Are loot drops really random?
by Elizabeth Harper 
Jun 9th 2007 at 7:31PM
If you've been to a few raids, there's no question that you've heard some interesting theories about loot distribution. The drops are determined by the precise time (to the second!) that the first player zones into the instance. Or perhaps the drops are determined by the class of the group leader. Or maybe by the first letter of the group leader's name. Does the current phase of the moon have something to do with it? Perhaps it's a little of all these things!Trust me, I've heard every theory that's tried to make sense of what Blizzard constantly assures us are completely random loot drops. However, EU forum-goer Rooted came across a post by Blizzard employee Issuntril which stated:
There are many other variables which effect which items are going to drop. I'm afraid this is information not intended for the community however, and is not something I can comment further on.
Other variables, you say? So... loot isn't random? The conspiracy theorists were right all along?!
Well, hold on, CM Thundgot has a few things to say on the subject:
Of course there are rules concerning loot. You won't find a level 10 random mob dropping the same loot as Illidan. Edwin VanCleef drops stuff no other mob drops - not even randomly from level 70 mobs outdoors. Some mobs can drop cloth, others not. Etc, etc. That does not mean the characters involved, the time of day, the guild, the raid leader, weather it's raining in Shanghai or the colour of your bicycle has any effect on the drop...
Whew. I feel better now that I don't have to keep tracking weather conditions in China to determine optimal raid times. But on a serious note, why aren't there more rules concerning loot? Before the Horde had Paladins and the Alliance had Shamans you didn't have Paladin set drops in a Horde group or Shaman set drops in an Alliance group. This random loot system can be kind of harsh -- why not add some more rules to the system to make it easier on players? Thundgot has some thoughts on this, too:
If you want that kind of predictability, why not program an equipment check and drop exactly what you need - every time? Got 7/8 of a set? Next run you will get that 8th piece, no matter what. Can you make Mageweave bandages? Let's not drop Silk Cloth, but only Mageweave. I honestly think that'd be boring, and prefer the random chances and excitement of hoping to be lucky. It's about finding a balance. You know where the item can drop, but you can't be sure it will drop.
I do see his point, but honestly, I don't think Thundgot was ever the unfortunate last person without tier 2 pants when his guild decided to stop running Molten Core to focus completely on Blackwing Lair and Ahn'Qiraj. However, I do think Blizzard has addressed some of these concerns -- raid dungeons after Molten Core have entire armor sets drop completely within that dungeon, so players completing higher level sets don't have that annoying problem of needing Ragnaros to finish off their tier 2 set that's otherwise in Blackwing Lair. And in Burning Crusade dungeons, bosses drop tokens which can be turned in by multiple classes for set items rather than dropping specific set items. The random loot system is still a headache, but Blizzard seems to be taking at least some steps towards making it a bit less of one.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
bill Jun 9th 2007 8:04PM
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=292150713&sid=1#4
that's the original thread containing the blue post. The post that was linked to devolved (or evolved?) into a quantum physics discussion, while north america forums only get scores of "lol wut" posts.
Also notice that every post in both threads contain punctuation, capitalization, and grammar?
WTB european copy of wow.
Nebz Jun 9th 2007 8:26PM
@1 Wow, they use full words and everything. That's amazing. Most you'll get on this side of the pond is, "LAMO NUB rouges overpowered! Hax." For crying out loud, "hack" isn't spelled with an "x."
tallguy59 Jun 9th 2007 10:19PM
As it turns out, I'm not from America either, though I play with the US version, and I use grammar, punctuation and spelling too... a trend, perhaps?
The line about tracking Chinese weather patterns cracked me up.
qhiiyr Jun 9th 2007 10:26PM
Well, nothing is truly random. If I told you to pick either red or blue, maybe you'd pick blue because you like it better. Or maybe you'd pick red because you don't want to pick a color you like.
AFAIK, any given random number generator (or human, for that matter) you come across can't pick a truly random number out of thin air. It's all about factors.
Coherent Jun 9th 2007 11:39PM
The loot drops aren't random. For instance, my old raiding guild would never ever ever get much priest gear in MC. After four months of raiding we still hadn't accumulated enough priest gear for even one fully outfitted priest. However, another guild raiding MC at about the same time as us outfitted five priests completely, and was actually sharding priest gear regularly.
This was enough to convince us that the loot drops were absolutely not random, because it was just too incredibly unlikely that in four months of raiding, we would be getting multiples of one class type of gear and sharding it, while our sister raid would be getting all of the gear that we weren't, and sharding it as well. If it were truly random, it would even out over time. But it wasn't. The discrepancies just got worse and worse.
Clearly, there is some variable that affects the type of gear that drops, something that is not consistent from raid to raid.
Chris Deke Jun 10th 2007 12:24AM
"Before the Horde had Paladins and the Alliance had Shamans you didn't have Paladin set drops in a Horde group or Shaman set drops in an Alliance group. "
Uh, yes you did! I dont know how long you've been playing, but this DID used to occur. Dont know how many times we cleared UBRS only to have the freaking shaman gear drop and get insta-sharded.
Merus Jun 10th 2007 12:48AM
"The loot drops aren't random. For instance, my old raiding guild would never ever ever get much priest gear in MC. After four months of raiding we still hadn't accumulated enough priest gear for even one fully outfitted priest. However, another guild raiding MC at about the same time as us outfitted five priests completely, and was actually sharding priest gear regularly."
See, this definitely suggests that it IS random, because it's not consistent. If you roll a dive six thousand times, you're not going to get a girlfriend one thousand of each number. You're far more likely, in fact, to get some big imbalance one way or another.
David Bowers Jun 10th 2007 1:00AM
I don't know about other factors, but for all of you who doubt Thundgot, I have important news: I just got back from Shanghai, and it is NOT raining there! This is the season for rain though, so hurry up and raid before the next storm comes. Or... hurry up and wait for the storm, depending on which class you are.
Nick S Jun 10th 2007 1:08AM
I don't know how non-random drops are, but I did hear one theory that went something like "greens drop more often from mobs if you grind the same type of mob for a long time".
I tried this, and I FELT like it was working, so I decided to try it scientifically. Using a pencil and paper I kept tick marks killing only one type of mob, over and over, on three different kinds of mobs, and kept track of greens. The greens did, in fact, show up in the later part of the ticks.
Then, to prove to myself it wasn't just random luck, I did the same tracking, but with random mobs I needed to kill for quests. Three sets of 50 mobs later, the results came out - more greens dropped from mobs that I killed many of in a row.
Coincidence? Maybe. I'm an engineer, so I'm not convinced until I see the code, but I'd say it's definitely possible that events in the game affect drops.
Nick S Jun 10th 2007 1:11AM
@7 I disagree - his evidence that 4 consecutive months of what sounds like regular runs yielded drastically different results from a similar test run by another group does imply an element of influence - i.e. non-randomness.
The Anonymous Jun 10th 2007 3:29AM
@9: A 'scientific' assessment, with only 150 mobs total... You ARE kidding right? You're going to need at least thirty times that for even a vaguely accurate reading.
malkor Jun 10th 2007 4:30AM
the loot system will never be fixed to drop only items of classes in the raid even, just because it will make you finish content faster, and if you ask me thats the real reason why blizzard doesn't make it. they much rather have you shard stuff for months and keep the money coming.
Jem Jun 10th 2007 6:20AM
@7 You need to brush up your probability maths. If you roll a dice 6000 times, it's unlikely you will end up with 1000 of each number sure, but you will end up with 6 values that fall *very* close to 1000.
Run the test out further to make it more accurate, say 6,000,000 or 60,000,000 rolls, and the results will stay the in the same proportions. It's simple to test, hell you can chuck together a C program and show that a rand function will come up with an even spread.
But on to the topic presented. I believe that WoW pretty much runs a rand function through the appropriate loot table, and pumps out what it falls on. It's not a fantastic system either, it doesn't even remove what has been dropped, so that doubles of items are not an uncommon occurrence. It's simple, straight forward and unlikely to fail (assuming the tables have been assigned correctly) As to cutting out certain drops from due to the old pally/shammy restrictions, that would be a simple check of weather or not the raid or group is flagged as Alliance or Horde.
*shrug* Not that hard, just break it down like you'd program it yourself.
BenMS Jun 10th 2007 8:00AM
@6 The UBRS Shaman drops don't really count, because any class that can wear mail can use them. He's talking about Molten Core and above, where if the Shaman gears drops, *only* Shamans can wear it. If there are no Shamans in the raid, then vendoring it or sharding it is your only option.
That being said, just afer 2.0 dropped, but a good two months before BC came out, they changed the raid loot tables to include all gear for both factions. Regardless of the fact that we had not shamans, and wouldn't for another month, in the beginning of december, we did a full clear of MC over two nights and had five pieces of Shaman gear drop. Great was the QQ'ing, and lo the GM did speak: Sorry, that's just the way it is. Apparently, the Horde were experiencing a lot of the same thing with Paladin gear.
Eztonic Jun 10th 2007 10:34AM
@1 and @2: And we're not even posting in our own language! :-)
nav Jun 10th 2007 10:34AM
It's not a good idea to come to the conclusion that things are non-random because you heard of a guild sharding priest gear regularly, or one that hardly got any priest gear. The reason is that all the guilds that get an average set of drops aren't likely to tell you. It's only worth mentioning if you're experiencing unusual loot trends.
In other words, the outliers are the most noticeable guilds. All the people getting drops more obviously consistent with randomness remain quiet.
This is very noticeable on Thottbot and Wowhead. People will often comment to say "Got it on my first kill!" or "Ground for six weeks and I've still not got it!".
Dean Jun 10th 2007 11:53AM
"This was enough to convince us that the loot drops were absolutely not random, because it was just too incredibly unlikely that in four months of raiding, we would be getting multiples of one class type of gear and sharding it, while our sister raid would be getting all of the gear that we weren't, and sharding it as well. If it were truly random, it would even out over time. But it wasn't. The discrepancies just got worse and worse."
Just 4 months of raids? That's what, 20 or so runs? Now consider just one boss, that for simplicities sake has an even chance to drop a set item for any given class. Now the more likely result is you'll get a mix of class items but getting 20 priest items is still a possibility. Getting just priest and warrior items is even more likely. The chance of getting *no priest drop at all* in 20 runs is 7%. The same chance of rolling 1-7 on /roll and that happens all the time. Factor in the massive numbers of guilds running these raids and some of them are bound to get weird streaks.
To extrapolate to real life: consider 'co-incidences' - things which seem to be really random events that you assume couldn't happen by chance, ie. you meeting someone and them having both the same first name and birthday as you. The odds of this one event happening are tiny, but given the billons of events that happen to us all across the world every second, the chance of at least one person experiencing an unlikely co-incidence is infact extremely likely! In WoW, the chance of your guild getting a really weird run of all the same loot is tiny. The chance of any one guild seeing this, out of the thousands that raid, is actually fairly high.
Dean Jun 10th 2007 6:33PM
On the subject of randomness though, loot drops can never be completely random to a mathematical standard. As computers simply cannot produce random numbers. A computer can't just roll a die. The numbers are instead 'psuedo random'. You take a bunch of factors representing numerical values such as the number of seconds since the raid leader logged in, the combined remaining durability of all the lowest dpsers gear, the temperature in Kelvins in Normandy, the number of gold spam messages blocked in the last hour and the total played in seconds of the guild leader. Then you multiply all these together, divide by the number of items in the loot table, and the remainder represents which item drops.
So theoretically you could control all these factors (if you knew what they really were: those were just made up examples) in order to get the drop you want. Practically it would an impossible undertaking, so for all intents and purposes, it's random.
And that's the easiest way of doing it. Basing it directly on other factors is just more complicated and pointless.
Verit Jun 10th 2007 2:09PM
I think what he's saying though if the probability of the gear you want dropping is 1 in 20 - over the course of a month of raiding you really would see that the priest gear dropped 5% of the time.
If you look at other in game mechanics - for instance use a combat log analyzer you'll find that you do in fact crit around the percentage your character sheet says you do. No more no less.
I think the problem is that the server never takes into consideration what has dropped, what your party already has or anything like that. I think that would save us from having to run Shadow Labs 57 times to never see our priest get his gear...
But we all know that Blizzard isn't about not wasting time right?
Trollyboy Jun 10th 2007 11:06PM
Quick and Easy:
I don't care what drops, or for what class, or even if someone in the group already has that item.
Just STOP DROPPING LOOT for classes that aren't even IN the damn party.
Working 2 hours to get through some crappy instance in a bad PUG only to have HEALING MAIL drop off the last boss when there's no paladin in the party? OMFG.
I can understand a completely random loot table in a 10 man or 25 man, where all the classes are represented, but pleeeeeease, 5 man instances can be annoying enough already.