Your concerns are conveniently addressed in this case Almost always he used an assassin , and because of his popularity the realm almost always had 60 players close to full . He did pop loot potions but he did this both before and after so I don ' t see a problem unless Deca changed loot potion mechanics , ofc . As with any other empirical experiment statistics is prone to critique and one can always come up with a counter argument because experiments can never be perfectly replicated . But in this case I think the evidence is pretty sound . The difference between the two is big enough to reliably offset every counter argument I could think of . You raised a good point about the several drop thresholds . It is possible that it was the threshold rather than the droprate being changed .