They change drop rates on GGR? Wiki full of BS?

[DMN]

Only know two people dumb enough to camp this piece of trash that I trust:

Moron 1: over 20 hours 100+ couriers, no ring
Moron 2: over 15 hours 60+ courtiers 1 ring.

that's 1 ring in 160+ couriers, well under a 1% drop rate and way under the supposed/estimated 3.5% drop rate on the wiki suggests.

[Snortles Chortles]

RN GG

[Beckoning]

I gave you the results from my sample size, but you don't strike me as the kind of guy who would understand statistics very well.

[jadier]

Only know two people dumb enough to camp this piece of trash that I trust:

Moron 1: over 20 hours 100+ couriers, no ring
Moron 2: over 15 hours 60+ courtiers 1 ring.

that's 1 ring in 160+ couriers, well under a 1% drop rate and way under the supposed/estimated 3.5% drop rate on the wiki suggests.

Nope, it's a Poisson process. Think of it like this: flipping a coin twice does not guarantee a heads, even though getting a heads is a 1-in-2 chance. Flipping a coin 4 times and seeing no heads still doesn't mean your coin is "broken".

If you see roughly 400 couriers in a row, that'd be decent evidence that there's something off with a 2% drop chance. Until then, you just have a run of bad luck.

[aztec42321]

For what it's worth, I've been camping him off and on over the course of several weeks and managed to snag myself a GGR a few days ago. It took over 80 couriers. The camp sucks ass because the placeholders spawn so quickly that you can barely step away from the computer once you have found them. I would root or entrance the PHs when I needed to grab a drink or quick bio break but a number of times I lost them if I had to be away for more than a minute or two.

This was all on Blue though, I don't know if that would make any difference.

[jadier]

Nope, it's a Poisson process. Think of it like this: flipping a coin twice does not guarantee a heads, even though getting a heads is a 1-in-2 chance. Flipping a coin 4 times and seeing no heads still doesn't mean your coin is "broken".

If you see roughly 400 couriers in a row, that'd be decent evidence that there's something off with a 2% drop chance. Until then, you just have a run of bad luck.

To clarify, this is very likely just a run of bad luck. You need way more than 160 courier pops to reject a 3.5% drop rate.

So if you see (or hear about from "trusted friends") 160 couriers in a row with no GGR that's...not super unexpected! Thousands of courier pops have been observed, and generally only those who get it crazy fast or who wait crazy-long without seeing it mention their experience on the forum. So the variance is easy to overestimate without careful logging.

tldr; put up or shut up on an actually large (>1000) spawn dataset before throwing shade on the crowd sourced wiki.

[Tunabros]

who cares

[Albanwr]

so if I kill 10 and get 3 rings that means what to you?

[TheBardo]

DMN has made 2887 posts, every one of them terrible, yet i keep clicking em

[Swish]

Only know two people dumb enough to camp this piece of trash that I trust:

Moron 1: over 20 hours 100+ couriers, no ring
Moron 2: over 15 hours 60+ courtiers 1 ring.

that's 1 ring in 160+ couriers, well under a 1% drop rate and way under the supposed/estimated 3.5% drop rate on the wiki suggests.

Should have stayed for one more, was probably the spawn you wanted.

[DMN]

so if I kill 10 and get 3 rings that means what to you?

Those results would, too, suggest that 3.5% isn't accurate and/or that the drop rate has been changed for some reason.


Nope, it's a Poisson process. Think of it like this: flipping a coin twice does not guarantee a heads, even though getting a heads is a 1-in-2 chance. Flipping a coin 4 times and seeing no heads still doesn't mean your coin is "broken".

If you see roughly 400 couriers in a row, that'd be decent evidence that there's something off with a 2% drop chance. Until then, you just have a run of bad luck.

The problem here is how you qualify "decent evidence", especially given the original source of the "expected average". To me, when it comes to random nobodies' claims on the internet, beyond 1 standard deviation I start to expect some some bullshit is afoot and virtually assured of it by the time I get anywhere near 2.

DMN has made 2887 posts, every one of them terrible, yet i keep clicking em

Oh, we both know why you read all my posts with bated breath.

[cd288]

TLDR: doesn’t really understand statistics

[DMN]

TLDR: doesn’t really understand statistics

Sorry to hear that.

Statistics isn't really that complicated, but I understand you struggle with pretty much everything in life.

[Isomorphic]

The problem here is how you qualify "decent evidence", especially given the original source of the "expected average". To me, when it comes to random nobodies' claims on the internet, beyond 1 standard deviation I start to expect some some bullshit is afoot and virtually assured of it by the time I get anywhere near 2.


Under the assumption that the expected drop rate is 3.5%, you are already more than 2 standard deviations away from your expected number of drops after 160 kills.

[jadier]

The problem here is how you qualify "decent evidence", especially given the original source of the "expected average". To me, when it comes to random nobodies' claims on the internet, beyond 1 standard deviation I start to expect some some bullshit is afoot and virtually assured of it by the time I get anywhere near 2.
.

It’s not really a problem? Statistics exists specifically to quantify what counts as “decent evidence”. A string of 160 failures in a Bernoulli trial with a 2% success rate (twice what the courier page says) is about 4%.

So about four in every hundred would-be lords of the ring will see such a stretch of bad luck.

Given how many people camp that thing, it’s not at all surprising that you know someone who is experiencing such a run. I guess if you know exactly two people who have ever camped the ring, you’d be in some reasonable territory. But you likely know many people who have and you’ve only got data on a pair of recent bad runs. So it’s a biased data set.

Again, if you want to call the wiki bull shit or argue that the drop rate has changed, you need a run of bad luck so exceptional as to fall outside expectations. 160 is just not that surprising.

Edit: I found the 3.5% source! It is based on 224 kills. So 3.5% is the point-estimate, with the margin of error that means the drop rate was most likely between 1.5% - 7%. So, as above, a string o 160 failures is consistent with that dataset. That is, if you think the drop rate has changed, you'd need to find evidence that the drop rate is decidedly outside that interval than your two friends' recent string of (not outside expectations) run of bad luck.

Would be interesting to collect a fair sample of people’s camping experiences to refine that estimate, though!

[jadier]

Under the assumption that the expected drop rate is 3.5%, you are already more than 2 standard deviations away from your expected number of drops after 160 kills.

This would be true except:

(1) this isn't a "fair sample" so a strict application of standard deviations isn't really appropriate. My guess is that DMN knows way more than two people who've camped the ring, and is *only* reporting the two most egregious bad luck runs he's seen (because most people only talk about really bad or really good runs of luck; you brag when you get it in <10 couriers, and complain when it takes >50, but no one spontaneously posts in guildchat or whatever about that time they got it in 31 pops).

(2) there's a margin of error associated with the 3.5% estimate. If we think the drop rate has changed, we'd need either a more representative sample of camp results, or a staggeringly large outlier dataset (which this is not) given the uncertainty in the 3.5% estimate & the bias of the sample.

Edit: To put it another way, if you take the 224 kills with 8 rings the 3.5% is based on, and just add another 160 pops with 0 rings from the "DMN dataset" here (which, again, you shouldn't do as the DMN is biased in ways the original isn't) you get an estimate for the drop rate of...between 1 and 4%. Even with the bias reporting, it doesn't exclude the 3.5% estimate. It's just not that bad a run.

Edit edit: To be even more precise: DMN's friends would need to observe 221 total pops without a ring to *just barely* exclude 3.5% if you lumped them together (which, again again, you **cannot do** since the friends-complaining-about-bad-luck dataset is heavily biased).

[Vizax_Xaziv]

so if I kill 10 and get 3 rings that means what to you?

That would mean I hate you.

[Isomorphic]

This would be true except:

(1) this isn't a "fair sample" so a strict application of standard deviations isn't really appropriate. My guess is that DMN knows way more than two people who've camped the ring, and is *only* reporting the two most egregious bad luck runs he's seen (because most people only talk about really bad or really good runs of luck; you brag when you get it in <10 couriers, and complain when it takes >50, but no one spontaneously posts in guildchat or whatever about that time they got it in 31 pops).

(2) there's a margin of error associated with the 3.5% estimate. If we think the drop rate has changed, we'd need either a more representative sample of camp results, or a staggeringly large outlier dataset (which this is not) given the uncertainty in the 3.5% estimate & the bias of the sample.

Edit: To put it another way, if you take the 224 kills with 8 rings the 3.5% is based on, and just add another 160 pops with 0 rings from the "DMN dataset" here (which, again, you shouldn't do as the DMN is biased in ways the original isn't) you get an estimate for the drop rate of...between 1 and 4%. Even with the bias reporting, it doesn't exclude the 3.5% estimate. It's just not that bad a run.

Edit edit: To be even more precise: DMN's friends would need to observe 221 total pops without a ring to *just barely* exclude 3.5% if you lumped them together (which, again again, you **cannot do** since the friends-complaining-about-bad-luck dataset is heavily biased).

The standard deviation is a property of the underlying distribution, not a sample. Regardless of what you think/feel about OP's reporting, my claim still stands. Given the assumption that the drop rate is 3.5% nothing I said is false. This leads me to your second point. I am assuming what the drop rate is, meaning I am deriving the standard deviation from this assumption. I am not assuming there is some estimation of the drop rate, which suggests that the drop rate in question is a random variable, it's a constant.

[jadier]

The standard deviation is a property of the underlying distribution, not a sample. Regardless of what you think/feel about OP's reporting, my claim still stands. Given the assumption that the drop rate is 3.5% nothing I said is false. This leads me to your second point. I am assuming what the drop rate is, meaning I am deriving the standard deviation from this assumption. I am not assuming there is some estimation of the drop rate, which suggests that the drop rate in question is a random variable, it's a constant.

Yes, a standard deviation is a property of the distribution. But the reason for applying it is to figure out what the chance you'd observe some data is given the distribution. However, it doesn't work that way if the data are biased.

That is, if you know that the normal chance for something is 10% with a sd of 2% and I tell you, "hey, I got a drop rate of 5% with this dataset where I just ignored all the people who got the drop more often than 7%" you can't just go "oh well 5% is more than 2 sigma away from 10, so I guess the droprate changed". [ I'm not saying DMN did this. This is an extreme example of why using Z-scores to interpret data relies on fair sampling. If sampling isn't, fair, it's meaningless to calculate Z scores ]

In other words, you can only meaningfully interpret a Z score if the sample's fair. If it's a biased sample, it doesn't readily translate to the probability expected from the standard deviation...because it's biased.

Regarding the assumption: the OP's question was whether the drop rate changed. 8 / 224 = 1.5 - 7% drop rate, 1 / 160 (even with the bias) translates to a <0.1 - 3.5% drop rate, and 9 / 384 = 1 - 4%. That is, they're all consistent with one another.

So you're correct that assuming a 3.5% drop rate, 1/160 is an unlikely observation...but my point is that although the point-estimate may vary by 2 sigma, when you account for sample size, even this biased dataset doesn't preclude 3.5%.

Eg, nothing posted here implies the droprate changed at all, even if you assume the true drop rate was exactly 3.5%. OP's friends just had bad luck, and the true drop-rate is uncertain but we'd need way, way, way more evidence to suspect a change.

(edit: tldr; if you assume a 3.5% drop rate, the point estimate of 1/160 is, as Isomorphic says, >2 standard deviations away from 3.5%. However, (1) the data are biased, so there's no way to actually connect a probability to the observation, and (2) even if it weren't biased, 1/160 is still not inconsistent at 95% confidence with a 3.5% drop rate because while an assumed distribution doesn't have error, 160 is a small sample size when dealing with a 3.5% chance event so the confidence interval still overlaps the previously-estimated drop-rate)

[Fleelord]

Moron 1: over 20 hours 100+ couriers, no ring
Moron 2: over 15 hours 60+ courtiers 1 ring.


I put in 48 hours at CoS/Idol camp in Droga. Didn't get the Idol until the final hour.

Got 3 CoS before getting the damn idol.

[rewinder47]

If you are wondering why it is worth so much money, it's because.... it's not easy to get.

Yet I see them for sale pretty often, so the drop rate can't be as low as you are suggesting

Therefore by logic, everything is fine and you are wrong

[unsunghero]

Thank goodness hard-casting invis still seems to work just fine. Cancel magic on the other hand, broke charms at first then just stopped working completely...was weird

[Shadeynight]

Alright guys, someone get out there and kill 10,000 couriers for the sake of this argument! You’ll probably even make some plat out of it!

[loramin]

Thank goodness hard-casting invis still seems to work just fine.

It works just fine, but results in slower leveling.

When you charm fight, you want to break your charm right when both mobs are about to die: if you break it sooner, you'll have to spend more mana to kill the two mobs. Ideally you want them both with 0.1% left, so you can just kill them with a quick low-level spell or a melee hit.

But when you "hard-cast" invis, you have to account for the casting time. That means you have to guess "the mos are at 10%, hopefully they'll be down to 1% when I finish casting". If you cast too early, they have too many HP left. If you cast too late, the mob dies before you break charm, and you get either 0% or 50% of its XP.

Instant-cast invis (from GGR) let's you break with no guesswork, at the latest moment possible. Over the course of a lot of charm fights that adds up ... a lot. For a charm class, virtually no other item in the game offers a similar increase in XP speed (only a very few like Fungi, JBB, or Lumi Staff).

[unsunghero]

It works just fine, but results in slower leveling.

When you charm fight, you want to break your charm right when both mobs are about to die: if you break it sooner, you'll have to spend more mana to kill the two mobs. Ideally you want them both with 0.1% left, so you can just kill them with a quick low-level spell or a melee hit.

But when you "hard-cast" invis, you have to account for the casting time. That means you have to guess "the mos are at 10%, hopefully they'll be down to 1% when I finish casting". If you cast too early, they have too many HP left. If you cast too late, the mob dies before you break charm, and you get either 0% or 50% of its XP.

Instant-cast invis (from GGR) let's you break with no guesswork, at the latest moment possible. Over the course of a lot of charm fights that adds up ... a lot. For a charm class, virtually no other item in the game offers a similar increase in XP speed (only a very few like Fungi, JBB, or Lumi Staff).

It costs too much mana to try to line up both mobs dying around the same health. Either with a slow, a dot, or nukes on the enemy mob, no matter what it’s a waste of mana. Not only that, but if your mob happens to win, it ganks 50% of the exp

Therefore, the best method to charm kill for exp is in reverse, which means picking a pet that will for sure lose to the mob you are attacking it with. What I do is usually grab 2 enemy mobs if I can, and root them roughly in range of where I want my pet to fight

Keep 1 or both of the enemy mobs rooted, then mash the pet back off command when the pet is less than 10% health. This will ensure that only 1 max level nuke will finish it. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to cast invis, as long as it is less than the duration of root on the enemy mobs. Invis could take 35 seconds to cast and it would still work out. After pet is dead, pick the next most hurt mob to become the new pet, and sent it against something you know it cannot beat

No need for instant charm break this way

[freezzo]

I camped this on and off over a three week period and killed over 200 couriers before I got my ring. I had to go back and tally up my logs, because I didn't believe I had killed that many. I witnessed other people come in and get them after 15 minutes of camping.

[loramin]

It costs too much mana to try to line up both mobs dying around the same health. Either with a slow, a dot, or nukes on the enemy mob, no matter what it’s a waste of mana. Not only that, but if your mob happens to win, it ganks 50% of the exp

Therefore, the best method to charm kill for exp is in reverse, which means picking a pet that will for sure lose to the mob you are attacking it with. What I do is usually grab 2 enemy mobs if I can, and root them roughly in range of where I want my pet to fight

Keep 1 or both of the enemy mobs rooted, then mash the pet back off command when the pet is less than 10% health. This will ensure that only 1 max level nuke will finish it. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to cast invis, as long as it is less than the duration of root on the enemy mobs. Invis could take 35 seconds to cast and it would still work out. After pet is dead, pick the next most hurt mob to become the new pet, and sent it against something you know it cannot beat

No need for instant charm break this way

It depends on the mobs, but there are lots of places where you can absolutely find multiple animals of the same level (eg. http://wiki.project1999.com/Alligator%20Alley comes to mind). But whether you have mobs that are the same level or not is irrelevant; in any case, the GGR is going to let you break your pet reliable and instantly, and that's going to be hugely valuable when charm fighting. Casting invis will be neither reliable (with fizzles) or instant (and neither will racial hide).

To be clear: I'm not saying you need a GGR to charm fight! But I am saying that you will earn XP faster while charming with one than without.

[fastboy21]

Sorry to hear that.

Statistics isn't really that complicated, but I understand you struggle with pretty much everything in life.

You don't camp the Gazughi ring...it camps you.

[unsunghero]

It depends on the mobs, but there are lots of places where you can absolutely find multiple animals of the same level (eg. http://wiki.project1999.com/Alligator%20Alley comes to mind). But whether you have mobs that are the same level or not is irrelevant; in any case, the GGR is going to let you break your pet reliable and instantly, and that's going to be hugely valuable when charm fighting. Casting invis will be neither reliable (with fizzles) or instant (and neither will racial hide).

To be clear: I'm not saying you need a GGR to charm fight! But I am saying that you will earn XP faster while charming with one than without.

Ideal scenario would be areas where multiple mobs are around the same level range. But I’ve learned that even if both mobs are the same level range, your pet can always have a few rounds of hits when the enemy missed and be winning the fight. I’ve tried doing things like the /pet sit command to even things up, and never had much success with it

That’s why I personally switched to pulling multiple mobs at once with the pet. It is somewhat risky to do vs dark blues because of root breaks, but the surest way to ensure your pet loses any fight is to send it to aggro at least 2 other enemy mobs around, then pull pet back to an area relatively safe from pathers, then root+tash each of the 2 mobs killing the pet. The pet will be in melee range of both at once and so his health will plummet. But if needed, i can back the pet off and send him after one or the other mob individually if I want to slow down how fast the pet is dying. The only scenario where instant invis would be clutch would be if root broke off one or both of the enemy mobs as I was casting invis. I admit this does suck when it happens because if I timed pet back off correctly, it means 1-2 more rounds of melee kills the pet and costs me mana and time. But as long as root holds I’m golden to cast invis

The scenario that is more annoying is when there are only lower level mobs around the pet. In these cases I have to become a genocidal maniac and send the pet after literally anything remotely near me, which are going to be green cons that give zero exp. Even at a 5ish level difference the mobs can usually do SOME damage to the pet. After I kill about 3-5 of these, the pet is softened up enough to where another blue con that is lower level can kill it. Typically the pet will need to be around 50% health to lose to a mob that is 1 level lower. This takes me some trial and error to get right

To me, GGR seems like a super costly convenience item, like jboots, not something that fundamentally changes the class like torpor/epic for shaman. I would have to weigh out just how often it happens that root breaks on enemy mobs while I am casting invis, and the amount of time it would take to recoup that lost experience. Then figure out how much pp/hour I can grind before I reach a “break even” point on time saved to justify spending 8k+ of pp. I see rings auctioned all the time by the same people, so there doesn’t seem to be a scarcity of these in regards to the OP

[Dustyslippers]

160 sample size is far to small to make assumptions...

I got my ring in 30 minutes and 4 couriers. in rngesus we trust.

[fadetree]

There's actually no such thing as (provable) randomness, so there's no way to say 'it's just bad luck', only a subjective 'reasonableness' criteria. But yeah, the wiki is probably F.O.S., that ring is a much rarer drop than 3.5%. From what I hear around the EQverse.

[mtkoan]

There's actually no such thing as (provable) randomness, so there's no way to say 'it's just bad luck', only a subjective 'reasonableness' criteria.

There's actually no such thing as (provable) reality, so there's no way to say we're not in a simulation, only a consistent subjective experience.

[Arvan]

Imagine thinking probability works like OP thinks it does

[DMN]

Imagine thinking probability works like OP thinks it does

Imagine trying to flex on a guy who loses more brain cells during a weekend bender than you were born with.

https://i.imgur.com/olgkEAg.jpg

[cd288]

Imagine trying to flex on a guy who loses more brain cells during a weekend bender than you were born with.

https://i.imgur.com/olgkEAg.jpg

You kinda just insulted yourself there a little bit

[DMN]

You kinda just insulted yourself there a little bit

You must have a really low opinion of Arvan, eh?

[cd288]

You must have a really low opinion of Arvan, eh?

More like someone who goes on weekend benders as a grown man

[Andad_Filla]

It works just fine, but results in slower leveling.


The real question here is what slows your leveling down more, camping this ring for 100 hours (aka 60,000 med ticks) getting no XP or having to med for 1 more tick to recoup that invis mana? Trick question the correct answer is play a dark elf or wood elf charm class and use mana free hide while you are medding instead of dropping 8k on a gimmick or having to put invis on your spell bar at all! :D

[Jimjam]

Pft real pros just keep 77 cloudy potions on them at all times.

[cd288]

The real question here is what slows your leveling down more, camping this ring for 100 hours (aka 60,000 med ticks) getting no XP or having to med for 1 more tick to recoup that invis mana? Trick question the correct answer is play a dark elf or wood elf charm class and use mana free hide while you are medding instead of dropping 8k on a gimmick or having to put invis on your spell bar at all! :D

Except Hide is a total toss up with a long cool down for what you need it for. If your mobs are right at the end of their HP such that you’re breaking charm to kill them, if hide doesn’t work you’re gonna need to try and invis real quick rather than waiting for the hide cool down as if you wait one of those mobs is gonna be dead

[Shadeynight]

The real question here is what slows your leveling down more, camping this ring for 100 hours (aka 60,000 med ticks) getting no XP or having to med for 1 more tick to recoup that invis mana? Trick question the correct answer is play a dark elf or wood elf charm class and use mana free hide while you are medding instead of dropping 8k on a gimmick or having to put invis on your spell bar at all! :D

I'd rather ask, what else are you going to spend your plat on? Hitting 200cha is pretty trivially done(probably less than 1k if you do the incandescent quests/find a couple desperate people trying to flood the economy with even more loam gear), and after that... sure hp/mana is nice, and rune aint free... but it would really be a question of GGR or Jboots, and if I had to have one or the other on my ench I'd take the ring every time. You could most likely easily farm the plat leveling in the 35-50 range any way. I think you're right though that camping this your self while leveling is dumb. Leave it to the bored high level necros laying on the spawn points day in and day out and go kill some guards lol.

[Snortles Chortles]

the lesson here is
don’t camp items
hth

[Andad_Filla]

I'd rather ask, what else are you going to spend your plat on?

The same thing we do every night, Shadey, make and twink more alts.

[NPC]

The real question here is what slows your leveling down more, camping this ring for 100 hours (aka 60,000 med ticks) getting no XP or having to med for 1 more tick to recoup that invis mana? Trick question the correct answer is play a dark elf or wood elf charm class and use mana free hide while you are medding instead of dropping 8k on a gimmick or having to put invis on your spell bar at all! :D

FYI-Enchanters use it for charm breaks not for hiding. Instant cast invisibility makes all the difference in those situations.

[Shadeynight]

FYI-Enchanters use it for charm breaks not for hiding. Instant cast invisibility makes all the difference in those situations.

Hide can give you the same benefit of the GGR, it's just not 100%. DE enchanters might suck balls at cha, but it's a non-small benefit in the early levels.

[feniin]

https://eq.magelo.com/item/10593