Hi Bfr,

Actually to a fair extent you do know how it is suppose to work - we tell you on the tooltips on the heroic tier selectors when you select difficulty.

Tier 2 for example reads:

+40% gold and lumber drops
+20% improved gems
+20% equipment rarity
+2% rare equipment drops

So +40% gold and lumber is pretty obvious, it means if you were going to get 100 from a drop instead you get 140. You can see it pretty clearly in the shots above.

+20% improved gems means if you were going to get a flawed gem there is a 20% chance instead that you will get a regular gem, etc.

+20% equipment rarity means if you were going to get a green item there is a 20% chance instead it will be a blue item, and if you were going to get a blue item, there is a 20% chance it will be purple, etc. (This is also very visible in my test above, you can see the number of rares + epics going up with each tier)

+2% rare equipment drops means the chances of each rarity type have been increase 2% of their original values so if a chance of drop being green was 10% it is now 10.2% really a very small increase. (This is too small to be observable in my chest test above, the sample size is too small!!)

"Also a lot of players reported getting better drops from lower tiers, so I did some tries there and i can conclude that lower tiers (t=2,3) in SP indeed show an overall higher drop of uncommon items than high tier (4,5) Sp runs. If this is on purpose to help lower players getting a leg up, then this may be a nice intention but it almost defeats the purpose of the higher TIERS`increased item rarity and drop chance..... "

This is not the case, the system uses the numbers you see displayed in the tooltips (they come right from the data) and does not use any different system on the higher tiers.

Anecdotally you don't seem to be getting any rare drops. On the other hand anecdotally, before I came up with the idea of just putting down a lot of chests I tried to play through the spider bounty sp with a very over powered character to see what I would get. I got to T4 before realizing how long it would take to get a good sample size, but in that time (T1 to T4) I got 3 whites, 2 greens, and 2 blues. That does seem to be in line with what I see in the chest setup.

Remember random is random. It is something we have found (and we have been making games that use randomness to award items for over 5 years now) players very often struggle with. Heck even after years of university level probability and statistics I still find some of it to be very non-intuitive. What often throws people is if something has a probability of happening lets say 1 in 20 like rolling a 20 sided dice, they expect that every 20 rolls or so they should get a 20. But thats not random, that would actually be very consistent. What often happens, and is actually random would be to roll 2 20's in less than 20 rolls, and then not roll any twenties for more than 20 rolls.

This very thing is going to occur in the game, you could get lucky, and get 3 blues on a mission, and then get unlucky and not get any blues for the next 3. Its random... Now bear in mind previous rolls, or wins do not effect future rolls or wins. Which means you could get lucky and get blues over and over, with enough players the odds that this happens for some players is quite high. The same is true on the other side, not winning for a while doesn't change the odds in your favor, so again with enough players again the odds that this happens to someone are also quite high. This is actually why in some of our other games like EBA and Bushwhacker we track wins and slowly converge the odds if you go long enough without winning. It is possible that we need a system like that in Shards as well.

-David

Hi Chrismaz,

The number of items in the chests is set when the content creator places it in the zone. I set all mine up top to contain 5 items, as I mentioned above most chests in the game are set to 3. I was demonstrating the relative drop rates of whites, greens, blues, and purples at each tier. So the more items on the screen the higher sample size and the more closely each image would represent the actual drop rate. That is drop rate as in %change to get a type of item, not how many items you get per chest. I really hope there is no confusion on that!

The chest on the very first forest mission there is set to 1 item I think, that mission actually has a bunch of special cases on the loot, as we try to make sure a brand new player gets a few specific things (including lumber) after the first mission. So its not a good place to go looking for loot...

I just loaded up the bandit camp mission and did it on tier 2 (highest I have unlocked on live)

this is what I got:

http://gyazo.com/a1996a448ac15576789e9becf0e94439
http://gyazo.com/516f4f6519a2eaa17a5ec402cf87b03a
http://gyazo.com/737da87e4091b75275bb1351238966c0
http://gyazo.com/cec7fcdc63d4769ce2eac32795d49aad
http://gyazo.com/284b48d28609e8f9daf16a422755d939
http://gyazo.com/c72bcdac239eb74b6966d74e80cc4a4e

4 whites, 3 greens, and some lumber. Which is about what I would expect. I know your first thought is going to be thats tier 2 and you were playing t5 so it must be t5 that is broken. I have to preemptively stop you right here, its just a multiplier, one number getting bigger for each tier, the math just doesn't stop working when the number gets a little bit bigger, and if it did my screen shots above wouldn't have so many more blues and purples on t5 than on t2.

-David