A Final Stand?

Aleron Ives wrote:Ver.2 has a horrible drop system; it tends to get stuck and generate similar results repeatedly. What this means for players is that you generally either find very few decent rares, or you get showered with them. I have been moving the rates up and down, and in the end it took me around 30 runs to find Handgun: Guld, which is one of the rarest items. The problem is, is 30 runs too easy? Well, someone who's luckier than me might find it in 20, and someone less likely might need 50. For all I know, it was simply a fluke that I didn't find one sooner, or it could be a fluke that I found one as soon as I did. There's no way for me to know, so I fear that my only option is to just make a decision and hope that PSO behaves and players aren't disappointed. -_-

How many people are testing it? just you?

If say 3 or 4 people tried it for a few weeks then we would see the true effect of the drop rate change. Sure its all still based on luck, but if say in 30 runs out of 4 people, only one of them finds a hangun: guld, then you can be fairly sure it was just a fluke.

Wing wrote:ah man. I know what you're trying to do, Ives. However those are some massive risks. I personally don't want the entire community walking around with shit they found in a couple weeks that took me like.. years. XD

Or it could be the other way around and be worse... I suppose we won't know till you try.

The trouble is that you were lucky to find stuff over the course of years that most of us have not found, since most of us have bad luck. D:

Seismica wrote:How many people are testing it? just you?

If say 3 or 4 people tried it for a few weeks then we would see the true effect of the drop rate change. Sure its all still based on luck, but if say in 30 runs out of 4 people, only one of them finds a hangun: guld, then you can be fairly sure it was just a fluke.

It's mainly me. I've sent it to a few other people, but I'm doing the majority of the runs. It's very hard to test this when there are so few players left, and most of them either don't have characters in Ultimate that they can use to test or aren't willing to hack proper test characters to use for the testing process.

Ver.2's handling of droprates is very odd. From my experience, I would hold the following statement to be true:

When you start Ultimate mode at level 80, Vulmers will drop Red Daggers fairly easily, and you can get 3 - 4 of them by the time you reach level 100. However, at some point, be it 100 hours, level 100, or something else, Vulmers stop dropping Red Daggers and you never see another one on that character.

Now, if PSO was simply doing identical calculations each time, this would not be possible, yet it happens, at least to me. Some other factor(s) must play into the drops which we can't control, which basically unbalances everything. When you think about it, Vulmer is probably the most prevalent enemy in the entire game, with Claw being second most common. Every room in Cave has like 5+ Vulmers, and sometimes they spawn like 10 at a time. With such an obscene number of Vulmers, you'd think that you would find Red Daggers fairly easily at any time.

Vulmer has a rare rate of 0xB9 (185) for Red Dagger. If 0xB9 is that bad on an enemy that appears so frequently, then would that not make a rare impossible to get on an enemy that appears less often? Ver.2 does not seem to like anything in the B range very much. Tollaw has a rate of 0xB4 (180) for Plantain Leaf, which took me a good five years to get to drop. There are far fewer Tollaws in the Forest than there are Vulmers in the Cave.

Right now, I have the rarest items like Lavis Cannon, Guld/Milla, at 0xC0 (192) for the most part. A few IDs have a worse rate of 0xBF (191), and others a slightly better rate of 0xC1 (193), depending on their affinity for different types of weapons. 0xC0 is not very far from 0xB9 (192 and 185); only 0xBE (190) stands in between them. Personally, I'm a bit scared to drop rates into the B range since PSO doesn't seem to like it, because after six years of playing this game and finding crap, I don't want things to still be very difficult. We have very few players and a small selection of equipment compared to the other versions. Perhaps it would be better if, instead of having a really hard time finding all these items, finding them was not the biggest problem, but rather finding them with good percents. People don't have to stress about Red Handguns because they know they can find them, but just finding one with 0% is fairly dull. People continue to look for ones with better percents, because that's what really matters in Ver.2.

For the record, Red Handgun has a rate of 0xDC (220), which is a good bit higher than rares like Lavis Cannon, so obviously you won't be finding a Lavis every other run. Still, we can't spam quests and Ver.2's ability to randomize its drops sucks, so maybe it's not such a bad thing if rares don't take months of constant spamming to acquire?

Well if that's true, then it would explain why I haven't found daggers in awhile.

I noticed newer characters do seem to find them a lot.

ive only ever found one pair and it wasnt my game T_T

Perhaps then I've just about finished adjusting the rates, then. If I go much lower, things may become too hard to find due to Ver.2's... finicky handling of drops.

I see, well im curious to see what this is like once finished

You keep saying that, and I'm not sure I like the sound of it. xD

What i mean is, ive heard a lot of talk about it and im interested to see the result is all

Is the Tech resistance patch included in the Enhancement Patch, or do I have to install both? Thought I'd get that question out there before Serena got higher up.

The Resist Mod is for use without the EP. If you have the EP, you're playing Ludicrous mode, which has already been designed for Forces in mind.