Items As a hunter I feel left out

not probly from korwil but hasnt he got like 2 smuggler weapons and asi ten edition.. atleast from arkadia.. and also after the ten edition he went and got another unl weapon from levi..

 

Comparing hunting to mining... I would say that hunters on ark still have much more opportunity to loot something exciting. Ignoring the fact that it's easier for a newbie to get a big TT loot mining, a UL armor/weapon in loot (SOOTO) is exceedingly rare these days. You're most likely to get a Mah'ketta piece if you get an armor at all (which is great, don't get me wrong!), but that's really all you're going to find until MA changes loot tables around again. But when hunting you have the chance of looting many more items, UL blades (aakas & smuggler), UL guns (smuggler, SIR/RAW), UL faps, shopkeepers, those body sculpting things, plants (still dropping?), DNA, uber UL armor (golden key), and there's probably other stuff I can't think of.

So, for the hope of looting something good, hunting is better than mining. For UL armor and weapons, hunting (golden key) is better than mining.

Mining is better for slow, steady profits and solitary ramblings across the countryside. And collecting Jars. There were about 3 days when treasure hunting first came out that SOOTOs were frequent and exciting. So these days, as a miner, I feel left out.

 

Its not about Luck, its about Karma, the more you whine about others fortune the worse your own gets

This is a lottery game and anyone who bets has a chance to win and in every way deserves it.... I have over 5K globals since tracker started and many before that so I bought more "tickets" then most.
and yes Arkadia been my lucky planet, I looted a cap 30 smuggler and ASI TEN here and a LC-100 on calypso not long after, this 3 guns is the only items I ever looted during my 6½ years.
I also cycled about 50K PED in the new cave on CP without a single mutade bone but I dont whine about others having better luck.

This is sad reading :/

 

this is far from lottery.. im quite sure ive dropped the most bombs ingame without a tower in records.. my best item loots been bela eye that sold for 1k.. before that was back in the 2006 powerful heal chip that sold for 400ped.. my first hunt hof came at lvl 43 and it was a whole 240ped.. so the karmas been quite a bitch towards other players.. but in the end arkadia has been ALOT better than any other planets.. and in future hope to see something without L in the loot

 

i think its a problem with their random number generator, if they even have one that is, if you look historically, first one had items drop the minute a VU came out, items would rain until a certain quota was reached, this caused people to be unhappy, MA in their ineptitude did not fix the cause but fixed the symptoms by making insane high TT UL weapons, this made sure that UL items would slowly be released by the system. This caused new complaints, the only people that would loot UL items did so in huge hofs, players felt this was unfair as it was a double reward, MA gave in to complaints after years of bad financial results and lowered the TT on UL items, we then returned to the "item rain on VU day" and for example saw some players loot 5 UL weapons on arkadia, this renewed complaints.
now they have done "something" to the loot system that prevents this from happening, you now see most rare drops/items looted on arkadia comes in small bursts, not after they are announced in the VU, but sometimes much later, the way this happens makes it almost seem as if manual intervention by MA/ARK is required for items to drop.
for me this is the reason i dont hunt seriously on arkadia any more, i have been fooled twice into believing arkadian teams VU notes and made a serious attempt to loot a UL item only to see it take 1-2 VU's after the announcement for anyone to actually start looting anything, and only in these short spurts. Fool me once etc...
and i dont think im the only one that feels this way, if i look at the response from the community to this latest mayor update compared to last years it looks like a collective "whatever", there wasn't the same influx of players hoping to loot something unique or run the instances.

 

Yes, the strange loot waves does make it seem like it's on a manual switch or something. Because it's definitely not a random phenomenon. I know looting of rare items is not an easy thing to balance, but I don't think the current system is working well.

I think these "special" items like UL swords golden key parts, smugglers etc. should be a steady (random) drop rate, not come in insane waves once a month. Like the team that looted two smuggler faps in one hunt, or the times I've run instances and gotten 4 UL swords in 3 consecutive instances. If it comes in waves, you reward the people who can go spend oodles of ped the moment they detect something strange is happening. If it's random, you reward the players who grind at it day after day, and these are the players that IMO, do the most to support the game and the economy and deserve to find the special items. I know the A-team has been working with MA to get this to happen, and there have been changes, but the loot mechanism still needs a lot of refinement.

 

no argument from me there, and how hard would it be to just use a random number generator in combination with maybe a simple system that it takes X amount of ped cycled before drops start.
arkadia team may have done a lot of work behind the scenes, but what i see is, they announce some item/feature in a VU with much fanfare, only for it not to be in the system for us to loot/use it, this is insulting, and entirely the responsibility of the arkadian team.

 

Items not dropping for an extended period and then dropping in bunches is actually consistant with a random distribution. MA could choose to bias the system towards more even drop rates (based on time or mobs killed) with a little bit of random tweaking on top but then players could establish that "its time for a rare item to drop, I better get hunting".

I really feel that hunting for the purpose of rare item drops is a mug's game (and yet I do it myself). It's like crafting for ATHs. Yes it's nice to have that extra motivation and chance of the awesome drop but its far batter to hunt for MU or just for the fun of it. Cos if you're not having fun, you should be doing something else, and if you aren't hunting for MU then you are playing to lose money. So what I am looking for from the devs is a loot and crafting system that stimulates MU on some hunting loot and provides opportunities for the perceptive player to take advantage of that. I believe that they have tried to deliver this with the most recent content release but haven't actually got it right, and I am looking forward to the next release to see if it delivers tweaks to fix some current issues with the loot tables.

 

i know that clustering occurs in random distributions but i thought that with such a large sample size (all the mobs looted on arkadia in a give period) you would not see so many "items/dna rains for 20 minutes then nothing for days" as i saw when i last hunted seriously on arkadia. you would see some clusters but not only clusters?
and of course it is more sensible to hunt for MU, that is in part why i feel so insulted, i know how to play smart, i decide to take a risk knowing i will lose, but doing so with a chance to loot a nice item, if nobody loots one of these items or dna for weeks after it is announced, and not until after another VU, it is a slap in the face of people who made a serious effort in the hope of being lucky.
so i dont see it as a mugs game personally, it is taking a calculated risk, but with the way things are the arkadian team has made me feel like a mug, twice, first with the sir/law rifles that did not drop for months after they were announced, and now with the ten items and dna.
to be clear, in case one thinks i am complaining about not looting anything personally, that is not my complaint.

 

It's not the A-team's fault if these things don't drop regularly. They can talk to Mindark about it but at the end of the day all they can do is request that Mindark addresses the problem. The implementation of it is Mindark's doing. So if something doesn't drop when it "should", it's either the fault of the players who aren't doing the right activities or the automatic loot system or an MA employee, if it requires some manual switch to turn it on or off, or it's just chance. I think all of these have been at fault at one time or another in Arkadia's history.

I do agree, though, since these problems recur, it might be wise for the A-team to make announcements of new items like this: "We have designed several new ____ and Mindark has informed us that they have been added to the loot pool." Announcements like "you can now find ___ uber items in your loot" can lead to a lot of disappointment when they fail to drop.

 

I still like that one persons theory that there is an MA Mob Santa that every once in awhile comes in and starts to stuff things in the mobs That's when you get the items(rare) drops


It is true that random number generators (especially average and poor generation algorithms, which are implemented in the basic Rand() functions also known as pseudo-random) seem to cluster when given fixed sample sizes, so you do have a point there Kikki. There are some processes out there that do get really close to true random though but pretty sure MA doesn't put any effort into implementing this type of complexity into their systems. To more understand this random number generating see this actually very good wiki about it, that describes it in a way most anyone can understand, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generation.

BTW there are some sites out there that do generate really close true random numbers because they use hundreds of very volatile data samples form everywhere and anything on earth and even some data from space and use them to give a very close to true random number and if you run huge sets is very hard to impossible to see a pattern being generated. To establish true randomness you can not base your randimizer on a fixed seed this is what will build a predictable data set over time and produce those waves in the randomness of loot everyone talks about.

 

Sooo anyone ready to admit I was right when I said not everyone has access to the same loot tables yet? Its funny how every one denies this is gambling.. yet only people doing crazy things with money in here loot big... God forbid should a person who actually figured out how to get by without rotating millions of ped each year should find or get something of value. Its also funny how no one says its a pyramidal architecture but yet we see the same people who started here back in the early days receiving nearly all the good stuff. The BEST part of all this is MA and all the so called "Ubers" preaching you MUST be eco when playing "eco" means less loss to generate the globals that allow access to all the good shit... Go figure... Anyway this has been another hilarious thread to read.. btw Ruskea.. Ill stack my crappy ass tracker against yours any day on who gets worse returns. I've managed to get to level 53 prospector, 39 surveyor and now almost 26 treause hunter and low to high 40's in all ranged hunting profs with ZERO uber items to loot and my 3 mining loots over 1k STILL don't total 10k in nearly 7 years ... anyone else wanna try and be under 12 to 15 globals a year in their main profession? didn't think so. So all you hunters crying I don't get shit...be me for a year bet you'll appreciate your status much much more after that.

 

I usually don't post but I felt the need to defend Neil. The reason he speaks of this issue is due to me and my roommate kahluaa. We are 0-53 on arkas 10 runs getting a codex. Having bought majority of these 10 keys from neil so he can verify. We have been offered to purchase one from other players but we have declined. Our loot runs are not that bad, we did loot an UL lacerating X chip which has made up for some of our losses which average about 70%-80% per run. Myself and my roommate have stopped farming arkas for this sole reason. We watched 5 different players who I wont name, but everyone knows who they are, come to ark and get multiple codex over a series of 1 in one case or a few days. You can make whatever reasoning you wish but there is 100% a difference between avatars or whatever. If you do it straight math wise you will know that the odds of getting 7 over 5 days or 4 in a day and others going 0-53 is the same as a metor hitting me and killing me this very second. Im Sorry but I just don't buy it. I am not complaining I have the CHOICE to do the instances and where I farm etc.. and my CHOICE is to avoid them for the forseeable future.