Loot depends mainly on.............

[Arylia]

I do believe this is another useless thread, more the type of thread about what people THINKS about a fact. Having a statistic about people's beliefs in a certain matter won't help you at all finding the truth behind the system. Also if you are interested mainly in what theories people hold as true -which in this case might be far from the truth itself- then placing a poll option like 'Birth of Avatar (like star signs)' is only a sign of the noobishness of a wanna-be researcher.
Its strange what people is willing to do to spam the forums or raise their posts count with childish 'research' or projects.

[Arylia]

I want to see the proof Alice because otherwise you can't make me change my mind: Sweat quantity IS dependant on the quantity of icecream the sweater eats.
On the other hand, since theoretically hunting involves more variables than sweating, my brilliant inteligence is driven to believe in Xandra's theory, especially because she uses algorithms 'n stuff along with the well known fairness brought in by using a population of starving hamsters to calculate loot.

Originally Posted by Alice

tbh, we had once a theory about sweating, that you get more sweat when you eat icecream
that was proven pretty wrong overall (tasty nonetheless)

maybe it applies for hunting though?

ah, +rep for Xandra, hilarious #D

[Uvas]

Well the poll number equals about 350%



I wonder if loot results are distributed in the sam fashion

[Indigo Wyrd]

WARNING: Epic Wall of Text follows.

I've put a number of years into working with the Gamebryo engine in a different game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I've developed more than few mods for it, and am going to take a little time to share some of that information, since Entropia also uses (for now) the Gamebryo engine.

There are some things you'll need to understand first, and the first of these is how creatures appear in the world. There are two primary ways for creatures to appear - they can be specifically placed or they can be generated from lists.

Specifically placed Creatures: Your auctioneers, technicians, and Civilians are good examples of Specifically Placed creatures. They are dropped into the world at a specific location and with the right parameters set, will stay there.

Creatures we hunt can also be specifically placed - I'm pretty sure a good example of this is the herd of Daikiba just past the forest north of Sweat Camp. The same ages and numbers routinely spawn in the exact same places.

This is a highly time-consuming and inefficient means to populate the world however, so the number of specifically placed creatures is probably fairly limited.

So this leaves List Generated creatures to populate most of the world.

The way this works is this:

A table is created that contains a number of creatures. This table is called a Leveled List.
Leveled lists can be used for all sorts of things, not just creatures, so keep this in mind, as I'll be talking about it a good deal very soon.

This creature Leveled Lists (known as Leveled Creatures in the game editor) can populate an area with a number of creatures in a very short time. This makes them ideal for populating the world.

And this is why there are areas of the world (non-Land Areas) that have no creatures in them. There are simply no lists placed to generate creatures and no specifically placed creatures. No there's nothing there.

There is a third way to generate creatures, and that's by means of scripted spawning. This method is most likely used to populate Land Areas, since the creature spawns of land areas is controlled by the Land Area's owner, and based on the use of DNA. I'm not going to get into the mechanics of this, as it would take a forum of its own to discuss.

Now creatures... each and every one of them has its own Inventory List.
In total there are 113 different creatures that inhabit Entropia (there may be more that have simply not been placed yet - again, another subject). Of these, there are a number of different age-groups. These age-groups are usually easy to distinguish from each other visually, as older creatures tend to be larger and stronger.
The larger part is a simple scripting matter - a script command SetScale will change the size of a creature, allowing the same model to be reused, while presenting a visual difference.

But the age-groups also have different stats - HP, the amount of damage they can do, and so on - this could be scripted, but it's a simple enough matter to simply duplicate a creature in the game's editor, change it's ID (each and every everything has a unique ID), and change the creatures "level", and allow the editor to auto-calculate new stats based on this level change.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to make up an example, based on how this would look in the editor. And I'm just going to use a single creature and just a couple ages.

Daikiba_NL_Y
Daikiba_L_Y
Daikiba_NL_M
Daikiba_L_M
Daikiba_NL_O
Daikiba_L_O
and so on..

These names here are the unique ID's of these creatures. For the sake of example, I've put some "plain language" extensions on these names. Let me explain this more:

Daikiba_NL_Y - The first part is simply the creature, a Daikiba. The next part, _NL means this particular Daikiba has No Loot. Its inventory is empty. The last part, _Y says it's of the age-group "Young". Since the creature has nothing in its inventory, it would not matter if you killed a million of these a day, for 20 years, you'll never get loot from them. They have none to give.

Daikiba_L_Y - Again, creature name, but then _L, meaning this creature does have inventory. It has a chance of providing loot. And again _Y, as it is Young. Now here's where things get interesting...

A creature's inventory can consist of:
Specifically-placed items or Leveled Lists of items.

Specifically placed items means just that - the creature can provide these items as loot. Doesn't mean it will, just that it can. This would likely be done in the case of an Event, where we are meant to hunt a specific type of creature to recover a special Event item.
This also makes it easy to remove the event item from the creatures when the event is over - but there's an easier and faster way to do that - and again, something I'm not going to get into for the sake of space.

Leveled Lists - now this is where the fun really begins.
A leveled list is table of items OR LEVELED LISTS of items.
A single creature can contain any number of leveled lists.
A single leveled list can contain any number of items or other leveled lists.

So let's look at our lootable Daikaiba again...

It's inventory might look something like this:

List_NL_90
List_NL_80
List_NL_70
List_NL_60
List_NL_50
List_NL_40
List_L_G_5
List_L_G_10
List_L_HOF_1
List_L_HOF_5

Just like our Daikiba, Leveled lists have to have their own unique ID's. Let's look at how these ID's are labeled.

List_NL_90 - A leveled list with 90% chance of having No Loot. The rest of the List_NL_## "family" work the same way, with a decreasing chance of having No Loot.
List_L_G_5 - A leveled list of loot, with a 5% chance the loot will score a global.
List_L_HOF_1 - A leveled list of loot, with a 1% chance the loot will score a Hall of Fame.

These lists, just like creatures, have their own "inventory". That inventory can be items, or other leveled lists. I suspect nested leveled lists, as "loot lag" is not uncommon, and this "loot lag" is often caused by nesting leveled lists within leveled lists.

So what's in a List_NL_50? Let's take a look:

List_NL_90a
List_NL_80a
List_NL_70a
List_L_Sm
List_L_Mn
List_L_Lg

More Leveled Lists!
List_NL_90a - that ID has to be unique again, remember? So a 90% chance of getting nothing again.
List_L_Sm - A list of Loot that is small.
List_L_Mn - A list of Loot that is minor.
List_L_Lg - A list of Loot that is large.

So what's in THESE lists?
Time to look again:

List_NL_90a might contain something like this:

Paint Can (Green)
Daikiba skin
Wool
Hair Gel
Animal Hide
Animal Oil Residue
Emik S50 (L)
Daikiba Wool
Stinktree board Short
Basic Leather Extractor
Animal Muscle Oil
Basic Stone Extractor
Daikiba Tusk

Meaning these are the things that can be dropped.
Now remember this list is 90% chance of No Loot? That's because Leveled Lists have settings in them that control the likelihood an item will be dropped.

You can take a look closer at these settings and what they mean here: http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki...p/Leveled_Item

And you'll also discover there's even more that goes into this than I've explained - yes, it can get excruciatingly complicated.

But this simply IS how the Gamebryo engine works. Oh, and if you're curious... when are these lists calculated and populated? When the dead creature is "activated" or clicked for loot.

This is also what causes "loot lag" - redundant, recursive calculating of random lists within random lists.

It's just a limitation of the engine.

[voom]

Thank you very much Indigo for that unique insight into how loot may be calculated. I find it all very intriguing, not sure it will help but very interesting.

I am also a big fan of Elder Scrolls. That is some awesome game you and your team have created and when loot gets Daikiba_NL_O over 90% per of the time you can guess where i will be

[voom]

Originally Posted by Arylia

I do believe this is another useless thread, more the type of thread about what people THINKS about a fact. Having a statistic about people's beliefs in a certain matter won't help you at all finding the truth behind the system. Also if you are interested mainly in what theories people hold as true -which in this case might be far from the truth itself- then placing a poll option like 'Birth of Avatar (like star signs)' is only a sign of the noobishness of a wanna-be researcher.
Its strange what people is willing to do to spam the forums or raise their posts count with childish 'research' or projects.

I only did it for the EFD's

[voom]

Originally Posted by Arylia

I do believe this is another useless thread, more the type of thread about what people THINKS about a fact. Having a statistic about people's beliefs in a certain matter won't help you at all finding the truth behind the system. Also if you are interested mainly in what theories people hold as true -which in this case might be far from the truth itself- then placing a poll option like 'Birth of Avatar (like star signs)' is only a sign of the noobishness of a wanna-be researcher.
Its strange what people is willing to do to spam the forums or raise their posts count with childish 'research' or projects.

I can't help but disagree with you about the usefullness or not of what people think about a fact.

Let's face it, what people think is happening is really all we have to go on. MA will never tell us the truth about how their system works.

As far as noobishness or wanna be researcher is concerned well 'We all have to start somewhere..'

My comment about doing this for EFD's was a knee jerk response to this type of remark.

For peoples information the choices with the highest number of votes are:

Purely Random 57 votes (29.78%)

Cycle of Avatar 53 votes (29.78%)

Time of Day 47 votes (26.40%)

Cycel of Globalling Mobs 47 votes (26.40%)

Now I have read in previous research that the purely random theory is unlikely to be true, but most people perceive it to be such and loot generally appears to be random.

This leaves us with the Sine wave theory, particularly relating to the Cycle of Avatar and Globalling mobs and time of day.

Now, if this is what people perceive to be true, we can conclude that there may be some truth to it.

How useful or not this information and thus this thread is remains to be seen but I cannot agree with those who consider this type of information to be totally useless.

[Wollongong]

amount of alcohol consumed.

the more you drink, the more you see double, making you think you got more loot