Quote:
Originally Posted by cavedude
Okay, completely forget about the old system... Probability never existed, in fact EQEmu never has had a loot system before today. As a human, when you flip a coin what is the chance it'll land on heads? 50%. Now do you think well, it becomes 25% because there is a 50% chance I won't even flip the coin? No. You will always assume whatever prerequisite is already met before figuring out chance. That's what I've done. That table is always going to roll true, you're always going to flip that coin. Now what do you want the actual chance of an item dropping to be? We only multiplied chance by probability to convert to the new system. From here on out, forget about doing that in your head. How often do you want the item to drop, figure that out and put it in your DB!
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Cavedude, this approach looks easy when you only have 1 item in question that you setting chances for.
Obviously if my only dilemma to drop a Rusty Mace at 25% chance I am not going to set it to 50% check to drop anything at all and then another 50% check to drop the Rusty Mace.
However once multiple items come into play the new approach becomes a more complicated way of looking at things.
Imagine following (old system):
Imagine you have a orc who may or may not have a BAG.
In side that bag he may have 1 out of 10 items each with different % chances.
So old system would very roll to see if an orc had a BAG
at all, and then it would start looking at - what exactly was in the bag?
So if I want to set it up such that Orc has 33% to "have the bag" (in other words "have anything to drop at all"), and in that bag I want an Ultra Rare Sword to only drop 1 time out of 50, I would use the Old system to set:
-general lootentry to 33%
-specific item in that loottable to 2%
-all other items in that loottable to other % as it suits their rarity
And that's it - system runs itself.
But in new system to achieve all this I have pre-calculate all that and THEN multiply all my values to 33% and then put them into the table.
This leads to: my simple system of:
-orc has "a bag with loot" 1/3 of the time
-the bag has Uber Sword 1/50 of the time
to "Mob drops sword 0.66% of the time" which is counter-intuitive to me ...
Now imagine there are 9 other items "in the bag" and I will have multiply each and all of them by 33% to get the values for the new system.
I am not talking about just internal math/coding inside the server- I am talking about the way human brain approaches this. When you want a mob to drop something you not thinking in terms of "I want this mod drop to Uber Sword 0.66% of the time and a Chain Bracer 8.25% of the time".
This is most definitely not an easier way to think (as a human).
Most people (server devs I guess) when they are designing the loottables they won't thinking in terms: "I want the Uber Sword to drop 0.66% of the time" They would think in terms: "I want an orc to drop a bag with loot 1/3 of the time, and 1 out of 50 there will be an Unber Sword there"
Extend this logic to 10 or even more items pet loottable and you see how much more complicated setting up the data becomes.
You are forced to move from nice round numbers like:
-mace drops 10%
-sword drops 15%
etc
to things like:
-mace drops 3.33%
-sword drops 1.678%
etc
Again, the final math will be the same, but setting up the tables is definitely becomes a headache. :(