As players, we often think of probability in games as flat percentages—this action has a 5% chance of success, that item has a 20% chance to drop, and so on, but assigning actual percentage values to rewards is a very problematic and ultimately futile endeavor. After all, adding a single new reward may require modifications to the entire loot table. Let’s look at a simple example!
In a loot table of 5 items, we have 4 common rewards and 1 rare reward, which we want to be 10 times harder to get. Calculating the exact percentage value for our rare item is not an easy task, unless we use weights, in which case it becomes trivial.
In our weighted probability system, each item is assigned a number, which represents its ...
