Expectations of mirror/portal gem

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relaxyo a écrit :

I think Portal Gem is pretty rare. I have only found 1 since beginning of open beta. I have found at least 5 Exalted.

I have portal gems to sell!

You will find a portal gem long before you find a mirror. After a year of playing ive found two portal gems, no mirrors.

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majesw a écrit :

So I've been playing PoE a lot for the past few months. This means at least a few hours every night with some binge sessions on the weekends. I've never found a mirror which I kind of expected, but I've also never found a portal gem. I've had a friend find 3-4 portal gems in about the same play time, and he also found one the very first day.

Does anyone have a clue about how much play time I should expect to put in to acquire either of these two drops?

To answer this, we have to know one thing.
1. How many clients are you multiboxing simultaneously?

If you are playing legit and wanting to know the odds of a mirror dropping, it's less than hitting the California Lottery. In terms of time, that's like 100 lifetimes. I have 2 buddies who run ISboxer. Between the two of them, they've found 3 Mirrors and 4 Kaom's.

The odds of finding one running multiple clients is much better. Just make sure to do what my friends do, come to the forums regularly, and say "dude I run every client manually and tab constantly to keep the chars within 13 yards of each other". You have to keep the public nice and stupid, so that you can keep running the multiclient software like a true badass. If you really want to keep them stupid, post a video of you doing a map while manually controlling, so they think that everyone does it manually all the time. It's like a club and you are expected to keep the stupids stupid.

Now go get your Mirror hero.

Is this a real question?

250 hours:
0 mirrors
2 portal gems
2 exalted
3 gcp

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majesw a écrit :

You need to take a course in statistics then. You can estimate expected time for an event to happen. You are speaking of outliers when you give the example of never finding an orb in a million hours. And that's not even an outlier in this case. It's just not really possible.

Yeah, you are technically right on this because you are talking about the simple question "drop or no drop" and from that data, combined with playtime you will get a simple graph, a line pointing upward. See, the more you play the more likely it is to get a drop, simple stuff. But that does not tell anything about a very specific drop in correlation to playtime.
Instead, if you were asking ppl that DID find an Exalted "how many hours of farming did it take you to find your first Exalted" then you would get a bell curve. Those are made up of low and high extremes (like getting an Exalted from the first Zombie on Twilight Strand). Now, while you can give an estimated time till drop X based on the average, this does not say a thing about you as a specific player. So you could as well either be in the middle or at the upper extreme (because we already know you are not at the lower end). But this estimation won´t tell you shit and is utterly pointless because it is a spurious correlation!

That is, because it does not reflect upon the chance of drop X afterall. The rarity of the items themselves creates the graph of a negative exponential function. For example currency: you nearly get an endless amount of wisdom and portal scrolls and an abysmally low amount of Exalteds/Mirrors. First, there is a roll if you get a drop, then if it is a currency drop and THEN which specific currency is dropped. To put it simple: it is random.

That is the reason why statistics (at least correlation statistics) won´t help you in this case. They are not made for such a scenario, where no time-event-correltaion is present. If you want to screw a bolt in a wall you don´t use a hammer, do you? That would be the wrong tool. You use a screwdriver! Same goes for statistics and specific drops. Wrong tool!

Statistics are made for the human world, where no randomness (though even RNG is not pure randomness but nvm) is present, like when asking "how long do students take until they eventually graduate" and things along this line. Or, in PoE, stuff with predictable outcome, like "how many Alteration Shards do I get from a rare item on average" or "how many Alteration Orbs can I generate per hour from farming boss X". Those are scenarios with a predictable outcome. Again: stop talking BS like "you need a course in statistics"... that makes you look like a douchebag! The correct tool would be: Stochastics!

tl/dr: Wrong discipline! You need stochastics, not statistics...


regards

e/
Thanks Reclaw, exactly my point.

Perhaps it`s easier to understand if you keep it simpel:

just as an example -> a 10% drop chance doesn`t equal something dropping after 10 kills


there`s a loot-table, items get a chance to drop within this "table";
now just cause you kill 10000000000 mobs doesn`t mean you will ever find a mirror or portal gem,
everytime you kill something chances are rolled anew (this is important to understand); there`s no hidden mechanic which keeps track of what has already dropped for you or how many things have dropped for you.
Chance on a loot-table, or rng for that matter, isn`t predictable in any way shape or form.

Expecting a specific rare item to drop will just make you sad ;)

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Inexium a écrit :

So Portal is actually a valuable item ? I wnder why no one wants it.. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/374756

It is certainly a RARE item, but it's not especially valuable because there's relatively little demand for it. There are a few major reasons for this that I can think of:

1. The relatively long casting time means it's useless as an emergency escape. You'd still need scrolls for that. So the only way to use it effectively would be to cast it ahead of time before a potentially dangerous encounter(primarily boss fights).

2. It takes up a gem socket which can probably be better used for something else in most cases. It also takes up an even more valuable space on your hotbar unless you keep another skill there and swap it out for portal, cast, then swap the other skill back in every time(which even further adds to the cast time).

3. Finally, there is the question of who will use it. Most higher level players will probably get way more portal scrolls than they know what to do with. Most of them probably won't bother using vendor recipes to upgrade through 3-4 other tiers of orbs in order to get something useful from them, so they probably have several stacks of scrolls anyway. An experienced player on a low-level alt character will probably just grab a couple of those extra stacks and be all set, especially since they can plow through the lower-level content so quickly anyway. This means the main ones who will be interested in portal gems are going to be fairly new players, who unfortunately are unlikely to have a huge amount to trade for it(if they even know the portal gems exist in the first place).

In short, most people won't find them especially useful and the ones who do, probably can't afford to pay much.

I would disagree with number 3. The portal gem lets you trade your portal scrolls for wisdom scrolls. Also, almost everyone has a free gem slot.