Loot Crate System

[Kaasovic]

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.

With that statement, it's clear you didn't put much thought in the non-ideal cases. Round robin implementations of distributed handlers usually have holes (e.g. sending/queueing jobs to worker machines). First, the results will heavily depend on the scope of the distributed handler. Even if the scope is the simplest scenario of a single game where nobody dies/leaves and rejoins/crashes/whatever, the best case is the number of items (I) dropping modulo number of players (P) is 0 (M), then everyone gets the same amount. In the case where the modulo is not zero, then P - M players get 1 fewer item than M players.

The simplest scenario in which the result isn't ideal is if a player is dead when the distributed handler points to them, then they get skipped in the revolution. Maybe you meant that you use that player's index as a pivot position where while they get no drops, everyone else positions in the queue in front of them, so the dead player is next when alive. But in this case, if a full revolution is made by the distributed handler then the skipped players will get more than one fewer item.

This also leaves multiple huge ways to exploit the system. If the distributed handler does not reset on player crash/suicide, then just join on the early 3n + 1 waves, spawn and suicide before you get any loot. At this point, everyone else is getting items,  and then spawn and play wave 10 or 13 and onward to guarantee multiple consecutive items from the distributor when the drops are better.

P.S. Then The Night King took out a spear and threw it at Viserion, killing it.

It doesn't keep count of who got what. It would distribute based on who's alive. That's what it current does anyway. Only those alive can get drops and it's "random" between those who do. Dead people don't earn things. Keeping an ordered list wouldn't change that fact. It just rolls through the people alive at the time, it's not a forced distribution to keep everyone equal in total. Clearly you didn't understand it.

1-2-3-4-5-6-7
A-D-S-A-D-A-A
-----------^-----

Pointer is sitting at player 5 who is dead. Next drop goes to 6 since 5 is dead, then 7, then 1, then 4 since 2 is dead and 3 is spectator. If someone state is changed, then that affects how they are handled when their "turn" is up next. If there is only two players alive, then they would split all the remaining drops till next spawn, just like it is now, except it would be an enforced split, instead of potentially one person getting all or most of it. It's a team game, it should team rewards.



PS If you're a troll who likes to spoil things for people they enjoy, then you need to find more fulfilling hobbies that don't rely on taking away from others.

So if only one player is alive he would get all the drops, 100% of the time? That doesn't sound very team based and kinda induces people to let the team wipe then kite for the loot.