Killing fairies and the laws of probability

[CraftingFailed]

Trying to kill enough fairies to get a light white wand is a risky business. With only a diamond staff and armour of 178, my level 210 wizard gets killed by swarming fairies pretty quickly. Eventually, a fairy dropped a white wand just before my wizard got killed trying to run for the bridge off the island.... So I had to reload and therefore lost the wand.

So..... I did what I do when crafting, keep reloading until the crafting succeeds. I felt my wizard had already earned his light white wand so I isolated a fairy for an easy kill by the bridge then went through the kill-reload cycle until she drops a wand.

At 1/1000 chance and having already dropped a wand, it was probable that I'd have to go through the kill-reload cycle 1500 to 2000 times to get one (That's a 78 to 86% chance of a drop). I've now killed the same fairy 2340 times (I counted to alleviate the boredom) and she still hasn't dropped despite the laws of probability showing that 2340 attempts yields a 90.4% chance of success.

This begs the question of whether there's some logic in the software that prevents a drop on first kill to prevent people using the kill-reload cycle to force a drop. Does anyone know?

[blitzcraig]

there is not, it should work... you're just unlucky lol
don't feel lonely though... in mmo I killed around 3500 ghost archers before I got swamp bow if I remember right.. it was crazy (now they have better drops anyway)... at least I have good luck with blitzbee stings

[CraftingFailed]

She just dropped after 2392 attempts!
I also had a problem getting a swamp bow. I still go for Ghost Archers regularly because they're good for levelling and now I've got a backpack full of swamp bows!

[ayZuse]

Lol i got a swamp bow and a lvl 150 bow both within 30 ghost archers

And i was using my lvl 119 archer at the time. Bpth of you have bad luck imo. Lol

[solsukut]

Glad you got it . 1/1000 on a caster/ranged mob is rough. I'd killed -a lot- of huntress, no Swamp Bow - never counted, but I leveled a couple times that's how I typically just how close I should be to getting a drop based on their XP per kill. Then I realized Ghost Arch had 2x the chance so I moved there, leveled a few more times, and got a Diamond Bow. So as you point out...laws of chance/probability. What I liked about Ghosts was the thought that since they have 3 drops "technically" I was getting 3 random rolls every kill...so just general probability of getting a drop of any kind was better.

I do wish they'd add gold drops to more mobs at a high % rate, even if it is so small as to not really make a difference. My problem is when I'm grinding away for a couple hours straight trying to get a 1/1000 drop you can really start to drone out and I'm almost sure I've missed them. Especially in some locations where the background color and the drop's color blend well. If you were getting a drop of gold almost every kill it would both be "reward", but mainly would keep you focused on looking up at the drop area.