As someone who killed tons of small mobs, I can say that there's definitely a time factor to it, I mean there's many factors ofc, but rare loot and good multipliers often come in waves, and your returns largely depend on how many of these waves you can get during a hunting/mining run.
Sure I agree with your experience, but I don't think there is "definitely" a time component.. I could give you the same experience without. Here's what I mean..
If we vastly over-simplify the loot function to something like this: f(x) = Θx where x is TT in and theta is the multiplier for the input, the question becomes, how is theta derived? Consider hunting 5 mobs over time, and these are your returns on those 5 kills (top number is theta):
Code:
0.8 0.3 0.9 2.5 0.4
13:00 13:05 13:10 13:15 13:20
The commonly-held belief is that theta is a product of time, such that e.g. Θ = time * eff * overkill * etc (parameters normalized ofc); in which case I got the 2.5x mult because at 13:15 I happened to loot at the right time in the cycle.
Alternatively, what if theta is calculated from a histogram? E.g. Θ = hist * eff *etc. In this way, theta is calculated with weighted probability based on prior input/output. As my overall returns decrease, probability for mult goes up, and visa-versa. In this case, the 2.5x occurred not because of time, but due to the probability for it being high enough.
A time-based algo would be a pretty bad choice for an RCE, since it could be exploited if one could reasonably predict the cycle peaks, not to mention statistically it would create a lot of disparity between players' returns. Conversely, a histogram-based algo would be significantly easier to regulate and provide a more consistent average return across all players (e.g. loot 2.0), while also being drastically more difficult exploit. NOTE: I am only talking about TT returns... I do think it's fairly obvious that rare loots operate on independent time-based cycles.
And btw, I thought the use of third party software that interferes with the game directly is supposed to be banned, unless it's LBML or the tracker ofc.
It is, and let me clarify my position... I do not condone botting, and I think if someone is clearly caught botting [by MA] they should be penalized as they violate the ToU. What I am "debating" is whether or not we need one of these retarded threads every week. I postulate that a botter does not impact Detritus' gameplay in any way, does not steal loot from me, does not fuck up the economy, does not gain an unfair advantage -
to any greater extent than any other player - thus I could not care less what other players do, I just worry about Detritus. I see these players who decide to put on their sheriff badge and go around policing other player activity as tedious busybodies who need to get a life. More importantly - the game is in a pretty fucking sad state, the infrastructure is still borked with lots of lag and failures still weeks after the breaking VU.. I do NOT want MA to waste their resources investigating botters, I want them focused on fixing the game.