Loot Crate System

[Galen_Thalheimer]

I want to point out that you suggest that the system should stray from true randomness, right after saying it's currently not true random anyway. 
Anyway the good thing about randomness based drops is the lack of anticipation, imo it's important to keep anticipation low.

With that statement, it's clear you don't understand the situation.

Computer random number generators are usually only pseudorandom. If you feed the same seed into them, you get the same sequence every single time. The only way to eliminate that is to use different seed values (which hopefully the devs are already doing) or to have the underlying software pull from a random pool of data. NI runs on Linux servers, I believe, so this is usually done via a pool in /dev/random. However, if the amount of random data in that pool runs out, the random data call will still give you a value, but it's now longer random. They have found in the last few years that this pool was depleting far more than thought on normal systems, and it's even worse in shared server situations (because more processes are running pulling from the pool) and then even worse in VM'ed OSes (which is how most servers run these days; because the actual things that generate the raw data aren't part of a VM so entropy of the pool is much lower already). And I'd be willing to bet that Warband makes heavy use of the random number system in general, due to the way aiming works plus all the bot AI, all of which can deplete the pool.

What is supposed to happen is that if you look at the distribution of random numbers coming out, NI would limit that pool to the number of players, so there are say 16 bins. Over time, those bins should be filled equality with number of times they were picked. However, the generator in NI could be starting with either the same seed (probably not), with a diminished pool of entropy (probably, but I don't know the server code or the OS/language versions or the server setup), or with restarting the generator each round. This means that the distribution won't necessarily trend towards even, especially in the short term.

While it can be that some players just don't get much, no player should be going rounds and rounds of playing and not get anything while others are getting a lot. I know I've played for hours at a time with full servers and not gotten any drops, while other players on the same server have gotten many. I know I'm not alone in that experience.

My solution is to keep the randomness in the type of drop given, but remove the randomness in the distribution. NI is a team game, so all alive players should be sharing in the drops gained, not relaying on the server pseudorandom number generator to give that distribution.