HM drying up?

This post IS truth. Hail to thee.

I expect someting like "We don't have antifarm anymore. Absolutely. You get diminished drops when farming?? Ahh well that's because of the anti-bot code, and of the anti-inflation code, and of the anti-too many rares code: the anti-farming code has nothing to do with it!"

hello there,

I have a theory about the fact that the community is indeed noticing fewer gold drops in HM and that is not in contradiction with Anet's saying there is no anti-whatever you like.

basically, each time you zone out to your farming areas, you create an "instance" on one of the Anet's servers, this "instance" contains data regarding the different monsters, their positionning, the item (+rarity) they carry and may drop and so on, all those informations are either fixed values (monster level) or randomly picked in a database (droppable item database for example).
I do think that the randomness used here is not absolute randomness, the server program is likely using a pseudo-random generator (possibly based on the computer clock, I don't know much about this though).
All in all, for a given server (IP address shown before loading a zone), the number of instances created by this server is likely going to burst when a farming zone is revealed, since many people (including bots unfortunately...) will request the "generation" of an instance of that zone, and thus you will get the impression that your farming area is giving you less loot, whereas it just has been spread out between the many instances the server had to create.
That may be the reason why some people could still have some lucky runs (a few golds), whereas some other would see a huge "nerf" (no gold at all).

there are likely more parameters to consider, but I think this may give a quite simple explanation of the phenomenon.

Well, I have to admit I've confused myself.

I definitely noticed loot degradation on repeated farm runs previously - in several locations and with a couple different toons.

However, I took a break from farming for the better part of a week to work on some other things. Then I hit one of my HM farming locations. I probably did something like 20 runs, and I can say that the number of golds and purples fluctuated, but never went away. A couple of the last runs I did still got me 2-3 golds and I was only killing something like 15-20 monsters.

I haven't checked numerous locations or farmed for several hours non-stop, but it seems almost like some flag got lifted and hasn't been triggered again.

This makes me believe both the people who claim loot degradation and those who say they see none, but it seems even more likely to be a bug of some sort if that is the case.

I've done 20+ runs of Zelnehlun Fastfoot solo in HM in the last half hour or so.

Most valuable drop? A scroll of Adventurer's Insight and 106 gold. STILL no green.

No more anti-farm code my furry butt. Anet lies, end of story.

I think the drop system still works on some sort of flag system. I agree anet is either mistaken, or maybe just lying to try to catch bots when they say they removed loot degradation from repeated entry. To the contrary it still works on a 'first visit = good drops' then declining from there. There are some extremely exceptional spots that can last quite awhile and have good drops, but the majority of places don't. So I think people are still going to want to look at ways to get around the undead flagging system.

At this point the thing that upsets me is not the existence of the farm code, but the refusal on the part of staff to come on here and counter all the stories, however anecdotal and lacking in statistical completeness, that contend that there is indeed a farm code and that loot degradation is, in fact, here to stay. There is some kind of code that degrades your drops as you play the game. I don't know how it works and I dont give a shit. But don't tell us there is no farm code and then expect us to giggle into our hands as things die off. This is beyond stupid. And I won't be buying any GW product that comes out in the future, you can bet on that. Again, it's not about the drops, it's about truthfulness. I'm a stubborn arse, and as much as I've as I've enjoyed this game in the past, I'm done with buying. But I'll play my money's worth.

What baffles my mind is that they will take loyal customers, give them a gift, let them enjoy it for a week, and then -on the sly- take it away. Did they think that no one would notice that there was a change, or that we would just think that we were having bad luck? The same thing with loot scaling and bots, yeah they made the game harder on botters, at the expense of the loyal, paying, rule abiding, majority of, players.

Code or no code I will still play

Finally got to playing hard mode and vanquished 1 area so far. Got 1 gold axe to drop from 1 of the 154 critters I killed. It has a perfect furious mod on it. Nothing else on it not even a +15% under 50% nothing. Opened 4 chests lost 3 keys actually saved one till I got to the next chest. 1 Elite necro tome and the rest purples. Enough drops to buy one lock pick while I was out and about. From reading other posts sounds like I am unlucky on my gold count.

I'm averaging 1 gold drop every 150 or so enemies (I'm with full part of 8, HnH), but I sometimes get 2. I've been recording my chest rewards over the last 12 hours or so now, too.

Of the 17 hard mode chests I opened in this time:
13 were golds
3 were purples
1 was white
-----
My hardmode retain chance is 22%:
11 keys were broken
6 keys were retained

Hi Gaile,
I'd have to agree, I am seeing a decrease in loot quality in HM. It was wonderful at the beginning. There may be a problem with the Anti-farming/bot code still being in effect. The decreased drop rate seems very much like the previous Anti-farming/bot code. I think it is a worth while recommendation to have your programmers check and see if there is some farming code still in effect.
Gaile can you at least tell us if there is ANYTHING in effect that causes the loot quality in HM to diminish?