Most players are a superstitious lot when it comes to the randomness of loot; my Warcraft guild is no exception. We perform an intricate ritual each week before we enter a fresh raid zone, the details of which I cannot reveal. They (meaning the collective developer They) don’t want to reveal how they seed loot for dungeons, I don’t want to reveal the intricate ritual which gives us more perceived control over the seeding. We all realize the ritual is bullshit on some level, of course, but we dare not deviate lest we receive only warlock drops for the night. Again.
Goddamn lucky bastards. And a bigger group of idiots you will not find. Seriously, I’ve started to refer to this as Our Warlock Problem, as in, “what the hell are we gonna do about Our Warlock Problem?”, which you might think means that we’re short on warlocks or that there’s a server-wide shortage of warlocks, but you’d be wrong. It means our warlocks are MORONS. Very well-equipped MORONS.
Anyways. Kylindra of the Cenarion Circle Warcraft realm went through her guild data on Molten Core drops and discovered something very interesting: it’s like ummm, random. Heh, just like They told us. Class drops can be streaky, for sure, but over time, it’s random and evenly distributed. Heh, just like They told us. Read: Pwned by Data: The *Real* Story on Drop Rates.
Reviewing my own guild’s records, our Molten Core drops have been, within reason, evenly distributed. While my perception was that the warlocks were rolling in purple splendor, the truth is more complicated: our rogues have made out like bandits, our druids are getting the shaft and our warlocks should be glad to receive anything at all.
Facts aside, we’ll stick with the intricate ritual — I don’t want to mess with partial success.
Also: Hanzo archive of forum thread as of 5/3/06.
The real problem is that while the loot is (mostly) evenly random, the classes aren’t. When there’s 8 warriors, 8 priests, and 1 warlock in your raid, of course the warlock ends up with all the class gear they could want.
Given that instance loot is appearently generated when the instance is created, it wouldn’t be that hard to make it match the class lineup a little better. They supposedly do this to some extent with paladin/shaman gear, so why not make the loot representive of the makeup of the raid?
Bring in one group of characters to start, of some particular makeup, boot (or exchange) various of particular classes, bring in others to finish the raid of different classes….
Enough said, yes? That’s why not make it representative of the makeup of the raid.
All I know is the typical mage raid channels for the last month have looked like this:
IHateWarlocks
WarlockLootDE
WarlockSuck
OhMyGodMageLootPlease
Of course, we have 4-5 mages every run and only 1-2 warlocks… It just makes a Mage bitter when you realize that we are stockpiling Felheart BOEs in the bank now and have not received ANY Arcanist BOEs at all.
I’ve been wanting to post a similar explanation on my guild website, using our data.
Randomness gives you annoying things like:
Nightslayer gloves are our most sharded item, by a large margin (not counting BS like nexustrike).
We sharded 3 Bloodfang boots in the last 2 weeks (bonus to one of those kills for also sharding a Venomous Totem).
3 months and counting with no Bloodfang hat, doing Onyxia every reset, sometimes 2x a week since we can field 80 some weeks.
my guild = sharded 13 YES 13! This may because he keeps dropping doubles… Stupid boss