lightstrike

Cadfael, my thoughts were following the principle that loot was generated from the mob's spawn timestamp. This timestamp would then be used to seed the rng that determines the loot, hence, what loot can drop is available right from when the mob spawns. It's deterministic, so at any point in time, given a timestamp and a loot table, you could recreate the drops, without actually having this item available in the game world. It's also more efficient to store...
To me, it just doesn't make sense to have each spawned mob in the world store their drops at spawn time, even if it takes as much as 1byte per drop slot(an index into the loot table), it's still at least 4bytes of redundant and possibly useless information. At any given point in time, there are *a lot* more alive mobs then corpses lying on the floor, and not all alive mobs will die...

Question: Does the server check if a quest item should drop for each quest item that each mob can drop when each mob spawns, and then just doesn't show it on the loot window if the player to loot doesn't have the respective quest, or does it generate the item when the mob dies? Is this a special case?

 

Emeraude

Hoped on Cairne, brand new PvE Server, was made 3 weeks ago.

Linked The Bladefist, Warglaives, Prism of Inner Calm, didn't crash, perhaps somebody contaminated the server via Battlegrounds maybe? -_- Or am I just missing something in this?

 

lightstrike

Could also be characters transferred in...

 

Emeraude

Server is 3 weeks old, you can't transfer characters in.

 

CD

I think there are several Illidan mobs in the encounter- the initial NPC, the one you take to 65%, the one you take to 30% the one that spawns at 30%. You definitely lose combo points at the 30% transition so I assumed that was an indication of a new mob spawning. If that's correct then surely it's the spawning of the mob at 30% that will determine the loot?
So if you are on a battlegroup with no warglaives, get the final mob to spawn then it still doesn't let you link either Warglaive you should reset?

 

◊ Cadfael

Storage is cheap, that is the answer. It is much more harmful to a live system with lots of action to continously allocate, use and deallocate say 5 * 10 MB of memory than to allocate once 10 * 10MB and always use them, never de-allocate.

Memory allocation is costly, having your memory lie around is cheap up until that causes you to swap. I guess that's why this is made so. And let's face it, 3000 mobs with each 10 itemIDs a say 1KB of memory is still only 30MB of ram. Who cares about that ?

Quest items become invisible if you are not on the quest or if you just fulfilled it. You can check that easily. Get a quest which needs drops. Gather until you have all but one of the quest items and then kill and never loot. Then loot everything except the quest item. You now have several sparkling corpses. Now loot the final quest item. Now try to loot the other corpses and see what happens. The game hides the drop, it just vanished from the corpse.

So yes, this is a special case. Quest items are always there (if the mob drops it, with quest item dropchance < 100%), you just can't see them if you are not on the quest or if you have your required amount. This is client side stuff.

 

Switchblade

I hate to say it but your theory is absolutely maddening (Add in raid ID's/timestamps). I'm almost willing to say keeping faith in God may be my only hope to finish my set.

http://ctprofiles.net/1031812

 

Chamani

As seen by my druid alt during the current patch, Dun Garok Mountaineers who are usually sword and board paladins:

ImageShack - Hosting :: normalmountainhq3.jpg

However this guy:

ImageShack - Hosting :: staffmountainxh7.jpg


Surprised when I saw one carrying a staff and then seeing it drop hence the screen shots.

 

◊ Cadfael

Sometimes the mechanism is entirely turned off and you can link everything. I think it was so on live at a time or two and suddenly it gets turned on again and you can't freely link anything anymore.

Can't say what it is for you. If the server is relatively young, can you link raiddrops ? Could of course always be that the items leak into the realm via BGs.

 

• Chicken

I'd recommend experimenting with linking items from pre-TBC instances as well. On a new server they're far less likely to suffer from "Battlegroup Contamination", since the amount of people using or still possessing loot from them is small. Especially bosses like Viscidus should be interesting to check, since even pre-TBC he wasn't killed much, and he also doesn't really have many items that people would keep around for sentimental value.

Raid drop only profession recipes could work as well.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

◊ vorpalblade

We were able to link Warglaives and most of the loot from BT on our server long before anyone was even BT attuned, because it had been seen on the battlegroup, and you can link things the server has seen in a battleground even if nobody on your server has seen one.

I don't think that having an itemID being linkable is a good way to try and predict what would drop, except perhaps on a BRAND new server, but even then.. by the time you had leveled and begun raiding, you would have encountered at LEAST enough items in a battleground to spoil any chance you had at determining what any as-yet-unkilled mob would have dropped.

You'd need mobs that hadn't been killed on any server in your battlegroup, at least.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you do not seed the RNG every time you need a random number generated. It's seeded once and then begins creating numbers as requested until such a time as the process is killed and restarted. This seed would be planted at server boot, and the RNG is then used for EVERY random number request on the server.. every /roll, every mob that spawns, everything. It's not like every instance ID seeds it's own RNG. The loot is generated on mob spawn, but it doesn't reseed the RNG based on the mob's spawn time... it just means the game has requested a new random number, which is then provided and used to determine loot.

There's no real way to game the RNG.. The only feasible thing mentioned thus far is seeing if previously unseen items become linkable upon mob spawn or only upon mob death.. a test which isn't really possible on current servers, due to pollution by the battlegroup. The only real test will be seeing at what point Sunwell boss items become linkable before those items have actually dropped on any given battlegroup. That would give us some insight as to when items "really" exist, but still doesn't really provide any way to reliably determine what will drop on an ongoing basis.

 

Legh

The Illidan mob doesn't disappear in between phases, it just becomes again untargettable due to the event-script (or something like that) taking over, which I guess is what causes you to lose target/combopoints from him. This is very similar to what was hypothesized earlier with the hiding/showing again the model not changing the GUID, I guess. According to what was linked so far, since there is no despawning of the monster, there isn't a new GUID (and hence no re-randomization of the droptable).

 

Faldrath

Yes, curses applied before the 30% transition will still be there afterwards, so it's not a new spawn. Dots will also tick during the p1>2 transition.

 

Mekasha

On the topic of forcing Warglaives to drop, I've heard of at least 2 instances where Illidan despawned before he could be looted (one guild wiped to shadowfiends right as he died, can't remember offhand what happened to the other). Both had a Gm assist to get the loot, and both times they were given a Warglaive.

Random luck, or something else at work?


Also, as just something of a side note
This's been around a while, I know you used to be able to run around Blasted Lands and pick out humanoids that would drop actual items vs which ones would drop nothing.

 

Faldrath

Actually, this happened to us two weeks ago (wiped at 2%, Maiev killed Illidan, we got the final animation but both despawned) and we didn't get a Warglaive.

 

lightstrike

The reason you seed the rng with a timestamp is to have the results deterministic. This could be an rng state kept only for loot decisions...

 

◊ vorpalblade

I'm not arguing that it's seeded with a time stamp (which has been confirmed), I'm arguing that it isn't seeded with the timestamp of the mob spawn. When a mob spawns, and the game goes to generate loot, there's no reason to re-seed the generator, you just get the next random number from the number generator that was seeded when the server came up. Once seeded, you have ostensibly infinite pseudo-random loot generation from that one seed.

Also (and this is not directed at you, Lightstrike), one thing that is incredibly commonly misunderstood is that when they say that a timestamp is used to seed a generator, many people take that to mean that starting your instance at the same time every day is the reason you're having streaky loot. I swear I wish i had a freaking dollar for every time someone has pulled this out at raid start time "Hey guys, I read that a timestamp determines all our loot.. lets move the raid up an hour!". A timestamp is often a value like the number of seconds elapsed since January 1st 1970, or the time in milliseconds required to perform a particular system operation...its not something that can be reliably manipulated to effect the outcome. Streaky loot happens.

 

Habanero

Please stop propagating this. This is exactly like saying that Illidan wields weapons that he may drop.
Edit: To be more clear, humans want to see patterns where only randomness exists. If you killed some mob and it dropped a weapon that looked nothing like what it randomly wielded, you would think nothing of it at all. If you wanted to actually attempt to prove this instead of being superstitious, feel free to do so. Make sure when you are surveying the mobs in question you kill all of them, not just the ones that seem to stand out for you.

 

Habanero

It is silly to assume that they never prime the item cache with some data, or clone an existing item cache as another form of priming it.

 

• Falk

Did you even read the entire thread? If you're going to refute, you'd do well to directly address the evidence. And no, obviously named/unique mobs are exempt from this rule.

As to some of the few different things touched upon in the thread:

Interesting if true. While doing Dire Maul for my Steamwheedle rep (0/36k hated -> 999/1000 exalted, roughly 200 runs) I've noticed the mobs near the zone in being consistent in their pat timing, for example pulling Guard Moldar every single time before a patrolling pack of hyenas cross close to him. Conversely, pats further on in the instance are often faster or slower relative to each other, which could be attributed to different spawning times. I'm not saying that's how it is, but that's what I've observed and it does seem to support the idea.

That aside, I remember when several Karazhan bosses were bugged and could respawn under certain conditions (killing Aran while he's drinking, for example, subsequent spawns gave different loot. I'd assume that means that even with the same raid ID, a soft reset will wipe all pertinent mob data, and zoning into a soft-resetted zone will result in a different set of loot.

Lastly, I'm pretty convinced that "unlinkable loot" only becomes linkable when a boss is killed, not when it's spawned. I'm pretty sure Boubouille would have something to say on this matter. :P

How certain loots became linkable on PTR, how Warglaives were linkable even when Nihilum was attempting Illidan, and how things are linkable that shouldn't be after a server restart, I'd say are caused by other factors - GM's, cross-server battleground contamination, etc.

 

Zyz

Just tried zoning into AQ40 with 4 various non-working itemlinks of loot from viscidus, lord kri, and ouro.
Items: Gauntlets of Kalimdor, Slime-coated Leggings, Burrower Bracers, Wand of Qiraji Nobility

Ouro loot might not work at all until he pops out of the ground, but I wasn't able to find many items that would DC me, so I tried anyways.

Tried 4 different raid leaders, and I wasn't able to link any of these items after zoning in.

 

◊ Praetorian

The "guys in Blasted Lands will hold the weapon they're going to drop" thing has pretty much been confirmed at this point, actually.

 

Nurru

It would make more sense to test something like Skeram's entire loot table I'd think. Otherwise you might just come down to the RNG not causing those items to exist.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Habanero

Sorry, there is no evidence. Evidence would be in the form of a large, impartial survey of the mobs in question (even only by one person), and not merely anecdotal. The mob wielding the weapon it drops is almost certainly just a red herring. In actuality, the likely "coincidence" is due to the fact that the mob would be spawned with a "weapon type" table, similar to a drop table, that says "80% sword + mace, 10% staff, 10% 2h axe". The ACTUAL "drop table" and the "weapon type" table would pull from the same level range of items so that the flavor of the models you see in WoW are not out of place. In doing this, you would almost always see an equipped item that looked exactly the same as the equipped item in the event that they are both randomly chosen to be the same archetype. That does not mean that the weapon type wielded by the mob directly influences the likelihood of it dropping a green of that same weapon type. It does give overactive human imaginations plenty of fodder, though.

You can see obvious marked changes in the style of typical item models from 1-70; it is quite sensible to equip the mobs in question with items that are tailored to their particular level in order to make the experience of the game more consistent. This is true of armor models, weapon models and potentially spell effects.
If it has been "pretty much confirmed" then please link a survey someone has done to prove it. This would include hundreds of entries of the form [ mob name, mob level, mob appearance, weapon drops ]. Anything else is completely anecdotal. Just because something is repeated often enough that it makes it into the canon of a culture does not prove it. I have yet to see one single survey of this form, have you?

 

Zyz

I was able to link every item on Skeram's loot table on my server/bg, assuming most people will be able to do the same.
You would have to do it as soon as the server came up, but it could be skewed if someone with that item logs in (because you know it exists somewhere).