Its not just stompers. Its DP assassins, xala thralls and magus, giants in ravine near the rope bridge. I have hunted all three critters looking for boxes and have got either one or two boxes total in the last three weeks.

Asterid

Also, please remember to watch the conflicts ~Sidatura

Bluefalcon,

<<<But, I was in customer service so my standards are high.>>>

I still am in customer service. I am a supervisor for customer service for an insurance company that was won the JD Power award for customer service for 12 straight years. I totally understand what you saying when you mention your frustration with lack of customer service from Simu. They just dont care about their customers. It would be nice if everyone boycotted for one month just to prove a point.

Not to derail your thread, but I recently had one of the spellbooks/cases from the fest (the expensive one) disappear. I had an assist and was told to write to feedback. I did that which took me sending a second request before I got a response. Their response was you "may have done" with your case, but not definitive. I then wrote back that its impossible for me to do that. No response again, and its been over 4 weeks. They want me to pay $250 for text that they cant find.

But if anyones listening, seriously, three weeks with no boxes, something needs to be looked at.

Asterid

Also, please remember to watch the conflicts ~Sidatura

Let's take a moment to try and clear up a bit of misrepresentation here. I'm saying this at the top: This is blunt speak. Misrepresentations like this happen on the forums, on reddit, in private Discord groups and elsewhere. We often stay silent because the discussions are either not happening in places we have jurisdiction, or there isn't an elegant way of defending ourselves without it coming across as attacking. I do not mean this post as an attack against the player who raised the concern, but I am going to be very blunt with the response as this issue with item loss comes up a fair bit.

Item replacement policies are pretty clear -- they expect some level of personal responsibility in taking care of your stuff. If you DROP something, or SELL it to a pawnshop, or PUT it in a bucket -- mechanics are working as intended when the system deletes the item. It was a bad choice or accident or unfamiliar script or whatever...and that sucks, but the system isn't broken. It didn't behave in an abnormal or unexpected way. It was told to delete a thing, and it did. In those situations, there's no obligation on us to "find" or "fix" anything. I can't stress enough how important it is to keep session logs -- I have every session log since I joined staff in 2003 still (scattered across hard drives in storage, but I have them!). At the very least, while time consuming, they do allow you to track down the last time you had an item and what you did with it.

That said, we have been increasingly lax with the harshness of those policies since item registration has become more widely used, and we've even implemented systems like the Lost and Found to help make the automated janitor more forgiving. If we CAN help a customer out of a bad situation, we often try to do so, even though the policies say "You made a mistake and the system was working as intended, so staff won't replace it." We want you guys to have a good experience, we recognize mistakes happen and it can yank the fun out of things when they do. But again -- there's some personal responsibility here. You have to help us to help you. Item registration takes a snapshot of the item so that we CAN re-create it if we feel a situation warrants it (good behavior, not a pattern of "losing" items, etc). This is even more important with customized things like spellbooks, player crafted items, and alterations that don't come from a standard / accessible shop and can vary from player to player. These snapshots are even more important when any length of time has passed since the last time you interacted with an item -- it is hard, and even impossible after a while, for us to track things beyond certain points.

When we don't have a record to recreate with, that's the end of our hopes to be helpful. At that point, a restoral from Feedback is the option. That takes time -- requesting resources stored offsite, investigations through multiple backups trying to find a particular thing, etc. That's all handled by the folks onsite, not the in-game staff, and they have their own projects and priorities. The restoral fee is for the hoops that they have to jump through to find something lost through normal (non-buggy) game mechanics.

I am sorry you had a bad thing happen to something you valued, truly. It sucks, and absolutely no one is claiming otherwise. But there's only so much we can do when the mechanics are working as intended and when we don't have access to a valid snapshot to recreate with. Misrepresenting the situation as us not being able to find text that was lost through normal game mechanics, whether a mistake or not, isn't fair to the staff who are working very hard on updates to the game, on events, on supporting player groups, and who do their best to resolve these types of situations when they can.

Further discussion on this, if there is any, needs to be in the relevant topic and/or with Feedback -- not in the creature boards.

---

With that out of the way, I've spent the past couple hours combing through treasure mechs. I'm still seeing boxes spawning from the mentioned creatures, none of these specifically named creatures have had any changes recently, and the treasure system hasn't been changed in any meaningful way recently either. I do notice some F2P hunting in the areas -- it may be worth mentioning they get 50% normal box finding chance without the appropriate pass.

Relevant scripts and their last modifications:
Stompers, maulers, head-splitters: Last modified Sat Oct 08 12:25:04 2016
DP Assassins: Last modified Wed Feb 15 09:34:29 2012
Xala'shar Thrall: Last modified Sun Dec 29 04:33:50 2013
Xala'shar Magus: Last modified Fri Aug 30 20:01:38 2019
Sky Giants: Last modified Sun Jun 07 01:14:40 2015

The LOOT verb: Fri Mar 15 16:19:01 2019
The SEARCH verb: Thu Mar 28 12:53:25 2013

The 1st box creation utility: Thu Mar 31 20:12:07 2011
The 2nd box creation utility: Tue Sep 04 11:45:27 2018

The treasure system utility that decides what you get: Sun May 17 12:05:21 2020
^As the most recent update, but still well after the claim of issues from March, this tweak only added a missing BONUS to gem value for the BONUS event (it was triggered in 2 other places, but was missed in a 3rd "leftovers" section). Nothing that would affect box drop chances.


Here's data from the past 4+ hours:

-	# Looted	# Boxes Found	Chance of Box	Live Results
Stompers	645	60	10%	9%
Assassins	426	76	20%	18%
Thralls	444	61	15%	14%
Magus	278	53	15%	19%
Giants	106	13	20%	12%

It's a small sample size so far, but this doesn't look alarmingly out of whack to the levels being claimed. The magus creatures are doing above-average in this particular sample, and giants are below-average, but not wildly for small samples. I'm not seeing what you're seeing.

So that leads me to wonder -- could you be using a wrong LOOT command? Are you sure the LOOT you're using is specifically looking for boxes and not ignoring them? If you're using TREASURE or EQUIPMENT, you won't get boxes.

Zadraes

Just based on that table, assassins still seem off:

-	# Looted	# Boxes Found	Chance of Box	Live Results
Assassins	918	150	20%	16.3%

That gives us a margin of error of +/- 2.39% or an expected drop rate value between 18.69 - 13.91.

---

TG, TG, GL, et al.

"Disagreement with the fundamental plan at this point is akin to supporting Richard III vs the Tudors." -Raesh

Just want to clarify, I didn't want to suggest that there was anything buggy, but that the data seemed off. Being off because of grabbing wider data than you intended from different critters/players (F2P) makes sense, and with the updated table, the logged values are all within margin of error of references, even if it shows a little on the low side for that run for assassins.

-	# Looted	# Boxes Found	Chance of Box	Live Results
Assassins	1373	251	20%	18.3%

Margin of error now is +/- 2.04%, so within the range of 16.26% - 20.34%

---

TG, TG, GL, et al.

"Disagreement with the fundamental plan at this point is akin to supporting Richard III vs the Tudors." -Raesh

Zadraes,

Two things. First, I have been waiting for feedback to respond to me regarding my missing item for well over a month. So when they do not respond to me, this is my only other option is to post of the forums. I have never asked for a item to replaced in over 23 years of playing and the response that I got back from feedback was uncertain saying "you MAY have" blah blah.

Secondly, despite your numbers and scripts or whatever it was you posted, I am not one bit computer savvy, there is obviously something wrong with the box drop rate. I hunted DP assassins, xala thralls and magus, rossman giants and mountain giants and only received one box for an entire weekend of hunting. That makes a total of two box in four weeks for me. I am not talking popping in for a few minutes. I am talking about locking three armors in DP assassins and killing non-stop. With my bow, I can kill one assassin every 30ish seconds and having spent a good portion of my weekend hunting there, thats a lot dead assassins. I spent a good 30-45 minutes in rossman giants yesterday. No boxes. In assassins, I am typically either there by myself or one, possibly two others in the area. In rossman giants, there was one other person there the entire time I was there, and everytime I scouted them, they only had one giants, whereas I spent the entire time with 3 or 4 and being able to kill them quickly, one or two shots, that was also a log of giants.

Thank you for your consideration.

Asterid

Also, please remember to watch the conflicts ~Sidatura

I'm shutting down my monitoring, now. It's been running non-stop since about this time Friday afternoon. 3 full days leads us here:

-	# Looted	# Boxes Found	Chance of Box	Live Results
Stompers	8200	817	10%	10%
Assassins	5393	1061	20%	20%
Thralls	7915	1129	15%	14%
Magus	6645	933	15%	14%
Giants	2512	493	20%	20%

>what should the drop rate be for the Stompers, Assasains, Thralls, Magus, and Giants?

The third column, "Chance of Box", is what each of those creatures should be having. Box find chance is set per-creature, and those are the values their creators set. Stompers are 10% chance, thralls and magus are 15%, assassins and giants are 20%. Any F2P characters hunting in an area will lower the results because their box find chance is reduced. The results from 3 days of monitoring every player in the area align with what their chances are set at.

>First, I have been waiting for feedback to respond to me regarding my missing item for well over a month.

I can't speak for Feedback. It is represented by the folks onsite. I recommend following up with them if you haven't already, but again, the creature forums is not the appropriate place to have the discussion.

>there is obviously something wrong with the box drop rate

Not according to the data gathered. You may have personally had a bad run of RNG, or you may be using an invalid LOOT command. Checking my data from the weekend, I see 79 creatures tracked from you. Of those, only a couple triggered the box chances messaging I was monitoring (which would trigger on any loot that was looking for a box, even if the creature has a 0% chance), which leads me to believe you may be using LOOT TREASURE. I'll try to keep an eye out for you next time we're both around at the same time to watch you specifically, but these creatures on the whole are working as intended from everything I can see.


Zadraes

>But most of the time is loot treasure.

Then that seems to be your problem with finding boxes:

* Treasure - Loot only coins, gems, and items (like runestones and scrolls).
* Boxes - Loot only for boxes, ignoring the rest.
* Goods - Combines the Treasure and Boxes option, excluding Equipment.
* All - Loot everything on the creature.

LOOT TREASURE doesn't find boxes. If you want boxes, you need to be using LOOT (by itself), LOOT BOXES (for only boxes), or LOOT GOODS (which is the same as LOOT by itself).

Zadraes

Okay, got it thanks. I apologize for my misunderstanding then. I thought I had heard someone say the best way to get everything, plus those new book parts was loot treasure. Guess I will stop that.


Asterid

Also, please remember to watch the conflicts ~Sidatura