02-22-2004, 01:44 AM
Quote:Well, the effect *could* be psychological. But if so, then we would have seen the same psychological effect prior to 1.10. In fact it would be more pronounced, because MF was apparently lower then. Yet this is not the case. I and many others have only noticed an effect in 1.10.
Actually I have been hearing this same poorly supported argument through more that just the current patch. So it is not some 'new' thing and you could see the pscyhological effect then the same as now with some of you in this thread. Also with the lower chances of getting something good in the earlier patch, long stretches of not too good drops was not considered as unusal since not that many players used real high amount of magic find to boost the rate up to the higher levels. From what I saw it was actually only a minority of those that did high magic find runs that were really surprised at getting bad runs. Those that were doing for profit (ebay sellers and those that tried to work the trade games alot) usually only grumbled that they had a bad day as they understood that was one of the possible types of outcomes.
Quote:If I show a string of improbably low drops, then you can simply say that it was just bad luck. It would be exceedingly arduous to manually gather enough data to avoid this rebuttal.
The thing is that with just showing a string of low drops is that all you have done is show a run of bad luck. If you have not documented a pattern that can be consistently repeated to occur, then you really have not made a case for your argument in the first place. With out that kind of starting point for your case, why should we compelled lend it any credence in the first place? Especially when it goes againts what is known about the way the game works from looking at the internal game engine. The burden of making this case in the first place is really upon those that trying to make this claim in the first place. Back it up with something solid for the argument, not some loosely voiced poorly documented cases of "bad drop runs".
The way to test for some of this would be to look for a mechanism that could be exploited to cause a very unusual occurance in what happens (or drops) in the game. If these repeated magic find runs are being peanalized by getting a negative amount of magic find applied to the character (or game itself) then that would have some testable consequences outside of a just general reduction in the quality of the drops. Part of the code does a division by the quanity (100+MF) and if the the MF=-100 then the game will crash the first time there is a check of any random drop of an item that could be unique. If the net MF is less than -100 then the consequences for what gets drop change to a whole new level of what you would end up seeing. And this latter case has never been reported by anybody doing even massive number of runs (and it the botters that would have definately noticed this effect within one night of letting their bots do runs).