Do you full clear or skip as many mobs as possible? Opinions?

I have many many Key Instances under my belt and I want to get some other people's opinions on weather or not it's better to kill all the mobs in an instance, or skip as many as possible.

For me, skipping as many mobs as possible seems to be much, much more profitable in the end. The rewards just don't seem to scale up when more damage is inflicted during the instance and skipping mobs tends to save a lot of time.

If this is the case then wouldn't it be better if we eliminated all but the final large treasure chest and simply have mobs drop loot during the instance? This seems to make more sense.

Opinions?

 

Personally I clear all the mobs, returns definitely aren't great however and it seems to me like the key tt isn't covered by the loot in the end. However I think there is enough mu opportunities in running the keys to make them worthwhile, I don't know however if clearing all the mobs will increase the chance of looting better stuff.

 

Right. I haven't noticed a difference with the Final chest with a full clear vs. a partial clear. I'm curious as to why there isn't more variance with the final chest. I thought I remembered them HOFing quite a bit when the instances first opened. Right now it doesn't seem possible to come out ahead TT-wise on any of the mid to upper keys. This should be possible occasionally. Something's going on.

 

The keys tt gets return in the loot, the costs to kill gets partly compensated in the loot.
So if you kill all the mobs in an instance your total tt return will be higher but you % return will be lower. Assuming the chance of looting markup items isn’t affected by total loot return, it would be better to ignore as much mobs as you can.

As to the something is going on part… some people at the ark-team are saving up for a big nice long holiday i think

 

My tracking records show that all chests total value is equivilant to the anticipated average returns of killing the mobs, this is normal average runs not including getting a multiplier loot from a chest to confirm this theory/tracking method. The key TT value is not part of the loot return IMHO, and as most everything in game it is extremely hard to prove or disprove. My method has been building a way to predict average runs with different gear and I have a decent method to do this and this method works the same in an instance as it does when on non-taxed normal land hunting. X amount of mobs in and instance have a predictable average loot return and this is what I see basically.

I have not tested this myself as I usually team hunt the instances with friends and kill everything but I have trusted reports that skipping mobs also gives this same average return so it may not be based on how many mobs you kill but more that you make it the end to loot the chests and they contain the loot equivilant to the mobs in the instance with that possibility of that multiplier on the loot.

I believe this is why the team has added spots where the mobs must be killed before a door opens to continue in areas of the instances to somewhat force players to hunt as many of the mobs as possible.

So IMHO the most eco way to do an instance is to try to get to the chest with as little fighting as possible.

And of course, all this is just my opinion based on my own tracking results and results from friends, it could be totally wrong also, and an instance return could very well be dependent on mobs killed and the TT value of the key is taken into account ect. only the MA and PP teams that control this know for sure.

 

If you have access open for next level, i think only reason for kill all mobs if you have taken mob mission at IFN agent in Quarry. Is more quick run and evade combat if you can. Good luck.

 

It did, and there was a bug where some chests would have no loot. Then another bug got added where the no loot chest would not count as being opened, forcing you to wait out the 10 min looting timer. Ark devs fixed that by evenly distributing the loot between the chests.


On the the issue of the key tt not being included, I believe its just the opposite. All or almost all of the key tt is included in the final return.

 

Hmm that would mean I you would always get 20 PED minimum out of a lvl 1 instance, if that was true. I have had a lvl 1 instance return as little as 15 PED total before, that was just the loot I got not the the total after accounting for decay. I have not see a lvl 2 or a level 3 return less then the key cost yet but I have had some horrible returns in the upper 50 percentile tt returns in these instances also. And I run instances with pretty economical setups I think, minding overkill, trying to reduce as much armor decay and fap usage as possible etc. One of the reasons I started running almost all of them in teams, seems to be much more economical and the key cost is split up more.

 

I haven't run enough instances to have an opinion, but I do remember there was an official statement regarding this when initially there was a way to avoid almost all mobs (missing wall bug):

http://arkadiaforum.com/showthread....2-(Event-Closed)&p=46614&viewfull=1#post46614

 

Ye missing wall bug has been fixed long ago, although it does seem that cheating is happening somehow ... ie skipping straight to the boss and the drowning him too. Support cases have been filed and I am waiting to hear back from them.

Personally I wouldn't mind much but seems very rare components are being looted by these individuals while those of us spending 1,2k to run a key are looting consistently nothing. Anyway waiting on reply from support.

 

I was mostly referring to the part where Chris says: "Every mob killed adds to the final loot in the chests". If that's true, then no cheating is possible as anyone who bypassess mobs will get lower loot."

 

I thought the instances worked stacking loot while you kill and giving everything at once from chests, but I could be wrong.

If that was the case killing everything should be a good idea, but again I'm not sure.

 

Not really, in the end you get 100% back from the tt of the key, and maybe 60% tt return on the loot of the mobs. So if you kill fewer mobs the 100tt% return of the key will have a bigger impact on the average tt return of the entire run.

Let's assume two situations:

first we have a a 20 ped key and 20 ped tt spend on killing mobs (figures are made up a bit).

total loot is 20+20*0,6= 32 peds. That makes it 32 ped return (8 ped loss) and a tt% return of 80%.

Now in the second case we skip half the mobs and there is only 10 ped tt spend on killing mobs.

Total loot is 20+10*0,6 = 26 peds. That makes it 26 ped return (4 ped loss) and a tt% return of 87%.

So the first option gives a higher tt return, and the second option gives a higher %-return. Since the first option gives a higher tt loot in the chests, it might be more likely that they hold items. (although i doubt it really matters on keys of level 7 and higher).

 

I've been wondering too. It is possible to skip quite a large portion of the keys. Has anyone seen what global sizes (if any) pop up when the cant-be-named-but-totally-obvious person loots the rare items? I'm usually not on and they have their EL account hidden.

 

I suppose it works like this: at the end of the instance, it takes the total of the actual damage done (minus overkill, at least that much we know), and applies a randomizer factor to get a total TT return amount. Or maybe it does this calculation after each kill. Same result either way, I think. I think there's also another factor (random or not, I don't know) that determines the "luck factor" of the loot. This would be equivalent to a high TT value (HOF) on a normal mob. So, though you're looting awesome stuff your TT return is still only 85%. This suggests to me that the total TT return (and therefore the number of mobs killed) is not really related to the chance of getting good loots, otherwise these things would only be found in chests/runs with high TT returns. So you'd probably be better off using the exploit and skipping most mobs to get a better TT return so you can run a lot more keys and not have to cycle as many peds. Even if you're paying full auction MU for your key 10 (for example) that would equate to an 80% return, which is as good as a normal instance run. At least you're better off until you're caught. (So obviously I don't recommend doing that).

But this might explain why some old players appear to be using alts or "newbie friends" to run these instances for them. The other reason they'd do that would be the belief that after you've run a certain amount of keys, the good stuff stops dropping for you.

 

Yup only 3 globals on lvl 10 key and all 60 pedders ... hmmm sounds right

 

Yes, I got a good look at their EL profile before they hid it. Newbie avatar, clearly an alt, hardly any globals at all never mind instance globals. Average global sice 50-60 ped, only one or 2 globals per run, now 5 codex's looted total .

I for one would like to see a developer response on this. If it's an exploit, then permaban and return parts to lootpool. If not an exploit, then we need an official statement and the go ahead to do the same.

Personally, I think this person has to be doing more than just running past mobs. At this rate though there is almost no point in running keys anymore, as we're all going to end up buying our codex's from this prick anyway.


On another note, having done a lot of keys over the last couple of weeks, the instance system is clearly broken. Those who know me from pcf will know that I am a very vocal advocate of the 90%+ average theory, and I make it a habit of tracking all my returns in EU.

With close to 15k cycled through key 10's over the last 2 weeks, I have never had better than 73% TT return. That is not acceptable to me.

Someone earlier in the thread suggested that maybe we are not getting multipliers, and I think this is probably the case. ~70% is what I have come to expect from hunting at 2.8 eco if I don't get a multiplier. So I think for whatever reason the loot system is failing to apply multipliers to the instances, the HoF's that we would need to bring us back to the 90%.

I would be very grateful if we could get a developer response to either of these two issues.

In the meantime I've scaled back my key-running drastically. I'd rather get what I need off the auction.

 

Excellent summation. Based on the responses here and numerous in-game conversations, I believe the key system needs to be revamped. I purpose eliminating all but the final chest and having each individual mob drop it's own loot. The final chest should have a decent amount of variance too. A Key 1 should have the same variance as killing a mob that takes 20 PED to kill and a Key 10 should have the same loot variance as a mob that takes 200 PED to kill.

 

If the mobs were lootable, players would not be able to run the instance in a team of one. (You cant loot a mob if you are a team of one). So basically I would stop doing instances as my schedule makes teaming inconvenient. If there is a problem with loot balance there is no need to make the above change to address it.

 

I'm not sure the way the instances work need to be changed at all, just whatever is bugging the looting mechanism needs to be fixed. If the just make the same as hunting I will have no problem with it.

I can put up with the occaisional 40-50% run as long as I know I'm going to return to 90% eventually. Consistently getting almost exactly 70% is, first of all, damn boring; and secondly, financially unacceptable to me.