Talk:Conditional Drops

Hellion's just edited in "Some monsters will drop only 1 out of a set of possible items at a time, such as the swarm of fire ants dropping their familiar equipment[...]". But that contradicts the note on the ant page "More than one of the tools can drop at the same time". So which is wrong? --Club (#66669) (Talk) 00:32, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

• Since Hellion is a dev, I would lean towards the note on the monster page being wrong. Either an early bug, or people not distingushing between various pickpocket mechanics (or failing to count). At some point I can head over to the desert and re-spade the ants, but not for a few days. --Flargen 00:38, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Since I posted info that contradicts other info on the wiki, I went and double-checked. The familiar equipment is indeed a mutually-exclusive drop group. --Hellion 06:22, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about some of the info on this page. For instance, the conditional in the sea isn't there just to prevent yoinking. It's there because they needed the conditional effects of pressure and it's countermeasures. (Heard on the radio...)

It also seems confusing to call pick-pocket only items conditional drops. --Starwed 00:39, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

• The pick-pocket thing is a bit conjectural. Maybe. I don't feel like I'm the one who came up with that statement. The conditional would be a vapid one: it's always false, hence why you can only get it through pickpocketing (since it can't drop after combat). Combined with a "this can be pickpocketed regardless" flag. But I can't remember if there's an official word on this, or any way to actually discern the difference in-game. And if the sea conditional is a direct consequence of the pressure, then you should be able to steal items from putty'd versions of sea monsters, which is known to be false (and the He-Boulder disintegration doesn't give you anything from a putty'd fish). Well, I suppose the conditional could still be there and just always evaluates to true when putty'd. The conditional is equivalent to a trivial one from my spading data, however. Testing at various item drop bonuses did not yield inconsistent drop rates. If there's a non-trivial rejection rate, then it would introduce discrepancies between averages seen at distinct item drop bonuses. At some point I could head back there and see if I can refine things further and see if a rejection rate pops up, but for now I'd say it's functionally identical to a trivial conditional. --Flargen 00:52, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

A post by Jick concerning how nopickpocket conditionals tend to work. This sort of conditional flag is the same as the trivial conditional (functionally speaking). As for the sea pressure penalties constituting a conditional, the best I can figure is that the game rolls up values for figuring if you get a drop or not randomly; then it checks if that item would drop at your drop modifier (before the pressure penalty); then it checks if it ALSO would have dropped at the pressure penalty modifier, and rejects the drop if not. This would help explain why they also said on the radio--when discussing the possibility of dolphins you could fight to get items that didn't drop because of the pressure penalty--that they already had the code necessary to detect when it is the pressure penalty that specifically causes the item not to drop. This would still be functionally equivalent to the trivial condition, with the pressure penalty viewed as a standard item drop modifier, however. So the implementation may be thematically distinct due to technicalities in the code, but it's observable effects are exactly equivalent to the trivial conditional. --Flargen 02:44, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I just hit the Jilted Mistress with my He-Boulder's yellow ray, and got only the antique hand mirror. As one would expect, class-specific drops seems to be conditional, editing the page to make this clear.--Jeffbee 04:47, 4 September 2009 (UTC)