How can you be sure? I thought that some things (like runewords) are server-side only, so you modder-types can't look at them.
I'm also saying this from personal experience... I used to get pretty good stuff from Meph, exceptional/elite sets and uniques. Now I'm lucky if I get a normal elite/set item.
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06-15-2004, 03:32 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-15-2004, 03:32 AM by [wcip]Angel.)
If you go to the western-most corner in the south-eastern part of the mephisto's 3rd durance, you'll see an evil creature lurking about. He's not a big man, but he cause some serious damage whenever you see him. The best thing is to preted he isn't there; that way you'll avoid taking damage. The name of this creature is "Murphy", and he's the one causing all your problems, Unrealshadow.
Are you sure? I just asked a friend to look for him (he's a modder type) and he couldn't find any super unique named 'Murphy'. Typo?
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unrealshadow13,Jun 14 2004, 10:30 PM Wrote:Are you sure? I just asked a friend to look for him (he's a modder type) and he couldn't find any super unique named 'Murphy'. Typo? Clicky ;)
Don't worry. You won't feel a thing...until I jam this down your throat!
-Dr. Nick Riviera
Have you read the FAQ, Etiquette, or the Rules yet?
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You take all the fun out of life, Striker. :D
"AND THEN THE PALADIN TOOK MY EYES!"
Forever oppressed by the GOLs.
Grom Hellscream: [Orcish] kek
Er... We're talking about Murphy the super-unique in DoH lvl 3, if that is indeed how you spell his name.
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It's already been beaten to death in that thread.
Jarulf himself already said:
Quote:So no, there are no such run âcountersâ, nor any special MF dimishing effects in the game, not in single player, not on realms.
What more do you want?
If someone had posted detailed results of 1,000+ trials of a controlled experiment and it showed a statistically signifant downwards trend, we could have something to work with. No one has done that. All we have are samples of a dozen or so (completely insignificant from a statistical standpoint) and vague rumours of "well, it seems to be getting worse," which can easily be attributed to psychology. For example, if you've MF'd a lot already, you'll have more items and there will thus be less items that will be considered good. And if you've MF'd in the past and found good loot, you might be inclined to forget how many empty runs preceeded it (e.g. if you get a perfect dream item after 100 runs, you'll still count the 99 empty runs as worthwhile to get that, while if you just now did 50 runs and got nothing, it'll seem like a complete waste of time). There hasn't been any solid evidence of anything out of the ordinary yet. And the rumours don't match up. Others were saying that less of the items they found were unique (that is, that the overall quality was decreasing). You're saying that less of the uniques and set items were elite (that is, that the average TC was decreasing).
Neither of these has any basis on reality. They don't match up with how item drops work. And since they don't match up with each other, they become that much less credible.
(And I'm left wondering just what a "normal elite/set item" is).
If you come up with a claim that contradicts the current well-established knowledge of how things work, which contradict the words of Jarulf, and which doesn't make any sense, the burden of proof is on you.
The argument "server side patch!" doesn't work as proof. It can work as explanation once you have proved something, but just calling "server side patch!" doesn't allow you to make any otherwise unjustifiable statement.
Let me give you a silly made-up example:
"There was a server side patch yesterday that made it impossible to find any rune higher than Lo. I know this because I haven't found any rune higher than Lo today. You can't use the MPQs or any program derived from this to disprove this since it's a server-side patch. Unless you actually find a rune higher than Lo, I'll stand by my statement. Finding one would mean they must have made another server-side patch to reverse the change."
Surely you realize that this statement would be thoroughly ridiculous. There wasn't anywhere near a significant sample size to show that the runes could no longer drop. And it doesn't make any sense that they'd make that change. And the burden of proof should be on the one making the claim. You can't just make a ridiculous statement and make others disprove it for you.
Or how about this one:
"Blizzard is sexist. Somehow, D2 figures out if it's a woman or a man that's playing. It then uses this information to scale down the TCs and the quality of items. Women will find about 20% less uniques as well as 20% less elites. I know this because I see more men than women in trades."
The problem with this should be obvious. Blizzard really doesn't know who's playing a given character. Nor does it have the knowledge of how often you've killed a boss (see Jarulf's quote).
Really, if you want us to take that claim as anything other than an unfounded rumour, prove it.
Could I just do lots of runs? I don't want to look inside the files or anything -_-
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Take a second and read through this entire thread again.
Then step away from the computer and contemplate the posts for a few minutes.
"AND THEN THE PALADIN TOOK MY EYES!"
Forever oppressed by the GOLs.
Grom Hellscream: [Orcish] kek
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Sure. Do 1,000+ runs of the same monster, with the same character, with the same number of players in the game, using the same equipment (so no variability in MF). Record what the items were each time (the quality if you're trying to show that there are less uniques, the base item if you're trying to prove there are less elites). Include the durablity of any magic/rare items, so we can tell which ones are failed sets/uniques. Make sure to record the results for every single run; if you skip over a run because nothing interesting dropped, youll be skewing the results.
Once you have the 1,000+ runs, we can process the data and see if there are any downward trends. If there is a diminishing effect, it should be quite visible.
(Looking into files wouldn't do any good, anyways. They've been looked at already. Only a server-side patch would let things be different).
Ouch. I can usually do a Meph run in a minute-minute and a half, but recording all the stuff will make it last longer, probably more than 3 minutes. That's 3,000 minutes, best case scenario. I think that's 50 hours (I think). This will take me a while so don't expect a list for a few more weeks.
Hold the phone.... Can anybody think of a monster close to a waypoint that is easier to run? Any monster will do right? They can't be cold Immune, so that rules out the act 5 guys.
Quote: It's true.
Cross my heart.
I swear.
Really.
It is.
You were agreeing with me, now you're saying I'm wrong. What's up with that?
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You forgot the "/insert giggle edged with insanity" part at the end. Just to make it crystal clear: he wasn't being serious with that "It's true." thing.
Oh (sorely tempted to say lol)
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As unlikely it is that act bosses would have a counter used to decrease their drops, I'd think it'd be even less likely that there'd be one for other monsters. So proving that a superunique doesn't have such a counter probably isn't as strong as proving an act boss doesn't have such a counter.
Still, I'm not going to dissuade you. If seeing that there's no diminishing effect on a superunique is sufficient evidence to indicate there's also no diminishing effect on an act boss, do go with the superunique.
The most easily-accessible superunique who's not cold-immune is probably Fire Eye. Take the arcane sanctuary WP, go through the portal, and he'll be somewhere around there.
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I haven't had a thread make me laugh so hard in a long time. :D
-Munk
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Hi unrealshadow13,
First off, let me state that we did experiments with small sample size (50-50) to prove that 350 mf was better than 450. Yes, at such a small sample size, we really could prove it statistically. So, you truly need AT LEAST 1000 runs to be able to prove anything about diminishing drops. And mind you, even if you throw together a sweet little excel-sheet with an easy-to-fill-out form and the necessarry scripts to make it run, it'd still take at least 2 minutes to record every run.
Other issue: implementation of such a counter. It has to be stored on your character. That is a breeze, but now think about it: what would reset that counter? If you killed anything else than the given boss? This would be silly, you could simply kill a blood lord on the way down. Or killing another "counter"-ed monster? This would lead to allow players to do meph-pindle runs without "penalizing" them for the runs. IF blizzard truly wanted to screw around with that, they'd have to store 2^n counters (if n is the number of monsters whose kills they'd want to count), to be able to store the "kills on a given set of those monsters". Jeez. Half the character file would be "run counters". Highly unpractical.
Yes, none of this proves anything. We're dealing with people who created a spell that fires of dozens of separate shards, calculating the damge of each shard separatelly, so they COULD have done all this. It is just, well, rather unlikely. If, however, you're like some of those people who are unwilling to accept stochastical reasoning, go ahead, and spend the next 5k+ minutes running Meph. Just one last thing about statistics and sample sizes: at such a large sample size, the secondary error (that is: your mistake in recording what dropped) will be so large, that the data you collected during that week-long playing session will be all but worthless.
At least you'd have some cool items :P
Caaroid
ps: learn to tell apart "with" from "at".
Quote:ps: learn to tell apart "with" from "at".
What?
Why would my recordings be wrong...
Quote:The name of this creature is "Murphy", and he's the one causing all your problems, Unrealshadow.
I just finished clearing the Durance of Hate level 3 in all difficulty levels. I couldn't find any monster named Murphy. Are you sure it is a super unique? What kind of monster is it?
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06-15-2004, 06:43 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-15-2004, 07:02 PM by [wcip]Angel.)
Striker explained my little joke there with the following link:
http://dmawww.epfl.ch/roso.mosaic/dm/murphy.html
To simplify: "Murphy" as in "Murphy's law" is not a superunique in Diablo 2 (or perhaps he is, who knows really? :P). If you click the link, you'll be able to read up on Murphy's law.
--
Apparently, Murphy is a fickle individual. Whilst playing one of my runs (Countess, Andy, Travincal, Meph) I was lucky enough to find the tal rasha orb on one of the ghouls on Andy's level. As if that wasn't enough. On the same run, Mephisto dropped a certain green-looking amulet. "Great!" I thought; "another angelic amulet :(", but when I went to ID the thing (I never sell an unidentified piece of set jewelry, not matter what the odds of getting something decent is), lo and behold, good ol' Murphy was in something of a good mood and rewarded me with a Tal Rasha amulet. I now sport the whole set minus one lacquered plate!
The thing is, as 2 of you (Adeyk and Obiwan) already know, I was destined to trade away my 2 um runes for the tal rasha amulet along with a few other things with an acquantance of mine. Now I get to keep my um runes, AND enjoy my spanking new ammy!
Thank you Murphy!
edit: I've been playing 1.10 for a few weeks now, and I've yet to encounter an MSLEB. Are they gone?
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