Each professions has a different system in place which I believe work thusly...
MINING
Mining claims used to be "in the ground". This was provable back when you actually had to run and claim your deed after the detector found it because multiple avatars could find the same claim in the ground.
These days because there's so much vast space across a growing number of planets it's no longer feasible to handle mining this way so I believe claims are generated more on the fly when probes are dropped. Which is why you can just run in small 100m circles repeatedly dropping probes and hitting like 20 - 30 claims in a very small area.
Though I do think that there is an element of location that matters with this - not just for determining the types of resources found but the multipliers / SOTO's applied. Perhaps there are floating areas in the game which are set as "hot" areas that have a greater chance for success in finding something and possibly larger multipliers being applied. But whether this is intentional or just an anomaly as part of a RNG - we'll never know. I figure multipliers are handled in a similar fashion to hunting and crafting as outlined below.
CRAFTING
Crafting I believe has nothing to do with location and everything to do with the timestamp of the successful crafting attempt.
Each click goes through a specific process of checks and adjustments to determine the payout. For starters it calculates whether you're going to succeed of fail based on your skill level, your % of success with that BP and where your condition slider is. If it's a fail the process stops right there. If it's a "success" if then goes to the server for a multiplier.
One thing to mention is "near successes" ARE successes. They are just multipliers less than 1.0 and only multipliers higher than 1.0 will result in the item actually being created. This is why you will NEVER see a success for less than the TT cost to make something and you will NEVER see a near success with a value greater than the TT cost to craft something.
Anyways, the system feeds out multipliers in order whenever someone has a success (or near success). The multiplier is about about 0.05 - 1300x of TT value to craft which can then be multiplier more (up to 7.69x) based on where your condition slider is (to a max of about 10,000), of course this also affects if you will even have a success to begin with. I'm not 100% sure on the min and max multipliers but I've never seen a near success lower than 5% of the TT value or a max higher than 10,000x the TT value. Also, should the payout be less than 1 pec the system will round down and count it as a fail. This is why EP lvl 1's have horrible returns on QTY. Because not only do you need to pass the "success" check you also need the system to issue a multiplier of at least 0.5 to even get a loot.
This multiplier is issued is generally random but has waves of adjustments to keep the payout % the same over time much like a slot machine or like when shooting a gun.
With the example of the gun, try tracking your miss(evade) rate. In general it likes to float around 90% hit rate. And you'll see that you never really get more than a couple % above or below that line before the system tries to adjust.
If you've got a hit rate of 92% all of a sudden you'll start getting back to back to back evades for a while till it evens out your hit rate back to 90%. Or if you're down to 88% you'll start not missing for a long time.
So when you see someone HoF 3 seconds before you're crafting attempt finishes just think that would have been your hof if the crafting attempt finished first and was a "success".
Finally I believe that the average multipliers issued by the server are also affected by checks and balances to ensure there is a certain number of various things in game. IE If there is a short supple of available mining amps in world, the average multiplier for those items will be much closer to 1.0 for a period of time to allow more frequent success to allow those items to be created more easier and keep a balance of the available items in game. This also works the other way in trying to stifle production. Like with Mod Evil's... I imagine the average multiplier is lowered after each success for a number of days/weeks/months to keep the flow of new mod evils to a specific level over time.
I was working on a basic formula of how this works the other day using coding logic and came up with something like this:
Code:
[FONT=Calibri]// Set Success Rate[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]SuccessRate = BlueprintSuccessRate / SliderScale[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]// Determine Success Or Failure[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]SuccessFailure = rnd(1, 100);[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]if SuccessFailure > SuccessRate {[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]Attempt = "Failure";[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]} else {[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]Attempt = "Success";[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]}[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]if (Attempt == "Success") {[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]// Determine Multiplier:[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]BaseMultiplier = GetBaseMultiplier(0.05 - 1300);[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]FinalMultiplier = BaseMultiplier * SliderScale(1.0 - 7.69);[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]// Determine Result Type[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]if (BaseMultiplier < 1) {[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]ResultType = "Near Success";[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]else {[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]ResultType = "Success";[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]}[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]Payout ();[/FONT]
[FONT=Calibri]}[/FONT]
HUNTING
Hunting I'm still trying to nail down my exact beliefs for how it works. But as of lately my belief centers around that the multiplier is in the mob itself.
I lot goes into calculating the payout from a mob... It's not just HP but also damage the creature does. The best example/hint we have towards this is the poptropia shop. You can actually see the HP, damage and loot potential of each of the mobs available for purchase for instances:
http://poptropia.com/mobs.html
Note that it's not just the mob with the highest HP that have the best loot potential. In some cases even the higher maturity with 30% more HP has the same loot potential as lower maturity.
As was mentioned, in terms of what the loot actually is there are lots of checks an balances in place that affect drop rate of items. Obviously, every mob has it's own loot table of rare things it can loot. And the bigger and badder the maturity in general the better your chances at that rare loot it seems. Assuming there is a big different in HP and damage done with the higher maturity.
But if you're just talking about TT value of loots - I think it's similar to crafting where the system generates the multiplier when the creatures are spawned (0.05 - 1300x cost to kill). Note that I believe they have a specific formula for determining the average of a creatures "cost to kill" which is applied as a general rule and not per avatar.
I don't believe that the payout is calculated on the fly based on YOUR personal cost to kill something. Otherwise that could easily be exploited by shooting a mob down to almost no HP, then letting it regen, shooting it down again. Over and over and over till you've put in 100x what the cost to kill that thing should be in the hopes of gaming the system to giving you bigger loot.
Anyways, the reason why I feel the multiplier is in the mob is because of what I've seen. I've seen groups where people at one end of a spawn are hitting back to back globals while people at the other end are hitting nothing. And I've also had it happen a good number of time where I've seen two new spawns of something appear in front of me and both have been globals. Whether killed back to back or with kills in between.
Most recently I had back to back hofs on crabs. And both these mobs spawned on my at the same time. Killed them back to back and got 2 hofs over 500 ped on both.
In terms of the mobs and maturities... I don't think it's so much that some mobs are "hot" and some are not. I think it's a matter of what's being cycled. Or rather what's having a steady flow of kills and new mobs spawned. The system will only spawn new mobs of the same type to what's been killed. IE you kill 100 atrox here don't expect 100 bery's to spawn somewhere else. And with those new spawns bring new multipliers based on checks and balances to ensure the proper payout %. Of course this can be varied too based on item drop frequency... if some ESI's need to drop then mobs that drop ESI's regularly will start dropping them.
I think maturity can act similar to the condition slider in crafting. Where as your loots with swing wildly but you've got the chance to get a much bigger loot hunting the larger maturity. However, the larger multipliers are not guaranteed. I think it's more like MA spawns higher multipliers when they want. And as new mobs spawn it's random as to if they are going to spawn a young or mature and with that it's also random whether that spawn will have a higher multiplier. If it's determined by their system that it's time to drop a higher multiplier the range of that multiplier will be affected by the maturity they are spawning.
In other words... a young might only have a max multiplier of 1000, mature = 2000, old = 3000...etc.
Anyways a long winded read but this is basically what I believe after 10 years of playing. Though I wouldn't consider myself an "uber".
