TLDR - raid gear types do not drop equally for individual players and most people seem to get a surplus of one type of gear and a shortage of the others. This shouldn't happen if the gear drops equally randomly. So is the system broken deliberately or is there a massive bug?





Detailed post:

So we all know that by completing the raids we get a chance to win some raid gear that we all need. There are 4 types - furnace, droidcaller, nubian tech, and nubian scanner.



Everyone finishing a raid will get salvage (or a full item) for one of these gear types. The amount you get depends on the raid level and where you finish.



Now everyone assumes that we have equal chance of winning one of these 4 items. This would make sense as they are all roughly equally needed if we are collecting all the characters in the game (maybe scanners are needed slightly more than droidcallers but it is close enough).



However, after I have completed 69 raids, most of them at heroic level with a few early ones at tier 5 and 6, it is emphatically clear to me that the raid gear does NOT drop randomly.



In fact, it seems clear that people are more likely to get a single gear type only, with only a small chance of the other 3 types.



As an example, for my first 50 or so raids I mainly got scanners - the distribution was roughly 60-70% scanners, and 30-40% the 3 other gears (I didn't keep exact records back then but have been doing so more recently). This pattern has got even more extreme the more raids we have done - in my last 12 raids, I have received scanners 11 times.



If we assume the gear drops equally (so there is a 25% chance of receiving each gear type), then it is easy enough to do a statistical hypothesis test. In my case this test is rejected so emphatically that there is (statistically speaking) zero chance of this pattern of rewards occurring unless the original assumption is wrong. This means that gear does NOT drop randomly.



(I teach University level statistics and probability so know what I am talking about. I have calculated the hypothesis test and it is rejected so strongly that the effective probability of the original assumption of equal gear type drops being true is 0).





Now, my results could be an anomaly just specific to me, but speaking to my guild-mates and following the discussion on the forums, it is clear that although my example is extreme, it is part of a common pattern - most people tend to have a big surplus of one or two types of raid gear and a big shortage of the other types. Not everyone is short of the same gear types though so across all players, the gear types do drop at about 25% each. But for an individual player it seems that this isn't at all true.



Am I wrong?





If not, then I want to ask the question - is this gear drop anomaly deliberate? Or a massive bug in the game?





After 70 raids getting increasingly frustrated I think it is worth getting some insight into this question.

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