[Dev Update] Farming and Loot Scaling

I’ve got it; this is it in a nutshell:

A-net: We killed the gold drops, but we made sure that the rare-items were not affected according to scale; thus fixes boting, gold to money sales, and broadens the GW economy better.

Unfortunately the problem now lies with the double edge sword. I really can’t tell you how this might effect the GW economy, since it’s pretty much a wait and see. I agree with you A-net there was a need in getting rid of all those bots and Gold-Farmers. Also true is that something’s were way overpriced in GW, like a 1,000,000 gold price tag; come on.

Edit: I will also like to add that A-net was right about something else; there were portions of the game where loot dropped gold about tripled times it worth. I would see gold drops like 556g per kill, and no these were not verily hard places to find.

Guys , i am confused
if it say ecto is exempted from loot scaling is this apply in HM only?
so can i still solo in uw in normal with my w/rt and get ecto or i need to get HM to get? cos w/rt in HM cant solo anymore. thanks guys and nice update
cheers

First of all, I am a CS Major, and this isn't a flame or anything, but most of you could not possibly begin to understand how hard it would be to just implement an auction house, at your whim. Yes, after two years it should have been done, considering it's basically been asked for for two years, but it's certainly not something that would be easy, and maybe for whatever reason, they can't do it.

Also, parts of the dev's response really is worthy of being laughed at. They basically danced around the main issue here. The loot scaling more or less was either temporary insanity, or a way to discourage farming. How Anet could scale drops to (more or less) 1/8th of what they were before for soloers, and STILL claim to not be discouraging farming, is something that I don't understand.

Also, it's not fair that because of inscriptions, and lack of rare skins in the first two chapters, that farming now is basically pointless in Tyria or Cantha. I can't remember the last time I farmed (or got as a drop in a group) something worth selling from Tyria. Anet needs to realize that for most of us, chapters 2 and 3 were expansions - meaning that if inscriptions drop for people in NF, there's no reason that they shouldn't drop in Tyria or Cantha (a similar situation is with henchmen - we have all 3 chapters, give us access to sins, rits, dervs, and paragons in ch1!)

An ok compromise. Though I've seen that even in full parties you still get less gold than before, though in slightly bigger piles than before. *sigh* I just want enough gold to guy skills and armor when I need to. Early on in a campaign I usually go out alone to generate some gold, crafting materials, and maybe a weapon or two. Now that option is gone. The gold rewards from quests in GW aren't very big. Why do I need 3,000 exp when I'm already at 20 with more than 60 unspent skill points? I'd rather get 3k. *lol* I suggest that gold rewards earlier on in the game be a bit bigger.

How much will collector items be affected? I love getting collector weapons whenever I can for myself and guildies and getting the items is already hard enough. I spent 2 1/2 hours farming Bleached Carapaces! And this was before the update. I'm not really that rich in-game(I'm comfortable right now but I need to do Tomb a few times to get back above 10k in storage) and stuff thats supposed to be cheap becomes expensive. I got Scar Pattern Armor for my Necro from Droks, which is 800g a piece, and ended up spending 10k(excluding Sup Runes of Curses and Soul Reaping and Rune of Major Vigor) and I still need a decent Curses staff. But I'm getting off topic(we can discuss the overwhelming void between the rich and the poor in another topic), today I did a sweep of Arjok Ward to see if my treasure had been reset(it wasn't ) and only got 2 collector items out of all the monsters I killed. 2 out of like 15 drops(excluding gold)!!

Lol. THis is BS as we all know. Those bots in Granite Citadel are running for months without stopping. They might be ANET bots since they dont get banned.

Oh yes, the gold rewards in the quests, those should be definitely increased. Who wants to receive 500-1000 gold anyway? I'd say that all of the bonuses in the missions should have 2000 gold rewards.

I dont know how much clearer their stance can be than that.

Theyve made it clear what type of farming is ok and acceptable to them.

And what is not.


Anet never was against farming to begin with...watch Loviatar will bring up the quote.

Things are acceptable when they are not in extremes. I think this is what Anet's stance is.

There was this time i said to my guildmates: "I'm making so much money, this is gonna get nerfed very soon, you better hurry up and get in on this." The farming build was incredibly effective and downright ridiculous. The problem with some players is that they feel that such things are ok for the game.

When the scales keeps tipping to the extreme, its not ok. Anet will continue to keep trying to level the playing field.

-----------
On a side note: Anet needs to implement easier way to get collector drops now that party scaling affects it. Maybe non-merchant-able collector drops with a high drop rate? Easy armor + weapons, ne?

What you are saying is not true. The problem is that the Support needs to have a 100% evidence the player is a bot in the first place, otherwise they'll just get flamed by the customers saying they've been banned erroneously. And the second fact is that for every suspended bot, there's another one that takes its place. You can't stop the farming bots from abusing the drops system, but instead you can eliminate the source of the issue, and this is what's been done in the last update.

Gotta disagree with you there. Theres one source for bots.

Human. Players.

who lack:
imagination
patience
time

but have:
desires
wants
greed

you cant take the human factor out without severely crippling the game, since its what fuels gold-selling to begin with.

I can't belive how much of this is going over people's heads... STILL moaning.. wow.
QFT, lost of good stuff in this post.

For people who are asking what exactly is scaled, its obvious, the actual gold dropped from monsters.
Take Vermin Farming for instance, I used to get about 1.5k - 800 g a run,I have done 8 runs as of now and max i have go is 400g. The drops which are worthless and will be sold to merchant are also very less in numbers, so the bot farmers are ver nicely controlled and being a causal gold farmer I seriously dont see that much of a problem. IMO, I am f*#$ cause I used to farm the crap out of those poor vermin but now I don't.
However, all said and done I understand Anets problems with bots and am with them on this change.

Heres something id like to share from the farming forum:

Now.....if you consider yourself a farmer. You probably ARE/HAVE/WILL BE using one of Witte's many solo builds, or variations based on his original ideas.

Listen to those words from a domination player archetype.

It's easily addressed by slightly adjusting the prices of high-end items such as FoW armor. I've been playing this game for about three and a half years, with a total amount of hours going past 15,000 and still, I didn't get myself a single set of FoW armor. Could it be that I'm simply unskilled and silly at the game, or it might be a personal stance that I will not grind anything which goes beyond a price of 1 million? ArenaNet isn't that crazy to simply ruin the game with one update, it's only that the things need to be tested out in a live environment in order to understand what to fix.

Thank you ANet. The compromise of having loot scaling in general but not allowing certain rare items to not be affected by loot scaling is perfectly fine with me, if that's what it takes to once again allow AoE spells in all their glory and keep farm code out of the game code. Keep in mind I'm someone who liked to 'garbage sell' farm in the past, and I'm loving these batches of updates.

I'm happy as hell that the AoE scatter in normal mode is all but gone at this point. I can rain firestorm down like I mean it. I can use the ol' Wammo Cyclone Axe-Glad's Defense vermin farming build once again! Yeah, I'm not going to get a bunch of white drops to make money from the vermin anymore, but I just like to kill them anyways. II can now use those builds to farm XP again, which was a big draw for me in the past (in addition to the 'garbage drops').

I'm happy that the 'farm code' is no longer in place. Now there should be a better chance of getting good drops overall. BTW, hard mode is fun as hell, and oh my god do the purples and golds rain down like they're whites there.

In conclusion: love the way things currently are. Don't change a thing.

Diablo 2 bots had a solution to this. certian crafting items and item colors c an easily be taught to a bot. so that bots will deposit all golds in a buffed inventory and the players can log on and sell those items cheaply enough now that the average player has more money. STill i really couldn't care less. COnsidering PvE in GW is always held back by PvP i can say i play it much.

Wow, I love this idea. I hadn't thought of that nor had I heard it suggested. The only thing I don't agree on is the high drop rate, but this would be a great solution for the people who say "I can't afford max armor, I can't afford a good max weapon". Having monsters drop, on rare occasions, armor pieces that are customized and suitable for the area that they were dropped in is a good idea. I was just thinking if they made FoW armor drops deep within UW/FoW and made the drop rate extremely rare, it would still draw people to do the quests they don't bother with now. That's an incentive that doesn't exist right now. Maybe that's a bit extreme, but I certainly like the idea of customized, nicer than normal drops.

Which is exactly what the scaling-loot system does, players receive more gold (4x) while just playing the game then they did before.

It could also mean that with more gold in the economy, people are more willing (and capable) to buy green and gold items.

While solo-farming you get exactly the same drops as before (but AI is easier). But the 'game economy' sees more money agaisnt the same amount of rare items. That would mean those rare items will become more expensive.

Thanks Gaile for giving the info and the improvement... at least you tried.

I myself still can't see a difference though.

Went to the troll cave a few times to kill the trolls with my 55 SoJ monk (and god, I missed that).

What I got was 5 white items and that's it.

The problem is, the drop rate for rare (gold) items wasn't that spectacular to begin with. I only got about 1 gold per 5 runs (if I remember correctly), and most of the time, this gold was an often not-max damage Raven Staff that boosted the stats for 5 different professions.

As of today, I don't know a good PvE or PvP build that requires the skills of 5 professions, and I don't think it's possible either.


Greens...Well I never really farmed them. In fact, they were in the way when farming spiders, so I just gave the green longbows away. Oh well, more happy rangers now ^^
Dyes were never a part of my loot, since I bunched them up, so I can't really see improvement in gold per run here.
Hard mode items... Well I guess it can be good, but I don't farm Hard Mode atm, so...
Event items. Other than me collecting, enjoying them and giving them away, there's no making gold from this. (And no, I'm not going to sell these items for gold, as they are event items that anyone should enjoy without paying for it)

Then there is the inscription-problem. With the release of Nightfall, less people actually buy perfect gold weapons. Now, they can just get a weak version of it and upgrade it themselves. This excludes the VERY hard to get skins like Elemental Swords, Colossal Scimitars, etc. But these hard to get weapons were never the target of farmers anyway.


As of the materials... Well America holds favor atm, so can't go there :P If, however ecto's drop like before, then Underworld has just become more pleasant for me, and for alot of others I know.

It seems that me and my guildies can have fun 5-manning FoW again, too, so good job for these

Granted this is a concern, but how many of these bot users are really going to want to sit around and try to sell items like a normal person, especially with what they were used to before? They'll probably ID and sell any golds, but I'm not sure there's a perfect solution to the problem of botting. The change to the gold drop rate most certainly impedes their efforts. It makes me smile thinking of a lazy cheater having to sit in town peddling their items like the rest of us have to.

This is good, but there's always the problem for how purchase 15k armor, obsidan ect ect even the ecto are now dropped normally.
My idea is another: leave the update for hard mode normally. In normal mode drop back normally but instead merchant bought items for example 50g him purchase for 25g. In this way the player see the drop are same as before but it earns half of before. What do you think? Excuse for my poor english

This is sick, I mostly only have collector items, and like them, but now I will have to grind for the collector items as my droprate has gone 1/8 (solo farming is not always about gold) or pay ridiculous prices to other players for them, yay. Even the weaponsmiths are already costly enough for the casual player!! A.net beter lower the cost for skills, weaponsmiths, and the number of collectable items for collectors since you have to grind and grind now you casual player. I feel terrible for all the new players out there as for the casual players I feel your pain.

You can't restore a flawed economy after two years. We had the no-reroll error, non farm code time, ... and whatever more, its was screwed since day one+3months.

Why do I even bother anymore, GW:EN and GW2 are scratched from my to buy list.

I really don't understand why they didn't just decrease the rate at which you acquire everything when soloing, and increase the rate at which you acquire everything when teamed. That would be ideal. So a soloer would get things at half rate, and a full team of 8 would get things at double rate, scale all other configurations accordingly.

so the Underworld stays a 2-players only farming Area? Kinda pointless

Nope, there are alot of people who do Underworld/Fissure of Woe clearing frequently. Ask in your guild if people want to do UW/FoW once in a while, and there you have it. If your guildies don't want to, at least ask them to recruit people who DO want to do UW/FoW.

People just don't want to make a party in the Temple of Ages itself, because it is full of trade spamming.

I'm sure that if you find at least 4 guildies who want to join, you can find other people more easy as well (people like to join half-full parties). After they joined, add them to your friends list, and you get a whole bunch of people with the same likings as you, good luck and have fun ^^

I think ArenaNet did good job by bringing this update and I like new system of farming, there will be a lot less bots.. GG

Good update
Tnx a lot for the ehads up

never seen anything like that in the german districts

Sweet, loot scaling now doesn't affect much, i like it :P

To bad about scaled purples, as some in NF could get max stats ^^

Hmm it might be a problem then... Well you could try the English districts ^^ (by the way, from as far as I've seen, German districts are acutally better for PuG's, I did most of the Nightfall missions with German people, cause the German districts were full of guys, while English were full of heroes)

But doesn't your guild do UW/FoW, or at least want to try it? What I do in my guild when I want to do something together is just ask and ask and ask :P (Well being an officer, I can just recruit people who want to do something with me, too)

Thanks for this change. It is completely sufficient. I have nothing further to add about this.

I made a very depressing post in the anti-loot-scaling post.

Much happier now.
Kudos to A-net for listening to it's community.
GW:EN and GW2 are back on my wishlist


... until the next update probably

I would really like to see this question answered. (Sorry if it has -- I skimmed through and didn't see it though)

This all sounds good to me.

As far as all the whiners going on about no ingame trading..

..what about the party search option?

If you dont want to use it thats your problem, but it is available to all for trading.

Wait, isn't this good? I mean, a "pro" farmer (i.e. bot users and such) have no time selling items for gold. I think that's the aim of the update: you receive more green/gold items and ecto's, but to earn cash from them, you have to trade. Trading takes time (and it's relatively boring), but you can earn alot. "Pro" farmers pretty much have the following system:
Pick location+build => farm like hell => hop to town, visit the merchant => sell all loot => repeat.
Now, however, selling items would not help much, because that would mean they sell rare items. If they wouldn't sell those to the merchant, they will have to start trading to players again, which would result in slower farming. Plus, since there will be more ecto's/rare drops, items will (probably) become cheaper for the casual players like ourselves.

A short answer to raven214:
You will find your answer at the GW wiki's talk page of the farm article ( http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Talk:Farm ).

I've been playing for a while now, and the drop-rates are terrible. Soloing, with a friend and heroes, or even with a full party... they are the worst I've ever seen.

We completed an area (Xaquang Skyway) and I received <100g, one stack of 5 bolts of silk, two useless items, and three white weapons.

So now, the only way to actually gain any significant gold is to farm rare items and weapons. Those of us who actually play thru the game are buggered with botched-up drop rates.

Brilliant RED ENGINE GOing update, aNet.

Well we have a happy A-net, a happy bunch of UW ecto farmers, happy expert Players.

And the average players have been penalised. Thats a fact.

Oh and don't forget. The bots still work at Granite Citidel. I get less they carry on.

I have such a love hate thing going with this game.

Let's start off nice. I have only had a couple hours to test hard mode out, but I love the more difficult builds the monsters are sporting. I love having a goal again. Clearing out a map of enemies has put a smile on my face because I know I can do it with a hero party if I want to, and I know there is a reward at the end (the title.) I love the IDEA that I can get more good drops (the increase in golds), though I have to see proof that this will turn out to be more than just the "waste of space" variety. The concept of skill tomes is a step in the right direction, but addresses the problem in the wrong way entirely for us PvE players. Lockpicks SEEM like a good idea, but I will make that call later. For all I know, it's still impractical in most cases to buy, hopefully lockpicks drop. And as for UW and FoW entrance, honestly those places are boring. I go occasionally, but I'm almost always dissapointed. The Vortex and the enemies in it are far more fun to fight.

Ok, bad stuff. I feel that the devs are too far removed from what motivates people to play the game in the first place. Some will argue that the game is free past the retail price, but I have to say that the business plan was chosen to be that way and has to stand on it's own regardless, since it realistically is competing with MMOs even if it claims not to.

I (and many others) have been around for years and have invested over 2000 hours in the game. What keeps me coming back is not the story, because there is honestly very little, but the chance to feel that the way I spend my leisure time MEANS more than the alternative ways I can be spending my time. I could go play on my XBOX 360 to earn acheivment points (and do), on my PS2 (PS3 has no games, neither does the Wii beyond Zelda, wo I'll spend later <---- pay attention to that, no draw means busted system), my DS, even some PC games and, hell, even Pogo. But what has been a more powerfull draw than all those is the feeling that I want to get good looking armor for all my 11 toons, useful weapons and runes, the right dyes, and a very large and expensive collection of skills.

That's what keeps me farming. I don't abuse it in my opinion, and I doubt that most players do. I simply make as much as I need for whatever my current gaol is, then I go and socialize and help out new guildies with my time. Farming is boring, but how else are we to spend our time? On the new quests? Oh, that's right, the game is a finished product, essentially. No, I spend it upgrading my toons, because that collector mentality is the true trait that drives your most hardcore fans. We get done in a week with the story and spend the rest of our time running around collecting things. I have many players in my guild who played through ONCE and then called it quits because, to them, this is just a game. They finished the story and who cares about a silly new staff. And that happens EVERYWHERE. You need the goodwill of the goal driven.

Skills... bad job. Completists will want all the skills for all the classes. But there is a HUGE barrier in the way of the awesome pile of gold you need to get them. I'm talking many hundreds of thousands just to get all the basic skills. Some skill collection is even encouraged by titles such as skill hunter and the upcoming hall of monuments which is going to drive the collectors out there like me to a frenzy of title farming before the release of GW2. The skill tombs are nice, but cater to the PvP, not the PvE who will actually find them and use them. Some Character had to actually pay out that vast amount of gold to even unlock them in the first place. All you do is make it easier to pick up a second time. Maybe on a secondary profession, but is this encouraging makeing new toons? Because the hardcore are most likly to never delete a character becuase we want to get the birthday presents for years one and two now. A better solution would have been tokens that you turn in at a skill trrader INSTEAD OF paying the 1K gold... which is now far harder to come across.

Which brings me to farming itself. I would argue that most farming is beneign because it really just involved turning the simple drops into gold that just got handed back over to the NPCs for armor and skills. The gold didn't actually go anywhere. Most people never made much gold to begin with, then there was a huge set that just bought armor and skills. The few that actually went all out to get the big items traded amoungst themselves anyways. Only the super rich can buy the super rare.

If you wanted to make the economy better you should focus on diversity and ease of aquisition. If there are only five armors, and only one is detailed and expensive (just like the situation is now, only "elite" armor looks good), then people shell out big money for the rare one. But if you make a larger selection of detailed armor and make getting them a little easier, then people get to follow thier tastes as opposed to buying something based on it's rarity.

And weapons are a bit odd to me. Why not make getting a weapon you want pleasing to the collectors out there? Make it more engaging. Why not allow a person to craft a chaos axe by finding parts from all over the game, encouraging travel and exploration rather than the grinding in one spot? I'd much rather collect monster parts culminating in a quest to animate my axe by slaying and capturing a powerful spirit of the underworld.

Then go a step further and eliminate the farse that is trading. No auction house needed, just some mod traders, and possibly some weapon traders (not crafters). You can directly deal with price inflation by allowing prices to fluctuate based on demand with a cap on price that will keep the more casual players within range of thier dream weapons. Trading between players will still occur because there is always a middle ground between the buy and sell price of the trader, just keep it broad to encorage interaction.

With more viable (DETAILED) armor options, a fun way to build your dream weapons, and a quick and fair way to distribute the mods, you will make gaming more accessible to the new, and more fun for the collectors. Skill tokens make achieving skill completion affordable. All of this still adds up to a lot of quality game time and eliminates the need for huge sums of gold and therefore will curb the bots, because the more mods they pump in, the lower prices go. And the gold has less draw when I know I can go on a fun series of quests to get my nice looking items, shich in turn gives me a reason to play more and gives me a better impression of the company... which, I' sorry to say, seems disconnected from it's player base.

Sorry for the long letter, remember, I opened with I love Hard mode.

ArenaNet wants farmers sell more to people? I agree, but by spamming WTS in towns? because if they really want that type of economy, they must add once and for all the trade house! Please dear developers, go and try to sell something in a town, it's not funny at all!

Now, two questions for ArenaNet developers:

- Are you rolling back some previous changes done to skills because of farming problems?

- Are chests included in that new "loot scaling"? I mean, can I open millions of times the same chest now without reducing my drops to purples?

OOoooh, I want to know this too, because many of my favorite players left over a year and a half ago, because most of the ways they liked to play were being bombed into oblivion to halt farming.

Gaile Pls respond to this:

I know botters are a problem, and well yesterday's loot update was just bad for all players. Todays update is a lot better, and solo farming is better off. The only grunt I have is Doing UW /Fow now. With all most normal drops gone, and the ecto drop rate as it was 1 in several runs. You almost can't break even on merching. So I would suggest the following:

A: Lower the entrance fee for Elite Missions (fow/uw)
B: Leave the normal drop rate for these Elite missions. It's not like you can bot UW/Fow/DOA,Deep or Urgoz.

Also is the drop rate of ecto's in UW in hard mode any better then normal mode?

Thx For listening to most of us. I can finish making my Dervish UW rdy now ^^