Patch 59 - Sept 9, 2008

[Derrick]

• New Tip Of The Day system with old scroll style messages.

One one character thi screen always comes up no matter how many times I might try to click the hide on startup button. All my other characters don't get any sort of hints page. Thoughts?

Aye, those buttons don't work since the client side support for this menu was disabled when it was removed. You'll have to issue the [notips command in game to not receive the tips window. The tips for your other chars were likely disabled via out previous tips window.

I should have put this in the patch notes:
[tips - Shows a tip of the day, and enables tips on login
[notips - disables tips on login

[eyesdearth]

The drop rate has nothing to do with replicating the actual numbers, it has to do with replicating the drop percentage that was seen on OSI (with vanquishing at about 1% of the drops in circumstances where one could be found at all). Whether your server has 20 or 2 million people, a 2% drop rate for vanquishing weapons will be proportional to the other server, given proportionally equal iterations. The only difference between servers would be the percentage of time that their population spent actually farming (i.e. 20% of the population spent 100% of their time farming, 20% spent 50% of their time farming, etc.). That particular peice of information is unique to each server, and the drop rates were derived from the averages from all servers (initially on OSI it would have obviously had to come from the beta servers).

If a server has 2 million people, then the drop rate is probably determined mainly by the monster spawn rate, because people will be over-camping the spawns and they will be at saturation. There will be no missed opportunities. All drops which could exist in an arbitrary time interval do exist.

If a server has 20 people, then the drop rate is determined as you say, because there aren't enough people to keep the spawn points refreshing at maximum possible frequency. There will be many missed opportunities, and those monsters not killed in an interval will not drop anything. Many drops which could exist nevertheless don't because nobody was there to cause them. Any server which can maintain this trend and not the one just above will be as you say, scale-similar. The OSI servers failed to maintain this trend, and were victim of a tragedy of the commons. The best spots were over-camped and many could never realistically get a drop from them no matter how committed they were to doing so, just due to the many other people trying to do the same thing.

The OSI servers hit a ceiling, and this server won't at the current population, monster spawn rate, or drop rate. The ceiling influenced the rarity of the special drops out of proportion to the ideal metric you describe. From a player perspective it is of course a Good Thing that this server lacks a population-induced problem that OSI had, but it is nevertheless a difference and adds up to era-inaccuracy, and rares being less rare in the way I described.

This is conceptually akin to the fact that if you want use miniatures to make realistic special effects in movies, you also need to scale down the laws of physics, usually done (imperfectly but adequately) by using high-speed film.

Population density of a server causes certain problems which can't be replicated in a straightforward way. There are certain ways that a low-population server can never be like a high-density server it seeks to mimic, without artificial assistance that breaks from the configuration of the original server. In a case like that, is the configuration more important, or is the result? The result is what the players see.