Original Post — Direct link

Edit: my pictures aren't on here, I thought you could submit a text post with pictures. Here's my pictures I meant to include showing my kc, drops, and my graph. https://imgur.com/a/wWzLht5 Also obligatory thanks for the gold, kind stranger!

TLDR: The odds of going as dry as I did is about 1/163,736,252,064 (about 1/164 billion). My guess is that the Dragon Defender drop rate is not really reduced in Trailblazer League. I'm hoping this is the only thing that was overlooked and that there aren't more items that aren't reduced despite saying they are.

So this isn't just another rng post about bad rng... what I have goes far beyond that. Here's my data, and what I did with it.

I killed 2,000 cyclopes in the basement of the Warrior's Guild, and received 16 dragon defenders.

These are claimed to be at a reduced drop rate (1/33, compared to 1/100). Normally, after killing 2,000 basement cyclopes, you would be at around 60 dragon defenders with that drop rate.

I wanted to see what the odds are of going that dry. I do a bit of programming, and ran a simulation of 10 million players who killed cyclopes at a drop rate of 1/33, and I wanted to see how many of them had 16 or fewer defenders. (This is the histogram attached - this shows the distribution of those 10 million players.) To my surprise, NONE of the 10 million simulated players had as low of a drop rate as 16. In fact, the lowest anyone had in my simulation was 24 defenders. 16 isn't even pictured on my graph.

After this, I realized I didn't want to wait several days for my computer to compute vastly more simulations (10M simulations of 2k drops took several hours), so I looked into how to calculate the odds statistically. The odds of getting a certain amount of defenders in a certain amount of kills are (this is binomial probability, if anyone wants to look into it further):

n!/(x!(n-x)!) * px * (1-p)n-x where:

n = number of kills, 2000

x = number of drops, 16

p = probability of drop, 1/33

This only gives you the odds of having exactly 16 defenders, so I had to calculate this equation for all numbers 0-16, and then add them all together, with the help of programming again.

The final result of this calculation was 6.107383358731508 * 10-12. This is the same as about 1 in 163,736,242,064, or about 1 in 164 billion. This is the odds of having 16 or fewer defenders throughout 2,000 kills. I think it's safe to say the drop rate isn't reduced.

As suggested by someone who commented, the odds of being this unlucky while on the standard drop rate is about 21.9776% - about 1 in 4.5. Is it kind of unlucky? Sure, but it definitely could happen.

Why does this matter? Realistically, this in particular doesn't matter - it should still only take you around 100 kills which doesn't take that long. Maybe I could have had some more alchs from defenders which would have been nice. My concern is that there are other, more lengthy grinds that have drops that are out there that are not really reduced despite the game saying they are.

Feel free to correct me if anything I did is wrong - I believe it is correct as I used that equation to find the odds of having 60 defenders (which would be on drop rate, if the drop rate was 1/33), and that came out to roughly 5% - matching what my simulation showed me (around 500,000/10,000,000 had exactly 60 defenders).

I'm guessing there will be a few questions on this, so here's my answers:

  • Why did you take the time to kill 2,000 cyclopes?
    • It's a slayer task I can pick (hill giants), and its extremely afk, seeing as there are a lot of cyclopes down there which are aggressive, and Draining Strikes restores more than enough prayer to sustain protect from melee, even without the melee relic. Last recall also helps me pick my new task/teleport to bank drops/etc. so I can get right back to the basement. Attack cape also lets me enter without spending any warrior's guild tokens.
  • You have 2332 kills on your drop log but you said you killed 2000 - why is that?
    • 332 of these kills were for the previous 7 defenders, that's roughly on drop rate for 7 drops that are 1/50.
  • Shouldn't the drop rate be 1/33.3333 rather than 1/33? That would be equivalent to 3/100, which is 3 times as often.
    • That's not how the reduced drop rates work, it says in the areas guide that these drop rates are always rounded down. So it should be 1/33 exactly.
External link →
over 3 years ago - /u/JagexHusky - Direct link

You appear to be correct and I can do my best to explain why

I've checked the original job for the droprate modifiers and it was never part of the original list at all so it was never modified on launch.

However, while sifting through all of the week 1 feedback I saw a comment asking if it was increased despite not being on the interface I checked a line of code that used my ~modify_droprate proc and went "Oh it actually is increased" and added it to the interface.

Turns out it has that line of code because I centralised modifying droprates so that leagues and DMM use a more generic system which is easy to plug into so it is currently on the list of DMM items which are increased but not the list of Trailblazer items which are not increased.

I hope that makes sense and it also explains why, this was just me stupidly and incorrectly updating text on an interface after week 1 when I shouldn't have. Sorry for the confusion, that was a busy first week of feedback after all!

over 3 years ago - /u/JagexHusky - Direct link

Originally posted by FirstTwoWeeks

Thank you, glad this post got your attention! Not sure how long it would take to look through each item, but there aren’t any other items affected like this are there?

Every single drop which was added on launch went through QA testing to ensure that the numbers they saw when defeating a creature had reduced quantity X to X/3. I even self-tested every single instance myself.

GWD had a separate issue in which my debug was actually still doing the X/3 but just wasn't rolling a random( ) check around it to pick a random number and I've already checked every single instance to ensure the random() wasn't missed anywhere else if that makes sense.

So no, I don't believe it is anywhere else unless there's a similar issue to this which I can't remember adding anything else to the interfaces post-release

over 3 years ago - /u/JagexHusky - Direct link

Originally posted by RefusesToGiveAShit

Will this be fixed or will it remain unchanged for the rest of leagues?

I don't believe it would make all that much of a difference at that point whether we did fix it or not.

It's a relatively easy drop to get regardless, most people will have gotten it already and only those who are on second accounts or are playing late will really be affected.

I don't mind either way I suppose, I can run it past the team to see what they think on Monday.

Edit: What gothiclogic said below, it's more of the fact that I added it to the interface correctly as opposed to it being bugged and not working when it should've

over 3 years ago - /u/JagexHusky - Direct link

Originally posted by GothicLogic

I gotta respect the instant reply to confirm the misinformation. I feel more vindicated than annoyed anyway so it's all g.

I never mind admitting when I'm wrong, mistakes happen after all!

And no problem, it's not like I had anything better to do on a Friday night right...? haha

over 3 years ago - /u/JagexHusky - Direct link

Originally posted by BrentB23

When you're back in the office Monday do you mind checking thr superior rate with mutated bloodvelds in Prif? I don't think they're affected by the slayer relic as they should be.

I asked in thr Trailblazers discord and never got a response from anyone in there.

If you're ranging them and safe-spotting make sure the npc has enough space to spawn a superior, bloodvelds are 2x2 and the superior is 3x3 so if you're using for example the west safespot near the entrance you can't actually spawn one.

FWIW all superiors run the same code for superiors so if one of them is buffed they are all buffed