How Drop Rates Work

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(copied from my post on the Facebook Group, PSO Episode III C.A.R.D. Battlers)


Been wondering how the Drop Rates in this game work? I'm more than happy to share.






In the card database file on the disc, PsoCardDataTbl_Base.prs, every card has up to TWO drop rates assigned to it. In general, one drop rate allows the card to drop in a pack in any mode with a higher level requirement, while the other rate usually allows the card to drop at a lower level, but only in a specific game mode.






Unfortunately Sega didn't stick to this distribution model 100%, which is why certain cards in the base game are only available in certain modes. "Protection" is a great example of a card people need for team decks, but was confusing to obtain because it only dropped in multiplayer Free Mode (outside of the rare machine thing, but that's something else).






So here's the breakdown. There are 10 different level requirements for cards to drop, and 5 modifiers for game modes. (I do not know what the level cutoffs actually are, I only know that there's ten of them) They're in hexadecimal - from lowest to highest they are,

 


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00 00 - mostly N4
03 E8 - mostly N3
07 D0 - mostly N2
0B B8 - mostly N1
0F A0 - mostly R4
13 88 - mostly R3
17 70 - mostly R2
1B 58 - mostly R1, plus plenty of rarer N4-R2
1F 40 - basically S only
23 28 - strictly SS only, and only at +4 (read below)




for game mode modifiers, the second number gets increased by a certain amount,

 


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+0 - any mode
+1 - any offline mode
+2 - solo Free mode
+3 - multi Free mode
+4 - online (probably)
+6 - unobtainable. only used as 00 06




I'll use Cross Slay as an example. It has drop rates of 00 01, and 0B B8. What this means is that you can find Cross Slay at any level in any offline mode, but if you were playing online you wouldn't see it until the 0B level cutoff.






I love how this works, in theory. Being able to find certain cards early is cool, especially if you've been playing other modes than your friends. But it starts to suck when you see stuff like this,

 


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Heavy Slash - 17 74 // 17 70
Solid - 13 8A // 17 73
Gal Wind - 1B 59 // 00 06 (very common rate)
Gibbles - 1F 41 // 23 2C (nearly every + variant has this)




So for Heavy Slash, both of its drop rates activate at the same level, but one is mode-specific. All that means is that starting at cutoff 17 you can start finding Heavy Slash, but online you have 2x the chance to, I guess. Solid has two mode-specific rates, the earlier one being solo Free mode and the higher being multi Free mode, so they never overlap.






Gal Wind's rate represents a whole host of cards across rarities that people believe to be "card transformation only". In fact they are just hiding behind a very high level cutoff. Card transformations don't reference drop rates, just card rarities, so it's not actually too difficult to transform into a Gal Wind since it's only an N2.






Gibbles +, and almost every other + card, is believed to be online only. With all the data I've collected, I would assume it could drop offline at cutoff 1F, then online at cutoff 23. But with all of the testing I've done using Jarrett's Clv 100+ save file, I never once saw a card drop with those rates. Jury's out on this one. I hesitate to change them if they're possible, but I will likely change both rates to +0 to put them in every mode anyway.






(as a side note, 23 2C is the only form of that drop rate that shows up on the disc, which is particularly useless since Sega's servers sent a different version of the same file every time you logged online - it's how they changed the drop rates of cards every so often, and 'enabled' the + cards to drop, or so I hear.)






Overhauling the drop rates is one reason I haven't updated the ISOs in quite some time. I want to make sure I do it right, without unforseen consequences. What if there's some hard cap of the # of cards the game can pull from for pack seeding? If I give too many cards low drop rates, will it unintentionally omit card later in the file? I obviously don't want that to happen. Is +4 really online rates? I find it hard to believe, when the server sends it's own database.






Anyway, that's pretty much it. Any questions you may have, throw 'em at me here.