Riamus
Sun, 12 Dec 2010 03:15:12
Ok, I think I finally figured out what is happening with this and other drops not showing a percentage. I saw this same thing happen to Deviate Scales and Perfect Deviate Scales. Thankfully, I was on a skinner character, so I saw what was happening. Here's what's going on:

Any item that can be looted through skinning, herbalism, or mining can cause this bug to appear if those items can also be looted normally. What happens is that there is a loot list for normal drops as well as a loot list for special drops (stuff that was skinned, mined, or "herbed"). Those special drops show with a * in front of them and use a different drop count to calculate drop percent. For example, I might have looted something 10 times, but only skinned it 5 times. If something like light leather was skinned all 5 times, then the percentage would be 100% even though it was looted 10 times. That's a good thing. The problem comes from items that can be looted normally as well...

Let's look at the deviate scales and perfect deviate scales. Those can drop normally from various mobs in WC and can also be skinned from those same mobs. If I loot one of those scales without skinning any from a specific mob, it will try to calculate the percentage like this:

1 time looted divided by 0 times skinned

Because that's a Divide by Zero error, no percentage appears. Now, if you later skin that mob, it will then be 1x loot divide by 1x skin (or 2x loot divide by 1x skin if you skinned the same item).

Those Zangar Caps can be looted through herbalism used on certain mobs, so if you loot it from a mob that you've never used herbalism on, you won't get a percentage. I have a feeling this will also be true for mining, but I haven't come across it yet.

There really aren't many items that can be looted normally AND looted using skinning, herbalism, or mining, But for those that can be looted both ways, this bug will be present.

There isn't an easy fix that I can think of for this. For example, if you aren't a skinner and only show your own stats, then you don't want to always see no percentage on deviate scales and perfect deviate scales. You also don't want it to say 100% or 0% automatically or give some form of error such as [Div/0]% or whatever. The problem is that the only way to make this work correctly is to determine HOW you are looting the mob and use that to determine if it counts as skinning, mining, or herbalism, or if it counts as looting normally. The result of that is seeing 2 "copies" of the items that can be looted both ways. One with the * and one without. The one with the * shows the loot count and percentage related to how often you get it from skinning/etc. The one without the * shows the loot count and percentage related to how often you get it from looting. Seeing it twice may not look that good, unfortunately.

You *could* combine the two stats... if it's looted 5 times out of 10 and skinned 4 times out of 5, then show the percentage as 9 times out of 15 (60%). The problem with that method is that your skinning stats will get dragged down a lot by your looting stats, which isn't good. I think showing both loot and gather stats for those items would probably be best. Maybe even have an option that will hide gathered item stats if you can't gather. For example, if you aren't a skinner, then hide all skinning stats. That would mean that person would only see the drop count/percent for the items rather than seeing them twice. Of course, if you can skin, you'd still see them twice.

Anyhow, I think this is the cause. I'll leave it to you to decide the best way to handle fixing it. Hopefully these comments and ideas can be useful in figuring out the best fix for the problem.