Product Drop Rate highly inaccurate

[John Ware]

In-game name: John Ware
Affected worlds: Juarez
Browser: Chrome

Type of Bug: Job - product drop does not come even close to reflecting % shown in job window even after 100 times

Description:
Working on the Gold Dust quest for the St Pats event. With full Clyde set and all gold pickaxes the job window showed my product drop at 57% for 1 hour. Did job 5 hours, only 1 dropped. Drop rate for 15 second job shows 5% for fool's gold and gold dust. Did a little over 100 jobs (partly just to test out whether there was a problem) at 15 seconds and got ONE gold dust and TWO fool's gold. This is not 5%. It's not even close. I understand there is a bit of randomness in the game but the chances of this happening with these percentages should be basically impossible. Odds are not always reflected well in a small number of actions but when you do the same action more than 100 times and the result is less than one fifth of what you've advertised there is clearly something wrong.

Resolution: I just want the gold dust I should have gotten so I can complete this stupid quest.

 

[Harsha..]

Same thing happened to me too. I did 14 hours of prospecting where drop for gold dust was 45%, but got only 4 dust out of it - that's a drop rate of 28%, NOT 45% as indicated on the job page. If drop rate is really that low, atleast give the correct figure on the job page rather than inflating it.

 

[John Ware]

I think the problem is with the Clyde's set. I've talked with others on the world I play in (Juarez) who've also noticed that when it is equipped job windows often overestimate the actual drop rates, especially on jobs with less than 100%. I did this quest a second time today and again I had to run like 150 x 15 second jobs to get all four gold dust. I think the real drop rate is closer to 2% on those.

 

[Slygoxx]

The drop rate shown is fine, but because of luck you might receive a slightly lower or higher amount.

 

[John Ware]

Slygoxx, please read the numbers I posted carefully. I ran 15 second jobs HUNDREDS of times on a 5% drop rate and it was less than 2.5% drops, consistently. Randomness disappears as sample size grows, that's how odds work. There's no way the % advertised is correct and there seem to be many other players who are experiencing the same problem.

If by Luck you mean the luck calculation in game, Clyde set has a huge bonus for luck so if that is a factor in product drop then it should end up being HIGHER not LOWER than the % advertised. However, I don't think that luck calculation applies to product drops, only to luck drops which is a completely separate thing.

 

[RaiderTr]

What now? Luck effecting Drop rates?
Is that new

 

[DeletedUser15368]

One day in the distant future, they might release the code for this game, and we'll finally get answers to the big mysteries like apparently rigged RNG, how luck works with other game features, and if enabling character premium does in fact make your luck worse like every dueller I know believes lol

 

[John Ware]

Luck is a calculation like any other. But in the game there are Luck drops and there are product drops. They aren't the same thing and are calculated based on different attributes.

So far I have prospected 231 times on 15 second jobs which the job window claimed had a 5% drop rate for gold dust (and for fool's gold as well).

4 Gold Dust have dropped: 4/231 x 100% = 1.73% --> 1.73/5 x 100% = 34.6% In other words the actual drop rate is only about 1/3 of that they claim it is. You can talk about "luck" in laymen's terms, as something mystical, but computers don't work that way. They work based on math. Odds can be tricky because of course there will always be some deviation from the odds in real world samples. Small sample sizes can produce large deviations from the expected average, but as sample size grows the deviation gets smaller and smaller and approaches the real odds as the sample size approaches infinity (yes there's a bit of precalculus involved). If I had done this job 20 times and complained that the drop rate was off you would be valid in claiming that the deviation on a sample size that small is too great to be reliable. However 231 times is NOT a small sample size. It wouldn't be unusual to see a deviation like 34.6% of the expected odds of finding gold dust on a small sample size of 20. But on a larger one the deviation would be much smaller, certainly not 1/3 of the drop rate claimed.

By the way there were 9 fool's gold dropped from the same number of jobs which is a 3.9% drop rate. Still below the 5% advertised but maybe a little more believable deviation from the expected average. In any case I will continue doing the 15 second jobs since this quest is daily for the rest of the St. Pats event AND I will continue to update you on whether the 5% drop rate is either validated or disproved. So far it is disproved.