wow is another good example of something like this for the "collect 10 wolf pelts" types of quests. in the beginning you had a drop chance of, say, 30% and a di

wow is another good example of something like this for the "collect 10 wolf pelts" types of quests. in the beginning you had a drop chance of, say, 30% and a dice roll on every kill. so after ~30 wolves you should have your ten pelts. but if you were really unlucky you could 100 wolves and still not have enough. --- note: seems i remembered this wrong, and i can't find the source for this anymore. iirc, they fixed this by creating a "random queue", i.e. a fixed size queue (say, twice the average) with the amount of needed drops randomly distributed. this way the players bad luck streak would have an upper bound. --- note: what they actually did was increase the drop chance progressively, but it might be that this was only for single item drops? Linear Regression of Progressive Percentage in World of Warcraft http://math.arizona.edu/~ercolani/pyzdek.pdf http://math.arizona.edu/~ercolani/pyzdek.pdf