No way they implemented something like that... we had like 8 Robes of Rhonin so far and not a single Healer staff off Archimonde.

You can sometimes see that the loot is generated when the mob spawns and not when it dies. For example I have seen shade of aran holding a big sword and everyone commenting on it. Sure enough on death there was a green sword in his loot which when equipped had those same graphics. I recall something similar in burning steppes with mobs working around with the non standard graphics since they were equipping an item in thier loot table.

Hmm, if I remember correctly, there have been people reporting that the same bosses dropped different loot after server crashes and rollbacks and when the mob respawned after death (Moroes, Lurker..) due to a bug.

So "spawn" in this case would mean the actual spawn of the game object (the mob) and not bound to the instance id. This would also mean that a soft-reset, also resets the currently assigned loot, since a soft reset probably frees the server memory and removes the instanced objects, which are newly instanciated when someone enters the dungeon after the reset.

It makes perfectly sense if you look at it from a programmer's perspective in object oriented programming, so the constructor of the spawning mob could already assign the loot.

I think that is right. We had a Pumpkin Bag drop back in Naxx from a trashmob after the halloween event. The only possible explanation for this is that the Instance was created (and the mob spawned) when the event was still in progress and his loot was determined accordingly. (Instance created Wednesday, Event ended Friday, Pumpkin Bag dropped Sunday).

There is an old thread when we first figured this stuff out for all the MC/BWL and AQ bosses but I cannot seem to find it. I think it was some time in 2005 though so I doubt any of the data in it is still relevant.

But to comment on your thesis there are 100% definitely loot pools. We had people from dozens of guilds digging through their dkp/loot trackers and no one could find exceptions to the rule.

Rare drops(war glaives) are in an additional loot pool and represent an additional loot when they drop.

Loot inside the pool does not need to have the same chance of dropping (though recent dungeons it seems like they maybe do) Back on nef each pool had 4 20% drops and 2 10% drops, I remember that pretty clearly.

The set items will just pick 1-2 tokens from the same even distribution pool.

That theory stems from a Something Awful thread ("Ask a WoW GM").

As previous posters have stated, killing Moroes twice in the same Kara clear can yield different loots. Hell, the opera event isn't even determined until you talk to the doorman. We've wiped intentionally and switched the raid leader just to get a change to a particular event. Loot is either on spawn or death, and really, who cares.

Also, there's not a super secret way to influence the loot dropped. It's all random.

I don't want to derail the thread further, but this is absolutely 100% true, regardless of how Blizzard has actually implemented the loot tables.

That's the problem with randomness: you can never be sure



Anyone with unlucky streaks of loot that think they can somehow influence it is fooling themselves, because you would never know if you were actually affecting it or not.

ShowEQ.

It worked in one of two ways. The first was running on the same PC as EQ, the second running as a packet sniffer on a second computer on your local network (In this mode it would read the network traffic sent, decrypt the packets. Since it was a on a second PC and only reading traffic it wasn't detectable in this mode).

I tried it out once. Pretty impressive. It would display a map of the entire zone you were in. Since Sony made the mistake of broadcasting _everything_ in the zone to each person in the zone you'd see a dot on the map for every NPC and item. (Imagine being able to see every herb in SMV without having to move and every rare spawn [and rare spawns that drop good items])

It also took advantage of a second mistake that Sony made... NPC drops were precomputed at spawn time and equipped on the NPC model. You could select an NPC across the zone and it would show you weapons/shields/etc that it would drop.

These are reasons why WoW only informs your client of NPCs & Items within a short visual range of your character and never shows equipped items on the NPC model.


Edit:
W.R.T. loot determination @ npc-spawn or npc-death: It makes no difference from the client perspective and is impossible to test (You'd need control over the server's random seed @ mob spawn & mob death).

People going crazy to find the "secret sauce" of switching the raid leader, mesuring the moon phase or whatever need to ask themselves this.

You can get an effectivelly random # by looking at the 1/100ths of second on the computer's clok after you requesting one or simply running a counter as a background process that goes up to 1000, resets and does it again really quickly. Want a random? Call Process(WhatAreYouAtInYourCount). Take the number and use it.

Or you can go through some insane machination that is the function of a raid leader, the number of paladins dancing in Ironforge, how many AV victories alliance had today or whatever. Nothing makes sense at all except for a variant of the first one.

The "loot pools" explain a lot about the so-called extraordinary frequency of same drops. If there are only 4-6 items in a loot pool, seeing the same one over and over is hardly exceptional from a chance perspective. If there are two dice in your hand, rolling a pair of 3s doesn't make you go "ZOMG TWO THREES THESE DICE ARE LOADED."

And while everyone who understands the difficulty with computng truly random numbers has a point about the lack of them, it's irrelevant here. Blizzard doesn't need an exceptionally good random number generation for most loot to remain random. It needs an incredibly basic one. There are so many dice rolls, so many kils, so many everythings...

The reality is that even if there were a massive bug that resulted in streaky loot, you'd never come remotely close to seeing it. You are simply not privy to enough dice rolls.

The notion that the game somehow is secretly storing the dice rolls from independent raid IDs (i.e. your previous weeks' raids) and getting "stuck" in giving you the same loot is absurd. Why would they do this? Why wouldn't they simply re-seed the RNG each week with an obscenely simple method of approximate a die or pair of dice in your hand? Well, of course they do the latter.

Period.

And everything else is a conspiracy theory of the highest order. When you're researching Schrodinger's cat, take a look at Occam's Razor.

^ Pretty much.

I always find the discussion interesting but mostly because it's an excellent example individuals not understanding what "random" really means along with not understanding how to code something that tries to emulate "random"

Anyway, this thread just took an off-topic turn so I'll drop the comments about random loot with this old Tseric quote:

No.

Please read what has been posted. From a design/programming perspective this is the equivalent of building a car with its wheels on the roof and the engine in the driver's lap. It is not how the system works. It is random.

Animal brains are designed to find patterns. We therefore naturally see patterns where there are none. Rabbits in clouds, lucky numbers and yes, imaginary loot seeds.