[Dev Update] Farming and Loot Scaling

QFT

Somewhat contradictory message from ANET over past few days.

Let's see. Farmers were complaining that their livelihood was being cut off. Then ANET compromises and basically gives you back all the more valuable stuff in gold items, greens, ectos, gems, etc etc and you STILL complain? That's the point here.

Complain complain and complain some more. I dont think I've seen one post of gratitude. Wow what a community.

those bold an italic words right there make me laugh.

It would be alot easier to sell things IF THEY DIDN'T HAVE TO SPAM IN TOWN FOR HOURS ON END.

yes, you dont NEED 15k armor, nor NEED expensive or shiny weapons, but you WANT them.

its this WANT, that drives people to solo farm for gold. people are not content with the bare minimum. they always WANT MORE.

now if there was no need to solo farm for gold so you don't have to grind for items you WANT, then there would be alot less farmers.

maybe if you introduced easier means of getting gold, or even adjusted quest mission rewards.

loot scaling? im sorry, but its a joke. people very seldom pug ever since the introduction of heros.

and since i mentioned heros, if we have to give them items/runes/upgrades, WHY ARE THEY GETTING LOOT ANYWAYS?

/sigh.

Admittedly it's Gaile's job to defend whatever the Dev team is doing, whether she understands the reasoning behind it or not. Clearly she didn't understand earlier which is why she had to ask them as mentioned in the post. A downsides of hiring a PR person instead of talking to your fans directly.... though I can't blame devs for not wanting to talk to most of the fans here.

Great update, thanks a lot a net!

Seems to make sense to me. A better trade system would help, current one isn't extremely bad though.

Of course, if they talked open and honestly, then perhaps they wouldn't need PR people? Just a thought.

Incidentally, I'm solo farming in area where I would traditionally get a gold or two every now and then, so far, its just a minute selection of non-max whites.

GG ANet. I deserve good itams!!!11 U GI3V S0J LOL!!1

Keys are still affected? Darn it...

This is going to encourage botting. Harder to get money=more ebayers. Plus, as I think anet saw with the last attempt at killing bots, the bots will find a way around it. They will either continue solo farming, or they will start running teams of bots. You can't kill the chinese farmers, you can kill the casual player.

Glad about the quick response/update.

So, are the ecto's and shard's safe for us solo'rs??? In HM or NM?

Finally, I'm going to get back on troll farming :P.

Oh and just to let you know, most of cash can actually be from COLLECTABLE ITEMS TRADED WITH COLLECTORS AND THEN SELL THEM. So it still doesn't make a difference since these items are rare anyways.

solo farming is my life!!!

DONT SCREW WITH IT

thank you for fixin my life anet :P

I dont think thats the case at all actually...

On the face of it this seems like a reasonable attempt at compromise by ANET. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and give it a try.

For those complaining about an auction house...yeah it would be nice to have but there wasn't one before and it wasn't included in the update. Everyone hates spamming the WTS messages and this compromise may require some more of that but at least we have gotten small team/solo farming restored and that was the critical issue. Thanks for listening ANET.

Well I am happy again. I can farm my greens and my guildies can farm ectos, this should make 90+% of the people affected by loot scaling happy again.

How??

Solo farmers can farm all most everything again like nothing happened.
Solo Famers & Team players = same gold drop rate now (solo down from what it use to be)
HM Players = Better gold drop rate, better drop rate across the board..

If bots started to form "teams" they lose that 8x loot advantage

It still negatively impacts bot farmers compared to the previous state of the game.

They is a shift from solo farms to HM players with wealth disruption.

Sad.

Anet gives in to the whiners and people are still whining. What a world.

Hyperbole will get you nowhere.

On the other hand, if you're serious, pay more attention?

Count the number of people who complained and the people STILL complaining and count the number of people who actually expressed gratitude. I'm not far off in my slight exaggeration. There's no way you can say that people acted maturely at all.

I'm going to issue a warning here;

Posts as of this point which are created for the sole point of calling others 'whiners', going after Gaile, another poster, or otherwise being non-contributing will be deleted without notice. Posts which embed the aforementioned may be subject to similar action.

The rules always apply, even in a heated issue.

Post content saved and PM'd to poster; If you want to continue this, take it up in PM's with the other person, please.

Post content saved and PM'd to poster; If you want to continue this, take it up in PM's with the other person, please.

To whose asking "If all those are excempt, what does this affect?"
If you read the post indepth, you will see that the exceptions is all normal items and gold. So the drop rate of white Half-Digested Boots are affected, but not the drop rate of gold Half-Digested Boots. They want people to farm rare items, but not gold. Anything that is not sold to a player is what they don't want people to farm.

_Zexion

Heh... you never hear about anything good for days and days do you? If you take out all your anger on Anet, why not take out your happiness too?

A big question of society shown in a game...

I know I don't post here much (darn lurkers... )
and it may just sound like paranoia, but after the announcement of GW2 it seems a little strange that they would implement a slew of updates that only seem to annoy a large ammount of the players and ignore the input they initially claimed they wanted.

Something sounds fishy.

GW2 is announced and they put all the "oh noez! GW will die!" naysayers at ease by saying GW1 will be around as long as people are playing.....

Then they suddenly come up with multiple adjustments that get people threatening to "ragequit" and the likes, and saying GW "sucks" now (in so many words).....

And after the diehard fanboys and the players who still want to believe ANet has their best interests at heart fork over the cash for EotN they wont have any real financial reason to keep GW up and running.....

Except of course if a large ammount of people still play, which they wont if the game sucks, to be quite frank.

Too many recent changes really have made many thing in this game "suck" of late.

It just seems a tad too suspicious to me.

I apologize if I sound too rude or accusational here, but I just had to vent my thoughts somewhere.

I think the loot scaling was originally intended to slow bots not farmers... They then work around the bots' programming in a clever way that let's solo-farmers still reap the benefits, and people start complaining saying that they're "caving". While other people are saying it's not enough! no matter what they do 9/10 people are gonna complain...


PS: For all anybody knows an auction house could be impossible to implement with the GW engine.

Then you'll have to adapt, because the thing you describing is exactly the way 99% of the bots generate the gold which is then sold for real world cash. Every experienced PvE player knows that farming the gold is not any way efficient if you're looking to increase your wealth. Try switching to farming the greens like Exuro's Will and then simply sell it for 20k, it's way faster than ripping these 20k out of lowly-minded monsters.

Who is this "TRADER" you speak of Gaile?




And another thing....Trade is better facilitated in an economy when you have an audience/consumer base that is AWARE you have something they need or want. You could be selling gold bars for $1.00, but if you are in London standing in the city square shouting about them and I am in NYC, how is this considered a "Good Trade System", one that helps the player base in a uniform way? Your updates and changes to the game are always painstakingly explained as a way to make it fair or affect all players in a uniform way, yet the current trade-system in GW's is only beneficial if you look forward to logging on and standing idle while you go BLIND sifting through trade-spam. Even then, it isn't efficient or uniform EVEN IF WE ALL DO THAT, because I cannot "hear" that somebody is trying to sell that "Terror Scythe" I have been trying to find if they are in Lion's Arch and I am in Kaineng City.

{sigh} Do you get my point? If you didn't, I'll spell it out: I didn't buy your game to stand in a virtual city for hours trying to "Do business". I bought it to escape into a virtual world and....ummm, actually have fun.





Honestly, I would rather be buying a single Soda in the back of a 300-person line at Walmart on a Sunday after Church when there is only ONE CASHIER working than sell things the way your "Vision" of a good trading system works {or doesn't} right now. I mean, isn't that also one of the unmentioned reasons {Along with the ones you gave in the update announcement} that Storage space was increased? Was it because you FINALLY realised that people would like to play for a while than be FORCED to play one hour, maybe 2-3 and then be SENTENCED to spam-hell to unload their loot that was too valuable just to simply Merch? {Because of no storage space left}

Pffft, why bother going on. Many, many others besides myself have pointed this out for 2yrs now and since there are not going to be anymore chapters for GW's-1, The final nail has been driven into that hope's coffin. Specifically regarding trade and a better economy, you guys have been missing the forest because all the trees have been blocking your view.





-Prometheus.

suggestion to arenanet:

with updates that will effect the entire playbase such as the loot system and soul reaping changes, release the update notes a few days or weeks beforehand and see what the players think about it. make a poll too to see if they agree with it or not. if players in favor of it wins the poll release the update as planned but if players not in favor of it wins, do not release that part of the update. also take the suggestions of what other players have thought of thats better where everyone can agree with and put those into the update.

That's simply not true. They already have a crude version of a trade system in place that could be tweaked to make it automatic.

In FFXI they had a full fledged auction-house system as well as a more crude system, called a "Bazaar" All it was is the normal trade window GW's uses now. In the Player's inventory he had a button he could click, making any item in his inventory "For Sale" and there was a special window that would pop up asking the player to set a price. Once he did so there would be a confirmation button to click and VOILA'! a "trade icon" would appear over his head that let other players know by sight in game, that he had items for sale.

When you would come upon these "bazaars" in game, you clicked on that person and there would be a button that you clicked that allowed you to "Browse" that persons items for sale. It was EXACTLY the same as our current trade window, except that there was a greyed out "Accept Trade" button that would only become active when you placed the correct amount of Gold/Money into the trade window. It worked great, and even as crude as that is, it's still LIGHT-YEARS ahead of what is in place currently.




-Prometheus.

I'm all for stopping bots. The strange thing is, in other MMOs, there are usually GMs who circulate (either paid employees or interns) who are able to detect and ban said accounts.

Now, the playerbase has all but handed over the locations of popular bot farming areas. You can still see Mo/W in many different Prophecies locales, whom don't respond to invites or chat.

Would it not be more cost effective, AND player friendly to see a character with a GM tag zoning in and clearing house by banning accounts? Or is it more effective to take in "player sightings" respond too late, then nerf the system by which legitimate players get by, which does nothing but make gold even MORE valuable, which means botters make MORE money!?

People complain because they bought the game and are not only entitled to the privilege of voicing their opinions and concerns, but ANet encourages them to do so.

It would be pretty easy to make a new window called "Trade Search" have it look exactly like Party Search, and allow people to list trades there. They would be static, could be organized by type of item, class (green, purple, gold, high end etc.) and so on and so forth. I can tell you right now, if ANet implemented THAT feature, it would see a helluva lot more use from the general playerbase, judging by my own guild's activities.

I'm playing GW in window right now, Alt-Tabbing to read and post here. Its not like I don't play the game, but I am concerned with the direction the game seems to be taking, and rather than sit back and let the ANet apologists run the show, I'm stepping up and voicing my opinion. Every business can and should be held accountable by their customers for their products, and while some may like the new system, some don't. From what I've seen, those who like it don't seem to understand basic sconomics, that's not a dig, just an observation. Supply and demand can be complicated, especially when inflation and depreciation are brought into the mix, but for the most part, the economic "fixes" I've seen are band-aids to eliminate botters, and don't address the reason why botters exist.

Unattainable (perceived or nearly so) prestige items. You can tell people they don't need them, but its a game they paid for, that content should at least be accessible. I still rarely see FoW armor even after 2 years, and then its usually only the biggest guilds or people who've sunk 2000+ hours into the game. Probably not something Joe Parent With a Job can reasonably do...

/AGREE




-Prometheus.

as with anything in life, majority rules.

you don't piss off the populace and not expect repercussions, especially with an expansion coming out, and sequel in the making.

sure, you have your die hard fan-boys/girls and loyal customers, but that will only get you so far.

if there was a poll asking how many farmers, casual or not, i bet there would be ALOT.

Unfortunately, if you're talking about professionally programmed bots, those might still get the full advantage, just because they can be programmed the way to gather in parties of 6 bots, where 5 auto-resign and then just follow the main one. It's not the issue for those serious coders, and of course these scripts can scale the loot by item id handles, the bots aren't just merching anything they find. The key idea behind the last update is that the most of them aren't able to farm the tough areas like DoA or FoW, and the primary way the bots are earning the gold is merching things. Actually, I think ArenaNet should bring some kind of anti-farming code in, such as if the player is entering the same area every five minutes for 30+ times to do the similar things, all normal loot starts to decrease, the chances of rare drops become 1/8 and on the 40th run the normal drops go zero.

most of you really need to stop and think for a second. They aren't trying to hurt solo farmers, they just want them selling their items to other players instead of to the merchants. They don't care if the solo farmers make a ton of gold. They just dont want that gold coming from the merchants. They want it coming from other players so that too much new gold isnt being introduced into the economy.

Heres an example if you still dont understand.

Mr Farmer decides to go out and farm prior to the loot scaling. He gets the following:
20 White items
2 Purple items
1 Gold item.

He sells the purple and white items to the merchant introducing about 1,000 gold into the economy. His total profit (assuming he sells his gold item for 2k to someone) is 3,000 gold.


Now Mr Farmer goes out and farms after loot scaling. He gets the following:
5 White items
0 Purple Items
1 Better Gold item then before

He sells the white items to the merchant introducing 250 gold into the economy. He sells the gold items for 2.5k to a player. His total profit is 2,750 gold.


So what did this scaling do. Reduced the new money coming into the economy by 750 gold, while only costing the player 250 gold. So while its not hurting the farmer too much, its reducing the amount of new money into the economy. All its doing is making the farmer earn his money selling to other players, rather then by selling to merchant.

You Destroyed the hope of questing in the Underworld again just when I had hope.

Now Underwold will be flooded again with 55 monks and Echo SS with an easier AI to boot.



Silly munchkin farmer people..



Well if you can't beat em join em... at least I know where to farm Rubies and Saphires again...

Thank you again for listening to the your community even if I have to struggle to find a party to quest in the Underworld.

This is an awesome update. I don't know why so many people are complaining. Even before certain items were exempt, I was happy about this.

I know there were a lot of people in the community who were concerned about professional gold farmers and their effect on the economy, and I think this really addresses the issue. Why have GMs roaming ingame to find bots, acting like a bandaid for the problem, when this update fixes it at its root.

Thank you ANet for providing such a detailed dev update, and for listening to the rational members of the community.

If trading would be the major issue of getting in money I would gladly welcome a auction house, instead of the endless hawking in kamadan. It almost feels like this temporary job i have at the moment to bridge two incomes. Another major benefit of the auction house is that it would bring the prices down to real supply and demand values due good competition, not the "artificial" ones that you are happy to meet a seller of the specific item and therefor actually pay too much..

You did the right thing with this Gaile. This was a change that was unacceptable to many and you took proactive action to fix that. I commend you for that. I'm personally very satisfied with the compromise. Now I can farm again, not to get rich, but to feel the reward when I find something really nice. Really, that's what I get out of it, that's what I enjoy. For those who do it fairly for the money, that's up to them, and if they want to invest their time in that, more power to them. This REALLY puts a hurting on the bots and that's something I think makes every fair player happy. Good for you guys for what you've done. You can't make all the people happy all the time, but this time you made a change that I think will satisfy as many as you could have.