TARichter

I just don't particularly understand why loot is this way currently. I personally stopped playing because honestly chasing a build was taking long periods of time to get any piece because there was no real way for me to chase anything specific and my luck feels extra trash even running 90 luck. I recall spending about a week and a half trying for the life of me to get a mw component for ranger as well as I still have never seen a last argument or a single mw light machine gun which were my favorite weapons all the way up to when I started gm1.

I just sincerely hope the team understands the problem. I can't speak for everyone but for me getting anything I want feels unattainable and ending a mission with a barren rewards screen after I salvaged everything is about the worst I've felt in these types of games.

As a comparison in td2 I'll run around for an hour or two and then have to pick through my inventory to clean it out after all 100 slots of my inventory fill. It's certainly not all good but I'll walk away with a generous amount to tinker with and it's enough that I can keep chasing for the perfect piece. That alongside recalibration really lets me feel like creating my perfect build is attainable.

I think we understand what some of the core issues are... there's a huge problem with variance for example... with a large enough sample "everything is working fine". But the issue there is that that isn't the case for people actually playing the game... you don't get thousands of drops in a night for example - so statistics aren't really comforting there.

So longer term fixes to the base system will likely include reducing variance and narrowing the band between "lucky" and "unlucky" people.

Paul_Indrome

Speaking in my function as a programmer: That doesn't really sound like a simple bug anymore. That almost sounds like a fundamentally broken system in need of re-implementation from scratch. I am not meaning any offense and I'm just speaking from experience. When I try to adjust a system to correct a misbehavior and it takes me longer than a week working within the established confines, I start to seriously consider rewriting it from the ground up.

It has some development overhead but in the end it saves on HOURS of unnecessary debugging and builds on previously acquired knowledge, allowing a forward-thinking approach to its scalability.

Yep, and that's something we're considering. "Rewriting Loot" isn't a quick thing though... so regardless of whether or not we want to proceed with that, we're still left with this annoying bug that we want to fix. 😊

[deleted]

[deleted]

It's ok, like I said... I understand that people are frustrated.

I'm definitely not the right person to get into the conversation about how we got here... All I can promise to do, is to raise it - and we'll have to see what happens there.

braddeus

Well, it's two separate issues... and I don't think changing drop rates would be a good fix for the bug.

I would agree. However, what are your (I say "your" but of course mean the devs as a group) thoughts on changing drop rates being a good thing for the game itself?

That's a much larger conversation... we're currently having a lot of internal discussions on the future of loot and progression and this is tied up a lot in that.

Gildian

If the drop chance for legendaries/mw for other javelins is a low chance and not some other issue, raising the drop rate will indirectly fix that.

In D3 you can always get legendaries from other classes but you get so much loot it doesnt matter in the end and it feels ok.

It would, but as I mentioned in the other reply - it still leaves us with an unknown bug in our systems... and who knows what other issues that might cause as we continue along.

berninhell

I appreciate your responses. My last response was cheeky and lighthearted fun, but to be serious for a moment, the lemon drop rate in GM3 content appears to .. have an issue beyond just RNG that exacerbates issues like the one discussed here. I posted a bit about it here if you are interested:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheGame/comments/b6gyih/i_might_be_the_luckiest_guy_on_earth_in_anthem/ejkhq6q/?context=3

Why don't you think that changing the lemon drop rate (even if just on GM3) would be an acceptable solution?

Edit: and to be super clear, by drop rate, I don't mean raining more loot, I mean increasing the chance that the loot that does drop is lemon drop quality. I've seen some dev comments in the past where the issue between loot frequency and loot quality seems to have been a bit confused.

Yeah, I know you were messin' around - I usually avoid joking around too much as it can get taken out of context 😊.

Why don't you think that changing the lemon drop rate (even if just on GM3) would be an acceptable solution?

Well... it's more that there's a bug in the way that loot is selected, and it's not working correctly. Adjusting the drop rate in response to that would be addressing the symptom - not the root cause. There are cases where you might want to do something like that... but generally, it's best to address the root problem.

blue_nation

Ah yes the good ol' non-answer answer

Not sure what you want man...

I literally cannot say more than I just did. I get that you're frustrated, I am too... but this doesn't really help. 🙁

DisposableTowel710

When are you guys going to start a PTR to beta test patches and prevent these issues from recurring???

Quite bluntly it seem foolish to not have a PTR at all. These patch gafs are doing a lot of harm to Anthem and its reputation.

It is very frustrating to me because these issues seems easily avoided.

Clearly your test setups are not catching bugs that only manifest "in the wild." A PTR is the obvious solution this problem.

Also I noticed the "fix" for the armor bug is that is now forced to visual only all the time. People not understanding this may be incorrectly telling you it is still bugged dur to perceptual bias.

It would be worth explaining you can see your full amount of health pips when taking damage. The pip shadows are fleeting and you have to pay attention to notice them.

I don't disagree with what you're saying.

I can't comment specifically on a player test environment - but I think we are in agreement that it would be good to have one set up.

berninhell

Yeah... We can haz more lemon drops then? :0

Well, it's two separate issues... and I don't think changing drop rates would be a good fix for the bug.

There are separate conversations going on about loot. 😊

TwiistedTwiice

It would be amazing if you could put the weather forecast in the news updates upon loading the game.

Good idea! I'll forward it along 😊

WillShakeForFood

I appreciate the heads-up on why you guys think it might be. Really prefer that way of answering to just seeing "working on it". 😁

Good to know! I can try to provide more context in the future (when I know it 😊).

berninhell

The issue doesn't appear to exist for legendary gear, just legendary components. Looks like the change to include universal components in the loot tables opened the door to all components being in there, but holy moly, why is it so heavily weighted against the javenlin you are playing? It's maddening. BTW, it wouldn't be an issue at all if the drop rate for legendaries were reasonable (like 1 every GM3 legendary contract/mission/SH).

Well, the crappy thing is that if the filtering isn't working... Then you really only have a 1/4 chance of getting the drop for your current suit 🙁

artanb88

Thank you very much from a mass effect trilogy lover here 😁

Nice! Lot of fond memories working on and playing those games! 😊

octa01

Thanks for coming into the sub to answer questions, Brenon. Does this confirm the constant rain was unintended? There is a significant contingent of the fans, myself included, that thought the bad weather was a buildup to a special event/new stronghold/cataclysm/story. Now I feel silly :)

Not unintended, it was just part of the weather forecast. There's a background simulation layer for weather that determines what the weather will be for the next while. 😊

I'm not at work yet, but I could do look and tell you what the weather would be like this weekend for example.

artanb88

And what do you think about getting the same 2-3 legendarys All the time? Rng or Somthing else? I play on ps4 with a Group of people (7-10) and all of us have this "problem". Thanks

We're still looking into it, it's theoretically possible that it's just RNG... But given the reports, that seems unlikely. So... Still investigating!

Naoghas

Thank you for clarification. Hopefully you find a solution soon :)

Me too! This bug in particular really sucks. 😊

Not intended, we're still looking into why this is happening. We've narrowed it down significantly (current thinking is that it may be related to how loot tables are filtered).

fanny_bandito

Hi there, Brenon. This is only somewhat tangentially related to the hotfix, but I was wondering if you might be able to shed some light on Stronghold chests and the fact that embers are now included in the loot pool. The perception of the player-base is that by adding embers to the pool, the chance of seeing a masterwork or legendary has been reduced due to the fact that ember drops appear to be replacing actual gear drops.

It's hard to judge this change objectively without knowing how this all works under the hood, but on its face, it seems to run contrary to the prior changes to loot that were implemented previously.

For example, let's just say that GM2 received a 20% buff to the drop chance of masterwork and legendary items. If that was then followed by a change to Stronghold chests where we receive only 70% as many gear drops coming from chests, then we're actually worse off than we were before as far as the chest rewards are concerned.

I've heard of it, but I don't have any context for the change. I'll poke around and get back to you.

xMateo619x

Is there any info on flight times being shorter?

I know theres less rain but shouldnt the flight time with no rain after the patch feel similar to when it was raining pre patch?

We're looking into it now... flight duration was numerically increased by about 25%. Doing vanilla before/after tests, this seems to be working correctly.

We're investigating if it's an issue with some of the flight boosting stats.

Beyond that, it could also be due to the long bout of rainy weather we've had... since that reduces heat buildup by around 35%.

sbear37

My man, it is definitely not fixed yet.

Ok, thanks! I'll make sure the gameplay team is aware we're still seeing this in live. 😊