killing from the click-in door to the dining hall, but I've also had several drop in quick succession when I wasn't looking for it. I didn't see a Stoneroot Starfish until almost two years after DoDh came out. By the time my SK got the zonewide aug out of the Mech Guardian, it was already almost obsolete... but I've seen several since.

    Don't be fooled by any illusion of due probability. If an item has a .5% chance of dropping, that doesn't mean you'll see one every 200 kills, and killing 500 mobs doesn't mean you're "due for a drop"... this is the same illusion of control behavior you see with gambling. All it means that you have a 1 in 200 chance of seeing the drop with every kill... and the chance is rolled fresh with each kill.
    Bauer likes this.
  5. Bauer Augur

    This post couldn't be more wrong lol
  6. Tulisin_Dragonflame Augur

    It is highly dependent on your server, but Kravitz is definitely exaggerating with the idea that 100 people can't keep the zone down. I've seen Mistmoore and SolB completely cleared out by 40-50 people, but by the same token I've been able to find a camp there almost every time I've gone. "Not being able to find a camp" is server dependent, but there are definitely times where it is impossible on some servers. Kravitz may be "lucky" enough to be on a server where the zones are less popular and mobs are plentiful.
  7. Bigstomp Augur

    That is what random is supposed to mean.
  8. Jonny Panic Augur

    The issue with camps is that these items exist

    If you want to be sure a zone is locked down by a minimal number of high-powered toons, add items like this... powerful, tradeable, non-lore. Now those that CAN take an appreciable portion of the zone WILL, with the minimum necessary toons in group, because they want the item not just to use, but also, if they can get multiples, to sell for obnoxious amounts of money.

    You have two zones that were designed when adds were an expected threat, with the mobs bumped up in power to equal mobs from expansions where adds AREN'T assumed to be dealt with unexpectedly, and added tradeable, accumulable, powerful items that can drop anywhere in the zone.

    Pretty much guarantees the zone will be dominated only by the elite few, and will be completely unavailable to the masses until at least next year and possibly not until even later. It's seems counter-intuitive to business.
  9. Gnomeland Augur


    While it is the case that your 5000th kill has no greater shot of dropping a cloak/ring than your 1st, being due for a drop is still a fine way of looking at it from the start to the end of a chase.

    Say the ring drops 1 in 200. Then, your shots of not seeing a ring after 200 kills is:

    (199/200)^200 ~ 0.37 aka 37%. Thus, 63% of the people, on average, see a ring within the first 200 kills.

    Now say you're one of the sad ones, and you don't see a ring then. What's the shot of you not seeing one after 400 kills?

    (199/200)^400 ~ 0.13 aka 13%. Thus, 87% of the people are going to see it within their first 400 kills.

    It's easy to go further, and to the proverbial 1000 kill mark.

    (199/200)^1000 ~ 0.006 aka 0.6%. Thus, after 1000 kills, 99.4% of the people are going to get a ring. After 2000, the shots of you NOT seeing a ring is 1 in 22586. While that's still no guarantee that you won't be that one person in 22586, shots are after 2000 kills, you're going to see a ring.

    What this goes out to show is what everyone knew already. You want the ring? Kill stuff. Don't think that just because it's random, there's no way for you to work towards it. Random just says that there's no 100% guarantee that you're going to get it. But with enough kills, the shots of you getting one becomes so large that you're sooner gonna win the lottery than not get it.
  10. Jonny Panic Augur

    This is an example of illusion of control common in gambling. The odds actually reset for every mob killed; they don't accumulate or "even out" in the real world. Among players in the zone, there is no set number of possible rings/cloaks and any number of them can occur at any time with only an illusion of "average chance" among those witnessing loots in the hopes that the "odds" will swing their way at some point. Some will not see such a loot, some will see multiples, and the only "averages" and "patterns" in the loots will be in the eyes of those who need those numbers to continue. It's an addictive form of superstition. The only constant is in the chance for the item to drop on the server's side... which, again, do not accumulate, but start afresh with each kill.

    You are correct in that one can only hope to loot an item by killing mobs, but the odds are deceptive. For any pattern to emerge, thousands of players would need to kill at LEAST tens of thousands of mobs and record the result... and by the time you see a larger overall pattern, you'll lose sight of the fact that any two entities operating within the pattern will still have such wildly differing experiences as to render the "averages" determined by tens of millions of results irrelevant to the individual.

    Ultimately, you cannot calculate your odds using the experiences of anyone else, singly or cumulatively.
  11. Tulisin_Dragonflame Augur

    This isn't the real world. If the item has a 0.5 % droprate (as assumed above) then we can reasonably expect the % chances above of "success" with X number of trials (kills).

    You're right in that it'll take tens of thousands of kills to determine what the droprate is exactly, but the fact is that it probably does have a discrete droprate like everything else in EQ, and will be governed by the same formula.
  12. Tulisin_Dragonflame Augur

    Half of SolB is pretty much no CC required, and there are various places in Mistmoore where it isn't difficult to ensure you get nothing over 2 mobs at a time. The only people I've seen struggling with the difficulty in these zones are those who believe that just because lower level characters can wear the gear (level 90 required) that these are not max-level zones. Neither zone is excessively difficult for max-level characters and many camps can be held down by a single character + a mercenary.

    If only "the elite" are in these zones on your server, it says a lot about the quality of the average player because they just aren't that difficult.
  13. Ishtass Augur

    The math used to create EQ is very much based in the real world. He's completely correct.

    The drop rate is the average on the bell curve. Outliers can exist pretty far away from the middle.
  14. Gnomeland Augur



    It is completely different from the illusion of control in gambling. Gambling revolves around money, and therefore the correct calculation is the expectation of net monetary gain, which for the bulk of gambling enterprises in the world, is negative. To put it in simple words, it costs you $0.25 to pull the lever, and therefore even though after 1,000 pulls the shots of you winning $100 is pretty large, in that time you’ve already lost $250, making pulling the lever a bad idea to begin with.

    However, in the case of EQ, your play time has no a priori value, and both cost and reward are psychological. Here, the correct calculation is then the expected amount of time it takes you to ‘win.’ This is fully calculable within a margin of error, and you set the margin of error. Want a 99.999% shot of getting the ring? All you have to do is solve this equation:

    (1-drop_rate)^N = 0.00001

    Correct, but what you’re missing is that while the % drop rate for each individual kill is constant, the cumulative experience of each player is subject to the law of averages. That is to say, while this being your 500th mob makes no difference when it comes to % drop rate for the next mob, that you haven’t seen a ring in 500 kills says that you’re bound to see one soon. This is simply a product of the bell curve.

    Yes you can. That’s how statistics work. You figure out the drop rate of the ring by recording each player’s personal experience and averaging them, and by now we’ve had enough samples to make an educated calculation. This is because, while the forums suffer a sample bias – primarily a negative sample bias, because people love to advertise how the RNG sucks for them - we know from the quantity of people screaming that they haven’t gotten one in 1,000+ kills that the shots of the ring being a 1 in 100 drop is miniscule.

    This is because to not get a 1% drop in 1,000+ kills, you have to be 1 out of 25,000. I don’t think EQ has that amount of players camping for the ring between all servers, much less among the forum posting people.

    To this end, within a tiny margin of error, drop rate is less than 1 in 100, but given that we've seen the ring drop several times for not just one person but several people and the average kill quantity seen is a few hundred kills, my thinking is that it's not below 1 in 500.
  15. MrGPAC Augur

    This is the gamblers Fallacy, which IS at place here:

    I've killed 199 mobs. The drop rate is 1 in 200, therefore the odds of me getting it on the next kill are 63%, because the odds of me getting it within the first 200 kills is 63%.

    That is FALSE. The odds of getting it on your 200th kill are the same as your first kill, 0.5%.

    The gamblers fallacy is all about prior actions increasing the odds you get it the next time (i.e. I just have to bet one more time and I'll win...I've lost so and so number of times in a row, therefore the odds are on my side this time!)

    Now, that doesn't mean that statistically speaking you aren't likely to get it in your first 200 kills...it just means that your 200th kill has no greater a chance of having it individually than your first.

    ~MrGPAC
  16. Ruven_BB Augur

    I'm currently over 4k kills in Sol B with no luck even seeing a cloak on a mob looted since the zone repopped with the raid fix. What is the chances of me being that far out as an outlier?
  17. TarewMarrForever Augur

    You guys fighting over math are BOTH right...you are simply talking about different things. One of you is talking about chance on a micro level. The other is talking about chance on a *macro* level, sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as likelihood. They don't mean the same thing. Different math governs them.

    Let's say your chance of getting a rare drop is 1 in 200 (0.5%). Every kill. That does not change. It does not change if you have killed 1. Or 200. Or 200,000. Each kill, there is a 1 in 200 chance of getting that rare drop if it is assigned a 0.5% chance of dropping. That is "chance" on a micro level..

    Gambler's Fallacy is assuming that just because I've killed 150 without seeing one, that I am somehow "due" a drop. This is not true, as that is not random. True random chance means that that 0.5% chance stands on it's own every single opportunity. Just because you have killed 199 or 199,999 without seeing the drop in NO WAY affects the chance of a drop on the very next item. That poster is correct. Your chances of success on each roll is 100% independent of previous rolls.

    Whether we are talking real life or virtual life or real currency or virtual money has NO IMPACT. Chance is chance, as long as the randomizer is "sufficiently random".

    That, however is NOT what the other poster was trying to say! He was not talking *chance* on the micro level. He was talking *likelihood*, or percentage chance on the macro level. And you can compute that for known sample sizes if you know the micro chance. The reason you can do this is it a MACRO view of many opportunities, whereas chance is a MICRO view of one.

    Likelihood is not always simple to calculate. If I have a raffle of 100 tickets and I buy 100 of them, then the likelihood of me winning is 100%. If I buy 90 of them, it is 90%. That is simple. However, the reason it is simple is the number of winning combinations is finite and known. So while the other poster is correct in theory, it is not a simple calculation, but his estimates are probably in the ballpark if the drop rate is in the ball park. And given that we don't actually know the drop rate, will never be better than a guess anyway.

    I'm sure everybody can understand that you are of course more LIKELY to see at least one cloak if you kill 200 more due to compounding opportunity vs. killing only 1. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will, and there is no compounding of chance per event. It is just that given enough OPPORTUNITY, your LIKELIHOOD increases of succeeding across the sample set. How much it increases is a factor of what you consider success (1 cloak? 3? 5?) and sample set and the chance (drop rate). These are the only 3 values you need to know to compute likelihood percentage, and just because you have that percentage does NOT guarantee success. Even if it 99%, each time it is still 0.5%. And to get it to 99%, you would have kill tens if not hundreds of thousands.

    So if that number if 67% for 200 samples, what that number means that if you walk in there with the intent to kill 200 mobs and the hope of walking out with exactly 1 item, your chance of that happening is 67%. Better than 50/50, but still by no means a certainty.

    However, it is not a guarantee, and killing an extra 100 mobs does not take the chance to 100%. Each additional occurrence increases your overall likelihood of success, but each additional also is diminishing compared to the previous. It is not linear, as of course it will never reach 100%, but it will get damned close given enough opportunity.

    Where this is interesting is reverse-calculating at what point the occurrences needs to be in order for the calculation to hit 50% (even money). Let's say in this case it was 160 kills. So if you see the item before 160 kills, the RNG gods have smiled on you (good luck). I you see it in > 160 kills, your Karma needs some more juju (bad luck). ;-)

    For example, if you kill 10,000,000 mobs, and the drop rate is 0.5%, your *likelihood* of seeing 1 or more items is easily 99%+ in those 10 million kills. But on each and every kill, your chance is still 0.5%. It's just that you had so many chances that your likelihood becomes a near certainty, but not absolute. If you know the chance, and if it is truly a random event and the chance does not alter over time, you can calculate these percentages of seeing N successes of M tests.

    However, in the context of EQ, this is really all meaningless anyway, as we don't know the loot tables (usually), and we don't have large enough sample sizes or documentation to make an educated guess as to what the drop rate really is. But it is fun to discuss in the forums. ;-)

    Macro vs. Micro. You are talking about two different things.
    DeadLikeMe and BoomWalker like this.
  18. Magik Journeyman

    The reason people feel that something random is due to come up over time is because they look at it with different statistics. For instance, you have a 1% chance on an item dropping, every mob you kill you have a 1% chance, that's true. But.... What are the chances of not having that item drop or rolling a certain number with 100,000 tries?? You have more chances or opportunities to roll that number with more tries at it. Would you bet against someone rolling a 1 out of 100? Of course. Would you place the same bet if the person had 10,000 rolls to get it?? No way.
  19. MrGPAC Augur

    Again...the fallacy is this...and I'm going to change it to coin flips just to make it simpler.

    I flip a coin. There is a 50/50 chance it will come up heads or tails.

    Scenario 1:

    Before flipping the coin at all...I say that I'm going to flip the coins 100 times. The odds that it comes up tails 0 times is less than 1% of 1%...its tiny...

    Scenario 2:

    I flip the coin 99 times and it comes up heads 99 times in a row.

    Gamblers fallacy is that because it came up heads 99 times in a row, its due to come up tails now because the overall odds of 100 heads in a row is less than 1% of 1%, the odds of the next coin flip being Tails must be a near certainty. In actuality, the odds that the 100th flip is tails is 50/50.

    Past events are no indication of future events when it comes to probability or odds (i.e. I've killed 999 mobs in solb, at 200:1 odds I have a very good chance of getting a cloak on kill 1,000)...

    However, future events can be (i.e. I'm going to kill 1,000 mobs in solb...at 200:1 odds I have a good chance of getting a cloak in that time!),

    ~MrGPAC
    --Voodoo-- likes this.
  20. --Voodoo-- Augur

    To simplify this: Probability applies only to future events. 0.5% drop rate only means a ~63.3% chance of a drop within your next 200 kills.