Blizzard's finally said without a doubt, once-and-for-all, how loot is determined to drop on a mob.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...359902&sid=1#48


Later in the thread,


So there you have it. It has long been debated about whether loot tables were determined when you kill a boss or when the boss is spawned. Now we know.

I wonder if someone will ever find a way to game the generator, as was found with Diablo 1? Once you know exactly how loot is generated, you could theoretically time an instance creation down to the exact second that will produce, say, a Warglaive from Illidan.

-Bolty

So, pretty much like in other Blizzard games then. Not really a surprise.



I never understood the point of debating this, why would it matter? I can understand if one wondered if some player affected ingame stats was used to create items but other than that, it is a quite pointless discussion except from perhaps an academic point of view.



Ehh, what do you refer to? Manipulating your own game? The problem here is that the game is not based on your computer or run on your computer so you can't affect it that way.





Rather timing it to the exact milli- or microsecond. Still, you don't really control the actual creation time since it is not done on your computer.

Exploiting it based on the timestamp is not possible. The timestamp is not most likely not looped; it'd be impossible to get the same number twice in a row. Besides, it's just a seed for the RNG. The same timestamp won't produce the same result twice in a row, so even if you could get the same timestamp twice, you wouldn't get anything out of it.

Aside from that, you can't control how long it takes before you enter an instance. Lag will ensure that. You need to control it down to the milisecond, or however exact the timestamp is.

Blizzard is extremely careful with regards to loot; they learned their lesson in Diablo.

For instance, in EQ, someone produced a program which was capable of intercepting the loot information, displaying the mob's loot before it dropped. This isn't possible in WoW, as Blizzard keeps tight reins on how you can access that information.

That's not necessarily true. It depends on how much information the time stamp is taking into account. If the time stamp is only using hour, minute, second to create the seed, then the same seed will occur every day at the exact same time will give you the exact same loot (this has been proven in the past with other games like Diablo). Now, if Blizzard was smarter and included not only hour, minute, and second, but also day, month, and year, it would be impossible. So saying that getting the same timestamp twice requires more to go into than just the hour, minute, and second because if it's only hour, minute, and second, you can repeat it every single day, 365 days a year.

Hence, "the timestamp is most likely not looped".

The timestamp would most likely look like 20080201204000000001, which would be 8:40 PM, February 1st, 2008.

Not necessarily true. All RNGs that I've ever come into contact with give the exact same sequence of "random" numbers every time if given the same seed. If this weren't the case, you wouldn't require a seed.

Now, if they make it impossible to get the -exact- same seed (like using seconds since the epoch, or timestamp + other factors) then you get what looks to be random behavior. But if you could replicate the exact same seed, you should get the same results.

I guess you're right. Computers cannot be truly random (though they come darn close).

It's moot, anyway -- you shouldn't be able to get the same timestamp twice in a row.

Though if you could scramble the first number using a second RNG, you'd just need a different kind of variable, one that is entirely independant of the timestamp... Individually, they'd produce the exact same results, but together, they'd be scrambled. Blargh, nevermind.

I think it's very likely that they use a very high precision timestamp. Seconds are not good enough. Two instances could easily be started by two different groups in the same second.

As Jarulf said it probably is at least as precise as microseconds. To get a fairly random number you can take only the most precise digits from the timestamp. They change so fast that from a human perspective it seems like the number is comlpetely different from one instant to the next.

There can be collisions, but at slices of time that tiny, they are horrendously improbable. They would also be impossible to predict or exploit.

Using a full timestamp would prevent collisions. I guess it depends on how the logic decides on loot given a seed.

20080201204000000001 and 20080201204000000002 would need to "generate" completely different loot tables.

Just random musings.