So I been on a BL break for a long while. While I was gone I played a lot of Genshin Impact. I found it to be a great game with many fatal flaws. Most of which are flaws “by design” as part of the money trap that is that type of gacha game.
One of the primary flaws that drove me away was weighted stats. As if RNG wasn’t bad enough Genshin weights the stats against you such that the bad stats everyone hates have a much greater chance of ending up on gear than the desirable stats. This made gear farming a nightmare but I’m sure makes them a lot of money from the gacha system. So to me Genshin is not a true RNG system.
This experience got me thinking about BL in general but TTW and BL3 specifically. Does anyone know if the stats in BL are truly RNG or is there some hidden weighted system on top of it to drag out the farming process? There isn’t the same direct monetary gain in BL that Genshin has but BL does plenty of other things to stretch out the game and force you to endlessly farm so I don’t think it would be an unreasonable assumption that there might be something like this in BL as well.
Is anyone aware of anything like this in BL games?
As a sort of side note to this but completely anecdotal it sure seems like enchants are heavily favored to action skills over spells. Only noticing this because I’m using ambi-hextrous so the action skill enchants are worthless to me and I rarely see enchants for spell casts (especially on spells):
Years ago in BL3 I did something like 500 runs at Graveward tracking every drop and it was pretty obvious that the drops are weighted. The excessively high drop rate of the Woodblocker is meme worthy.
Yeah I’m aware of the Woodblocker drops among others that didn’t seem to follow a pure RNG rule but that was in the category RNG for the item itself. What I’m talking about here are the stats on items. I guess you can make an assumption that RNG for stats follows the same rule as RNG for items but I don’t know.
For instance there seems to be a more than random chance to get some sort of “melee” type stat on items than other stats. Maybe that isn’t true and it just feels like it. I don’t know but in Genshin it is actually known that less desirable stats are weighted so you see them all the time on items causing an endless cycle of farming.
narfkeks
(May this forum rest in peace - Davin Dittrich)
#7
There is actually quite a bit of depth and purpose to the way drops are weighted in BL3 as it doesn’t make sense to have for example pistols drop at the same rate as rocket launchers. But additionally there are weapons that - at least originally - were weighted higher in the world drop pool so, among those the ■■■■… I mean Woodblocker. But in general the weighting is rather favorable for the player as without it anointments would drop equally for all classes, as would class mods. But your currently played Vault Hunter gets - if I remember correctly - around 40% of the drops in that regard instead of the 25% you’d get otherwise.
Unfortunately there has been a debate for years as to the state of anointments as some say they were weighted towards action skill anointments and some say that they aren’t. I personally can’t say as there are way too many anointments to keep track of that.
Genshin doesn’t really force you to farm for the best stats, none of the content is really difficult enough to require it. People just want those perfect stat rolls for the sake of it, but it’s mostly just overcompensation. With proper team synergy/element matching you can coast by with builds with at least above average stat rolls.
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VaultHunter101
(So long, and thanks for all the fish)
#9
^ So much this. Given the very large anointment pool, the only way to get a handle on this would be to compile a truly massive quantity of stats and do the analysis. I’ve done some crazy analysis in the past, and there are forum members who went way beyond anything I did, but the number of anointments makes this a ridiculous task.
So in the meantime, we’re left with observation/confirmation bias on small sample sizes (even if they get into the hundreds, they’d still be too small). Statistics is a bitch.
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narfkeks
(May this forum rest in peace - Davin Dittrich)
#10
Just to show how absurd of an undertaking this would be: Due to the amount of anointments in the game, even with all other factors disabled, it would take over 100.000 rolls to even get a rough estimate and to get out reliable numbers we would probably have to go past 1 million rolls. And as determined the community might be, this is just too much to ask from anyone in my opinion.
So we will more or less need data pulled directly from the game files of the loot generation system itself to get a clear answer.
You are talking about item rarity itself but I’m talking about the RNG of stats on items. Like is it pure RNG if a +melee stat is added to an item or does it have more weight than say +crit chance because obviously +crit chance is more desirable so by weighting +melee it makes the more desirable stat harder to get even beyond what a pure RNG system would have.
That may be true but without min/maxing stats there isn’t a lot to do in Genshin. I mean if you get Zhongli it’s like an “i win” button regardless of gear so I get your point but people like to “progress” their characters and the only way to do that is to perfect your gear.
Ok, but I wasn’t even really talking about anointments or enchantments. I’m talking about the other stats on gear. +melee vs. crit chance or crit damage. Are those stats on gear determined by pure RNG or are they weighted such that the more desirable stats are less likely than others? I think some items always have certain stats present (like on legendary gear) so I’m not counting those but of the stats that are just purely on gear by RNG is it weighted or not?
We likely have the same issue of crazy analysis with these stats as with anointments but wasn’t sure if anyone had ever cracked the code or done any interesting analysis pointing in a particular direction.
VaultHunter101
(So long, and thanks for all the fish)
#12
Same issue - we’ll likely never know unless someone wants to put a LOT of time and effort into collecting the data. My sense is that, besides the fixed parts on certain legendary or other red text items, it’s all equally weighted. Two reasons for saying that: firstly, the number of times I’ve seen screenshots of items with bonus stats that make absolutely zero difference because of some other feature of the weapon. And second, because implementing any kind of weighting system (which could also potentially prevent the silly stats/anointments situation) would just add extra complexity to an already complex system - I just don’t see the programmers going that deep on this.
Weighting the RNG wouldn’t prevent what you are saying. Weighting it just makes it more likely for some stats and less likely for others but there is still an RNG element that can overcome the weighting of the stats. As to the complexity I don’t think it adds much complexity. Even back in early Everquest days I had a raiding guild and we used a weighted DKP system for raid loot. It’s not that difficult to implement so I doubt it would be much complexity programmatically.
That being said the one thing I think that keeps me from having a strong conviction that stats are weighted in BL is just the sheer number of stat combinations. That alone is probably enough to just keep good stats from appearing in a configuration that you may want so weighting the stats on top of that might be redundant.
VaultHunter101
(So long, and thanks for all the fish)
#14
I guess my argument would be that if a developer is going to go to the trouble of weighting parts, why would they not go the extra step of also avoiding weird combos.
If you are to believe that a company intentionally makes it difficult to acquire perfectly rolled items by whatever means (RNG, weighted RNG etc…) then you can easily believe that “weird combos” of stats furthers that strategy of prolonging gameplay with less than ideal stat combinations that requires people to keep farming.
Imo, there’s no point in progressing when there’s no obstacle to overcome, especially when it’s not even “fun” to farm for perfect gear. People like to complain about how bad drop rates are when at the end of the day, their frustration is their own fault. It’s not worth it, just to be one of those people posting screenshots of their characters doing millions of damage or videos of them clearing the abyss using only a single character per team.
Like everything it’s on a spectrum. Some people enjoy perfecting their gear as a form of “progression”. MMOs are typically built upon this type of gear progression. I agree that some might take it to the extreme but who are you (or me) to say this is wrong or not fun. However, in Genshin it’s hard to even put together gear that just makes logical sense (with respect to stats) let alone “perfectly rolled” gear. The reason for that is the weighted stats. I wouldn’t complain about RNG but weighting the ■■■■■■ stats on top of RNG is not too cool and worthy of complaint IMO.
narfkeks
(May this forum rest in peace - Davin Dittrich)
#18
It’s part of the same system, which we know the rough workflow of:
If the game determines you get a drop it seems to first take a rarity of the drop, then the item type, then the manufacturer, then the parts (OR in case it rolled legendary as rarity it rolls the legendary item first, then it’s parts). There is a weighting in place with parts, but it seems to be primarily depending on the parts’ manufacturer and seems to vary even between guns of the same manufacturer.
For example the famous matching grip seems to be slightly less likely than average on some weapons as far as I have heard, which is funny as in many cases the matching grip in Borderlands 3 is not even the ideal version unlike in BL2 where it was best in slot in the majority of cases. But overall it seems to be rather random which part is more or less likely on what item. You would basically have to test all primary items for yourself, but I can’t say that I’ve heard of any extreme cases.
In the case of some legendaries people have looked into the stats and how likely it is to get a certain part, but in BL3 specifically parts of legendaries have been far less variable than before with some legendaries only having 1 part that can even change (or only 1 stat that can vary), like the Bloom for example.
What makes me believe that weighting - if it is done intentionally - would be almost irrelevant for modern Borderlands games is that the amount of part combinations goes into the billions, even if you take out the most variable category of class mods, is so immense that no one of us has even the slightest chance to ever see even 10% of all combinations, probably not even 1%.
What I could see is weighting as a tool to keep a healthy amount of item drops with non-fantastical effects dropping by lowering the chance to see laser barrels or stuff like that, so that the player isn’t overwhelmed with crazy ■■■■ too quickly during their first playthrough (which is by far the most important one and most people never even start a second. Hell, most people don’t finish the first playthrough). But thats just speculation on my part.
Yeah I forgot about how the different manufacturer parts worked in BL. That is sort of a defacto weighted system in and of itself I think. Thanks for the info. That is a pretty informative breakdown.
I’m not saying it’s wrong or not fun. I’m infering that it’s not fun for people who do farm for perfect gear based on how many complain about it, hence the quotes around the word fun. What I am saying is that there is nothing in Genshin that requires you to farm for perfect gear. And the complaints about drop rates and weighted stats tells me it’s not even worth trying, this is just basic inference on my part. I’m not saying they can’t criticize it, but it doesn’t change the fact that they only have themselves to blame when they choose to subject themselves to it.
Farming for good stats + the right set bonuses is one thing, but If all you care about are stats, it really isn’t hard to build a character. You can just cobble together random 5-star artifacts with the best stats on them. The Gladiator set is one example of an artifact that just piles up in your bag because of how easy it is to get. I have dozens of them with amazing stat rolls.
