How to Fix Loot Drop Rates Being Wrong Because Rarities Are Rolled in Order

If you roll legendary, then epic, then rare in sequence and stop at the first hit, the configured weights no longer describe the real odds. Use a single cumulative draw. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Sum all weights once

Add up the weights of every loot entry to get a total. This total defines the range for a single random draw across the whole table.

2. Pick one random point in the range

Draw a random number from zero up to the total, then walk the entries accumulating weights until you pass the draw. The entry you land on is the result.

3. Stop short-circuiting per tier

Remove the per-tier independent rolls. Sequential roll-and-stop logic makes later tiers depend on earlier failures, which silently distorts every configured rate.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every GameMaker error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.