Econ-Friday Ranting 09/18/26

“The reason why the Loot-Grinder Style of instant gratification and availability of new gear works differently in older games is because the accompanying structures of secondary sources have a different simulant model than just the Pity Drop due to tradeable aspects.”

Continuing the trend of increasingly technical rants, today we’ll go into some statistics, though I’ll downplay the specific mathematical aspects of it, with the expectation that most designers of games with good combat balance or enemy encounters have a good enough grasp of those basics to follow along, and that players who are serious about Econ things understand most of the math ‘intuitively’.

There are many reasons why a simulated droprate cannot properly represent the type of ‘reality’ most Fantasy games are aiming to. Even Survival games tend to rely on more ‘real’ systems of Supply for items of various types. This is why a certain claim made recently by Throne and Liberty effectively ‘couldn’t work’, why a certain older event in Final Fantasy 11 was ineffective at its goal, and why for some players, Black Desert Online can’t maintain its ‘charm’ even as a Loot Grinder.

Simulated Droprates are governed primarily by statistics, and statistics, particularly Permutational Statistics (droprates across a population) are annoying and streaky to manage for game developers. To save time, here’s a simple example:

Crafting Precious Dual Recovery Crystals, Throne and Liberty

When crafting these items, the displayed chances for the outcome of ‘produced Sellable version’ for me is about 5%. 1 in 20, or in TTRPG terms, 1d20. The displayed chance, if we make a ‘strange’ assumption, that there’s a bug preventing a certain bonus from being applied, is 1%, 1d100.

My most recent crafting session of 100+ attempts yielded 1 Sellable version, not 5. The hypothesis is that the bug exists, but the amount of crafting required to prove that it exists is not reasonable. The alternate hypothesis is that in the Standard Distribution of results obtained by some population of players each crafting 100 of these, I am in the bottom percentile. Hold that ‘shape’ of experience in your mind for this rant. Everything else relies on it. I crafted 100 times with the goal of getting at least one other sellable version of this item, and did not, and whether or not I continue to craft or stop depends on my hypothesis.

Multiple Input Factor Supply

One of the reasons humans become ‘superstitious’, and make up reasons for outcomes, is that brains are more comfortable with the idea that things are controllable or deterministic at their core, but with too many external factors to control, than they are with the idea that they just happen to be in the bottom percentile in some statistical distribution. It’s literally more comfortable to think ‘Oh it’s early Winter in TL so managing the flame to do the synthesis is harder so my success rate went down’ than it is to go ‘I’m just unlucky’, and the same is even more true for the concept of ‘the Devs made a mistake or are lying about something’.

This fact also gives a benefit, however small, to more complex systems with more inputs to the final result of getting the item. There are certain ‘magic numbers’ in statistics that human brains are ‘happier’ with than others (for example, if you’re the type to trust my experience, 36% is the optimal droprate for anything in that ballpark value, 22% is the ‘next step down’, and 6.7% is better than 5%). Within those different ‘tiers’, people are much happier with a two or even three stage ‘construction’ of a different outcome, than with the raw stats, and this basically requires a Crafting System with multiple inputs and steps. I won’t give another direct example, just some numbers.

A 36% droprate material with a 50% chance of being more useful which is then put through another process with 36% success rate comes out with just about the 6.7% ‘success rate’ that a designer sometimes ‘needs’ to maintain the correct supply balance, but to the player’s mind this usually ‘feels better’ than just having a 6% success rate, provided the game has some reasonable output space for the ‘byproducts’. This applies even more to something like a dungeon drop, because it changes expectations, especially when a multiple-pipeline is involved.

A dungeon or mob that has a 36% chance of dropping some Gold and a 64% chance of dropping just ‘something else not as useful’ is more appealing to a player who likes the experience of fighting it, than one that has a 6% chance of dropping ‘this specific gold ring they want’, even if the process of making that Gold into the ring they want follows the previous example and still ends up only producing the ring about 6% of the time (relative to the number of times they defeat the boss).

This increases drastically when there is any way to sell the intermediate product, and increases even more if there are multiple items involved.

Statistical Simulated Supply

By contrast, a ‘Loot Grinder’ game can’t hold any of the functions required to produce the feeling of this outcome. Everything becomes insular and for most people, more frustrating.

A player who is on the low end of the statistical distribution for a 5% drop in BDO, for example, can spend dozens of hours without getting it. Then a player on the high end can come along, hit it, and go ‘huh this drop is neat, I guess that’s why you farm here?’ and leave.

There are players in TL who I’ve seen claim that they have literally never received a Boss Equipment Selection Chest from the Conquest Participation Reward drop from Boss fights. This makes sense, those Reward Chests are given to everyone, so their odds of dropping the Equipment Selection Chest can’t even be 1% without causing an oversupply, even considering that the results can’t be sold (and even within the new Sealing Key system, still cannot).

Most games deal with this in the simplistic way, when enough players on the ‘high’ end of the distribution have received the item, they update and add new items for them to chase while changing the droprates or handing out the items more directly to the players that were on the lower end, but this doesn’t change the feeling, it just ‘restarts the dice rolling’, presumably in the hope that players will be happier this time around. Yet all this does is generate a constant feeling in many players that the act of trying to get new items isn’t itself ‘fun’.

Economic Incentive Communication Differences

This is the general reason why certain older/Classic games have ‘more’ success longterm than newer/Modern Loot Grinders (or even some that aren’t Loot Grinders but which mismanage the numbers and interactions). A Statistical Simulation of Supply is a poor tool for communicating economic incentives to players compared to the alternative, and I’ll just end with another simple ‘example’.

If I fight 100 Golems and get anywhere between 6 and 50 Golem Fragments, then make between 1 and 30 Golmetal Ingots, I can now decide ‘do I want to try making the Golmetal Ring(s)’ based on how I feel that day. In a game where I can sell some items, even if I can only sell the Ingots, I can ‘cut my losses’ here. The player who has an extremely bad streak and gets only 6 Fragments and somehow, even with 50-50 odds, only gets 1 Golmetal Ingot for the day, is probably frustrated, exhausted, etc, but they are less likely to be ‘blaming the game’ in the same way as the player who fights 120 Golems which supposedly have a 5% droprate and only gets one Ring (in a Loot Grinder style model).

If the player is unable to sell anything except the final Ring (or possibly even that, it’s just that such a system doesn’t usually related to Economy, only to player expectations and enjoyment), the result is the same, but they feel better about it anyway.

This improves further if the player has multiple possible uses for the Golmetal Ingots, even if their odds of success are the same or worse. By providing additional agency, the feelings of success and failure are spread out more than the other approach of ‘wait for saturation and then devalue the item’, allowing the developer to decouple development from the ‘treadmill’ of progression, and this, in turn, hides it from players more effectively, making them less likely to ‘revolt’.

And no one wants their game to be considered ‘revolting’.