Jeff Kaplan On Progressive Percentages

Ever since the start, questing was such an integral part of the World of Warcraft experience. Not only is it the best way to level up but it also helps the player be part of the story and lore of the game. There are many types of quests and they all cooperate to make the gaming experience more diverse. But I’m sure a lot of you will admit that you’ve had some kind frustration with the types of quests where you have to collect items that drop from a certain type mob.

We’ve heard the continuous complains about why that hoof doesn’t always drop from a certain animal mob or why liver doesn’t always drop from that boar and so on. This is even more true in the older days when some drop rates were really absurd (collecting raptor hearts for that quest in Arathi Highlands used to take over an hour of killing raptors).

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Former WoW lead designer Jeff Kaplan (also known as Tigole), who is now working on another MMO for Blizzard, went out to talk about an interesting new mechanic that explains why we don’t really see such horrible incidents of drop rates for collection quests in the Wrath expansion. This new mechanic which we haven’t heard about until now is called Progressive Percentages.

In the past these quest items would have a fixed drop rate of 35%, causing both good and bad streaks. We all know these bad streaks aren’t fun at all. According to Kaplan, Progressive Percentages actually increases the percent chance the item will drop every time that mob is killed and eventually leading to 100% or a guaranteed drop. Another thing Blizzard did to help players when doing these types of quests is that they raised the base drop percentage to 45% from 35%.

This is really quite a revelation by Kaplan since it’s something we never ever heard of in the past from anyone. It certainly is great to know and it’s certainly nice to have some sort of explanation why we never really run into much problem when doing these collection quests in Wrath of the Lich King.