Sorry if this was already posted but I could not find it.

When an elite is alerted, how is the drops calculated? I did 33% damage to lock in that I would get a drop and then alerted to help people out. When I came back, someone disabled it and got the better drop. Should I have waited until I did 50% or how does that work?

Completely random dude.

Yeah I have tried it multiple different ways and as far as I have seen it can only be random.

yeah ive gotten on half a dozen akkiren, drannik hubs and got 5 drannik swarm traps and 1 power core one of my friends got on the same ones as me got 4power cores and 2 swarm traps! its completly random

Random, my ass.

I fought 7 Hives in the past week, and the first one gave me a defense utricle module, then the other 6 gave me useless Gas Ventricles. Seriously, 6 useless drops in a ROW? Thats definitely not random.

Think of a 3-faced coin. The chance of it landing on 1 "face" is 33%. Then the 2nd time, landing on the same face again is 33% of the first 33%, and so on.

1 time = 33%
2 times = 11%
3 times = 3.5%
4 times = 1%
5 times = 0.3%
6 times = 0.11%

With 0.1 percent odds, I could win the Lottery in real life, get a Dyson from a planet scan here in GL, or succeed several critical hacks and gain enemy planets.

I think it's random, but not necessarily the same odds for everything. Some drops are rarer than others, but it's still random in the sense that nothing you do affects it.

Not true. Each "flip" is completely independent of the previous one. The is no such thing as "law of averages". The numbers you show are only expected, there is no mathematical basis for them.

If I flip a regular coin several times in a row, the odds of me getting heads consecutive times get lower and lower.

1st flip = 50 / 50 chance for heads.

Head
Tail

1 out of 2 odds.

2nd flip = 50 / 50 chance again. 25% chance I'll get heads twice in a row though.

Head -> Head
Head -> Tail
Tail -> Head
Tail -> Tail

1 out of 4 chances for Head -> Head, so thats 25%.

3rd flip = another 50 / 50 chance for heads, but 12.5% chance for 3 heads in a row.

Head -> Head -> Head
Head -> Head -> Tail
Head -> Tail -> Head
Head -> Tail -> Tail
Tail -> Head -> Head
Tail -> Head -> Tail
Tail -> Tail -> Head
Tail -> Tail -> Tail

So 1 out of 8 possibilities for 3 consecutive Head's. So thats 12.5%. And so on for the 4t, 5th, and 6th consecutive flips. How is it independent? Yes, the flip itself is independent, but getting the exact same result (or "face" of the coin) consecutive times isn't independent as demostrated above.

So for the Hive and getting Gas Ventricle 6 times in a row out of 3 possible loot drops for the Hive...

1st kill = 1 out of 3 odds
2nd kill = 1 out of 9 odds
3rd kill = 1 out of 27 odds
4th kill = 1 out of 81 odds
5th kill = 1 out of 243 odds
6th kill = 1 out of 729 odds

If it goes to 10 kills with consecutive ventricle drops for me, that would be roughly 1 out of 55,000 odds. Ridiclious. With these odds, I should be getting Dysons or several good crit hacks + steal planet locations from enemies!

Well, if you look at from the point of "I've already gotten this, so my odds of getting it again are lower" that's incorrect. Say you flip a coin and get heads, your odds of getting heads on the next flip are the same as your odds of getting tails. However, looking at it from the perspective that you will be doing two flips, you then have your expected values.

I agree that Darth Flagitious is incorrect, there is a mathematical basis for them because the expected values come from mathematical probability. And the "law of averages" is just that, as the amount of test cases goes to infinity, the amount of instances of something will match its probability. That being said, 6 test cases is not enough to apply that, you should have at least 30.

I will say again though, I believe your model is incorrect because, while the drop is random, each drop doesn't have the same odds.

That's called the Law of Large Numbers. If given enough samples, the results will trend toward the expected outcome.

Granted it's not a 100% reliable source, but then neither is the GL Forum....
Law of Averages
Law of Large Numbers


You are working on the assumption that just because there are 3 possible drops there is an equal probability of receiving each item (ie 33.3333..%) Other than Dan & Co, who is to say the probability of receiving a defense utricle isn't .0001% compared to 99.99% for the gas ventricle (with the other item rounding out it out with .0099%) ??

You are confusing ODDS and PROBABILITY. I will grant that the ODDS of drawing the same artifact X times in a row will decrease, but the PROBABILITY that you receive a particular item does not change. It will ALWAYS be Z% EACH TIME.

Let's assume that the Gas Ventricle is set at 70% in the RNG... Each time you kill that particular NPC you have a 7 in 10 chance of drawing a GV.

1st kill = 7:10
2nd kill = 7:10
3rd kill = 7:10
4th kill = 7:10
5th kill = 7:10

After 5 kills you have a total of 35 chances out of a possible 50 of getting the GV. 35/50 = 70%

Given your Hive situation, what's to say that your next 13 don't drop an utricle? Gives you 14 out of 20. There's your 70%... No different than if the order you got the 14 in was completely unpatterned.

The Goddess does not have a memory, she just likes pissing with your head....

wow you guys are making my head hurt.

i tend to think it is completely random as much as its annoying that i might do 45% damage and still get the relatively low end artifact.

a bigger issue to me is how to improve chances of sharable elites - i go thru the npc battles alot and still have gotten no elites in at least 3 weeks if not a month. I have improved scan given some claim this helps but still no luck. I'm not the brain you guys are tho so i may still not be optimizing damn if i know based on what i've read.

Wow, I thought that's what the "Law of Averages" meant. Alright, then you got me on that, I assumed they meant this "Law of Large Numbers," which is true, and they just didn't realize that a few samples isn't a large number.

even with large samples, samples tend to be hand-picked to illustrate a point. if say the odds of you not getting a certain drop 30 times in a row is 1% then it isn't often mentioned that you have actually killed many many more of that NPC in the past that are selectively omitted from the larger, more accurate sample. The percentage of that streak ever happening, go up enough that is bound to happen to a certain percentage of people. With the number of types of bad luck streaks one can have in this game, you can rest assured that you will experience quite a few and even some that seem freakishly unlikely. Once you have to use scientific notation to express how unlikely it is, like with the cloaked planets before that update, then you probably will have a really good point.

I fought 7 Hives since I passed rank 200 and became able to see them. The first one gave me the defense utricle, then the other 6 after that gave me the gas ventricles. I haven't seen a 8th Hive yet. What bugs me the most is that all the other players who got loot drops from these 7 Hives got roughly equal numbers of gas ventricles, defense utricles, and energy hubs (all 3 loot drops). So I'm getting shafted by getting the least useful drop 6 times in a row while everyone else isn't within my legion.

Yes, that's true too.