Seeing so many discussions about the 10% and 30% luck increase while being flagged for PvP I decided to revisit the recent developer blog post (which goes into quite a bit of detail about how luck works in this game) and try to understand what today’s change actually means for all of us.
I have to say that even after rereading it several times I am still unclear on some of the points as not everything is explained in an easy to understand way but I think I have a relatively good understanding of the topic in general so I’ll try to analyze it as well as I can and also visualize things along the way to make them easier to understand for everyone. I will occasionally be quoting parts of the post, which I will italicize.
With that in mind, let’s get to it.
Types of luck
There are two types of luck used in this game:
- Fixed scale
- Moving scale
Fixed scale
This scale is applied to things like enemies and searchable containers, meaning whenever you kill a mob out in the open world or loot a chest the game triggers this type of calculation to determine if and what reward you should get.
Loot drop tables are divided up into overall rarities, with rarer groupings of items living “higher” on the roll table than more common items. Additionally your luck stat increases the likelihood of you getting the less common items in the list. So what does this mean?
Imagine a scale from 0 to 100 where the common drops sit at the leading end of it and legendary drops sit at the end. We can visualize the scale as follows (where C = common, U = uncommon, R
= rare, E = epic and L = legendary rarity):
┌ C ┐┌ U ┐┌ R ┐┌ E ┐┌ L ┐
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█████████████████▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█████████▓▓▓▓▓
↑ ↑
0% 100%
As you can see common drops take up the largest portion of the scale while legendary ones take up the smallest. I am almost certain that the further up the scale you go the narrower the groups become to ensure the chance of getting them is smaller than the chance of getting lower tier items.
The graphic above is obviously just a visualization and the upper tier groups are probably much more smaller in reality but for the sake of this example let’s assume the percentages are as follows:
- Common: 30% (0-30%)
- Uncommon: 30% (31-60%)
- Rare: 20% (61%-80%)
- Epic: 15% (81%-95%)
- Legendary: 5% (96-100%)
As I’m sure everyone knows there’s a thing In programming called random number generation (RNG). You define the start and the end of a range and pick a random number somewhere in-between those two. You then use that number to determine the rarity of the item you should be rewarded with.
Using the sample scale, if RNG generated 54 that would mean you get an uncommon item (because it falls between 31 and 60). If the number was 80 you’d be getting an epic drop and, finally, if you got lucky enough and rolled 99 you’d be getting a legendary drop. As you can see any number has an equal chance or being picked, however the groups becoming smaller and smaller means the higher up you go in tiers the chance of your number actually falling within that range also becomes smaller and smaller.
I’m not sure what happens after the tier is determined but I would be guessing that they pick one more or less random item from that tier using some additional logic (e.g. items that only drop from certain enemies or at certain times of day). This is not so important though in the scope of this post.
The original post says:
Luck doesn’t increase your chance to get higher gear score rolls or roll more perks, but it does increase your chances of seeing item drops that have higher chances of rolling bonuses.
In other words luck increases your chances of getting higher tier items.
This can be interpreted in multiple ways but my guess is that the higher your luck is the higher the start of the range is. So instead of having your loot pool in the range between 0% and 100% you have it between 10% and 100%. In that case, when picking a random number you’d simply be picking one between 10 and 100:
int myRandomNumber = rand.Next(10, 101);
This way you basically get rid of a large portion of the rubbish that you would get and increase the chances of getting the rarer drops. We could attempt to visualize the change as follows (in an exaggerated way):
Before:
┌ C ┐┌ U ┐┌ R ┐┌ E ┐┌ L ┐
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█████████████████▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█████████▓▓▓▓▓
After:
┌ C ┐┌ U ┐┌ R ┐┌ E ┐┌ L ┐
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█████████████████████▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓███████████▓▓▓▓▓▓
I simply removed 10 items from the common range and redistributed them as +4, +3, +2 and +1 inside the subsequent ones. As you can see all rarity ranges (apart from common) got “buffed”. Obviously the ones that were initially smaller got increased by less than the lower ones but it’s an increase nonetheless.
What this change means in reality is hard to judge without seeing the actual numbers baked into the code but my guess is that the “+10% Luck bonus” they mention in their Into The Void release notes is the change to the fixed scale we’re analyzing (as the 30% is definitely gathering luck). If that is the case AND my assumptions so far in regards to how their fixed scale works are correct then you are getting a 10% increase within each (except probably common) tier and not a 10% increase to that tier.
Let’s put that into some perspective. If we use the sample tier percentages that I listed above then the 10% luck increase would mean that the common range is now 10-30% instead of 0-30%, which means that the sum of all remaining ranges goes up from 70% to 80%. The multiplier that we need to adjust the upper tiers by is roughly 80/70 or 1.143. By applying it to ranges above common we end up with the following numbers:
- Common: 20% (0-20%) - reduction by 10%
- Uncommon: 34.3% (20.1-54.3%) - increase of 4.3%
- Rare: 22.9% (54.4%-77.1%) - increase of 2.9%
- Epic: 17.1% (77.2%-94.3%) - increase of 2.1%
- Legendary: 5.7% (94.4-100%) - increase of 0.7%
As you can see it’s not a flat increase in 10% across the board, they’re small increments on each tier totaling up to those 10%. I’m sure no-one expected legendary drops to go from 2% to 12% with this patch so this method seems rather plausible to me.
An alternative method
There is a big chance that I am overthinking this and the 10% bump in luck is literally just that - a 10% increase to your chances of getting better items in each tier (using our previous example 15% chance to get legendaries instead of 5%) but I think that would be insane because people would be getting top loot left and right in comparison to now, which is why I don’t think it’s true.
Moving scale.
The post describes it as a relative scale that has a movable odds range based on values added into it. This scale applies to gatherables (but not fishing) and is the one that gets the whopping 30% luck bump for all PvP players.
So how is it different from the fixed scale? Well, first off it is still a scale of numbers from X to Y except in this case the numbers are not 0 and 100 but instead arbitrary values that developers have chosen. The example the post gives is 0-100,000 for trees.
Here’s an important excerpt:
As your luck stat increases it gradually enables new items to drop from the tables. This means that if your luck values are totally unmodified, there are some items in those tables that are impossible for you to obtain without a bonus.
To visualize this let’s use the tree and fish scale they give us as the base:
105,000 to 120,000 = fish
↓
████████████████████████████████████████▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
↑ ↑ ↑
0 100,000 120,000
If you’re running around naked or without a single piece of gear that increases your luck you can only get items in the range between 0 and 100,000, which means you’ll never be able to get that fish because it’s outside the range that you can roll.
If you increase your luck by 5,000 then your range becomes 5,000-105,000. Not sure why it’s not 0-105,000 seeing how they talk about AND and OR ranges and not wanting to eliminate your chances of getting items in the lower roll ranges of the table but anyway…
The reason they say if you only increased your luck by 5,000, you would have a 0.00001% chance at that fish is because your reward is determined using the same random number generator we had in the previous example. You pick a random number between the start and end of the range and see where it falls into. If your luck was +5,000 then the chance to get the fish (i.e. roll exactly 105,000) would be 1 in 100,000, or 0.00001%. If your luck is increased by 20,000 then your range becomes 20,000-120,000 and the possibility of you getting said fish is suddenly 15% because that fish range between 105,000 and 120,000 (15,000) is 15% of the available 100,000.
Judging by the way they’ve worded it sounds like not every item’s roll range is 100,000. My guess is that different trade skills could have different ranges but again, I don’t think there’s a way of finding out without seeing the actual code. At the end of the day it’s irrelevant if it’s a simple 30% bump to your luck. The ranges could be 0-1,000 or 0-1,000,000 and it wouldn’t make any difference.
Assuming they’re roughly similar though, we can start guesstimating how much various foods buff the chances of getting certain items. Let’s take Sliver of Adderstone as an example. We all know you get them from boulders and it can take hours to get one. The reason for that is that it’s high up in the loot range. So in case of our 100,000 example it could be somewhere around 95,000 or even 98,000 which gives you about 2-5% chance in getting it to drop (pure guess obviously without seeing the actual numbers). Let’s say it’s 95,000, which is 5%. If we consume herb roasted potatoes that gives us 1,400 points then we increase our range from 0-100,000 to 1,400-101,400 and our chances of getting the sliver go up from 5% to 6.4%. Miniscule but still better than nothing.
So how does the 30% bump to PvP players works? Seeing how they talk about a percentage and not number of points then I can’t think of anything else but assuming that ranges of 0,100,000 go up to 33,333-133,333, which, if true, is absolutely insane. With this bump your guesstimated chance of getting a Sliver of Adderstone goes up from 5% to 38.3%! Add herb roasted potatoes to it and it’s 34,733-134,733 or 39.7%!
Conclusion
This is where I get agitated. If indeed the 30% bump is a 30% offset to the start of gathering loot ranges then, if you are flagged, your chances become insanely good. On the other hand, if you’re not flagging then your PvE salesman career is pretty much over because soon the PvP players will start flooding the now merged trading posts with stuff you can’t even gather. Having had a browse I already see a few posts talking about drop chances that seem to be too good (example) or market prices starting to go down.
Obviously it’s only the first day but if I keep seeing more and more of these reports then I think this might be the end of my time with New World. I’m purely a PvE player. I’d gladly do Outpost Rush as it’s an isolated experience but I would never flag while just running around, especially now when every valuable node will be camped by groups of PvP diehards that you can do nothing against. I had my fair share of getting ganked in this game and I just don’t see the fun in running around constantly checking my surroundings to make sure I don’t have a bunch of players chasing me like a pray.
When it comes to the fixed scale changes - the 10% change is probably not as drastic as it might sound at first (obviously assuming my logic is what’s actually implemented) but I still don’t understand the thinking behind rewarding PvP players for engaging in PvE content. Rewards for flagging should be PvP related - be it gear that is useful in wars or Outpost Rush, be it special jewels that you can slot into your weapons that give you advantage against other players, anything, but not better PvE loot, higher chance of getting valuable resources and an advantage on the market for having said items and being able to make more money, which eventually creates an elite that normal PvE players just can’t compete with. We already have companies milking us to no end, last thing I need is rich PvP players who have stacks of void ores or luck trophies for sale that I can neither obtain nor craft.
This game has taken the wrong turn in my view and it doesn’t know what it wants to be anymore. There are so many games out there that do PvPvE well and that have loot pools and stats separate for PvE and PvP and I’m surprised Amazon haven’t learned anything from any of them. They seem to just have one vision - all players together, same stats no matter if you’re gathering hemp or participating in a war.
Finally, ironically I’m not even disappointed because having reached level 60 I now see what all the complaints were about from people in the same position as I am. Content is lackluster, levelling up skills is an absurd grind for normal people and chasing watermark is pointless. What is the ultimate goal - getting 600 gear so that you can zerg more Myrkgard? If that’s the epitome of this game then there are far better alternatives out there.
P.S.
For everyone interested, there are datamined loot tables that you can find here. I’m not quite sure how to read the ones that have several items with 100% against them but if we take AzothWaterSpring as an example we can see that it has a 100% chance to give you 3-7 of AzothWaterT1. What I don’t understand is why e.g. TreeLarge has a 100% chance to drop 1 WhisperwoodT1. I’m guessing there is data that isn’t available in the dump that is used to pick which item to drop (e.g. whisperwood would only ever pick WhisperwoodT1).
Either way, have a browser and I’d love to hear about your findings.
Disclaimer
Obviously take everything I’ve written with a lump of salt. This is as much as I could come up with my small programmer’s brain and I’d love to see if anyone else have any ideas. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m completely off with my ideas.
Even more so I would love for an AGS developer to tell me how far I am from the truth and maybe give us a bit more insight into how the system actually works.