Experiment 20 Duty of the Survivor (solo vs party)

tags: [god] [quests and drop]


the snow sparkled and crisped under tully's feet as he walked, his battle axe resting on his shoulder.

a cousin of tully's wrote him a letter inviting him to go on a quest for new year's. "lots of mob-hacking involved", it said. that sounded good, as far as tully was concerned.

he had finally reached the designated place and saw his cousin: a fiery-bearded robust dwarf with a huge menacingly-looking axe.

'oi, geezer! how's life?' he grinned broadly as tully approached.

'can't complain. you?'

'great! better than ever! how's the citadel? still standing?'

''course it does, what can happen to it? you'll need an army, and a bloody good one, to take that one down.'

the dwarves laughed heartily.

'how's folks doin' back home?' asked tully.

'things actually are pretty well. just opened a new mine!'

'you greedy fellas,' tully smiled.

they exchanged a couple of jokes and bits of news.

'well, i think we can get going,' the red-bearded dwarf said, weighing his massive axe in his hands. 'after you.'

they both grinned and walked onwards to play good old "slash'n'hack".

​

purpose: to compare the chance of receiving quest items solo and in a party while doing the duty of the survivor daily quest, a quest for awakened characters in bloody swampland.

test: i am going to carry out the tests under different conditions, doing the quest 10 times for each of them. all the tests will be done with level 87 characters. the monsters to kill are the corpse absorber, the mobs that drop the putrefied extract quest item.

test 1​

a character (let us call him character a) completes the quest 10 times, receiving 20 putrefied extracts quest items each time.

result: to complete the 10 quests, the character had to kill 345 mobs. that is, in order to gain the 20 items necessary to complete the quest, he had to kill on average 34.5 monsters each time.

test 2​

the same character a does the 10 quests, getting the 20 putrefied extracts each time, but this time he is accompanied by character b, a level 87 char that is in a party with him but has not undertaken the duty of the survivor quest.

result: in total, the party had to kill 341 monsters to enable character a to complete the quest 10 times. this means that on average they needed to kill 34.1 monsters to complete one quest.

conclusion (tests 1 and 2): the presence of characters who have not undertaken the duty of survivor quest in a party does not affect in any way the chances of obtaining quest items.

test 3​

this time both characters undertook the quest and did it 10 times in a party, collecting 40 putrefied extracts each time (20 per character). i noted down two numbers: the total amount of mobs killed by the time the first character collected the 20 items and the number of mobs killed by the moment both characters completed the quest.

result: all in all, 685 monsters had to be killed by the party so that the first player collected the 20 items needed and 829 (144 more) had to be killed so that the second player could get the remaining items to collect a total of 20 putrefied extracts.

nb: the items were distributed between the characters rather evenly, and they alternated in being the first to complete the quest. in most cases, by the time the first character received the 20th item, the second character had collected 15-19 items.

to find out how many monsters on average one has to kill in order to do a single quest, i shall divide the results obtained by 10. thus, by the time the first player completed the quest the party had killed, on average, 68.5 mobs per quest, while by the time the second character received the 20 items the party had killed 82.9 mobs per quest.

in order to calculate the number of monsters each party member had to kill to complete the quest, i shall divide the results by 2, which stands for the number of players in the party. by the time the first player got the 20th item (to remind you, the second one had 15-19 items by that time) each player had killed, on average, 34.25 mobs. this figure is very close to the one i obtained in test 1, when a character did the quest solo (that time he had to kill 34.5 mobs).

as for the second character, he completed the quest when each of the characters had killed 41.45 mobs, which is more than the number of mobs he would have to kill if he were playing solo. the second character seemed to be only getting the items every other time, as if the first character were still collecting the quest items. since that seemed strange, i decided to carry out one more test.

test 4​

in this test, the character collected the 20 items 10 times while being in a party with a character who already had the 20 items in his inventory and just helped him to kill the mobs.

the result corroborated my hypothesis: all in all, the character had to kill 758 mobs, that is, 75.8 on average per quest (37.9 per party member).

conclusion (tests 3 and 4): the results of test 3 bear out the fact that once one accepts another person who has the quest undertaken in a party, quest items start being distributed evenly between the two party members. test 4 makes it evident that it does not matter if the other character has already collected the necessary items: he still continues receiving his “virtual” share of quest items.