Agren

So Galatea and I were yakking about the new journals (to teach fish finding) that would be inside fished up crates. I pointed out that you could determine at what point loot was determined by opening crates gotten before the patch after the journals were added. Galatea predicted they would use lazy evaluation and not determine loot until it was opened. I predicted that loot would be determined when the container was generated, as since almost all of these crates are opened and looted immediately, there would be no point to not doing so.

After much theoretical jawing about all this, I said, "Fine, I'm going to save my crates until after the patch and then open them, and we'll see." The results? Neither of us was entirely correct.

I saved 100 Curious Crates, and since I was fishing the Steam Pump Debris nodes, I also saved 100 Heavy Supply Crates (which data out at the time pegged at a much lower drop rate of journals). Since it is much easier to get Heavy Supply Crates, and I got that 100 before I got the 100 Curious Crates, I saved another 100 Heavy Supply Crates, but I looked inside them before mailing them to an alt. I opened them all this afternoon after the servers came up.

The results:
100 Curious Crates - 17 journals
100 Heavy Supply Crates - 17 journals
100 Heavy Supply Crates that had already been looked in - 14 journals!

My guess is that a seed is assigned to a container which is used to generate the loot, and that the actual contents aren't stored unless you disturb the contents by looting something from them. Up until this point, these crates have always contained a single item in them. I intend to get my hands on some rogue lockboxes to make sure that the contents are actually saved once something is looted from the container. If it isn't that could be an interesting exploit.

 

• Galatea

I want to point out this is consistent with the notion that loot on mobs is viewable by GMs, once raid instances are generated. When the loot container (in that case a mob, in the case Agren experimented with various crates) it has a seed stored with it inline in the DB. Once something is looted it needs to store an indirect reference to another row somewhere with the items in the container.

Assuming the computation of the loot is cheaper than creating a new row in the DB, it makes sense to not bother storing anything but the seed unless the loot is perturbed, because the containers seed will regenerate the same loot unless the loot table is changed. In normal operation the loot tables for mobs do not change between when someone clicks the corpse and the first item is looted ;-)

 

RK

Simple experiment. I have a lockbox on my character on live- I'll get a rogue to unlock it, I'll look in it, then mail it to a bank alt and put it away for at least a week until there's been a server reset on my server and see if the contents changes.

If it requires a loot table change to reset the contents (like your crates) then there's nothing really exploitable. If it just needs a server reset, that's leads to potentially storing up hundreds of lockboxes, checking them after every downtime and only clearing the ones that come up with a blue...

 

Agren

No, what I mean is that since rogue lockboxes often contain more than one item, you loot all but one thing, then log out (presumably triggering the save out function), then log back in and see if the box has the original contents back in it.

Awhile back there was a bug with rogue lockboxes that if you unlocked one and then logged out or mailed it, it would get relocked. This may be related.

 

Shadewalk

I believe I once did this by accident, I had a rogue open a few lockboxes and then had to log before looting all of them (probably out of inventory space or something). Anyway, I was sure I remebered unlocking all of the boxes and looking in them, but at a later date they had all relocked themselves. More to the point though was the feeling the loot had rerolled somehow when I eventually got them unlocked a second time, but without actually knowing for sure what was in each one I just shrugged it off at the time. (/passed the whole thing off as myself going a little crazy.)

-edit, seeing post above about boxes relocking on posting, I guess this could have actually been the cause of all my confusion.

I suppose the experiment if anyone wants to try it is get a large sample of boxes, unlock them, loot a single item from some with 2 items (to check if interfereing with some of the contence "saves" the data for the rest), and then post them all to an alt, tagging those with 1 of 2 items looted, as well as those with 2 items left inside to make sure. Then if you see them relock thats a sure sign, otherwise after a server reset or a week take a peak at them again. This combination should cover most of the potential variables that we can try and play about with, but your 1 lockbox is actually plenty enough to cover most of the matter.

 

monkorn

I've had this happen a few times with the fishing boxes, but not consistent enough to know what triggers the switch.

 

Vaccine

We don't get the patch till today but being an avid fisher I did save 10 Curious Crates without peeking on the offchance they'd have the journal in, nice to know one of them will.

As for the regeneratign contents in my experience this doesn't work. In my old guild we had a running joke passing around this crate that had a bolt of silk in it and the other items removed. We passed this about for four to five months (whover looted the silk would get hacked and then killed irl!!!!) and it never regenerated the leather that was originally in it.

 

Metrosexuelf

I fished up two Curious Crates in Nagrand the day before the patch and decided to wait to open them for this very purpose. Low and behold when I opened one today (Tuesday) -- it did indeed contain a journal.

 

Howard Roark

If you're looking for an easy to get container with guaranteed more-than-1 loot inside, try the consortium gem bags.

 

Zenedra

You could (dno if you still can in 2.3) fish up crates with e.g. 3xSpirit scrolls in them. If you didn't loot them from the crate, you could just relog your char and look in the crate again. This time you could get lucky and have 3xAgility scrolls instead. Fucktarded tbh but very nice little thing if you want scrolls for extra dps.

Note that this only ever worked by relogging 1 time. 2nd time relogging, the same scrolls would be there which makes me wonder how exactly those crates work.

 

Zurgat

I've pointed this fact out to a GM once

I had a iron bound chest or such, from fishing in SSC (lurker), i took out the cash and left the cloth and leather inside it.
The next day (friday) i looked into it again, and the contents had changed, there was nog a healing potion in the box instead of cloth and leather.

The GM responded that boxes are expected to be looted clean the moment they were opened.
I thought this weird.

Perfect idea, next time i get one with 2 greens i'll let it sit and see what happens to it.

-= Random Ravings - RSS Feed =- Rogue and Hunter stuff here. As well as guides to get you trough your spare time.

 

Agren

I would only expect the contents to change if for some reason the loot table had changed (as in the case of the crates and the journals). Keeping a bunch of boxes/bags around on the off chance the loot table changes and you get a better item is a really weak and not worth it exploit, there seems little reason for Blizzard to guard against that. To avoid srerious exploits, the contents should be explicitly saved and not change once they have been modified in some way.

 

Kadaan

I noticed this with the Ticking Present from christmas. I got one on all my alts to get the special patterns, but left the mechanical greench inside since it has a duration but the present does not. A few months later I was going through making space on my alts, and some of the presents had patterns in them again. I don't know what causes the content reset, but I'm 100% certain it does get reset at some point (server restart? content patch?)

 

Kewangeder

I am fairly certain the loot can change within hours.

Same thing happens with the boxes dropped by Southsea pirates, in Tanaris. This was learned much to my sorrow. My shaman found a box with a 2.60 speed offhand dagger in it, while my current one was not only faster, but also around level 30 (I was leveling hard, AH shopping be damned). My pack was full at the time, though, so I elected not to throw something away to loot it.

I later got back to Gadgetzan and found... a dead parrot.

I suspect a box is somewhat like an instance; it can "soft reset".

 

xmod2

I believe the way it works is that loot exists as some form of probability waveform, which then collapses into the proper loot table when the contents are observed.

As for the dead parrot, I'm afraid you got what we call Schrödinger's Crate.

 

Northerner

More likely a Monty Python reference. Mind you, if you checked the crate again later and the parrot was alive...

 

Mist

I'm dying laughing right now.

 

Khaleel

Blizzard programmers are looking into the phenomenon, but at present time can only speculate it appears to be "spooky physics."

 

Shazam

I had a thought that I can't quite organize completely but here are some pieces that seem to fit together and I'm going to try to test.

1. Most RNG and pseudo-RNG's i've seen are seeded by timestamps as this is a constantly changing and for the most part non repeatable value.
2. Mob objects become containers at the time of their death and their loot (i believe) has been confirmed to be determined at the time it is opened.
3. There seems to be a hard coded time frame between the time a mob is killed and the time the mob disappears, a looting time window if you will.
4. Boxes seems to share the mob property listed in 2, but do not share the property listed in 3.


Two tests to consider.
a. Kill a mob - begin stopwatch or timer
b. Wait for the mob corpse to disapear - stop stopwatch or timer
c. Open a fishing box but do not loot
d. Close the loot window of the fishing box
e. Wait the amount of time passed between steps 1 and 2.
f. Re-open the fishing box and note the loot
Repeat for 10 iterations

Two tests to consider.
a. Kill a mob
b. Open the loot window but do not loot- begin stopwatch or timer
c. Close the loot window
d. Wait for the mob corpse to disapear - stop stopwatch or timer
e. Open a fishing box but do not loot
f. Close the loot window of the fishing box
g. Wait the amount of time passed between steps 1 and 2.
h. Re-open the fishing box and note the loot
Repeat for 10 iterations

The thought process being that Blizzard designed their corpse cleanup function in order to prevent players from exploiting the re-seed of the RNG which determines loot. Especially so for bosses which have a condensed looting table, if there was not something to remove the container (corpse) before the re-seed, you could pick and chose the blue items from the condensed loot table given enough time.

 

Whiteknight

Bliz GMs are apparently able to tell what loot is on a boss when the instance is generated. I believe the current consensus is all boss item drops are rolled when the instance ID is generated.

 

PSGarak

Blizzard has corpses despawn to prevent areas from becoming cluttered with thousands of unlooted corpses. It would be rather difficult to actually impliment periodic re-seeding, compared to attaching a seed to MobID, much less impliment a new mechanic to prevent it from having a practical effect. You will note that boss corpses persist unlooted for considerably longer (hours instead of minutes)--this is because they're more likely to contain important items that take time to be looted. If the consideration was the RNG, rather than bodies everywhere, normal mobs would presumably last just as long.

The current theory is that the loot seed is static, and changes to the loot table change the resulting loot of the loot seed.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Zamaar

I was leveling my level 5x druid today, and there is a quest in Un'goro, druid specific, that you need to loot the bloodsprout thingies on the ground, and they can contain the quest item in addition to the normal sprout.

In the last patch they added special glowing effect for quest nodes, and I could see some of the sprouts would sparkle and have the quest item, and some don't and don't have the quest item, so I guess it has the loot before you even considered opening it.

 

Shazam

Had the luck of a server reset this morning on Ravenholdt.
At the "Server reset in 10mins" mark I had fished 10 boxes from the Hillsbrad area.
Noted all the contents by peering into each box.


After the reset the loot was unchanged. Seems to support the statement that only loot table changes have the ability to change what is inside a box. I'll keep them unlooted for another week or 2 to see what happens.

 

Agren

I have been handing out my boxes with journals in them (I looted all the junk from them) to guildies, and so far, all of the boxes have retained their contents, in spite of being stored on alts, and going through server resets. However, I have heard that a stored pirate box (from lost rigger cove) that used to contain one of the ship schedules that starts a quest, has now become a Lower Half of the map that starts some other quest. Reportedly, Blizzard upped the drop rate of the map fragments for that quest, thus changing the loot table, however, this is a box which had already been looted of some of the contents. That seems to indicate that what is stored is "item index X and Y have been removed from the box", and any items remaining in the box are subject to changing, based on which loot table they come from. For instance, if a pirate box has a slot for money, for a quest item, and for a worthless item, leaving the worthless item in the box will only ever get it rerolled to another worthless item.

As for the sparkles on nodes, I thought they changed it so that any object you could interact with sparkles, thus all of the bloodpetal sprout nodes should sparkle.

 

Zamaar

Nope, only those with quest items in them sparkled.