I’ve been trying to get stats on the files dropped in forums at a pace which is slower than they come out with new ones, usually 1 1/2 weeks per forum, and then I realized that if ET were to suddenly add or remove a file from any forum I get any sort of stats on, it would suddenly become a complete waste of my time to have tried getting any percentages.

Does anyone know if files can be randomly added or removed from already established forums? I know recently all of the forums that had no drops suddenly do and that’s all fine and dandy but were the old ones changed at all? If so, is it at least safe enough to bumume that the files currently in the forums won’t be removed?

So far all I have found in my grinding leads me to believe that

– Luck does not affect the pieces dropped, they are randomly given

– If a single piece of a file can be found in a forum, the entire file can be found eventually in that forum

– Luck DOES affect the rarity of certain files, making some more common and others less so, but that there is no file that can only be found if you have a certain amount of Luck (1 in a million chance is still a chance and it would be far easier to program. It’s not like there is any need to completely remove the chance of finding one piece of a 20 piece file when a 0.05% chance means you more than likely will never get it anyways.)

– There are not pieces that are more rare than others, only files

– The drops are not skewed towards unique pieces

Currently I don’t have any real statistically valid proof of any of this other than Luck does affect file drops, but for it to be statistically valid I would need thousands of runs across all possible Lucks in all the forums. As it stands it’s just conjecture from thousands of drops in a select few forums but it’s also most likely that ET didn’t do some sort of insanely complicated algorithm just for the sake of complication. A single line of code to affect how Luck affects drops (well, it will be more but still something relatively simple) and a random number generator is all one would need since because of that number generator it would be near impossible to determine the line of code anyways, no matter how simplistic. Finally since if anyone really wanted any individual file, they’d just have to grind a forum. To go through all the extra work of putting tiny nuances in the code for such a minor part of the game would be rather silly I’d say, but maybe ET really loves to program complex algorithms.

If anyone has any info on Moar drops, preferably from the Trout’s mouth since I’m not willing to go through thousands of threads to maybe find a scrap of info, I’d love to hear it so I know if my efforts for finding percentiles are in vain or not so I can simply work on finding out which forums have what files and if necessary, which pieces.